Demiplane Itemization

[Discordant]

I'm going to go ahead and follow Oiingo's lead from the EverQuest Live Forums, and post this.  Since its kinda of obvious that the devs aren't going to pay attention to us there, perhaps as our class rep, Tastian, you can prod them into looking into the Demiplane itemization and tweaking it a bit, because honestly, so far, I've seen 1 item that I might upgrade from Anguish. 

The belt from Redfang is obviously, in my opinion, the most horrible item to put our pet focus on, as many of us have either the Haste Belt from Anguish or Vish's belt.  I'm not about to sacrifice all of those combat mods to get a focus that allows me already weak pet to hit a bit harder and have a bit more life, when in all things considering, it still sucks at survival.

Our class item in demiplane is a neat concept, not a good choice for a slot, kinda like our item from DoN.  Alot of BST's use OMM's range for the overhaste.  While I personally don't and will probably upgrade my Harrier stone to the Demiplane range, it again forces us to choose to upgrade a slot that probably doesn't need upgrading, just so we can get a cool effect. 

Also, I was extremely encouraged during the 5 trials to see more items with focii on it, now it seems in Demiplane, that the focii are horribly chosen and placed on items in which directly conflict with other items from Anguish, example being:  Demiplane Boots and Anguish Boots (which if you upgrade, you have to either upgrade your belt for Demiplane pet focus, or switch in the boots when you summon your pet).  The rest of the items in the armor table are pretty nice for beastlords to be honest, especially gloves/sleeves, (FINALLY GETTING RID OF PYRILIEN VENGEANCE).  But on the same token, our epic's focus has been truly negated by these gloves. 

It just seems that the dev's spent more time on the encounters and trash mobs' crappy abilities (screw those drachnids on the way to Hatchet), than they did designed correct loot tables and itemization.

[Tastian]

I hear ya dis.  There were a few early items that made me think they might be heading in the right direction item wise, but more and more of the new items have me scratching my head. 

I was going to start a thread in the wildblood section about items people have obvious problems with and some reasonable suggestions for what to change/add/drop/move/etc.  This works just as well imo, so please use this thread to give as many specifics as you can about the item you have issue with and what you'd like to see changed.

[Essant]

A lot of gear is rotting or going to new applicants that drop in demiplane for us.  Most of the seasoned guild members don't feel that its worth the dkp for a 25-30hp upgrade.  Now, in my case, I've been the beneficiary of that because the first time we got arms they got passed down to me, but peronally I'm not interested in the pet foci belt because i currently use Vish's belt, but really aggrivated me was the boots - its hard as heck to get extended buff duration foci and they go an stick it on the boots for beastlords, when that happens to be where my current pet foci is.  I'm not even really too thrilled about the range item.  Granted 25% mana reduction for bestial empathy is nice, but it also has a bunch of mods that I already have in spades (atk, regen) .. and I kind of like the shielding I get from Yar Lir's range right now.

It's kind of depressing .. we don't really kill demiplane targets for the loot, more because they are obstacles that need to be overcome, but no one, no one wants to spend a few hours beating on a mob and have all its loot rot.  It makes you feel that you wasted part of your time, and no one likes that.  I guess we really dont care who the loot goes to but we seem to be pretty happy when its used if even by a new app.

[Bengali]

I'm all for suggestions, but I can tell you exactly what we'll here if we bring up the itemization issues right now:

1.  "You haven't seen everything yet" and

2.  "You're supposed to make tradeoffs".

Yes, the Redfang belt isn't all that appealing *right now* because I don't want to give up Fero V, etc.  But, there will be a Fero VI item or items in Demiplane that will make that choice easier.  Also, for all we know we'll be able to make up for the lost accuracy/combat effects (or haste if you use the Anguish belt) with new items in other slots too, and so on.

It would be one thing if all the upgrades in Demiplane were in conficting slots with each other,so that it would be impossible to get a reasonable number of upgrades,  or if we have a ton of leather-only items with totally unusable foci like we did with the Pyrilen Vengeance debacle, but it's too early to tell if we're in that boat.  Plus, the devs have always said that juggling effects/foci is just part of the upgrade process.

Also, there are still people who are differently situated.  For example, the Demiplane boots won't bother me because I don't have the Anguish ones and probably never will given the demand for them and our bad luck with the RNG.  So maybe the Redfang belt will be useful for me when it drops because it would be a two-level upgrade instead of a one-level upgrade.  The bst-only range is plenty better than my Keldovan range, and it would free up a ring slot because I mostly only care about detrimental mana preservation for Bestial Empathy anyway, since it's almost impossible to go oom by nuking and my DoTs are still useless.

I'm not sure that the fact the demiplane gloves make our epic focus obsolete is very persuasive, since it has been obsolete from the moment it was created.  You can't even get an epic 2.0 without first having to kill a mob that drops an item with a better focus.  I actually never have used the focus on my epic at all.

