The gear chase doesn't work when moving into NG+

[Mastodon_2]

Seriously, I knew there'd be a gear level jump when going into NG+ but I didn't expect it to be so steep. Just a warning if you were thinking of farming boss mats to craft high level sets in NG+, be careful when you spend them, saying as you can't get more until you meet that boss again.

I farmed a Fugitive Mage set with all 8 pieces in epic rarity for my NG+ run. In NG, you're capped at gear level 146 but can occasionally drop epics as high as level 149. When you go into NG+, the first level drops gear above 170. If you want to carry a set through the game, you will need to grind a lot of revenants to get enough to drops to level your gear up, then each main mission pushes the level up by 4, so with each main mission, to keep up with the gear curve, you need to drop another 2 epics for each item in your set. This isn't so bad with weapons but when all you need is one more epic ring, it feels like it takes forever to drop.

Of course, you can just let your gear become obsolete and find new stuff, which is what the game obviously wants you to do, and that is fine, you'll make it through NG+ just fine even with random assorted pieces and unoptimised builds.

It's a shame however, that they didn't find a way to make old gear relevant in NG+. NG+ could have been a cool opportunity to try out new sets with new playstyles (this was my thinking behind Fugitive Mage as it changes the way you play GS to make use of the unique skills) but instead, all you can do with those gear sets really is replay missions in NG and get a few missions out of your set in NG+, unless you want to grind.

Seems like a wasted opportunity. An amazing game overall, however.

[sgrey]

All normal people grind for the extra mats and just craft the gear they want after starting the NG+...
Gear upgrade is obviously absurd. Even just normally playing, keeping up your unique gear up to the level without re-crafting is already tedious and boring and requires absurd amount of mats. Not to mention it becomes obsolete if you level above 150 on NG0

[kl250d]

Mate I think something wrong with your numbers.
Ng+ first level for me doesn't drop level 170 items. I crafted my gear at level 149 in base game and the first level started with level 150.

It isn't an issue though anyway as you can just augment your gear up.

If you are getting level 170 items it should be even easier for you to do this

[Mastodon_2]

Grinding the drops to augment is really slow and totally sucks the pace out of the game, even if you play the whole time with the Bard set (which defeats the point of grinding your favourite sets out in the first place).

[Hormesis]

Originally posted by Mastodon_2:

Grinding the drops to augment is really slow and totally sucks the pace out of the game, even if you play the whole time with the Bard set (which defeats the point of grinding your favourite sets out in the first place).

plus agumenting only increases the def, it does nothing for the roll. you'd have to constantly reroll them. i personally used the same armor i made at the end of ng, and upgraded only my weapon, periodically rerolling it so reflected the higher values.

[Baron01]

I agree that the transition from NG0 to NG+ is problematic in terms of gear progression. The jump from item cap 149 (147 for crafted items) to 170+ is way too big. It effectively invalidates your gear in terms of levels but the problem is you can not easily replace your old set as it might not drop in early areas.

Another issue already pointed out here is that increasing gear level via gear augment is not changing stats on the item. This means even perfectly rolled items will become obsolete eventually as the ranges increase but the actual rolls stay the same. You can not easily re-roll the item that you have increased as the cost can get very high very quickly. The material to reset re-roll costs is one of the rarest items in the game and it is very hard to farm. This means that you are better off just regularly re-crafting you gear every 15-20 levels, which again is an issue if the materials are from end-game bosses.