Gear vs. Player Skill: is it ridiculously imbalanced in WAR? See my writeup and thoughts within.
If you are a former or current player of Dark Age of Camelot, read no further: it’s much like that, though without special artifact abilities. If you’re not, it basically boils down to roughly 85% skill, 15% gear as far as the split goes. The best gear will probably give you a roughly 15% advantage in terms of character power over someone in lesser/average equipment. A good player is able to turn an advantage like this into a landslide, but then again, a skilled player with worse gear is going to generally be able to beat a worse player with somewhat better gear fairly reliably, luck and situational circumstances notwithstanding.
It absolutely is not at all like World of Warcraft where gear made such an immense difference in character power that you may as well not try bothering to fight back if an enemy had much of a gear advantage. While it’s a nice tool in your arsenal in WAR, it is not the thing that truly dictates a fight unless two people are of even skill, in which case it gives them a small but decisive edge that could be overcome with some luck and improvised tactical play. You’re not going to see weapons that do twice the damage of ones that most people have, or give a doubling of stats. While there are lots of good items to strive for, and are worth getting, they aren’t going to be the difference between life and death in duels (1 versus 1). For group on group combat (6v6) you will see an even lesser divide as was seen in DAOC.
At Rank 40, while you’ll want to get a decent set of gear, there is no true “need” to go for the absolute best the game has to offer if you don’t have the time or even don’t want to, period. Yes, they do convey some advantage, but the overall required “grind” amount will be significantly lower than games such as WOW, and around the same as modern-day DAOC, which has undergone many changes to Master Level and Artifact requirements to make them easier to obtain. With the soft caps and diminishing returns on stats, there will be a need to make sure your items fit together well. While not being full-fledged templates like they would be in DAOC, Talismans will provide a small level of adding stats to armor and weapons in a way that mimics having a spellcrafting slot or two on an item. Note that at launch there is no player-made armor or weapon in the game at all, so you will have to put forth an effort to fit things together nicely and use Talisman-making gems to make it work, ala DAOC. One major advantage over the spellcrafting system is that these gems can be applied by anyone, though they have to be made by a Talisman crafter of course.
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