Well for 1- The Chardok 2.0 patch hasn't been fully released.. They released a big portion of it recently as you are aware. But it wasn't the full patch.

But 2.0 is supposed to be the last big patch. After that, i assume it's bug fixes. Possible custom content some day.. Who knows? But leadership definitely has not ruled out the custom content on this server once it's complete..

Adding in Kunark era stuff that wasn't implemented until years later would be a good start once the main stuff is done.

There's loads of quests that were added just as of 1-2 years ago on Live, and the Iksar epics for the Iksar playable classes, and not just Greenmist.

And yeah, why not Veksar? That's another should-have-been-in-when-Kunark-came-out thing.

Doesn't get more Classic than intentions.

What's the tuning and itemization of Veksar like? How much of the zone could be copy-pasted onto P99, versus how much of it would have to be modified to fit the existing era?

Danth

Awhile back a dev (I forget who) stated that they were unlikely to re-create live zones ever again after classic. Apparently it is significantly more work to do that than to just create their own custom zone, so if we get a Veksar here it will almost be guaranteed to be a completely different version than the one on live.

Since Raev deserves more than a couple lines in reply, here's some thoughts on the specific items he lists:

[*]Rebalancing of several items including the 'real' Blade of Carnage and Ranger-usable Crown of Narandi
---This strikes me as kind of fluff; existing itemization already allows for the trivialization of content.
[*]Spell fixes including no more dex+focus, cheaper Rapture, AE immune Wizard pets, and pets using player level/resistances
---Case-by-case. I like dex/focus stacking, it helps bridge the cap between lower-end and high-end equipment. Rapture cheaper...Enchanters aren't exactly needing buffs. Wizard pets were fluff, but kinda harms the classic feel of the class. same effect could be baked in without the visible pet, if you want to re-tune the Wizard. Pets using player resistances seems moot given the general way resistances work on P99.
[*]Full FT stacking
---See above note with respect to itemization. Fluff.
[*]No-aggro Eye of Zomm
---Not enough. Want to fix trivialization of pulling, probably need to disable beads/probes entirely.
[*]Blessed Coldain Prayer Shawl
---More itemization, hence fluff.
[*]Ring of Vulak
- --Maybe it was just the folks I hung around with, but back in the day pretty well everyone I knew despised that event after doing it once.
[*]DoT stacking
---Positive change that benefits DOT-specific classes and harms nobody.
[*]Focus Effects
---Spell scaling is needed, but I didn't like that solution to it. Should've been a statistic akin to warcraft-style spell power. Placing the entirety of spell scaling on individual pieces of equipment tended to limit overall itemization too much.
[*]Ancient Spells
---I don't remember those. What are they?
[*]Late Luclin AC system (289 hardcap should be in effect all through P99's timeline)
--P99 already seems to use something of a custom AC system, so this might be moot. In general the Luclin-era AC tuning changes were an improvement over that of Kunark/Velious.

Basically Raev, aside from a couple exceptions I don't oppose most of the balance-related stuff so much as I don't think it goes far enough. (the itemization-related stuff, as noted, is fluff to me since existing itemization is already plenty strong enough for existing content). The way I see it, if we want to improve the game--then improve it, instead of limiting ourselves to half-measures. I'm not a classic purist in that sense, so much as a proponent of doing a job right. None of the game's most serious weaknesses are sufficiently addressed by that list. No defense-oriented discipline for hybrid tanks (IMO give 'em evasive at 60 on a 72 min cooldown), insufficient tuning for Wizards and to a lesser degree Druids, Charm remains grossly overpowered, Warrior snap aggro still sucks (make melee stuns generate high hate IMO), and so forth. What's your own thought on that assessment?

Danth

Don't think I ever saw the zone from Live. Do the textures/etc match the Kunark-era? One of the problems with, say, Gunthak/etc was the jarring change to the polygon counts and texture detail going from Stonebrunt to the expansion zones. Jaggedpine had the same problem, it looked severely out of place next to blackburrow/qeynos hills.

Danth

There is nothing wrong with the current balance between the various melee classes, and I am including the hybrids here, at least once Haynar fixes various mechanics (spell hate, FD linger timers, push to interrupt) and the rest of the melee balance patch. The problem before was that all bosses were zone pulled, which eliminates the Knight's 'trash' tank role. When we crawled TOV during Velious Beta we used Naxi and Feign and co all the time. Sure, you CAN do it with Warriors, but Knights are far superior even with the BoC. People will remember.

The late Luclin AC system is a sorely needed nerf to P99's overpowered melee relative to both casters and NPCs. For example, even if we ignore the Monk overnerf and put them on the Beastlord table (350 cap + 8% overcap if memory serves) from the beginning, a fully NTOV geared monk would be roughly equivalent to a Warrior with 1050 displayed AC. That is a yuge drop. Meanwhie additional FT and focus items substantially buff casters and make their itemization relevant again. I think Wizards and Druids are underrated here: they are bad, but nowhere near their reputations especially if NPCs ran like they should, making snare critical and evac more useful. Wizards will still be raid focused, but <shrug>

NPCs not aggroing eyes is a gigantic monk nerf and makes FD splitting risky and interesting again.

I suspect your guild hated the Ring of Vulak because it was way to long and difficult relative to its loot in Luclin. But for a Velious locked server it's perfect, especially since Vulak would be the only way to get Ancient spells including Blessing of Aegolism, Ferine Avatar, etc. Meanwhile the Blessed Coldain Shawl opens up a lot of content by making tradeskills more useful. Admittedly rather dumb and boring content though!

TLDR: I think Verant actually did a pretty reasonable job of fixing the biggest balance problems of late Velious during Luclin. I'm sure we could do it better 15 years after the fact, but following their 'classic' timeline will maintain the feel of the server more than custom mechanics. I doubt any of this happens, as somehow it doesn't feel very Nilbog, but I do think it would improve experience of the individual players and I enjoy this kind of exercise, even if it's pointless!

Just chiming in on the non-classic wiz fixes idea. If a fix were made for wizards I think it should just be to increase their natural mana regeneration by some amount. Make it slightly higher than other classes, that way they are mostly limited in damage potential by their ability to manage agro. Which I think makes sense from a class standpoint. Obviously this would require some experimentation as to what works at what levels but I think it is the easiest way to make Wizards a more viable class to play. Maybe an extra 1 point of mana regen every 10 levels or something? Its been 16 years since I played my wizard, I remember being pretty stoked for my first flowing thought 1 item only to find it didn't really seem do much at all :p

On live almost all sebilis groups sought out a druid or wiz to evac or port to EJ once they were done. I think the OT hammer being so common really hurts druids and wizzes main purpose. Oddly there was usually a "master looter" who was in charge of distributing all PP and gems looted that night. I recall almost every seb group ended in EJ after porting out and passing out loot.

Maybe not "almost all", but I remember this being common too.

If custom content ever decides to trade "classic mechanics" for "classic environment", simply nerfing puppet strings to not work for OT Hammers would have a huge "classic environment" payoff for a tiny break in "classic mechanics" ...

.. or at least it would on Green :( But custom content will be a Blue server thing, and even if the entire OT hammer quest was removed entirely at this point, so many people have OT hammers that it's impossible to put the cat back in the bag.

And just flat out breaking all OT Hammers feels a bit too much of a "classic mechanics" breakage for even custom content.