True, everything pre Luclin was exclusively tank and spank.
The problem with VT was:
-INSANE 3 months long shard grinding to get the key
-Endless trash mobs with gazilion of hps that added no extra difficulty other than to tie your raid force down to 8+ hours raid what otherwise would be 2-3 hours content in Velious
-And after you endure the above, THEN you got nothing more but another boring tank and spank
So yes, the Ssra was the pinnacle of creative raiding during Luclin, while VT was half-done. If you read the history behind the VT release it was initially suppose to come BEFORE the Ssra. Original loot that dropped in VT was inferior compared to Ssra loot. But at the last moment some devs at SOE decided to swap VT and Ssra around progression wise. But they were in such a hurry to release the expansion they even forgot to upgrade the VT loot, so when the first guild finally broke into VT they found extremely sub-par loot drops, that were even inferior to Velious loot. It was only 6 months AFTER Luclin release that VT loot got upgraded to the loot you now remember.
But VT bosses remained inferior to Ssra challenges.
You can find all this history if you read through allakhazam posts.
PS. In EQ2 SOE tried to pull the same shit during Echos of Faydwer expansion. The final raid zone - Emerald Halls was VT 2.0 in every sense. Before you could get to the bosses you had to plow through HUNDREDS (i kid you not) yes HUNDREDS of trash mobs who kept spawning wave after wave for 3-4 hours straight. This was SOE attempt to slow down the top guilds so they don't run out of content too fast.
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]