Comparable Incomparables

I find it quite interesting that in Moria days there was constant whinging about the lack of "comparable incomparables" and a lot of nostalgia for the halcyon days of SoA, where you could get mostly equivalent gear from a number of different end game regions.

It seems to me that addressing that is a large part of what Turbine is doing now. There's a lot of new stuff added that is almost all lateral moves to what already exists. Now you can choose to get end game gear from the Moria raid cluster, the Lothlorien raid cluster, or the Mirkwood raid cluster.

Of course, everyone is complaining about the lack of gear progression as a result. A lot of players did the same as all the lvl 50 content was rolled out slowly. If you had Helegrod gear, there wasn't a lot of progression until the Rift came out. And once you had Rift gear, there wasn't much improvement until Moria.

I do think that the devs boxed themselves into a corner by setting the bar too high initially in Moria and not giving themselves much room to grow. The Watcher set and first ages were as high as one could reasonably go. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they added 5 levels just to have an excuse to reset the Legendaries to a more progression oriented system that lasts longer.

Personally, I think the game would benefit from another long stretch of stable cap like we had at lvl 50. I think a lot of the "OMG, grind!" angst with the current set up is the implicit assumption that in a few months it'll be obsolete. "Get it now before its useless!" or "Bah, why bother? I'll have to do it again next week."

You can't fix the Moors if the cap keeps changing and freeps power up ever couple weeks. You can't retrofit the lvl 40-50 'endgame' style content for the new cap (like Turbine is doing in DDO) if the cap is constantly increasing.

I would like to see actual drops to drool over and some item progression in the new content. The barter system is great as "an" option. Its dull as "the" option. But I'd also be pleased if we were in for a period like book 7-14, where new content was added to a stable cap and power level.