The Weekly Innervate - Star Wars: TOR - End Game Gear Is Making Me RAGE

Welcome to the Weekly Innervate where I go over and share my thoughts about something going on in the world of video games! This week was originally going to be about my thoughts of Guild Wars 2 after playing during it's free week. Then I was going to replace it with SWTOR Patch 2.4 notes, and then I got in game to take some pictures of the Jedi Consulars end game PvE/PvP gear. The Conqueror gear, as usual, looks absolutely awful so I decided to try the Obroan (Ranked) gear in hopes it looked better. And I actually really liked it! So I decided to see what the other classes end gear looked like... and this is what I found.

This is the ranked PvP gear that is currently the highest you can get for the four Republic classes. See anything odd happening here? THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME! Every single class has exactly the same armor design except for minor changes with the chest piece design. Fair warning I am going to rage about this because I think this is completely unacceptable.

This is end game gear. The absolute best of the best, you cannot find gear anywhere else that's better than this in the game until their next content patch which is months away now. So for the entirety of this patch everyone in end game PvP who does ranked Arenas will look exactly the same unless the use Adaptive Armor. And that's the excuse; "It doesn't matter what the end game armor looks like because everyone is just going to use Adaptive armor anyway". NO! This is your END GAME ARMOR. This is armor that is going to take people months, hundreds of matches to play before they get their entire set. Something that takes that long to get should be shared, I for one would want to show off my gear and I do. When I get end game gear that is current I like to show it off and not cover it because it says "look at me, I do end game content and I worked for weeks to get this gear! Look at me!". Now, there's no point in doing that because every single person, not just all of Jedi Consulars will look exactly like me and this forces people to either look the same as everyone else (making the gear you worked hard to get completely bland and not unique) or cover it with Adaptive Armor so they feel unique in an MMO. You should not force players to make that decision because you're too lazy to make gear class unique.

And that's what this is completely. Laziness by the design team. "People are going to wear adaptive armor anyway so it doesn't matter if the end game gear looks the same because no one will wear it". What kind of mentality is that? In an MMO, your end game is your everything. If you don't have End Game that people want to do then people won't stay to play your game. I mean, that's what we saw go wrong with SWTOR in the first place. And instead of listening to the community and fixing their mistakes, they would rather tell their design team to hurry up and finish the end game gear in 2 hours so they can spend the next week working on the gear they put in the Cartel Market packs. And that's what makes me the most angry. We get a new Cartel Pack every month with 2-3 sets and 5-10 individual armor pieces that people will spend hundreds of dollars buying but we get a new tier of raid content every 6-9 months and we get gear that looks exactly the same between all four classes. It feels like, to me, Bioware and EA have completely given up on the game succeeding because they couldn't keep their subscriber base during it's early stages. They would rather just design Cartel Market items and make as much money off of the game as possible until it dies and that's all they care about. They don't care about fixing the game or improving it, it didn't stay popular so they call it a failure and move on.

What would happen if World of Warcraft took this mentality. What if in Tier 16, Blizzard released the 11 gear sets and they all looked exactly the same except each class had a different chest piece pattern and Blizzard came out and said "Well, we thought about continuing to release unique gear but everyone just transmogs it anyway so it didn't seem important to do that anymore". Do you know how much their fanbase would rebel against that? No, they wouldn't. They would never be so stupid as to do that because they know that people are going to be wearing this for 6+ months and they want it to look good. Why? Because they understand end game is important.

One of the worst things about this, is that this gear will not be easy to get. It will take people weeks if not months of straight grinding to get this gear. Not because they cost so much or because Ranked Arenas are hard. But because before you can even buy this gear, you have to grind out the Conqueror gear, which comes from Unranked Random Warzones. So we have to not only grind out a complete set of gear through regular Warzones but only then can we use our Ranked Warzone commendations to buy the end game gear. This will take so long and the reward is reskinned gear that everyone looks like. The reward is to go into a Ranked Arena and having not only your entire team looking the same but the enemy team and every team you come across after that looking exactly like you unless you or they change into different Adaptive gear. Months of hard work and that's what you get.

OH, I almost forgot. As if it couldn't get any worse, I found this.

Look familiar? This is the End Game (non-tier) PvE gear that can be bought with Ultimate Commendations (the highest form of PvE currency). The Tier Gear with the set bonuses look exactly the same as this except they are recolored Blue and Gold. So not only does every classes gear looks identical but the end game PvE and PvP gear is exactly the same aside from color. There is NO difference. And SWTOR wonders why it isn't succeeding as a top grade MMO. People wonder why it can't compete with WoW on the smallest scale. Laziness. Plain and simple. Absolutely disgusting, abhorrent and inexcusable laziness.

I don't usually get angry about MMOs in general, but this is something that absolutely just sent me off of a cliff of emotions when I discovered this today. What do you think? Is it acceptable for the gear to look the same? Do you not care because you're just going to pull the Mods out and put them in something you like better? Or does it annoy you that your end game gear looks exactly the same no matter what activity you do besides a recolor?