As it stands, heroic gear is illogically better than rare gear and the meta forces people to use revenge oriented builds to stay competitive. With the current matchmaking system, anyone without heroic gear stands very little chance of success. With changes to the gear system, matchmaking issues could be ignored and possibly resolved without altering the algorithm, allowing fast matchmaking while leveling the playing fields between people with all levels of gear.
Currently, there are six types of gear and are organized as such:
1) Throw distance, revenge mode attack, revenge gain by injury
2) Feat cooldown, revenge mode defense, revenge gain by defense
3) Attack, Defense, Stamina cost reduction
4) Block damage resistance, revive speed, stamina regen
5) Execution health regen, block damage, sprint speed
6) Debuff resistance, revenge mode duration, exhaustion recovery.
There are obvious problems with this setup. The clear choice is making a revenge build. Revenge is not broken; it is how quickly and often revenge mode can be activated. This, compounded with very useful stats lumped with mostly useless stats, reduces the variety of viable builds. Take category six, for example. Debuff resistance (the anti PK stat) compared to revenge mode duration (clear winner) and exhaustion recovery (still much more useful than debuff resistance.
A better way to sort these would be a two-fold solution: First, put similar, but ultimately more valuable stats together, making the choices more difficult. Second, change the values that gear is modified by. Scavenge crates would still work as they do, now, but there would more variety in gear. Example:
Common Gear:
1 – Increases one stat by 10% and reduces another by 10%
2 – Increases two stats by 5% and reduces one by 10%
3 – Increase one stat by 10% and reduce two others by 5%
4 – 0% change in stats
Rare Gear:
1 – Increases one stat by 20% and reduces another by 20%
2 – Increases two stats by 10% and reduces one by 20%
3 – Increase one stat by 20% and reduce two others by 10%
Heroic Gear
1 – Increases one stat by 30% and reduces another by 30%
2 – Increases two stats by 15% and reduces one by 30%
3 – Increase one stat by 30% and reduce two others by 15%
Stat changes would be organized like this:
- Attack, revenge mode attack, revenge gain by injury. – This gives the difficult choice between being powerful out of revenge mod, being powerful in revenge mod, and getting into revenge mod faster.
- Defense, revenge mod defense, revenge gain by defense. – Players have to choose between having a temporary shield, a general tank value, and getting into revenge mode in the first place.
- Stamina cost reduction, stamina regen, exhaustion recovery. – All about stamina choice and how players want to manage their stamina.
- Throw distance, sprint speed, revenge mode duration – Not a hard choice because fast characters often have weak throws and characters with good throws are usually slow. Characters also have the choice of balancing against revenge duration.
- Block damage resistance, block damage, Feat cooldown reduction. – Getting into less useful stats, here. Chip damage is small for everyone. I’m not sure about feat cooldown reduction – depending on the character, this can be a very powerful stat.
- Revive speed, execution health regen, debuff resistance. – Crap stats which compared against other stats, wouldn’t be picked. Revive speed is only useful in a couple of game modes and is situational, so I value it lower than feat cooldown, which is also situational.
Ultimately, this gear change would give players the choice between being good out of revenge mode, being powerful during revenge mode, or getting into revenge mode. Choices would be harder to make, regarding gear, and the variety of builds would dramatically increase. Low level gear score characters would not necessarily be worse than high gear score characters; just less specialized.
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