There hasn't been one of these threads in a while so I'd like to bring the topic back up.
Tier armour is pretty obsolete, even for SL-only accounts. Mix and match Miy armours for levelling, and Dustbrigade + Biodome armours for endgame are superior for pretty much every profession in virtually every slot and that's just looking at SL/RK armours. Add in AI and OFAB and when you consider the excruciating pain of farming Tier 2 plus the massively high equipment requirements for the actual stats you get out of it at Tier 3... Well I end up wondering why Tier still even exists.
So, why would anyone care?
Tier armour is pretty iconic. It's only really farmed for social nowadays, barring 1 or 2 specific bits for buffing certain stats as part of a twink job. It used to be pretty hot stuff back in the day and it has a fair bit of content associated with it. Why not update it a bit and make it useful and relevant once more instead of letting the whole system go to waste?
Only a few small fixes would be needed to bring Tier up to spec as a worthwhile alternative for levelling armour. This isn't a total rewrite, this is tweaking to bring effort vs reward into line with the current armour options.
1) Make the armour itself worth wearing.
2) Make the catacombs worth teaming up for and going through.
To make the armour worth wearing, I'd suggest lowering the equip requirements so it's more in line with Miy armours, adding one more buffed stat of some kind in line with Miy armours, adding in a neutral Tier 3 (leave it a boring grey if you must), and streamlining somewhat the steps it takes to get it. Revert the removal of Scheol sigs dropping in Elysium and add in failsafes that stop you from accidentally ruining an expensive bit of armour because you tuned it to the wrong profession (Back pieces and Shoulders I'm looking at you). Maybe cost and TS reqs can also be tweaked. Perhaps, as with Prisoners daily, if you take the relevant Catacombs Daily and complete it you can pick a Will/Advent/Fruition/Embryo/whatever of your choice as a reward. There should be more granular Cata dailies that fit the characters' levels better.
The Catacombs themselves need a kick up the backside. The mob HP needs to be lowered significantly and mob XP needs to be increased significantly. ALL TIER COMPONENT DROPS MUST DITCH THE NODROP FLAG. I cannot emphasise this enough - Tier 1 parts are all yesdrop which means you can trade and swap with people efficiently and easily. Not so with Tier 2. When you combine the massive mob HP, the nodrop nature of the Tier 2 parts and the fact that Ado catas are a literal waste of time (you have to go to Pen catas if you want ANYTHING to drop within the couple of hours it'll take to kill every single mob you can find), Tier 2 armour is simply not worth the massive pain in the rear end. The only people that bother with this now are rich bored vets who can log 220s to escort lowbies through to loot. Those lowbies would only want Tier for social anyway given all of the vastly superior options available.
In summary:
Make the Catacombs suitable for appropriate level teams to chew through at a reasonable rate, with the tier components all being yesdrop and xp rewards being worthwhile. Make the Tier armour itself a competitive option in terms of stats buffed, equip requirements and hassle of building - I'm not asking for it to rival Combined!
Oh and speed up the NPC dialogue please. You have to hand over so many parts that it takes ages waiting and waiting for slow dialogue each and every time...
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Originally Posted by Ekarona
