“At least on par with crafted” means that many of them will wind up being the best in class. I find the claim that you can somehow “opt out” of grinding for the best-in-class gear a bit disingenuous when it comes from a PVP player. If PVP really worked like that, I doubt we would be seeing so many complaints about meta du jour every time Funcom changed something.
There was a fairly popular video by Ceronesthes outlining what’s wrong with PVP in Conan Exiles, and many of the points in it were met with approval from what was the PVP community on the forums back then. Pretty much no one disputed his point on “barriers to entry” in PVP.
Now we’re suddenly seeing a vocal minority claiming that adding more barriers to entry would be okay.
Yes, variation. Not an endless cycle of buffing X until it becomes the meta everyone screams about, only to be either nerfed back or obsoleted by Y.
If it’s nerfed, you’ll hear screaming from both PVE players who are sick and tired of that, and from PVP players who enjoyed that meta.
If it’s obsoleted by something else, you’ll keep hearing complaints from people who are nostalgic for X and can’t just let it be not as good as Y.
Give us variation. Make a legendary item be a better choice for some situations and a crafted item of the same kind better in other. And hopefully make the situations that call for a legendary less common than those that call for crafted, so that people don’t have to add yet another thing to their list of yak-shaving preparatory busywork.
EDIT: What really adds insult to injury is just how ridiculously low some of these RNG percentages are. There’s really no excuse for some of the low values you can see in the DevKit. “But then everyone will have one” is not a justification, either. If you really want to limit how many of X can be on the same server, that can be implemented in code. If not, then everyone will have one sooner or later, so why should it matter if you can get it in a couple of days instead of weeks or even months?
At any rate, that’s just a side rant, really. The game should captivate you by being fun. For those who think slot machines are the pinnacle of fun, I hear Vegas is really fun this time of year.