A lot of people complain about how negative my posts tend to be, so I’ll try to keep this lighthearted.
Let me ask you this. How many new items from Empires do you think are good? Explicitly good. As in, could you use them in a fairly meta build? Maybe even just a build to survive?
You’d probably estimate about 10, mainly because that’s how much I would estimate, so I’m assuming you would as well.
Despite that estimate, there are a lot more than 10 new armor sets in Empires, and it’s mostly the most expensive ones that are the worst.
To start, let’s go over some exceptions.
- The Marauder’s Cloak gives a combination of the two best secondary stats in the game. It doesn’t trump boss drops in EP, that is until you equip it with a modifier. Very good!
- The Royal Dress set has a very high output of intensity, being able to trump the Fallen King set in EP when equipped with a modifier.
However, these are not the big sellers of the update’s armor. These are simply regular boring old chest items. They are very good ones, but we don’t expect anything from this category.
Now then, what’s the good from the section that we do have expectations for? That would be Boss Drops.
As far as I can tell, not a single Boss Drop on release was “worse” than anything else. They all just fulfilled a different niche to each other.
Let’s also not forget Dark Sealed Chest armor. They’re known for basically being the dump for weird quirky ideas that didn’t really fit anywhere else, like how Fighting Styles are basically just all of the scrapped Magic ideas.
Well, everything from treasure charting is pretty good! Rusty, Diplomat, Envoy, they all have vanity value in their own ways, and use Nimbus stats in a good way. Envoy is always better than the other two in every way, but still!
There’s a couple highlights from Dark Sealeds, Dromeas is a real kicker, the way it reduces regeneration like never seen before. Sophragos is a really nice alternative to Vatrachos for the power-hungry out there.
Then there’s our one good boss drop item, the Tarnished Cloak. Good stats!!!
Sadly, the good ends here.
THE MOMENT YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR, THE BAD!
let’s start with the most mundane of “offenders”, the Mountainbreaker set!
Yeah, it’s worse titanium. That’s kind of all it is, it’s just titanium but worse.
What’s worse about it? It has the exact same stats, but without the ability to tack on a modifier.
Simply put, you have an option that’s less rare, and has more versatility.
And then we come to one consistent problem that makes everything else so bad, stupid Piercing.
I don’t know what it is, but Vetex seems to think that we just adore Piercing, and no, we all hate it but it’s on, like, half the items in this update!
- Kalliste’s Cape, it has it, and it sucks.
- The entire Scorching Sentinel set? Yep!
- The one and only full findable set, the Visigoth set? It has piercing.
- Diatrys, one of the items most awaited for its vanity? It’s Theurgist but terrible, and with percing.
- Even this one random chest item, Adventurer’s Jacket, it has it, and it’s baaaad!!
What was Vetex doing? Why did he give us all this piercing? Nobody uses piercing on purpose, nobody does it!
What’s so good about piercing that there’s an entire fort with 10 waves in the way of a set that gives it?
How Vetex sees Piercing:
It’s so situational, one glass cannon rolls up, and you’re at half your expected power! Even if somebody just has below-average defense.
The only rare armor pieces that evaded the piercingpocalypse are ones that you dig out of the ground, but I love digging, so I still love empires armor, just not the Castrum rewards, whose idea was it to make the rewards for something so rough be so lame?
