One of the things I look forward into clearing hard dungeons is the gear and what it looks like. It is fun showing it off. I must say through all the tiers the classes have been hit or miss. Some really bad. My suggestion would be to involve the community a little bit more to get feedback before you put them in game. Maybe have 3 different armor look drawings for each tier and have the community vote. This way you can get a better feel of what works and what doesn’t. This will save people from disappointment (i.e. mage hat).
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i just dont know where any of the armor for this update fits in anywhere. all of the armor sets look like we are trying to be 80s wrestlers, and the legendary bow is well… 2 fish. idk where the idea came from, but its just random. clear the super hard engame dungeon and get a legendary? here u go a fish kebab
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Thank you for the suggestion that is helpful feedback.
If everyone doesn’t like it we can certainly consider changing it. Obviously our goal is to put out gear people enjoy wearing but taste can be a pretty personal thing.
I assume this is why most MMOs eventually come out with the ability to choose your look regardless of what you have equipped.
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Musketeer techno armor looks awful. After how good TM musketeer armor looks this new armor looks like I’m in kindergarten.
We loved the desert musketeer armor with actual plate on it even though rangers got a plate helm that looked like it would have fit musketeer better.
If I had a request for the highest end gear make us look more like cowboys than wrestlers.
The fish bow is awesome.
I hope the warrior legendary is a shark on a stick. Or a swordfish.
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Yeah, I would suspect you would only have to do it for a few tiers just to give you a good feel of what the community wants. After the voting you wouldn’t have to release the results so it would still be a surprise in game.
It would probably be a good start to just list some of the sets people have liked and what they liked about them thus far. Then we can take that feedback and rework them.
Running into a situation where as I place my dungeon shard in my chest, I’ll walk out of my house and still have the same one in my inventory as I just put away. I relogged to try again and it continued to happen. I went in and out of my house about 6 times and finally it worked to where the shard wasn’t in my inventory and I could get back to my group to get another.
Did you mean to say what people “didn’t like” and rework that? It should be a combination of liked and didn’t like data.
It also sounds like a start to a plan for a huge fashion show event where everybody votes and gives feedback on all gear or something like that 
The bow or some of the armor I’ve seen doesn’t look bad in general, it definitely is fun looking at(some pieces are) and I like it being in the game. You’re right taste is something personal but I, too, hoped for the shard dungeon gear to look more epic instead of funny.
This is just my very personal opinion and I don’t want to disrespect the work you put into this at all
No worries as I said we welcome feedback. If people don’t like the gear we want to know what they don’t like about it and how we can do better in the future. If it was a swing and a miss then that’s how it goes, we’ll try and make it better as with anything else in the game.
One thing I have noticed is that many people seem to be pretty keen on the design style of both the Tradu and Shard muskets. Why not apply a consistent style like that across all weapons for all classes? The “bone gun” style applied to a bow would probably be more appealing to many that “a couple of twigs”, and the spikey, jagged “coral” style of the shard gun on a bow would probably be liked quite a bit more than “a couple of fish”. I don’t have a problem with the Tradu sword, or the images i’ve seen of the shard sword…but neither seem to fit with the other weapon styles at those points.
Alright I’ll post this but only because you want to know what we think of the new armor.
Riley…what is this on his head? Why does it look so phallic?
It definitely gives an April fool’s vibe.
Edit
Im a doofus. That image was photo shopped.
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DaddyDutyVR put his shard into a dungeon that pyra had already cleared the bosses. When shard started it showed 100% complete 0/0 bosses killed. No timer.
Did he get loot at that point as well?
No loot. Just broke the dungeon and no next level shard. All the mobs respawned. We didn’t rekill the bosses. moved on
I’m sorry, I really don’t want to give bad criticism, art is subjective, and I haven’t seen all the new gear yet, but from what I have seen… Fish bow, Musketeer looks like a old x-man design. I’m not sure I want to comment on what the Runemage helm looks like… well they’re not suited to my aesthetics.
Here’s my attempt at constructive feedback
The fish bow is kinda funny, I heard it moves 
but I think a fish bone bow might have looked better. And if that moved it’d be great, creepy, but fun.
The musketeer just looks like:
It just needs something added so it doesn’t look like a spandex onesie, a little bit of armor or strapping perhaps. I’m hiding the helm in favor of hair regardless, but the center detail, instead of being a small round gem, make it span across both eyes, more visor-like, connect it to the ear pieces
The legendary gun looks amazing
The hats and outfits in the beginning seemed better, from what I’ve seen so far, it looks to me like some of the designs are progressing to less 3D detail and looking more like patterned jumpers and toques. I’m not saying we need giant shoulder guards, but some armor, buttons, straps, details that are raised off of the form would add so much. (with the exception of the new mage hat, I’m sorry, that is just,… no)
The original designs had the look of layers, and dimensions, hats with brims, belts with bullets, straps and sashes with accessories. Maybe we’re pushing for content too quickly for the designs to be detailed like this, but for me, this is what I’d like to see more of.
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Warrior Gear:
Starter: Looks fine. Basic but warrior-y
Plains: Looks fine. More metal and professional.
Jungle: Chest, Shoulders, Gloves are cool. Nice colors. Not a fan of the helm. The spiky horns/barbarian-esque helm is not my personal favorite.
Desert: Really like it. Helmet is a little too blocky/buckety for the head model (Made the head look extra big and wobbly/top heavy). Everything else looked awesome.
