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Originally Posted by t0lkien
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I completely agree with everything you say right up until you get to words like "death blow" or "brutalized." Luclin screwed the pooch in many ways. For instance, new NPC races were a tableau of unmotivated tropes from all subgenres of fantasy. Why were there vampires, cats, little green men and mushroom people? Nobody can tell you, other than "anything goes on the moon." Just an example of your whole "zero context" point, which is really the best argument against Luclin and the only one I won't dispute.
As to stat inflation, there is no question developers gave in to the temptation to reward people with too-powerful items. This is a bad policy for obvious reasons, mainly because it will eventually destroy interest in old content just to briefly increase interest in new stuff. But you must admit that the numbers have to go up to keep people interested, and triple digits were inevitable. I think they probably went 10% too far with Luclin, which set the precedent for exponential jumps. BUT, like monetary inflation, the real problems are pushed into the future and Luclin items were fun and powerful and not yet game-breaking. There were some too-easily obtained droppable weapons (like Centi weapons) that destroyed the market for old world gear, and worse, enthusiasm for old world zones; but on the other hand, I didn't upgrade my t staff until our fourth emperor kill, and most Velious armor is only replaced in Umbral/Ssra/VT. Weapons and gear from ToV and ST were very hard to replace at all.
I think the class distinction argument is the easiest one to take apart. It is still a huge advantage to teleport from wherever your group happens to be rather than run to a spire or a book. It is still a huge advantage to have selo's instead of a mount. They gave new powers to everyone without ruining class-defining roles. SoW was still 5% faster than Swift Journey2, which was a pain in the ass to get, and shaman have had it since level 9 in classic. I don't see why a level cap shaman would be sad about not having to sow his guild as often, or how not having to do so destroys a beautiful interaction. More anecdotes: Critical hits were a cool thing to give other classes, but warriors stayed ahead of the pack. Class AAs were awesome rewards to work up to [Stonewall stands out in my mind, as well as EQ/AM for rangers and MGB for everyone], and actually deepened class distinctions. AAs gave the game a second life at level cap instead of everyone either twinking or quitting once they've done the raid content. I just don't see how you can look back on the imperfect class development of the previous 3 expansions and say that Luclin is where it all went wrong. Powers were shared and increased--and just like with stat inflation, perhaps to too great a degree--but everyone still understood that nobody was going to out-heal a cleric.
Somehow, the game had to mature and characters had to feel stronger. When it comes to the math behind character progression, it does seem like numbers across the board could have been kept more linear. Context and lore went out the window for Luclin and heralded a future where EQ would entirely stop trying to tell you a story you could care about (though they over-compensated with PoP's scripted progression). BUT, most raid content was new and interesting and your character felt more powerful than ever. At the same time, Velious raid targets and quests still posed a challenge and even certain Kunark and vanilla drops remained desirable. In total, Luclin was definitely a step backward, but hardly a game destroyer. There was a lot of content to play through and more zone variety than in the rest of the game combined, plus it bridged the gap to PoP, which failed in its own ways, but at least managed to close the book on EQ with some class.
For what its worth, I agree that "classic" eq ends with Velious, but I think "tolerable" EQ ends with PoP.