Vex Thal and Srra Temple + AA's

[Jimjam]

Fair enough.

I think we disagree on defiant too; I viewed it as an updated version of cloth/raw-hide/chain/bronze. People complained it made PoTime gear redundant, but I think the truth is it actually wasn't as good as ~10 year old raid gear at level 65.

Although I feel gearflation really started as soon as classic EQ was released, PoTime was powerful! I agree on that! It seemed ridiculous to me that you could bypass a decade of group content gear because you raided PoTime.

[maskedmelonpai]

The only way to combat gear inflation is with lateral progression. The simplest way to do this is to implement new statistics related to a specific content release that is needed for that release and possibly future releases, but has no effect really on past releases. Essentially your character does t really become much more powerful relative to old content, but you are actually able to do the new content. Ideally, underused old world locations would be updated with content releases to include new drops with stats for new content. Keep you pushing that button since none of it actually matters anyway :3

[lurk]

Vt handed out 125/125 gear with a million resists to all and simple to max FT. Following PoP progression you dont really see such upgrades over velious until EP or damn near there. My guild on live skipped luclin while our closest comptetior farmed VT. I never regretted our decision, we competed and out progressed them by a little...they never made it to time. I quit banging my head against uqua and the guild folded not long after..

Luclin serves no purpose other than to make sure easy loot is handed to poop sockers

[pasi]

Originally Posted by lurk [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Vt handed out 125/125 gear with a million resists to all and simple to max FT. Following PoP progression you dont really see such upgrades over velious until EP or damn near there. My guild on live skipped luclin while our closest comptetior farmed VT. I never regretted our decision, we competed and out progressed them by a little...they never made it to time. I quit banging my head against uqua and the guild folded not long after..

Luclin serves no purpose other than to make sure easy loot is handed to poop sockers

There were 1 or 2 guilds where I'm from that skipped Luclin and went straight into PoP progression. I always thought it was dumb to do.

VT gear was comparable and often times better than Elemental Plane Gear due to AC/atk/focus/mods/etc vs the 10-20 HP difference. VT stuff generally had better focus effects than gear Pre-PoTime given the higher percentage and the fact that spells you used weren't always scaled down much.

The sheer number of items was the biggest difference though. Fire was a loot pinata, no doubt. However, it was also priority #1 on a reset for uber guilds (outside of blocking coirnav if a guild is 3/4). Although not to the samedegree of Fire, water was easy loot too. Other than those zones, PoP was pretty slow for gearing a guild.

PoE and PoA rings were so much effort for some shitty loot. Half of our guild would rather take the DKP hit than do air or earth rings. The pre-eplane stuff was even shittier effort vs reward. Shit like Saryrn and Bertox were several hours for 2-3 bad pieces. I like to think they kept it this way so people only wanted them for flags.

Anyhow, if you have tanks geared enough (or are willing to defer all loot to) it makes sense to rush straight to PoTime. My argument is that gearing through Ssra/VT is preferable to farming non-time PoP though.

Time of course, is a loot pinata, but that's only 1-2 days of the raid week.

[lurk]

We had no problems doing PoP in shit gear..though we were cockblocked on RZ and had to poopslck the triggers back in 2004? Even then we were often trained by the top guilds. We did RZ with 40-50. Impressively our VT comptetition did him with less than 40. And xegony with less than 30. Both our guilds always pulled kills with pretty low numbers, difference being low number coirnav and rathe aint happening, which put us ahead. The only advantage VT gives is more resists, EP gear is slightly suppior.

Honestly though mobs like bertox, mith marr even rydda dar were huge pains to do in shit gear. We still managed.

Fire was a shitshow between us. We often had 'fte' disputes. With our rivals going as far as BDAing our tank on reparm or highsunning arch magus. Good times though, id never give up those memories for an instance

[Jimjam]

Originally Posted by maskedmelonpai [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The only way to combat gear inflation is with lateral progression. The simplest way to do this is to implement new statistics related to a specific content release that is needed for that release and possibly future releases, but has no effect really on past releases. Essentially your character does t really become much more powerful relative to old content, but you are actually able to do the new content. Ideally, underused old world locations would be updated with content releases to include new drops with stats for new content. Keep you pushing that button since none of it actually matters anyway :3

Well, you could have different expansions favour different stats (both in terms of what is needed to fight and what is given by equipment). Have a 'cold' expansion where cold resists and fire damage are favoured, a 'hot' expansion that favours cold damage.

Have an expansion where mobs have high AC so damage bonus/second is favoured, another with damage shields so powerful slow weapons are favoured.

Have another expansion where mobs proc huge -agi modifiers so tanks have to gear for agility to avoid the penalty.

Make items in the expansion mitigate the abilities of mobs in the expansion and you won't have to even add new stats for a while.

[fadetree]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well, you could have different expansions favour different stats (both in terms of what is needed to fight and what is given by equipment). Have a 'cold' expansion where cold resists and fire damage are favoured, a 'hot' expansion that favours cold damage.

Have an expansion where mobs have high AC so damage bonus/second is favoured, another with damage shields so powerful slow weapons are favoured.

Have another expansion where mobs proc huge -agi modifiers so tanks have to gear for agility to avoid the penalty.

Make items in the expansion mitigate the abilities of mobs in the expansion and you won't have to even add new stats for a while.

They did try some of that, I think, but didn't make it count enough to really be noticeable.

[maskedmelonpai]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well, you could have different expansions favour different stats (both in terms of what is needed to fight and what is given by equipment). Have a 'cold' expansion where cold resists and fire damage are favoured, a 'hot' expansion that favours cold damage.

Have an expansion where mobs have high AC so damage bonus/second is favoured, another with damage shields so powerful slow weapons are favoured.

Have another expansion where mobs proc huge -agi modifiers so tanks have to gear for agility to avoid the penalty.

Make items in the expansion mitigate the abilities of mobs in the expansion and you won't have to even add new stats for a while.

Yeppers ^^ the challenge though is that you wouldn't be able to introduce new gear with more stats without introducing inflation, so there wouldn't be much sense of progress/advancement. It may seem silly, but with new stats, your character can suddenly do more things (use this new set of armor to defeat zones a, b AND c!). Wihout them, your just switching the same gear around that youve always had, because if you increase the net available stats, you begin trivializing the base game. All depends on how important that is ^^ In the absence of new stats, you could rely more heavily on a cosmetic component, which players may appreciate though ^^