Make end-game 6/12 man gear better than crafted.

SHORT AND TO THE POINT... MAKE INSTANCE/RAID GEAR BETTER THAN CRAFTED!

Crafted gear at lvl 50 (on the new legendary servers) are Item lvl 53, whereas the RIFT GEAR which is end-game raid for the new server is only item lvl 50. You literally just have to use crafting components to get top gear...

My suggestion is make crafted gear item lvl 50 and make end game (rift, helegrod, annuminas) item lvl 51-53... 51 being annuminas, 52 being helegrod and 53 being rift. Make us have a reason to run these instances and obtain the gear.

/signed, they need to fix itemization. It's a moderate problem now, it will eventually kill the server if they don't fix it by future expansions. I shouldn't be able to go to the skirm camp and get the best gear I can have for the next 6 months in 5 minutes. Craft mats cost almost no marks, recipes cost almost no marks, raid drops aren't worth the raid for the most part, they really should give some respect to the thousands of players who are paying for a VIP server and address this issue.

EDIT: Also, Eregion gear should not be BIS, it's a normal quest zone that just happened to come out after the original raids.

I have not quite made it that far just yet but is crafted gear really better than rift gear? If it is I completely agree with you on that. My friends and I are so happy to be back and are looking forward to grinding out the rift gear. Also how easy is rift on t1?

So I thought I'd have a quick look to see what the difference is, and it's pretty significant.

Rift barter token tank chest
https://imgur.com/Gt2XPz2.jpg

Crafted Lvl 50 tank chest
https://imgur.com/GMMKgG1.jpg

Obviously the stat balance is different, but the extra three iLvls do seem to give the crafted item a bigger allocation of stats. That crafted chest can be made from either a single-use recipe (available from scroll cases, which can be purchased for 14 marks) or from guild recipe (limited by rep and a 7 day cooldown).

For Metalsmith, there are armour recipes available for level 42 (ilvl 45), 45 (ilvl 48), and 48 (ilvl 51), with the ilvl being for crit items. So the level 50 gear follows the same pattern, but as a result catapults the ilvl too high.

I think the only way to really 'fix' this is to nerf the output of the scroll case recipe crafted gear to a lower ilvl range, even though that overlaps with the level 48 gear, but with a better/different distribution of stats. So you still feel rewarded for hunting down and critting on that recipe while gearing up for raids etc. I don't think you can change the existing gear (as the output item of both recipes appears identical) but dropping the output of the one-shot recipe seems an appropriate middle-ground.

The guild-restricted recipe is I think appropriate to stay where it is - crafters should have end-game competitive items to strive for, and the 7 day cooldown means there's a natural limit to how many of those items will be available. Yes you could argue that it's 'unfair' that someone doesn't have to step into the raid to get that high-end gear, but there are plenty of people who don't want to raid but who still need items to strive for, and the raider still gets the flexibilty of the different stats (incase they need to prioritise incoming healing etc.) and the cosmetic look of the barter token item, as well as still being able to access the crafted item if they want to - that seems a fair balance to me.

I would hope that given Treebeard in particular is meant to sit at this tier for a long time that some effort could be made to prioritise rebalancing the items at each end-game tier to allow for a more structured sense of progression, but I understand that SSG is limited in personnel and time. It would probably be a weeks work to go through and alter the output of all the one-shot Master tier recipes to a new item that gives you the ilvl 53 item at ilvl 50-51 stats, and they might not have that week available to them. In which case we might just have to deal with some wonky itemisation at these level bands.