Changes coming to Level 70, 75, and 80 cultural

[Gildawen]

On the surface, this sounds good to me. They way I read it, they intend to bump up the armor stats at the expense of the Slot 12 seals that are acquired from raids.

I will start off with changes that we already said would be happening.

We will be evaluating the set of 70 armor + 75 Symbol + Serpent or Sunshard. Those overall stats are higher than our goal.

The intent of Cultural armor is to work in certain sets.

These sets are:

70 armor 70 symbol 70 seal (last blood) let's call this the "Last Blood Set"
70 armor 75 symbol 75 seal(TSS) (Serpent) let's call this the "Serpent Set"
70 armor 75 symbol 75 seal(TBS) (Sunshard) let's call this the "Sunshard Set"
80 armor 80 symbol 80 seal (Faycite) let's call this the "Faycite Set"

We are happy with the Last Blood SET and the Faycite SET, and we feel that the Serpent and Sunshard SET only need a slight adjustment.

BUT some issues are coming about because of the large increase in what we are giving to group level equipment that is making the 75 symbol, 80 armor and 80 symbol artificially inflate the value of the 70 seal (and to a lesser but still there extent, the 75 seal)

We have two options we are looking at, though we have fairly much decided on one. I will go over the one that we are likely to do first.

Overall (with the exception of the slight overdo of the 75 seals) we are satisfied with the way the sets work. The overall stats they give as a complete set fit where we want them too.

What we are going to do is move some of the stats from the seals into the symbol and armor of the set and out of the seals of the set. Overall the SET will be the same, but less of it will be concentrated in the seal. Additionally in some cases some of the stats from the Symbol will be moved to the Armor.

Additionally I am likely to implement a level 75 armor set, so that we can adjust the stats in the 75 symbol and seals to make it not so huge a jump from the 70 (though it will still be a large jump since we are improving group equipment so much overall)

With this adjustment, that does mean that the level 70 GROUP set of armor and symbol will see a large improvement. It should be equivalent to level 70 group armor from TBS when we are done. By moving these stats from the Seal to the symbol that will make the effect of "hanging onto" the level 70 seal less attractive and encourage it to be upgraded as we wish it to be. Additionally it will reduce the effect of the 70 + 75 + LB and 80 + 80 + LB. While they still may exceed some sets of equipment, it will definitely be a step in adjusting the large effect of it.

In some way this will be seen as an "Adjustment Down" of the Last Blood Seals. And well it is, but it is NOT an adjustment down of the Last Blood *SET* of armor. that whole SET will be the same as it is now.

The second option, which we do not like as much (but would be less work for us...) is to enforce an Idea of "sets" using item scripting (which brings a whole other set of issues). A sort of "Set affinity"

For this option the seals would loose value if they are not in there "SET" the stats would decrease the further away from their "set" they are. So if a Last Blood Seal was put in a 80 armor + 80 Symbol set, it would have its stats reduced by a percentage.

The main issue with this is that we would have to wait for a code change (that we are waiting on for jewelry) so that we would not be stuck with even more items that show no stats until they are equipped. So this issue we are having would be in the game longer than we like.

Neither of these changes will be happening until January or later, but the second could take even longer to happen since we need the code change first.

So with that information, our decision is to go with the first choice of just moving the stats around within the set, (and though it was not directly part of it, I think we will have to add a 75 armor set) because with this if we still find that mixing and matching outside of sets is still too much of an issue we can still go with the "set affinity" idea and the adjustments for being out of set could be smaller.

This is all still subject to change, but it is the direction we are going at this point. I will be starting on the research necessary to make the changes very shortly after I send this post.

Dev-Ngreth

EQ Designer