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There's no need to talk about how braindead the current loot drops are right now, we have plenty of posts about that. I agree with all of them. Anyone in the BioWare office currently faction aligned with "we can't boost loot drops because it'll hurt the microtransaction bottom line" (the only, ONLY plausible argument against it from a company standpoint) is simply 100% flat out wrong and should be fired from the project, because they're hurting the game and losing them money. It's that simple.
But, aaaaanyway....
let's talk about these undocumented changes. Three of them to be precise.
Lowered the drop rate of high-end Embers from Harvesting
Significantly increased the requirements to complete Path of Glory Monthly Rewards (requiring even more Daily/Weekly completions)
Significantly increased the overall damage of Legendary items, while keeping Masterwork items the same
These changes, to me, right now, in a time where we're complaining about how bad the loot drops are, are the actual slap in the face... and I can't believe more people aren't talking about this.
First, by lowering the high-end Ember drop rate, we can't run the Harvest-suit Freeplay marathon as effectively to spam craft Masterworks. Am I surprised they did this? Of course not. Am I a little peeved that they keep going out of their way to reduce the methods of play people are actually engaging in in their game? Of course I am. It seems that no matter what method people resort to to actually try and play the game and ENJOY IT, they say... no. This is too much progress too fast, our out-of-touch overlords demand that the grind stay a crawl to try and milk the players. It just feels scummy to keep making these negative changes.
Second, by significantly increasing the Path to Glory requirements, the developers are telling us exactly what we don't want to hear: we aren't playing the game enough. One of the now few methods of providing Masterwork Embers to get some crafting in on specific pieces required X hours of play a day/week/month, and since their player average is getting rocked, they said okay... we need to keep those faithful players playing even longer. So they increased this, a change NO ONE was asking for. Now, if we want those monthly Embers, we have to log in a considerable amount more to do a considerable amount more of the same repetitious tasks each day. Thanks, BioWare. That was a really needed, positive change to our schedules!
Third, this Legendary item change. Now this one is a little more controversial in terms of convincing you why it's a bad thing, because people will only want to see the good here. I'm going to do my best to explain why this is in fact a bad thing, so please just try to hear my side of the argument without flat out ignoring it. Understand that there's a very good reason they did this, and it's not because they wanted to make it a better experience for us. Like changes #1 and #2, this is very much to stretch out our grind and make it worse for us.
To start, let me explain the main criticism that existed before the patch:
"Legendaries don't feel Legendary."
A lot of people complained that the Legendary tier was only slightly stronger than the Masterwork tier. This was sort of true: the baseline damage was 15-20% better, and it could roll slightly higher Inscriptions. Not amazing, but still better for the sake of being stronger.
After the patch, the baseline damage is now close to 50% higher.
Now, some of you will immediately tell me I'm wrong for thinking this is a negative change to the game. "It makes them stronger! It makes them feel more rewarding! Legendaries feel worth it now! Stop shooting down improvements to our items!"
Here's why BioWare is playing you.
By making Legendaries THIS much stronger, they now become a significantly stronger tier of item, and thus Legendary is now practically mandatory to feel even the slightest semblance of "complete" in this game. I don't mean complete as in, I have every item rolled perfectly BiS 100% I'm done. I mean, more in the lines of... without having a Legendary in every slot, I'm far, far less powerful than I could be. Nevermind the Inscription rolls on the items you actually attack with; a Legendary with zero inscriptions can/is better than a Masterwork with a 200% roll on it now.
BioWare did this for the same reason they implemented changes #1 and #2. The grind is now considerably longer. By implementing this, they "nerfed" the over-arching power of Masterworks. A good rolled Masterwork is no longer something a min-maxer can simply settle for. We need to grind more, with the current crap drops, to find Legendaries, to min-max our builds. They're putting an even bigger carrot on an even shorter stick, to maximize every possible method they can to make us play this game more.
So the glass half full people will say, this argument is dumb because you're complaining that Legendaries are better now! Which isn't the point.
The glass half empty argument here is that BioWare did this to make Masterworks less meaningful, thus making the already-low-drop Legendaries all the more sought after to try and trick us in to grinding even more than we already were/wanted to. They did this, WHILE making Masterwork Embers less frequent AND making the Path to Glory achievements more time consuming.
BioWare simply wasn't happy that we were outfitting ourselves in Masterworks so quickly. Every change made to the game reflects this. Additionally, we weren't foaming at the mouth to replace them with Legendaries, because while technically stronger... our Mastercrafts could compete and get the job done with decent rolls. The answer? Let's make Legendaries ridiculously stronger to set them back to the start.
EDIT: And before you say "This Legendary change doesn't affect me at all" let me pull from a comment I left someone down below... and just say:
What if, when guilds drop and higher end content releases, better groups only want players with full suited Legendaries because of how much better they are than Masterworks now?
Are you still going to say it literally doesn't affect you if you can never get in to good groups because now they think you're undergeared because you only have Masterworks?
So, in short...
TLDR: While we're all complaining about how bad the loot drop rates are, BioWare low key made the Masterwork grind and Masterworks themselves less relevant and made the grind for Legendaries even more prevalent in the current system.
I'm not sure what we're even fighting for here. It's become very clear that they do. not. give. a. f*ck. about the players or what they want. I would LOVE to see the data driving them to think this game needs to be an endless grind for their bottom line, because I refuse to accept that the logic is sound. There is no way they are not losing money by trying to squeeze us this tightly.
BioWare, cut the sh*t with keeping the stuff you know we won't like out of the patch notes. We aren't idiots.
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