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Currently, the way 'rating contribution' works is, if your any stat rating is within 1-50k of your item level, you get some rating contribution from it. If you have 100k item level and 50k accuracy (currently impossible, however it is just to give an example), you'll get 0% rating contribution. If you have 100k accuracy, you'll get 50% rating contribution

This system was designed with ~50k being the max item level at the time. So you'd always get some contribution from your ratings. However as our item level increases, the need for stats increase. Hence why DPS players had 45-50% defensive stats when 50k item level was the max, but now you see people at 25-30% defensive stats. This is because the gap between item level and combined rating keeps increasing.

There is a major flaw with this whole system. As I mentioned before, it is because it was designed with 50k being the maximum item level. Your combined rating has to be between a set value of your item level, rather than a percentage. Imagine in the far future, we make it to 500k item level, and items give 80% of their ilvl as combined rating in average. You'll have 500k item level and only 400k on all ratings, and however many stats you'd get from enchants/insignias/kits etc. Lets say you manage to get 450k on all ratings, you get absolutely no rating contribution from your ratings. Because your ratings are barely within 50k of your item level. I am going to propose some solutions to this, the 1st solution would require all the rating bonuses to be re-built, which is not ideal. The 2nd solution would be much easier to implement, and it is the ideal fix.

1) Changing Rating Contribution Formula
One of the fixes to this would be to change the Rating Contribution formula to Rating Contribution = (Rating/Item Level) * 0.5
This way if you are at 500k item level and 450k ratings. You get a total of 45% from rating contribution as opposed to the 0% you'd get now. If you are at 500k ratings, you get 50%. The max rating contribution you can get is still 50% because of the ratings capping at your item level and the 0.5x multiplier. The only problem with this is that, for almost every item level value 1k rating will not end up being 1% stat. At 100k item level and 99k rating, you'd have 49.5% rating contribution, and getting that 1k would only increase your stat by 0.5%. This would make the stat system a little more complicated, and it is already hard to understand as a new player.

2) Make all combined ratings bonuses match their item's ILVL (The Ideal)
This would fix the stat system's issue and introduce a new issue (which is fixable), too much stats. First of all, the 50% rating cap from rating contribution would have to be removed, because you'd get a minimum of 50% rating contribution regardless of what you have equipped. And then the stat caps would have to be raised to 100% (and the CA cap would have to be removed), and enemy HP/damage values would need adjustments. An optimized endgame group would deal 30% more damage (including the removal of CA cap + some enemy awareness debuffs). The enemy HP in master content can be increased by 30%, and less for advanced, less for normal etc. Similarly critter damage values can also be increased to compensate for all the extra defensive stats we would get (no numbers here because I did not want to go into damage taken calculations).
Newly created characters would have to start with ratings equal to their item level. Or keep it as is, and min. rating contr. is 45% rather than 50%

It should be noticeable to players who played during the time stat rework happened. We went from having 45-50% defensive stats to 30-35%. And it will only spiral downwards from here. The devs can introduce bonuses with more ratings/percent stats to cover this issue without fixing the stat system, however these are all bandaid fixes to cover the flaws of the stat system. The stat system should receive some tweaks to fix this problem.

This new system seems interesting and this post was a good read until I got to this part:



I'm sorry but in my opinion the real reason there's a lack of gear variety on players originates from the fact that the last few modules have presented many weird, unusable or simply bad equip bonuses. I can assure you players will use an arm piece with Control Bonus ratings if it has a let's say 5% Critical Chance bonus. They won't like it but they'll accept it. But if the bonus is like "when you use your daily your next encounter power deals x% more damage" - everyone will pass.

An additional reason is the lack of gear options to even choose from. In the more distant past, a new module used to present 2-3 sets of gear for a role. We don't need 3 sets but 2 well designed sets could provide the missing variety. Mod 30 brings 4 new armor pieces (head, chest, arms, boots) per role and that's it. There's a no variety to even begin with.

I was an alpha tester for module 29 and my team and I gave extensive feedback about the gear the Lair of the Mad Dragon dungeon was about to award. However, it was disregarded except for only one piece (the Accuracy+Combat Advantage mythic chestpiece which was originally designed as a Critical Strike + Critical Severity piece, similarly with the advanced dungeon piece).

I must confess I don't like the aggressive Item Level push mod 30 seems to try to do. Knowledgeable players will not fall for a higher IL piece if it's underwhelming in terms of equip bonus vs what they're already using. This is why you'll see endgame players wearing a mixture of the items from MLoMD, MDWP and some healers even MTOS.

In my opinion the last time with had overall well-designed equip bonuses is MDWP. Gzemnid items were good too but some were kinda niche. Before these, the dragon hunts had solid gear options. Why don't we see the bonuses brought back? The wildspace modules contain too many weird equip bonuses and the LoMD store just perpetuates the issue through copy-paste reused bonuses. So how can we speak of gear variety in these conditions?