grade 6 ratchet or grade 5 impact driver?

[tools guy-kun]

just wanna know which of these YOU personally prefer, and depending on the comments, it will influence me if I should work for the materials to make a grade 5 impact driver or stick with my grade 6 ratchet.

thanks in advance!

[Vi-El]

I personally dont pay attention to performance but visuals and sounds so I personally recommend the Ratchet. Performancewise, although I didnt test, Impactdriver is probably better tho

[aY227]

The one with bigger block damage, with iron breaker + some other mods you might get 100dmg per hit - if not it doesnt matter.
(+15% from iron breaker is not shown in stats)

[Macdallan]

Ratchet, usually being able to add a that fourth mod bridges the gap between tiers pretty easily. Chalk that up to a flawed, nay - completely broken, quality and loot tier system.

[mathaniel]

Explain flawed, nay, completely broken quality and loot tier system in relation to these two tools in their lvl being compared.

[Macdallan]

Originally posted by mathaniel:

Explain flawed, nay, completely broken quality and loot tier system in relation to these two tools in their lvl being compared.

It's pretty simple, actually. I'm surprised you haven't seen it first hand if you've played Alpha 20.X a lot.

When you start finding low quality (Q1/Q2) items of the next tier they're almost always outperformed by the gear you already have making the new items essentially useless. It happens the most often with tools, but some armour and some weapons aren't worth using until you get a Q4+ item.

By the time the "loot stage" system decides you can finally start to find the next tier of items you're usually swimming in quality 4-6 items of the previous tier. There's no reason to upgrade to a quality 1 ratchet if you have a quality 4+ wrench. The stats on the wrench are probably at least slightly better, if not a lot better, plus you can put more mods in the higher quality wrench. The extra mod or mods you can install improve the stats on the wrench so much that they guarantee that the higher quality wrench will be significantly better than your shiny new low quality ratchet in both stats and because of the benefits the mods provide.

This also happens with some weapons, though there is usually some other benefit to the next tier weapon that may make taking a hit on the damage output, or having some other inferior stats, less of an issue. For example upgrading from a pipe shotgun to a double barrel shotgun is usually worthwhile even if the pipe shotgun is Q6 and the double barrel shotgun is only Q1 or Q2 because of the low ammo capacity and slow reload on the pipe shotgun.

We used to have a huge amount of variety in quality, and parts you could swap out to improve the quality of an item, and it was a better system than only having 6 quality levels. Now we just have "item is quality X" and that's it. Item quality dictates how many mods you can install and it shouldn't. If they just gave everything 4 mod slots then suddenly that useless quality 1 ratchet becomes useful, and installing 4 mods might make a Q1 ratchet better than a Q4/Q5 wrench, and maybe roughly on par with a Q6 wrench.