There is a large saturation of these cultural sets in game already. The fact that people were able to trivialize what is supposed to be an extremely difficult and expensive armor to make is a pretty big deal. Some of the cultural sets (Dwarven comes to mind) are equal to or better than planar. Being able to craft that for like 500pp a piece in mats is ridiculous.

Keep in mind the cultural armor trivials at an extremely high Smithing skill, and it's routine for even Master Blacksmiths to fail 3-5 combine attempts in a row on a cultural BP or Leg combine. If Blue Diamonds were required (as they're supposed to) you would have to burn through 10k+ in BDs alone just trying to make ONE piece.

THAT is how hard it is supposed to be to make these. There's a reason you don't remember seeing this stuff so commonly on Live.

make all that shit nodrop

I was a member of the 1700 club back in the day, I'm familiar with the difficulties of crafting.

By making it no-drop you force a market correction. Everyone that currently has the armor can use it but it no longer becomes part of the 'wealth' of that player or the server. The only way to extract that wealth is to add back in a large portion of it via the gems.

If you're intent is to remove the armor from the game to induce rarity, then I would suggest making the armor statless and having a vendor buy the armor for a reasonable price. I believe Catherin and other crafters used to sell it for 2500pp a piece + 500 for pieces that take 3 sheets of metal. Maybe make it sellable for a large fraction of that? Say, 70%? I'd be happy with either solution.

However, making it statless, worthless items, just punishes unsuspecting people.

I like your second idea.

My problem with only making it no-drop but keeping the stats is that it just feels like a wishy-washy solution, considering what's intended to be such a rare and expensive armor has been so trivialized for so long. There is already such a large volume of this armor in circulation, and it's been produced for 2.5 years now for pennies on the dollar. Everyone and their Mom already has a set in the bank somewhere.

With that said, it's a hard call to make. I'm just giving my opinion.

seriously, you're starting to piss me off with this crap

if you're gonna get up on your soap-box for this, atleast read through the whole f*cking thread in bugs

Welcome New Players!

To P99 where everyone has a set of cultural armor in the bank....(well everyone except you).

For the Elven stuff, the requirement would've been a minimum of 10 (yes ten) blue diamonds for chest/legs/back, less for other pieces. Failed combines would obviously raise that minimum. Same for jacinths req'd by Dwarf & Human armor.

As an aside, it is worth recalling that on Live, until cultural armor was introduced blue diamonds and jacinths were just semi-valuable vendor trash, they did not know as we do that blue diamonds will make better resist jewelry come velious, they did not have that same resist jewelry implemented for an extended period ahead of time and then nerfed.

Also, this applies only to the armor using "enchanted" components. The non-enchanted versions (for instance, all of the Human Imbued Field Plate including the somewhat popular Rallos Zek version) are not affected.

Funny seeing all those elves and shorty race tanks running around in their cultural brown poop armor. Would have been better off rolling an ogre and wearing bronze.

This

Fuck it, leave it in.

Server will never be fully Classic and it's cooler to see it than to not see it. EQ has too much useless (but neat) shit rotting because better shit is easier to get. Do everyone a favor and sacrifice cultural smithing on the altar of being awesome.

I say this having owned no cultural armor and having 0 interest in tradeskills that aren't fletching.