Marching Fire - Losing default perks when equiping one piece of non-default gear? | Forums

[OneBrch]

(If you haven't watched the August 2nd Warrior Den, this is about one presented change for Marching Fire)

First of all - I love the idea of perks replacing gear stats. I think it brings a lot fairer fights and lowers the differences between new and veteran players. Also it can be easily expanded in the future. More perks and/or higher gear rarities can be introduced with this system

But I have a concern about the default gear or in general if you don't have a lot of gear. In the warrior's den, it was said that if you have only the default gear, you get enough perk points to get one perk activated. But what if you replace one piece of gear with non-default? Or in general. What if you have several pieces of gear, but the combination of perks bonuses on them does not allow you to get any of the perks activated? Do you just run around with no perks at all?

I don't like this particular idea, because then having the all-default gear would be better than having several pieces of better gear.

[Wes8504]

(If you haven't watched the August 2nd Warrior Den, this is about one presented change for Marching Fire)

I don't like this particular idea, because then having the all-default gear would be better than having several pieces of better gear.

But that's the thing, the all-default gear is better than having those new pieces you acquired if they don't give you a perk. It's just a different system now, instead of swapping out a piece here and there making small incremental changes, you're going to be swapping out entire sets of gear to be changing perks. There are no more stats associated with the gear anymore, therefore pointless to equip a set that gives you no perks.

[OneBrch]

I understand that it is a different system. And I think the new system overall is much better. But in certain cases it can be worse. Consider this: In the current system if you equip better gear with higher score, you get better overall. it might have a boost to different stats than you want, but still, overall across all stats your character is better.
That is not necessary the case with the perk system. You can have higher level gear, but if you equip it you may lose perk score for perk you have. So overall your character gets weaker even with stronger gear.

In the new system each character has access to up to 7 perks. There are 6 pieces of gear each giving points to 1 or 2 perks. I don't have the exact numbers, but what I fear is that with the "right" gear, you might have all legendary gear equipped with zero perks unlocked, which would make you weaker than if you had all default gear. And that feels a bit illogical.

I think the good middle ground would be this: IF AND ONLY IF you have no perks unlocked by your gear, you could still get the default perk unlocked. And since the gear score is still going to be a thing, maybe with higher gear score, you could get another perk unlocked. Starting with the yellow rarity, your gear can unlock up to three low tier perks. So at gear level 114 (all yellow gear minimum level), you could get two of the low tier perks by default. But I repeat, this would be a thing ONLY if you didn't get anything unlocked by your gear. If you have any one perk unlocked by your gear, you DON'T get more perks for free.

[Wes8504]

Even with the current system, there has been several times I have kept a lower quality of gear equipped while I scrapped the "better" color because the new gear had stats I didn't want. Are you saying you would take a legendary (teal) piece of gear that gave up def pen and attack to only have block damage instead of an epic (purple) piece of gear that balanced the 3 just because that legendary piece of gear is of "higher quality"?

[Illyrian_King]

In my mind, they should have kept the stats and ADD perks instead of replacing stats.

Even now gear is hardly noticable ...

[OneBrch]

Even with the current system, there has been several times I have kept a lower quality of gear equipped while I scrapped the "better" color because the new gear had stats I didn't want. Are you saying you would take a legendary (teal) piece of gear that gave up def pen and attack to only have block damage instead of an epic (purple) piece of gear that balanced the 3 just because that legendary piece of gear is of "higher quality"?

I completely agree with this. I do this too, if I find higher rarity with bonuses I am not looking for, I keep the lower quality with the bonus I want. But that is not my point.

My point is this: With the current system, when you equip higher quality gear the overall strength of your character increases. For example you might lose some raw damage, but you regenerate stamina faster,which is nice too. Basically - when you equip better gear, you might lose some strength in some area, but in return you gain more strength in some other area.
With the new system this is not necessarily the case. you might lose something and get nothing in return. So the overall strength of your character is now lower.

In my mind, they should have kept the stats and ADD perks instead of replacing stats.

Even now gear is hardly noticable ...

The devs' idea is that the game should be about skill, not gear. At the moment there is quite a disadvantage if you play a new character that does not have good gear. This system is here to change that.