Tradu: Love the Shoulders. Not a big fan of fingerless gloves, especially for a warrior. Helm is cool and I like the thin chestpeice.
Shards: Chest is ok. Techy with some armor plates. Shoulders are too small/ makes us look more like sci-fi movie astronauts than sword swinging warriors. I think I saw a screenshot of the gloves (Not a fingerless fan). Have not seen the sword or helm yet.
Swords:
Beginner: Solid thin blade that feels good and looks like a good starter sword.
Striker: Looks good. Feels smooth swinging.
Chaotic: Looks cool, but feels awkward to swing. I prefer thin/straight blades.
Justice: Looks cool. It’s a little wide but isn’t hard to swing.
Personal preference:
I like medieval style armor and weapons. Armor that looks bulky enough to look sturdy/strong. Weapons that are thin/narrow long blades that can smoothly/accurately slice through targets.
The overall gear/look progression was really good up until Shards. The warrior gear really is the best looking gear in the game and the look made you go “WOw I look so much cooler now than before” So as I have minor critiques I do think the warrior has gotten the best deal when it comes to aesthetics.
I’m going to try to be much more concise in my feedback than I usually am, because who wants to read another wall of text but more importantly, I want to go play Orbus.
First up, praise: Guaranteed drops each dungeon, escalating shards and solid tooltips, clear messaging of time remaining, including non-gear rewards, leveraging old content for new end-game content, is all pretty damn great. Fundamentally, these shard dungeons fill a niche of a self-managed increasing escalating challenge for end-game players to work on progressing through over a long period of time instead of just chewing through in a day or two. Additionally, the attentiveness and the willingness of the dev team to make rapid iterative adjustments to improve the system and communicate those changes is to be lauded.
Major Concern/Issue 1: Balance
This is a really big one and while perfect balance is obviously impossible, even with a number of quick adjustments yesterday, the disparity between many of the dungeons is absolutely immense, and plays a much bigger role in potential success than the mutations, group composition, or anything else. One small example: having some dungeons where clearing one group of 5 monsters is a 50% mob clear, and another where each kill gets you maybe 1%, while keeping the same time requirements, is not going to work to have a comparable escalating challenge at each tier. And with such a huge disparity, successfully moving up through the shards is going to come down to who can get luckier on the dungeon RNG than who can field a more solid team.
This is also a serious issue with bosses and specific boss mechanics. Mechanics that can be mitigated down to zero by perfect player behavior (Example: Potion Keeper AE) are not going to scale in the same way that non-zero mitigation, unavoidable mechanics (Example: Any tank buster attack) are, as pre-shard L20 tank busters were designed to put pressure on tanks and healers prior to being scaled up and having mutations applied. Thus, some of the TM bosses (particularly tank keeper and soul keeper) are going to become disproportionately more difficult with the escalating scaling. This means these will only be done to a certain shard level and then abandoned as being a waste of time.
Other balance concerns including being able to hard CC trash in non-TM shard dungeons but not in TM dungeons, and any elite healers being so time intensive to overcome that players are already resetting to graveyard to avoid them after clearing everything else out in their groups.
Major Concern/Issue 2: Gear Appearance
Obviously appearance preferences are completely subjective, but the majority concensus I’ve seen with much of the new gear has been confusion and/or disappointment. To be clear this is in no way a knock on the dev artist’s work or capability. I see this as being more of a tone disconnect. Overall we have a world with this deep, often very dark lore, touching often on very serious themes, and then we have equipment that seems much more whimisical or borderline silly. I am not suggesting this type of thing shouldn’t exist, but things like the fish bow strike me more as something to have as a cosmetic purchaseable from an in-game store or microtransaction than as a legendary drop from the hardest content in the game.
I know a lot of jokes have been made about this as well, but I’ll bring it up anyway in a serious context. The new mage helm (and to a lesser extent the previous one as well), definitely strongly evoke phallic imagery. I don’t know if this is an oversight, a joke, based on something else which carries those details, or what, but it seems like everyone who sees it has a very similar giggle-worthy reaction. Fundamentally, I think many of us were hoping for more serious, functional, badass gear for our end-game efforts (though not necessarily over the top dramatic crazy). Or failing that, some level of customization choice where some of us can go the sillier route and others of us can pursue a more dignified look.
Major Concern/Issue 3: Bugs
With the introduction of the time pressure with shard dungeons, new bugs have been introduced and many long standing bugs have had their impact raised. Disconnects, client cache problems, vrclient crashes, missing projectiles, desynchs, are all made much worse when you are under a time crunch. Same thing with audio issues, and any and all combat bugs. One example is the ghosts in the cave dungeons have long had an issue where sometimes their AE is not visible. This was a major issue when the cave dungeon was maximum level, but feel in priority for a long time when people could just overpower it. Now that everything has been scaled up, it’s an issue again. Shield HP going invisible when a single block can wipe on a boss. Bosses not resetting properly when they can one-shot most of the group. This is not to remotely suggest you guys aren’t kicking ass and constantly closing bugs, but I believe a bunch of them that have been on the backburner need to have their priority re-evaluated in light of shard dungeons.
As always, all of the above is said with no malice whatsoever, and only the best intentions for the game as a whole. I am obsessed with and in love with this game, and I am continually impressed by what such a small dev team is able to accomplish.
Please let me know if I can provide any additional feedback.
(PS Sorry for the wall of text, I was really trying to keep it brief that time.)
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