Different Raid marks got to go....

[Amariah]

Ok, so are there any plans to consolidate raid marks?

Mark of Ascension, then Greater marks of Ascension, then Even GREATER marks of ascension!!!

What's next, Really super duper even more SPECTACULAR marks of ascension??

Ok they are called "infernal marks", but I'm being facetious....

So are there any plans???? Bueller.........

And while we're at it, I finish a T2 and can choose between 2 greaters, or 2 infernals, why would I ever pick greaters??? Unless I had like 45 greaters from 3 months ago HK raiding, and need just a few to get a drop, but the system seems rather limiting....

Can't Raid 3 just cost x2 as much and consolidate the currency?

[Highland]

yes ofcourse they can, second new content comes people can just instantly buy everything if they have enough marks.

Nevertheless expansion incoming: new raids, different tokens.

[xanduin246]

1: what the person above said

2: you might pick GMoAs because the gear you buy with them requires fewer of them, for example, i believe a GMoA belt requires 50 marks, but an infernal belt requires 80 (could be a little off, but thats the premise)

3: in the expansion i imagine this will be reset, not worth complaining about now

[Kedolan]

The reason someone would take greater marks over infernal marks is really easy to see if you think about it. Infernal items cost more, but the power gap between the items is relatively small. If you're looking to gear up as fast as you can, it would make more sense to buy the item that costs 50 marks instead of 80, if your only source of marks was the daily expert and weekly quests.

Once you have at least 4 piece of the greater items your synergy crystal will work, and a lot of raid specs require the crystal to function. So you're aiming to get that 4 piece ASAP, and then you can save up for the more expensive infernal items once you're geared enough to raid, and increase your source of marks by including raiding as well.

Back on topic though, they have to release new marks for each new tier, or everyone would just buy an entire set of gear the instant it was released. Unless you'd prefer they go back to dropping tokens for the items directly from the bosses, that's just how it has to be.

[Amariah]

For a returning player like myself it's just not obvious how to proceed.

For instance you can use GMOA to buy an unstable catalyst which you need for a seal, that's just not apparent when you queue for a T2. You have to stop and make a conscious decision as to what types of marks you are going to collect.

Also it's not clear that Infernal gear costs more either, unless you hoofed it to EW and took the time to click the forges, which are actually vendors.

All I'm saying is that the raid currency structures are just a tiny bit cryptic, that's all. It would be nice if you just got a flat raid currency for doing T2's. T1 boots are 25, T2 are 50, T3 are 80, or.....

If you think about it, they did it already for dungeon gear right? You had to buy Dungeon set 1 and pay a few plaques to get the Dungeon set 2 item. They should do the same for Raid gear and keep the progression steady.

Also for the SL expansion, best guess is Q4. Could be October, could be December... so we are living with current Raid currencies for a while

[AlexTrickle]

For a returning player like myself it's just not obvious how to proceed.

For instance you can use GMOA to buy an unstable catalyst which you need for a seal, that's just not apparent when you queue for a T2. You have to stop and make a conscious decision as to what types of marks you are going to collect.

Also it's not clear that Infernal gear costs more either, unless you hoofed it to EW and took the time to click the forges, which are actually vendors.

Dayummm having to think and put time in?!?? DO NOT WANT!

[Atropus]

For a returning player like myself it's just not obvious how to proceed.

For instance you can use GMOA to buy an unstable catalyst which you need for a seal, that's just not apparent when you queue for a T2. You have to stop and make a conscious decision as to what types of marks you are going to collect.

Also it's not clear that Infernal gear costs more either, unless you hoofed it to EW and took the time to click the forges, which are actually vendors.

What, do you want them to Tooltip it for you? Have a popup that shows you what you can buy with the marks, and for what cost? Maybe make it so the different vendors are at the end of each Dungeon, so you don't even have to go to them to use your marks? Or, you could stop being ridiculous, and instead of taking the time to write a gripe about a functional system, you could surf over to your Rift site of choice and look at your options.

[Galibier]

@ OP even the smallest amount of research points the way.

Most builds do not reach their full potential...tbh some suck, until you get to the HK 4 piece set (49 Nightblade comes to mind) so you get HK 4 piece first. This is no secret.

Now once you know this you can either grind the weekly and dailies for ID marks since if you do not have the 4 piece you are clearly not ID ready OR you can use those AND the numerous HK PUGs and alliance raids (I don't consider a regular non-guild raid group a PUG) to get the 4 piece set ASAP. As was noted HK gloves and boots cost 50 GMOA and the ID cost 80.

Once you have that 4 piece it makes sense to go with getting the ID marks.

They sorta need to have some sort of gate to keep progression at a controlled pace. All that said I do not think it would be unreasonable to allow some sort of conversion similar to the Inscribed system at a certain point.

Example ID is the current raid tier. Allow MOA gear to be traded in for say 50% of the full price for a GMOA piece. So for HK gloves you turn in GSB gloves and 25 GMOA. You wait to do this though until the next tier is close to opening. The people on the bleeding edge of raiding are still ahead, but the new player is not completely locked into being so far behind that he can't app with one of those guilds, all you have done is speed his/her HK progression when the end game raiders are getting ready for post ID progression. Rift thus far has lacked something EQ2 had. In EQ2 when a new raid tier was introduced there was a dungeon that dropped items that let you, when properly runed, enter and participate in that raid tier. This way a new player did not have to go through every raid tier to then have a chance to app. The new players won because they did not feel perpetually behind people just because they started in 2012 and not 2011 and the raid guilds won because recruitment was made A LOT easier. Here they made it easy to get t1r productive with crafted gear, but after that new players needed to be lucky in finding people willing to take them through old content or accept the fact they were well off the pace.

