Damascus Please Stop Posting Your Bad Opinions edition
Full disclosure: I've been trying to get the manual fragments for this stuff for a while now, but I promise there's more to this than complaining about drop rates.
The refined armor sets were released with the last dungeon update, being retrains of existing armor sets (Dustin, Royal Knight, Northern Lights, and Majestic Knight) with enhanced base stats and added set bonuses. The manuals are acquired via manual fragments dropped from dungeon bosses. Stack 2 of the fragments for a corresponding manual, chosen at random. Simple enough; farm manual fragments until you get the one you want, sell the ones you don't/sell the crafted gear.
The added set bonuses are pretty solid mid-game options, all suiting various specialized playstyles.
-The Royal Knight's bonuses are tank-friendly, giving a 10% chance to no-sell any instance of damage and granting immunity to poison, which otherwise deals % hp as damage over time.
-The Northern Lights set is mage-friendly, giving a movement speed bonus and lessened mana usage, allowing for faster repositioning and more freedom to spam spells pre-spirit.
-The Majestic Knight set is perfect for every close combat main, sporting a damage bonus to Smash, Charge, and Windmill.
-The Dustin set is a solid utility option, granting an attack delay reduction and granting protection to stomp and explosions.
On their own, these sets aren't bad, even if some of the set bonuses are only occasionally helpful. However, anyone familiar with giant gear is already seeing some problems; Absorption, Smash, and Charge bonuses are all already available on the quintessential mid-game giant equipment, those being the Colossal Valiance armor set and Frosted Borealis sword and shield. Not only do these not require manuals, being crafted through Hillwen Engineering as opposed to Blacksmithing, but they are infinitely cheaper to craft, with relatively common materials from shadow missions and requiring far less of them compared to the refined armor sets. From what I remember, the only options available to humans and elves for the absorption set bonus is the refined royal knight set and Millia's outfit, which obviously doesn't provide any extra defenses from armor masteries, meaning giants have far easier access to this particular effect while still gaining defensive stats that don't rely on random chance.
(HAHA OOPS I FORGOT ABOUT SAINT GUARDIAN oh well)
What's more, the Refined Northern Lights set is rendered completely moot by the existence of gacha gear and spirit staves/wands granting innate mana recovery. With Refined manual drop rates as they currently are, it is not only easier to farm gold to buy +movespeed footwear, but arguably cheaper. Shooting Star Flying Shoes sit at roughly 50~60m at the time of this post, with no listings for completed Refined Northern Lights gear.
(There are two manuals for the greaves listed at 20m and 45m, but the greaves grant anywhere from +2~5 for the set bonus, compared to the shoes' full +10, meaning you would still need the main body piece and crafting materials.)
Taking things a step further, the Refined Dustin set's best bonus, attack delay reduction, comes from both the helmet (which has a completed manual drop, rather than fragments, mind you) and main body piece, meaning the vambraces and greaves only grant stomp and explosion protection. However, the original Dustin vambraces had a +4 to stamina usage reduction, which wasn't found anywhere else on the set. I don't have a point to make with this, I just really wish that was a set effect on one of the refined sets too. Attack delay reduction is still just annoying enough to get that I think it's fine splitting between two hard-to-get gear pieces, even if I personally wish it wasn't on heavy armor.
Taking all of this into account, this means the only set bonuses really deserving of their rarity among these armor sets are attack delay reduction and windmill damage (the only other sources in the game being the Soluna Blade, Nightbringer sword and shield, and Nightbringer 2H sword, all of which are exceedingly rare).
But, these were intended to be mid-game sets, right? These are all pretty solid armor sets that would be much more useful if they were more easily obtainable before things like the Geas sets become reasonable to farm, or before getting powerful enough that gold was easy to farm.
Joke's on you, I was complaining about drop rates the whole time. Sort of. Only when other available gear is taken into consideration.
The real argument I'm trying to make here is that they're far too rare for their own good. They aren't able to provide to players who could still benefit from their set bonuses, since the more universally useful set bonuses found on the Geas armor sets are infinitely easier and cheaper to obtain, and players are infinitely more likely to have access to the g22 techs by the time they even see one refined manual fragment, let alone two of the same type. The only players farming for these manuals are ones who want to sell the crafted gear for exorbitant amounts or weirdos like me who want to set up a lower level character to mess around on.
This could easily be fixed with increased drop rates, making the manual fragments tradeable, or allowing players to choose which manual they get from collecting two fragments. All three would be optimal, but we all know asking for just one is already wishful thinking.
tl;dr the refined armor sets are useless specifically because they're so rare that players will be able to farm materials for better sets well before they come across the manuals for a refined set they'd want, and also they're completely useless to giants (EXCEPT for the windmill set bonus for double hammer windmill machines) as the most useful set bonuses are already available on the colossal valiance and frosted borealis sets.
