So Lost... Where Is The Path?!?

So I come back and find everythig is done got changed again. Can anybody help me get back on the upgrade path?

Spelly:


Nightie:


Archie:


Manie:



These are all on the very sparse tegan. It seems like if I ain't allready a heavy armored high dmg player I am never going to be one. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

Well, you've been on quite the long walkabout! Three expansions since you've been here.

I have limited experience with types other than Ranger. My current main toon is a just turned Lvl54 RA.

Unless you can find a buddy to help drag you into runs, Parallel Worlds are out of reach for you for now (there's a new location, City of Cardhun, which you'll unlock at Level 50, and which will allow you to unlock PW Q1-8, one-by-one as you defeat each main boss in time), but that's ok, as the Level 55 expansion brought major buffs to the PW bosses which make it difficult to defeat them even in Painful mode (oh, there are now 4 different levels of difficulty in PW: Painful, Excruciating, Fatal, and the latest, Infernal, which you can only begin to unlock at Level 55; and, yes, "unlock" is probably a misleading term, as you have to earn special fragments in lower difficulty levels in order to enter Infernal, and pay that cost each time, not a one-time unlock fee).

So, finding decent equipment is more challenging than ever.

Many will scoff, but I struggled at Level 50 for quite some time until I pulled together the full 4-piece new Full Moon gear. Decent damange, crit and crit damage %, great speed, and regenerates 1% HP for every enemy killed. You might consider focusing on that monthly event for a couple of months.

New New Moon is an event I may skip forever. Based on what I read in the forum, progress is so entirely ridiculously slow that many players farm amphorae key in other events just to use them in New Moon in order to get through it. Again, I've never run it, so you may want to consult others and/or just try it yourself.

On an older Lvl50 Ranger I have 3 pieces of the Darkness set which delivers some decent killing power. Gnob, the event merchant, is now always present in Kingshill. However, he rarely has useful items on sale. But, if you rack up enough event currency (Draken), maybe you'll want to buy some of the pieces of that set from him. Also note that gambling has become big in the game (at least, devs have added gambling in several areas, though not everyone thinks it's worth the risk), including "lucky spheres" which you can buy at a discount from the true cost of an item, but you'll not be guaranteed a result. So, you can buy "lucky spheres of Darkness" from Gnob for, say 2,000 Draken instead of the 2,400 to 4,600 per item cost (I'm going off of memory here; those aren't the exact numbers), but you may end up with 4 Pauldrens of Darkness instead of bow, helmet, shield, quiver (or whatever you were hoping to get).

Crafting is hugely different. There are many threads discussing the merits and methods of the new process; I'll let you find and read those instead of giving you my incomplete understanding thereof. But you'll definitely want to read up on it.

Sapphires, the blue speed gems, are no longer available. You can continue to use your old Sapphires as is, or potentially convert them into new "Runes," but speed Runes can only be used in the new 2-handed Siege Bows, which almost all Rangers deem only useful for selling. With the Siege Bows you gain significantly higher base damage, but you give up weapon speed (potentially slightly compensated for by converting Sapphires into speed runes), crit rate, crit damage %, concentration reduction, off-hand quiver (offensive) or shield (defensive) build, etc. Again, sell them, sell them all ... BP is wavering about what to offers us in terms of converting Sapphires, initially proposing to charge us to buy special Sapphire refiners to convert them into speed runes which, again, can only be used in siege bows. Bottom line, until the dust settles, hold onto your Sapphires.

What are Runes? Equipment now comes with two sets of sockets: The original 0 to 5 Gem sockets, and an identical number of Rune sockets. The Rune sockets are where all event and other specialty "gems" now go. So, if you just played the Dark Dwarf Heist event and earned an 8% crit damage rune, it would go into one of the Rune sockets, not one of the Gem sockets. This is a good thing -).

When you hit level 50, you'll enter the Sands of Malice expansion maps and find several changes to gems and gear. Gear will potentially come in different "Tiers," which correspond to the difficulty level of the map you run. When you enter The Great Desert, for example you can choose to run on Normal, Painful or Excruciating (I don't recall if Fatal is also an option?). If you enter on Normal, gear will have no Tier indicator. If you run on Painful, you'll get Tier 1 items, which have slightly better base stat ranges than no Tier items. Excruciating mode will earn you Tier 2 items. Etc. You can craft multiple different Tier-leveled items at the same time and the crafting output will randomly result in the Tier level of one of the 4 ingredient items. Again, this just impacts the base stat range for the resulting crafted item. You'll also find that there's now a second set of Gems; same essentially as the old set (amethysts, diamonds, rubies, etc.), but "of Qaizah." You'll soon discover that base stats and enchantment options on Level 51+ gear has changed dramatically. Crit rate is really hard to come by. Speed enchantments are lower; crit damage% enchantments are in some cases higher; both base stat and/or enchantments on some items may now include block rate; several items have "increased [crit rate|crit damage%|damage|health|armor|etc.] on this item" possible enchantments ... this allows bigger build up of HP, for example, but wasted opportunities for overall damange/crit/crit damage %, as the multipliers only apply to what's on that item. You might get a 3% increased damage on this item torso, for example, but you can't pul ruby gems in torsos, so that 3% increase will only be applied to the puny 15 to 45 damage that's in the base stats of the torso itself.

