Based on most of the responses seems like the community is pretty conflicted over which after velious era xpac started to ruin the game, but that's definitely the tending theme it started to grow mold "somewhere around there".
Primal was probably the devs first big booboo in item power scaling during velious, but my god was it awesome to have! It was just TOO good.
For me the game lore and ultimate play experience was at the pinnacle during Luclin.
It all made sense to me, leaving velious for the evil that was banished to the moon, all the mentions of shissar' in world items previously through Kunark, the deep ties to the Iksar race, the greenmist item coming into game.. all that really breadcrumbed the story experience for me and got me excited to face the Shissar in Luclin. I really really enjoyed that part.
Being in a server first raiding guild on Erollisi Marr, the best part of luclin was racing FOH, Afterlife, Triton, Legacy of Steel and several others I can't remember for Luclins hidden raids. Literally being one of the first few dozen people to obtain a Ssra, Seru and Vex-Thal keys were some of the most memorable gaming experiences of my life.
Spending so much social time in and out of the game with guildies on IRC trying to puzzle solve quest text and hunt for items across the world was something I found so unique to everquest, the mystery and then sharing it with the community once you discovered something.
But no matter how much I loved the luclin story themes and those very unique end game guild only experiences of getting first keys or kill attempts -- Luclin was the worst expansion and the largest step in the wrong direction. 95% of other players were given community destroying gameplay loops such as:
** Bazaar killing the player-run economy, haggling a thing of the past.
** Nexus killing the real interactions needed for portals, and just made everyone goto luclin. Bye bye old world.
** The horses destroyed slow travel and again community interaction for buffs,
** The horses also destroyed casters wanting to indoor dungeon kill because you could meditate on the horse in combat outdoors,
** The AA's while giving us so much to progress in, gated people out of simple things like groups or guilds more so that gear checks ever could. You had a max level that could make raids and levels, but not neckbeard 200AAs, now you have this endless AA point hampster wheel were good players and dedicated guildies up to that point got left behind.
** AA's also killed the alt experience, less people leveling new classes after hitting max level
** Bane weapons for raids bosses, if the RNG wasn't bad enough already.
** Really boring raid encounters, Vex-Thal was a put you to sleep raid crawl.
All of those things set the wheels in motion for me to feel like the game had changed. I pushed on from Luclin into POP with all my vex-thal shinies and by exactly plane of war or whatever fight in planes of power, I was done.
I would be really disappointed if P99 ever went to luclin without taking out all of those things and class changes. That would be the only way I would want to go back and do it again.
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