I'm at a loss to understand what the designers were thinking when they decided on the stats for the new Zafaria gear.
Almost none of it has any resistance at all.
It has a lot of critical boost It has a lot of critical block boost
But you have to stay alive in order to hit, and you can't critical if you don't hit because you died.
And critical block doesn't affect attacks that don't critical.
It's almost like the designers got all excited about the new armor piercing ability and forgot that defenses are far more important in our gear than attack boosts.
Do the KI designers actually play this game? It's really starting to seem like they don't.
I'm at a loss to understand what the designers were thinking when they decided on the stats for the new Zafaria gear.
Almost none of it has any resistance at all.
It has a lot of critical boost It has a lot of critical block boost
But you have to stay alive in order to hit, and you can't critical if you don't hit because you died.
And critical block doesn't affect attacks that don't critical.
It's almost like the designers got all excited about the new armor piercing ability and forgot that defenses are far more important in our gear than attack boosts.
Do the KI designers actually play this game? It's really starting to seem like they don't.
I'm just guessing here, but it seems that they went with massive health boosts instead of resist. It makes sense because armor pierce can drastically reduce resist (in many cases down to 0) at which point, you'd want more health instead of resist. It seems that regardless of their thought process, however, that no one is happy with the new Zafaria gear. I have yet to hear a positive comment on it.
I'm just guessing here, but it seems that they went with massive health boosts instead of resist. It makes sense because armor pierce can drastically reduce resist (in many cases down to 0) at which point, you'd want more health instead of resist. It seems that regardless of their thought process, however, that no one is happy with the new Zafaria gear. I have yet to hear a positive comment on it.
Bad design if that's what they were thinking. There isn't anything close to enough health boost to justify no resist, none of the Zafarian enemies have piercing, and I'm betting that when it starts showing up anywhere but pvp that it won't make much difference.
I put a set of gear on my storm with piercing and it almost never goes off, and when it does, it doesn't really help much.
Meanwhile resistance is used against every single attack.
After testing the gear, my storm went back to his ww and helephant tower gear. He dies very rapidly without the resist and he doesn't do enough damage fast enough to get rid of the enemies before they kill him even with the ability to pierce their armor.
I'm just guessing here, but it seems that they went with massive health boosts instead of resist. It makes sense because armor pierce can drastically reduce resist (in many cases down to 0) at which point, you'd want more health instead of resist. It seems that regardless of their thought process, however, that no one is happy with the new Zafaria gear. I have yet to hear a positive comment on it.
Bad design if that's what they were thinking. There isn't anything close to enough health boost to justify no resist, none of the Zafarian enemies have piercing, and I'm betting that when it starts showing up anywhere but pvp that it won't make much difference.
I put a set of gear on my storm with piercing and it almost never goes off, and when it does, it doesn't really help much.
Meanwhile resistance is used against every single attack.
After testing the gear, my storm went back to his ww and helephant tower gear. He dies very rapidly without the resist and he doesn't do enough damage fast enough to get rid of the enemies before they kill him even with the ability to pierce their armor.
I don't argue the point... I use select pieces of the crafted Zafaria gear and have left the majority of the rest by the wayside. I did, however, want to explain the pierce a bit... Most enemies in PvE only have resistance to one school (vs. most PvP players having global resist) so it would only ever have an effect when it hits a shield (for which blocking against the school of your attack is performed) or when there is resistance in the monster for the school of your attack.
So for instance, resist will always apply to tower shields. A good place to use it in PvE, for instance, is when you are fighting your school and don't have prisms (or don't want to take the time to put prisms on). If you stack it with a treasure infallible and treasure unstoppable, it will subtract your gear armor pierce value + 35% directly from their resist. This is fantastic for schools such as Fire when they use a DoT spell because prisms are problematic when it comes to DoTs. So say you have 7% gear pierce and use the treasure unstoppable and infallible. That brings it to 42% pierce. If you were fighting Fire enemies with a fire spell and the enemies had say 40% resist to fire, the pierce would remove all their resistance to the attack. Against tower shields, the pierce would reduce the tower shield from 50% to 8%. Pierce is consistent, there are just not a lot of instances in PvE where it would apply.
Again, I'm not arguing that you should switch, I'm certainly not doing it, I'm just saying that its possible that this is where the developers' heads were at when they were making gear. Speaking as a nerd myself, we tend to get tunnel vision from time to time.
While I'm not a fan of the gear I've seen yet either, I do have to remind myself that we are only seeing what is the beginning of something else. KI has a bigger picture to view and things that they plan out and have to implement in stages. We are only seeing a small portion of their vision.
Hopefully they will, as they sometimes have in the past, take our comments and views into consideration and be able to adjust the vision somewhat. Hopefully that is possible without damaging the whole.
The mish mash of stats on the new gear with the mixing of pips, accuracy, various school resists instead of universal resist, healing boosts, critical boosts, and critical blocks is not simple to sort through. I see this as a problem for younger players, not so much so for the older, more experienced and game wizened players. I suspect folks will remain in WW gear or even level 58 gear for quite some time.
While I'm not a fan of the gear I've seen yet either, I do have to remind myself that we are only seeing what is the beginning of something else. KI has a bigger picture to view and things that they plan out and have to implement in stages. We are only seeing a small portion of their vision.
I agree, there is likely more to come. I've noticed the level 68 gear comes in "sets." The Balance is a good example. With one "set" you get critical block against elemental schools, the other "set" is critical block against spirit schools. Legendary gear provides all the global resists, etc. To maximize use, you have to switch out sets against particular enemies.
Hopefully, the ability to quickly hit one button to switch out complete gear comes to fruition.