The Qaizah Gems are stronger than the old Gems at each level, Flawed, Splintered, Simple, etc. You can convert old style Gems into new Qaizah gems using special Gem Refiners which you'll earn through Daily Quests (or buy in the Jeweler's shop). Try to not convert any old style Gem at a level below Polished, as you'll be using relatively more Gem Refiners than necessary on the smaller Gems. You'll still find old style Gems in any map that's Level 49 or below, so, at least for awhile as you're transitioning from Level 50 to Levels 51-55, you'll probably have a mixture of both old style and new Qaizah gems in your gear and/or inventory. Oh, gems in locker or backpack slots now stack, so you may choose to do away with "gem holder" gear and simply allocate 10 slots to gem stacks (Flawed and Splintered levels of each of the 5 remaining gems [again, Sapphires no longer drop / aren't available for purchase]).

Back to your Ranger gear. The old "of the sea" uniques from the Atlantis maps are wayyyyyy underpowered. You'll replace those quickly as you progress through the Myrdosch (spelling?) dwarf maps (levels 41-45). There are a couple of sets of uniques you'll pick up over there along the way which will cause you to dump the "of the sea" stuff. There are supposedly PVE "Temple" uniques in the Lor'Tac maps (levels 46-50), but I never dropped any. There are Lor'Tac Uniques which you can buy, but I still think you'll end up with Full Moon gear instead that's much better than the Lor'Tac stuff, though my older Level 50 Ranger got the Lor'Tac Uniques as part of the expansion transition, and still uses the bow (I don't play that toon much ).

As for Parallel World gear, that's been a bust for me. Drop rates are atrocious, and difficulty levels ridiculous for my toon. Before the latest Sands of Malice (Levels 51-55) expansion, I had started to get comfortable running Painful on mainly green essence for the first two maps of each "world," then switching to blue essence for the boss. I considered moving up to Excruciating in the near future. Then the expansion came and PW mobs got slightly harder, but PW bosses became extra-buffed: I no longer can kill Grimmag (PW Q1 boss) with red essence in Painful mode. So, it's difficult to impossible to make the tons of boss runs necessary to finally drop another piece of Unique gear. The first time I've killed a PW boss I've always received a Unique item. I've never since received a 2nd Unique item from the 3 PW bosses I can access (I've done couple dozen runs of Grimmag, several dozen against Heredur, maybe a dozen on Arachna [again, mainly before the latest expansion buffed them up ... though, curiously, I find Arachna easier to kill now than before, with the other two bosses impossible and very difficult, respectively], but only have a grand total of 3 PW Uniques, one from each of them). So, I personally don't see PW Uniques as an option.

Yes, you might be more successful if you can group up with others and make more runs. But that's another thing you'll find with the last several expansions: Character class imbalance (real and/or perceived) has become a serious problem. For PW boss runs, most groups, apparently, consist of a Knight and several Dwarves. Spellweavers, and especially Rangers, are persona non grata. I've occasionally been invited to join a PW group, but always by another Ranger. Oh, yeah, and Tegan is deader than ever. If you complete a single PW run, on any map, as a Ranger on Tegan, you'll be in the top 100 on the Ranger PW Leaderboard. It's that dead.

