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About the gap between stats and item level
melechest
Member Posts: 106 Arc User
Every player who does randoms with pug groups knows what im talking about. Toons with enough item level to do dungeons but not nearly the stats required for them. Maybe some of you are those players and dont know what you are doing wrong and you can do very few things in a dungeon. And a lot of times this ends up to being a 2 hour dungeon run because the group cant get through a boss, or abandoning the dungeon after trying hard.
Just to be clear, i dont blame/hate on those players. Its not their fault. They are newer players who dont know how the system works and are mostly lost on what to do to get stronger.
The real issue is that item level and stats are almost entirely disconnected. Item level comes primarily from gear and some of it from boons, insignias and enchantments. But all of those amount to a small amount of stats.
On the other hand, stats come primarily from summoned companion, companion gear, runestones, companion powers and bonding runestones. And while these can offer some thousands worth of item level, it doesnt really match the stats and strength you get for them.
And its really easy for newer players to reach that desired 20k item level so they can do REDQ simply from gear, but then, since they are newer players they dont have a good companion or high rank bondings, they dont have the stats required to carry their own weight. And as time passes, newer gear comes, with higher item level, still not offering much in terms of stats. And it becomes even easier to get the 20k. And the item level is becoming more and more disconnected from stats. Ive honestly seen a 23k item level toon, which should be enough item level to easily do any dungeon in REDQ, having all stats at around 40-50k, struggling to get through anything in a dungeon.
And as an example of how much disconnected item level and stats are, try this out. If you have r15 bondings and a legendary augment, go in a lower item level dungeon, something like master temple of the spider (at least this is where its most obvious) and removing all your gear but keep your companion summoned, you will see that your stats will become higher than when you had your gear on, because the scaling takes onto account your item level to scale you down and without gear your item level drops significantly, so less scaling.
And now, with the changes to mounts, the item level will get even further disconnected with stats, if its anything close to how companions work.
Unless the gap between item level and stats decreases drastically, running randoms with pug groups will keep becoming more and more of a gamble. And newer people will have an even harder time getting through dungeons. This will result in more newer players getting frustrated by the game and leaving.
Now, please dont come in here saying "I can carry dungeons", "i can solo IC with one hand and my eyes closed" or anything like that. The point of this post is not to come and brag how end-gamers can solo every content in the game. The point is to showcase one big issue of the game and some of the problems players have. And trust me, most people, if not all, dont find it fun if they have to run behind an end-gamer, getting carried and doing close to nothing in a dungeon.
And just to show a bit more of what i mean by the above points.
https://imgur.com/a/IINqSis
These are screenshots of my main. The first one is with full gear, r15 bondings, legendary augment etc. The second one is without any gear. The third one is without a companion or companion bonuses. And i hope i make my points quite obvious.
Just to be clear, i dont blame/hate on those players. Its not their fault. They are newer players who dont know how the system works and are mostly lost on what to do to get stronger.
The real issue is that item level and stats are almost entirely disconnected. Item level comes primarily from gear and some of it from boons, insignias and enchantments. But all of those amount to a small amount of stats.
On the other hand, stats come primarily from summoned companion, companion gear, runestones, companion powers and bonding runestones. And while these can offer some thousands worth of item level, it doesnt really match the stats and strength you get for them.
And its really easy for newer players to reach that desired 20k item level so they can do REDQ simply from gear, but then, since they are newer players they dont have a good companion or high rank bondings, they dont have the stats required to carry their own weight. And as time passes, newer gear comes, with higher item level, still not offering much in terms of stats. And it becomes even easier to get the 20k. And the item level is becoming more and more disconnected from stats. Ive honestly seen a 23k item level toon, which should be enough item level to easily do any dungeon in REDQ, having all stats at around 40-50k, struggling to get through anything in a dungeon.
And as an example of how much disconnected item level and stats are, try this out. If you have r15 bondings and a legendary augment, go in a lower item level dungeon, something like master temple of the spider (at least this is where its most obvious) and removing all your gear but keep your companion summoned, you will see that your stats will become higher than when you had your gear on, because the scaling takes onto account your item level to scale you down and without gear your item level drops significantly, so less scaling.
And now, with the changes to mounts, the item level will get even further disconnected with stats, if its anything close to how companions work.
Unless the gap between item level and stats decreases drastically, running randoms with pug groups will keep becoming more and more of a gamble. And newer people will have an even harder time getting through dungeons. This will result in more newer players getting frustrated by the game and leaving.
Now, please dont come in here saying "I can carry dungeons", "i can solo IC with one hand and my eyes closed" or anything like that. The point of this post is not to come and brag how end-gamers can solo every content in the game. The point is to showcase one big issue of the game and some of the problems players have. And trust me, most people, if not all, dont find it fun if they have to run behind an end-gamer, getting carried and doing close to nothing in a dungeon.
And just to show a bit more of what i mean by the above points.
https://imgur.com/a/IINqSis
These are screenshots of my main. The first one is with full gear, r15 bondings, legendary augment etc. The second one is without any gear. The third one is without a companion or companion bonuses. And i hope i make my points quite obvious.
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Comments
From that I assume the devs actually know there are areas where IL is a nonsensical number. The problem with companions is: It would represent reality better if we just summed up all the stats the companion gives you and attached an IL to it as a whole. However, that is not the case - we are attaching IL to each piece of companion gear... to items, where stats will be both added and multiplied...
The math is merciless - sometimes additions give different results than multiplications. Who would have guessed.
(There is another part that skips the IL system in companion section, the defence/offence/utility slots, that have fixed IL regardless what you slot in. 8k of stats is treated equally to 1k.)
How to escape this trap?
The IL is all in all a nice number to have - for orientation where the gear roughly stands. I believe, the IL of player, however, should be counted a bit differently from how it is - by the same formula as the gear. The IL of players should not be a sum of IL of their gear, but sum of all their stats, divided by the respective number.
I know that such thing would bring confusion in sense "I added 1010IL to my companion, however, my IL jumped by a different number..." - but I think people would adjust to that.
(There is a little catch here: tanks, thanks to the HP bonus, would implicitly have higher IL than other classes.)
Another possibility is, of course, a removal of all the multiplicative stuff from the game. Bondings, augments, bolster.