What's the new gear going to be like?

Question from Sloan Shadowstaff:

Hi Friendly,
I was wondering if you could get some insider blogger information from Professor Greyrose again. I was wondering with the new level 60 level cap if there would be level 60 clothes. By that i mean if there would be new Grand Master clothes except for level 60 players. Ever since KI announced the new level cap I got a little excited and a little wary of farming for the possibly new "Grand" clothes. I think it would be very awesome and give players once they reached level 60 another exciting thing to do to make there character even better.

Heya Sloan! I tried to get some insider info on this and rolled snake eyes. I don't think KI is ready to leak some gear information to me yet, but at some point they will be ready and it will be awesome. I'm predicting some of our new gear will blow the Grandmaster gear out of the water.

It's happened to me before, but especially in the Game that Shall Not Be Named. There I was, a raider wearing Tier II Purple's and the moment their Burning Crusade expansion came out that raised the level limit 10 levels, all that work I went through to get the uber gear was for nothing. The first standard magic drop I got was more amazing than what I was wearing and had these new things called "slots" where I could upgrade my own armor! All that work I put into raiding . . . All those DKP points spent on great gear . . . all for naught.

Wow, I just had a scary flashback . . . /shiver

When KI released Dragonspyre, it went down a little differently. I was wearing old school crown gear clothes on Thomas, and they were fantastic. I pretty much wore them all the way through Dragonspyre and didn't slip out of them until I got my level 50 Grandmaster gear. You know, it would be debatable to say that old school crown gear is better than level 50 gear, but the resistances on old school crown gear is so awesome, that . . . well . . . if it weren't for the pluses to damage, I'd probably still be wearing my old school crowns gear clothes (and would still probably put them on for pvp).

SO, what's this long ramble getting at?

My prediction for new gear in the game when the new level cap goes live is this:

1- We're going to be happy because our gear will improve, but the stuff we find in the first areas of the new world will not be any better than the loot we find from the pre-quest because . . .

2- I predict the pre-quest clothes are going to be an improvement over our level 50 gear. And I predict that we will be spending a lot of time excitedly farming our prequest clothes while we wait for Celestia.

3- Our gear will start to improve over pre-quest clothes somewhere in the 5th or 6th zone of the new world. (these are all guesses of course)

4- Finally at the end of Celestia, your level 60 gear will be a far cry better than your level 50 gear, but it will make improvements in ways that none of us have thought of. Currently the stats you receive are, +accuracy, +damage, +damage%, +resist school%, +resist all%, +health, +mana, +power pip, cards, etc. I think that there will be a new stat influenced all together.

You see, with the pets expansion we've seen a new mechanic with our pet talents, and that's the "proc."

What's proc?

Well, this site seems to handle the question ok. Here's a quote:

"Proc" and "proccing" is used to describe whenever a random gaming item activates, or a random gaming event occurs. Particularly common for massive multiplayer online games, procs are random events where special armor or weapons provide the user with temporary extra powers, or whenever the opposing monster suddenly becomes more powerful in some way."

In the pets expansion, if our pets manifest something like "spritely" or a talent where they manifest a ward, our pet now has a chance to "proc." They will cast a pixie, or a ward, or a blade, or something else. Right?

What we haven't seen is a +%chance to proc statistic happen yet. Imagine a piece of gear that makes your pet have a chance to cast its blade spell more often? Nice eh? (Especially since I hear some of those ward proc rates seem almost non-existent.)

Also, what if your pieces of gear now have a chance to cast procs all on their own? What if your sword now comes with the spritely talent as well as 5 cards? I predict it is these kinds of improvements that will surprise you on the new gear. Stuff that we didn't see coming.

So, in summary and conclusion with much doom of the ending of this post approaching . . .

I got nothing but hope for the new gear. I really have no idea what it will look like, but when we do eventually see it, we're going to love it! We might hate that we spent hours farming our level 50 gear, but somehow we're going to just have to get over it, and I think "fun" is going to be the answer.

Hopefully KI makes the new gear more fun. :-)

Happy Dueling!