Ok, a bit on crafting after all: Don't? With your gear, and at your level, you can't get in to Parallel Worlds, let alone hope to run them successfully and efficiently, so you're not likely to drop exciting gear with high statistics (you'll see references to "gold lines" here and there in the forum: A while back, BP introduced an indicator on gear that displays a stat in gold-colored font if the stat is reasonably close to the maximum for that item for that level, making it easier to spot good stuff worth considering to use and/or craft). And, you'll be leveling up for quite some time, so an item you drop now with a good damage value might seem puny 4 or 5 levels from now. Which means if you craft it with other decent items at the time, you may end up with a slightly better item which will be outdated in a few levels. In the meantime, you've spent hundreds and thousands of gold and/or andermant unless you're extremely lucky, as crafting now allows the player some level of control, but also retains a high degree of randomness. I, for example, have been crafting for about 5 or 6 months (can't remember when the new crafting system was deployed), and have yet to craft something that replaced an item I was already wearing. I may have a few legendary pieces of equipment which might be components of a decent legendary (yes, you can combine legendaries to make even better legendaries, potentially), but by the time I get enough raw material and resources, I may be dead. Or have quit the game. Consider this: Each attempt to combine 4 extraordinary pieces of gear with 2 gold lines in each of the first 2 pieces to potentially craft a single legendary with 3 of 4 enchantment lines in that gold "close to max" range, costs 60 gold. And 90% of extraordinary crafts fail to result in one of those desired 3/4 gold lines legendaries, anyway, so you'll spend an additional 7 or 8 gold to undo the craft and retain two of the four extaordinary raw material pieces (yes, 2 of the 4 get destroyed if you reject the craft). And 90% isn't really an accurate estimate of how likely you are to fail to craft your first 3/4 legendary, it's worse (read those other threads by the various math whizzes to get the true stats).

So, though I stubbornly continue experimenting, I would probably be, no I defintely would be, much better off forgetting about crafting until I reach Level 55, and probably so would you. Keep that gold, build up more glyphs, save yourself the heartaches.

Geez, are you still reading? Are you bummed out by the bleak possibilities I painted? There's still some fun to be had in the game. I think.

Expect extraordinary grind in most events. But, realize that most events are designed to rotate around more frequently: We had two iterations of the Dark Dwarf Heist event already this year. So, consider playing only the main event the first time around, and only one or both mini-events the second time. Plan on taking several months before you've built up enough useful stuff from Full Moon to really benefit from the gear (for that monthly event, for example, you have to be patient, as some quests only become available on the 2nd or 3rd time you've played it; I believe New Moon has similar longer-term cycles built into it at the start). Hope you can find a friendly higher level player to group with who can bring you into the Parallel Worlds sooner (though don't bank on that). Think of making progress in terms of years, not weeks or even months. And pray BP doesn't break more parts of the game before you grow to the point that you can finally reach that next difficulty level and get that next piece of improved gear.

 

One mistake in this message Grand speed runes are only usable in 2-handed weapons The normal speed runes are usable in 1 handed and also adornments. All old sapphires that fall in the general speed rune category should be converted, as this will free space for extra rubies and or onyxes

 

And very little progress...
http://imgur.com/a/dmUlu

So the belts and adornments and necklaces you can get with the bone coins buy or not?

 

Once you get to level 50, there is a small crafting window that is useful.
The new style items (50+) have a pattern to the new base stats:
• on the right stack it's Damage/Health/Armor
• on the left stack it's Damage/Health/Resistance
The new style enchantments are all "+% to something" or "+% to something on this item". The old style of "+value to something" is only on <Level 50 items.

On the new items, the base stats have gold lines as well as the enchantments. Sometimes a blue or green item with dual gold lines is far more powerful than a unique or extraordinary with bad bases and gold lines 'on this item' in the enchantments. On new items, slots are hard to get as well. Those extra 3/4 slot items make good 3rd/4th slot crafting fodder. The end item slot count is the 4 items added up, divided by 4, and rounded up.

Now for that crafting window. When you are level 50, you can get lucky and get a craft result that has the new style base stats and the old style enchantments.
I turned level 50 two days before the Level 55 expansion was released. The next weekend brought my first ever successful craft. I had 4 blue rings levels 48-50. I ended up with a purple ring with 3 slots that I've glyphed up to level 51 and now is:
• Base Values
. . • +16 Damage
. . • +276 Health Points
. . • +237 All Resistance Values
• +62 on all resistance (gems: 26, 24, 14) . . . . [the 24 is a quazy gem)
• Enchantments
. . • +244 Health Points
. . • +255 Critical hit rate
. . • +31 Damage
The old enchantments make this ring more valueable than any other new style ring I've found. Just wish some of the enchantments were gold lines as well. On the new stuff, watch what the +% are actually referencing. "+%5 on this item" of nothing is a whopping gain of nothing and a waste of an enchantment line. There are a lot of those dropping.

The other good thing that has changed since you were here is that white items don't drop from monsters (occasionally chests). They drop more gold (equivalent of missing white items), which means you have more inventory space with greens/blues/purple/orange/yellows. You'll get half greens. They sell pretty well for gold build up. The blues and up I melt and use the glyphs. I consider keeping for crafting the items that have 4 slots or double gold lines (my armor is a green with 2 gold base and +8.8% damage (not on this item) for an enchantment (which is really close to being a gold line itself).

You've got a lot to absorb. Key thing to remember, build all old style gems equipped to Polished. Polished is the cheapest conversion rate and you will make leaps in pluses converting them to "of Quazy" (12 refiners for defensive, 24 refiners for offensive).