Again, I'm not suggesting that people refrain from posting, but I can almost guarantee you that the response we get from Zajeer (*if* he responds -- I'm pretty sure he's getting tired of the knee-jerk complaints from other classes) will be along the lines of "wait and see."

[Essant]

The problem with demiplane is that it definitely doesnt seem to be a farm zone, so planning gear strategies around it and working on perfect itemization is going to be a royal PITA.  We havent made it to Tier 2 yet but even best case scenario with familiarity I think the best we are going to be able to hope for is 2 Tier 1 targets a night.

Anyway I don't really care too much personally.  My ideal package is still based on Angish / DoN loot so if something drops in Demiplane that fits into that without screwing up my foci / effects .. fine.  I'll worry about balancing the kit around demiplane and beyond later.

[Discordant]

Zajeer's current response to everything Demiplane is that he doesn't care what anyone else thinks.  Hes happy with it and it sounds like hell be damned if he changes anything.

[Dummkopf]

He said already he is going to change weapons, the class only items are all basicly copy-paste jobs so most of them will rot anyway. I like the visible armor pieces so far, just hope that we will see a heal focus on either legs or bp (legs would be better of course). Im a bit puzzled by the inflation of the cleave vi focus since there already 3 bst usable items out there, just hope we will see some fero vi soon although the belt doesnt hurt me much since i have fero v on my shoulders and now can get those sweet boots.

Demiplane is very farmeable, we're just in the beginning of the farming process and can do the 3 easier targets of tier 1 in one raid, as we get more familiar with the zone and as we streamline our strats it will come down to a fast zone as well, probably not as fast as coa which is doable in well under 2 hours. Tier 2 is mostly riddled by several bugs (wtb a non-warp fix) at the moment but will be doable pretty fast later on as well.

[Tastian]

As I said I planned to hold off and see what else was dropping before starting a thread like this.  There are still a lot more items to come and some of the trade-offs/swaps will change depending on what else is found.  Not much harm in starting the list now though as far as I can tell.  Zaj is going to look at the weapons as was mentioned and maybe some other items will see changes as well.

[Dummkopf]

Ferocity VI item has been found, its on an ear which isnt that bad as slots go.

[Oiingo]

Farming: It'll be quite easy to do when they fix the warping issues.  The only thing keeping people from steamrolling the tier two encounters are the occasional warps.  If our timers worked out correctly, I could easily see us going all of the tier one and two encounters in two days, one day once we get more practice. The only difference will be Mayong.

As for the equipment, we have probably had a chance to see all of the drops off Thulli, Hatchet and Wailing Sisters, perhaps even Redfang.   Devlin, Roley and Tris are down so that only leaves one more tier two target (The Performer) that hasn't been defeated.  Unless there is another tier of encounters, which is doubtful, then we're rapidly running out of new equipment to discover.

Finally, the belt.  Ignore it.  Unless there is some major change to the way pet focus effects scale, then it'll be a marginal upgrade at best, perhaps on the order of 2-3 DPS.  You'd probably lose more than that by dumping your Vish belt.  Dummkopf has it and hopefully he will be able to provide us with some more data.  Fortunately for him, it really was a slot upgrade, which is good to see.

[Dummkopf]

Did some dirty parsing, warder was around 135dps against katta banker with only haste buffed, bestial empathy around 170 to 180 dps if you chain it, max hit respectively 112 for warder and 237 for bestial empathy. Hit/Miss ratio was about 70% for both. Not much of a parser though so someone else better off could dig through my data.

[Tastian]

Another thing to keep in mind is the direction and itemization philosophy on some of the items.  Some classes are pretty upset about some of the focuses only working on DoD spells, but that's intended.

I'm going to dig through dumm's data, but because of the big shift in parse target I'm not sure how much I'll be able to pull from it.

[Keryn]

You look at the loot and see that Stats are going higher and higher while HP and Mana are only slightly going up. Is anyone that is Anguished geared not fully maxed on Stats? Some people are maxed on the important ones for their class long beforehand. My only Stat not maxed is CHA.  The Devs need to look at other things like Focus, defensive and offensive mods.  Giving me +40 on a stat which is maxed means nothing compared to adding avoidance or combat effects.

[Oiingo]

It was mentioned that stats are going up to counter AEs that reduce stats or possibly as a precursor to another stat cap increase.

[Kanan]

heh.. i like my 500 unbuffed wis ;p

The amount that the stats are over cap is a lil silly.  I remember one druid counting it up once in a LDoN.  He wasn't even that very well PoP geared.  His wisdom was like 450 unbuffed there.

The thing is tho, there are the AEs that reduce stats, there are the other needs to have increased stat items.  Hell, there's always the need to have the stats be high.  I recently finally got my FT back into double digits and my attack closer to cap.  There're some issues related to this.  You've gotta have those things in your items, cuz if we complain enuf, they'll just say "Fine, this expansion's gear has no stats, just hps & mana & end to them and effects"

And watch the whining & moaning commence. So the stats are necessary.