[Pixel Monkey]

You have to stop and make a conscious decision

thats why it works

[Intim]

Other option is remove Moa and offer gmoa for t1 to help people gear up to New content. Might be the next raid tier is still 3....

[Kittyhawke]

I largely agree with the original poster.

In view of the PVP normalization plans, maybe consider ditching the current PVE armor scheme as well.

Normalized "class" armor for different dungeon levels with toughness/hit/focus only on add-on runes would put everyone on even ground, make earlier level content relevant again, and stifle many of the elitist attitudes that run rampant.

[Shaidar Haran]

Other option is remove Moa and offer gmoa for t1 to help people gear up to New content. Might be the next raid tier is still 3....

Simply put with SL and Level 60, I wonder what is to become of our old level 50 instances. Will new characters simply continue from 50-60 and make these raid dungeons obsolete? I haven't heard how they are going to handle this circumstance.

T1 raid content, for the most part, is already obsolete to most progression oriented raiders. Let alone what will happen when they hit level 60 and get a whole new set of gear (which I assume the level 60 dungeon epics will be on par, or slightly better, than the ID relics (minus the special abilities that relics offer like Darkling Skull out of RoS.))

[BlackZodiac]

Ok, so are there any plans to consolidate raid marks?

Mark of Ascension, then Greater marks of Ascension, then Even GREATER marks of ascension!!!

What's next, Really super duper even more SPECTACULAR marks of ascension??

Ok they are called "infernal marks", but I'm being facetious....

So are there any plans???? Bueller.........

And while we're at it, I finish a T2 and can choose between 2 greaters, or 2 infernals, why would I ever pick greaters??? Unless I had like 45 greaters from 3 months ago HK raiding, and need just a few to get a drop, but the system seems rather limiting....

Can't Raid 3 just cost x2 as much and consolidate the currency?

I made that as a suggestion and I'm for having an npc that will allow you to trade them in.

http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-gene...rk-trader.html

[Galibier]

I largely agree with the original poster.

In view of the PVP normalization plans, maybe consider ditching the current PVE armor scheme as well.

Normalized "class" armor for different dungeon levels with toughness/hit/focus only on add-on runes would put everyone on even ground, make earlier level content relevant again, and stifle many of the elitist attitudes that run rampant.

First I love how you try to turn it into an elitist argument. I hope you realize that "elitist" is an attitude and not a play style. As for game with end game progression like Rift your proposal simply would not work. Now before you scream elitist it has nothing to do with rewards, time and effort. Even the most reasonable person speaking on these issues is labled an "elitist" by some and I am not in the mood to engage in that useless argument.

It gets missed by many that part of the reason for gear progression in PvE, especially raiding, is not just to get the stats to move to the next level. It is also to control your progression to that level. They can only create so much PvE content so they need to control how fast your progress through it. Part of that is achieved through lock out timers, part of that is achieved through controlling how fast people get the gear needed for the next step.

If they were to simply have "normalization" where the minute you enter a room... WHAMMO you have the stats for the encounter, then the content gets cleared incredibly fast. As an example, I am currently in a raid guild that raided at the creation of our raid force in April of this year we raided 2 hours a week. Now about 50% of our raid force was already ready for Aky, that still means though that 10 needed to be geared up.. On April 11th we killed Murdantix. Less than 2 months later we cleared the first floor. Now we did up our time to 4 hours a week BUT that was about 3/4 of the way through so basically in 20 hours we had cleared the first floor. The only reason it took us another 10 hours to face Aky was because people needed to finish their water resist cores. Once we were at Aky he took some work... 11 additional hours to get him down but with all his phases it really is like fighting 3 different mobs, it makes sense.

Now keep in mind your "typical" non-world first guild raids 6-9 hours a week (9 is the most common in my experience), not 4 and certainly not 2. So in roughly 2 real days of game time, because we were only partially held back but needing to gear people out, we cleared a raid zone that is supposed to take a couple (to several) months for your non-world first guilds to complete. If we had a more typical raid schedule the zone would have been cleared in a month. How much faster if the entire raid force was appropriately geared due to normalization (no need to get the extra hit needed on Aky or the water resists cores, better weapons and armor for higher hps, dps etc)? Voodoo, was World First on Aky. Voodoo at the time raided Sun through Thursday 7p to 11p, sometimes even midnight. So they cleared something in roughly 100 hours that took another guild roughly 48. Why longer? Well in large part they needed to gear up an entire raid force where this other guild did not. Gear progression is a time tested manner in controlling how fast people progress through PvE content.

They simply can not create enough content to deal with the raminfications of normalization as you propose in PvE. The result would be lapsed subs at a faster rate while people what for something new to do and that means less money. Less money means less lay out for developement of new content which means the next tier is done even faster...quicker lapsed subs... the cycle feeds on itself.

There is a host of factors that play into this but it starts with the financial model, subscriptions need to keep ticking to pay the bills and to keep ticking players need to feel like there is something new to do or to be gained.

PvP is different. In that you do not have gated progression in this manner. There it is a different player everytime, a different experience comes with that new player. The devs have to devote very little in terms of resources to it because they are not designing zones, instances and scripted encounters to provide a dynamic experience. They provide a map and other players provide that dynamic experience.

That is the first part of "theory of content design 101."

[Amariah]

Dayummm having to think and put time in?!?? DO NOT WANT!

I don't mind making a conscious decision on how to spend money, I think it's just a little backward that you have to make a conscious decision on how to earn money.