LOLOriginally posted by Bionitrous
You can knock a quarter of the damage off of this level 100 item:
http://antiguardians.org/itemdb.php?&cmd=view&id=122914
with this nanoformula you can probably do by level 12:
http://antiguardians.org/itemdb.php?...ano=1&id=26399
(Yeah, I'm two points of debuff off. Through a Strength or Stamina debuff in there to finish off the job.)
The system is broken. The proposed changes are flawed. The fixes are haphazard, not well though-out, inelegant, and a mockery to the game-design and computer programming professions.
Gaute is showing his paying customers disrespect by not taking the high road and offering a PROPER fix that makes sense. Whether you support the changes or not, you are being disrespected by the lack of effort put into putting forth a PROFESSIONAL and SENSIBLE approach to making Character Skill Level matter more than Item Quality Level.
I'm just sorry that more of you players are not able to see the wool being pulled over your eyes, I'm really saddened to know these foaming at the mouth dogs starving for a bone are my peers and are so blinded they'll snap at anything, even a poisoned bone.
I like the style, there
Ok... Looking for an elegant, "PROFESSIONAL and SENSIBLE approach to making Character Skill Level matter more than Item Quality Level"... Here's my take on that:
First, Item QL is nothing, it is not used "as is" in the formulas, as far as I know. Item quality stands for a combination of several skill requirements: items can have 4, 5 ... skill requirements, the QL combines those and brings it down to a known scale (1-200); this way, one can make a quick estimation of between items, one can immediately know if a beam is a lot better than the other, for example. QL gives reference points.
The general rule is that a better item requires more skill to be used properly. Hence the link between Item QL and Character Skill Level: appropriately raising skills unlocks higher QL items. In theory, this is clean, and it is how it works for NFs: the only caps come from the skills (not levels, not title), so that is what we play with, using IPs, implants, buffs, items...
Funcom tried to make it work in the same way for armor/weapons with that old attempt at patching OE, but people did not like it, so it did not hit the Live servers. It was a zero-tolerance-to-OE patch, deactivating the items for which requirements were not met (just like NFs). That solution would have yielded an elegant, homogeneous system which would have had STRICTLY the same behaviour for every item/NF in the game.
What's my point?
In this patch, they try to fix OE while not being as harsh on weapon users. So, instead of totally deactivating your weapon (100% damage reduction), you get a 25% damage reduction and you don't absolutely have to switch weapons.
... Just remember, one SINGLE missing point in a required skill for a NF means the NF cannot be run.
However, I'm not saying "screw you". Someone else has proposed this earlier: compare current ATK vs required ATK. That may help a little.
Oh, and I think there are still options available for that support beam wielder, both before and during the fight. (As you have probably noticed in some of Crin's posts, above.)