If Im reading this right (alexander loot)Follow

ok supposedly HW has an improved loot system...

Yet from what I see Alexander chest dont drop loot, just coins to BUY loot, however getting a chest of coins is restricted to once a week, and since teh coins are in a chest that means you still have to compete with other played to even Win the lot.


how is this any different than the old way or getting loot.. i.e the chest actually contained equipment but you still had to compete to win loot and still has a once a week limit as opposed to competing for coins to BUY loot but still has a once a week limit?

I fail to see how this is improved or different, anyone care to explain?


Also they said enemies on the world map would be more threatening, yet they dont do any more damage to me or give me a harder time to kill than any of the stuff on the PRE HW maps did, the only huge difference I seen (which is actually an annoyance) is that EVERYTHING aggroes, everything aggroes =/= harder

Loot system is up for revision as per Live Letter today.

Savage grants tokens AND armor drops, which was what everyone expected. Perhaps they just wanted the easy-mode items to be a bit more grindy because of how easy Normal Alexander ended up being. Who knows, they're going to revisit it, will be a moot point soon.

Once again, Yoshida's crew seems to be on top of things, while still managing to **** off some people by taking a stance on their design choices. Liking the fact that the changes are fairly swift, even if they're not everyone's ideal.

That's exactly what I think they were going for.

Alex Normal is really easy, yet still awards superior gear. So it's the now-classic tradeoff of time spent vs player skill. Less skilled players will not be able to do Savage where gear drops in whole pieces rather than fractions of gear. Yet Savage still has some RNG protection built in with the collectable token system like the EX primals.

You can only get one drop per floor, so the correct way to look at this is you have a minimum 1/7 chance of getting a token on the first floor (because someone else will win the other token and be taken out of the running).

I know that won't make you feel better -- might make you feel worse, actually -- but just wanted to clarify that.



This has already started.

However, you can do Alexander Normal in the duty finder, and most duty finder groups can clear each floor.

The only real exception is Floor 4, which is about on par with some Extreme Primals in terms of difficulty. However, it's a shorter fight with shorter phases, and there's really no DPS check, which is the biggest obstacles in a lot of primal fights.

In other words, you'll be fine.

Edited, Jul 10th 2015 12:10pm by Thayos

You're correct, you can get one item per floor per week. In that sentence of yours that I highlighted, it sounded like you were expecting to get two drops from the first floor each week... I may have misread that.

EDIT: Oh, I see... I think you meant to say "1/8 chance of getting one of two tokens."

Edited, Jul 10th 2015 12:20pm by Thayos

Really, unless everyone only lots on one token and lets the other fall to the floor, then you have a minimum 1/7 chance at one of two tokens per floor. But we're splitting hairs at this point... the bottom line is you're unhappy with the grind.

In reality, though, I don't think the odds will be as bad as 1/7 for the majority of your runs. As people gear up, they'll ignore certain tokens as they aim for others. You also have groups who are using Alex NM to gear up for Alex SM, and they're pursuing "optimal" routes where they're only lotting on certain pieces with the intent on finish gear to complement what they'll get in Alex (or, right now, they're only focusing on gear they know they can complete within two weeks).

By the time you hit 60, more people will have finished grinding gear such as the body piece, so you may have an easier time winning those lots through the DF.

Of course, the way to do this would be with a PF farm group... each floor can be beat in less than 10 minutes, so you could farm whichever weekly token you need in the time it took to run two floors of WoD upon its release.

And you can do this with i170 gear, jumping up to i190 while entirely skipping hunts (which I'm sure you're not a fan of).

Really, this is actually a very cool system.

Edited, Jul 10th 2015 12:44pm by Thayos

Yep! That's what I was saying earlier... I'm probably not helping you feel any better, but just wanted to make sure you had the right info.

I think what worries me, is once Hard Mode hits, all the raiders/static people are going to completely abandon this. So you're going to be stuck just trying to scrape wins out from week to week. We'll see how it goes, but my DF runs so far have not been very pleasant.

Yep, I've been keeping visual records of my DF runs as the week went on and the amount of wins vs continual wipes skyrocketed after the "better" people got their item for the week and stop queuing lol. Not to be mean or anything but it'll be akin to WoD soon enough. You'll get through it, sure..but you'll get to a point you'll be thankful you only wiped 4 times instead of spending 2 hours wiping over and over due to the same mistake.

But yeah, HM won't be much due to the turns themselves having a lockout as well, so story mode will still get blood pumped into it simply because it's the only content we have to do once you're done with HW content via vertical progression.

Yeah, I'm enjoying Alex too. Really enjoying the fights and the songs.

Ways its better is shown in this example...

In a single duty finder attempt by yourself, its harder cause now you compete with the whole raid for loot vs just having to beat the other guy that was your job for loot.

On the other hand... you get a raid group together 8 men, then it is way faster as in trying to wait for that Dragoon piece to drop Vs as a member gets a token you no longer have to lot against two people the first got, 4 people the second, 6 people the third run, to the point where you get your drops pretty fast in 4 runs for everybody unless people looking for that crank, and it hasn't dropped yet, you might to run another one to get the man what he wants.

But yeah, by yourself in duty finder. Lotting against 7 people everytime.

This was the heavily advertised plan from the beginning. 2 weeks after launch would be Alex normal, 2 weeks after that would be Alex savage.

So now all the 3.0 content is out and available. The next content release will be in 3.1, probably 2ish months from now, and it'll be the 24-man raid (so not progression content). A new Alex wing won't open until 3.2 which is probably 5-6 months away at this point.

That's ridiculous. Seriously, unless gaining 10 item levels will cause me to more than double my current dps, that sounds like an impossible number to me.

Storyline and casual play.

I'm super glad they added the normal version. I really have very little desire to bang my head against the wall in savage mode, and I don't want to be enslaved to a static in order to experience the game's storylines. I STILL haven't seen all of Coil's story.