New Changes and a Casual Player's View

For starters I want to say that as someone who does application development as part of my job I can appreciate the complexity of all the work that has gone into the Combat Rework. That being said I have been struggling with a few things in the new system. Particularly Balancing Rating Total Percentages and Total Item Level, as well as the quantity of "adjustments" to existing in-game items.

As far as the Ratings go my main concern is that I find myself going back and using lower item level gear despite the new changes being advertised as "no longer needing to do this, item level being the new focus". Second is that I found it significantly easier to cap my stat ratings by lowering my item level, for example I completely removed my companion Runestones, most of my insignias, and most of my enchantments and my statistics as far as Percentage Ratings actually went up making me more "effective" in my case as a tank for absorbing hits. My concern is that while there is a "slight" benefit to raising Item Level for HP and Base Damage, many times it is not sufficient to offset the reduced damage taken or increased offensive "effectiveness" of actually lowering my item level. Maybe this is intentional or the entire design is to just make the game as a whole "harder" but when the same effectiveness of someone 32k Item Level can match someone 42k Item Level, it can be extremely discouraging as far as the desire to upgrade.

My second concern is the constant changes to what stats are given by certain items in the game and their effectiveness with different builds. First off thank you for the Radiant, Bonding, and Empowered Exchange those have been helpful. However without a stable idea of where things are at with the Combat Rework it is hard for us to know what to choose now that things have changed especially based on my previous remarks about Item Level and % Total Ratings. An example of this is the new "Adjustments" to gold bonus, these changes have dropped my Gold Bonus from over 2800% to now a mere 250%. I understand this may be intentional on your part to "adjust" the gold economy in the game, but many of us invested time, in-game currency, or in some case actual $$ to gear up a character with a high gold bonus to help us earn gold for use in professions, to buy useful items, and for redoing our builds. If your intention is to eliminate this option or at least severely reduce the ability to earn gold via these adjustments, could you at least provide an exchange so we are not left with Legend Insignias of very little worth? The same goes with other items that have been adjusted, such as Companion Runestones, personally I used multiple other Runestones beyond Empowered to balance out my stats. But now due to all the changes I do not need the ones I have, and instead need new ones which are not of equal value selling through the Auction House. The same could be said for Companions as well, the constant changes to Companions can literally cost people Hundreds of dollars, thousands of Zen, or Millions of AD to adjust their characters to get back to where we were before the changes. Some sort of conversion of old companions to tokens would at least alleviate some of this impact.

Lastly I know some of that seemed negative but again I do want to reiterate that I appreciate all the effort that is being put in to change the game, I think the new changes have a lot of potential. But I do feel like they have a ways to go before we all feel like we are actually good at our roles of DPS, Healers, and Tanks. As you continue to update the game I would just ask that you keep in mind that many of us feel frustrated with the constant changes and have a hard time justifying spending any money on the game particularly buying items, if there is a high chance they may get "adjusted" and end up no longer being useful and lack any sort of exchange value after the fact.