EQ Never

a_skeleton_02_sl said:

Also, I hate random green,blue,Purple,Quest drops with a passion. I think every item should come from a specific place and have a specific theme but I also recognize i'm in the minority.

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me2me2! I also like being able to look at someone and see their story, where they've been and such. It wasn't always possible in EQ, but sometimes pieces stuck out. Like if you saw a rogue in plate leggings you knew he'd been in live tower, or the dragonscale bps etc.

a_skeleton_02_sl said:

Yup, Wow Resets and stat crunches are a positive thing for people who leave and come back after a while. That's why the next big game that comes out should have more than just statted gear in dungeons.

EQ stuff like

-Bags
-Illusions
-Gems
-Faction
-Fun Trinkets
-Clickies
-Cosmetics


People still camped Classic Camps all through out later expansions not for shitty gear but for unique upgrades that did not fit the mold of "X Staff of the X"


Also, I hate random green,blue,Purple,Quest drops with a passion. I think every item should come from a specific place and have a specific theme but I also recognize i'm in the minority.

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The problem is that Hunters would only want to go to hunter places, Priest to Priest places etc. Unless there is a pool of something for every class, or a hunter item with some mounts or some gold blah blah blah

mkopec_sl said:

Yeah i was never keen on the resets wow did. For one it obviously made all the hard work for naught. And second, it basically killed off any of the older content. Instead of add on expansions, they were a new game every expansion.

Of course there comes a time in a games life cycle that a way to catch up needs to be added some way. But there are other ways to do this to have new people catch up other than just straight up resets every expansion.

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This was one of the things that EQ did really well. The resets on expansions weren't nearly as devastating as newer MMO's. Your raid gear from a previous expansion was still pretty solid up until you started really going deep into the next expansion. Gear from VP and Seb helped you to not be totally gimped while doing SOV. In fact, a lot of players were still doing raids in ROK well after SOV's release, and SOV well after the release of SOL, etc?

Bdo did something that should be adopted in every game: soft cap in levels, skill XP, combat XP and contribution XP and energy.

Adopt whatever playstyle you like on top of that, but if everyone copied wow with quests, everyone should copy bdo for that.

Well, EQ gear was largely irrelevant until and including Velious, casters were capped at 200 of their primary stat, armor class was soft capped and the only thing that made a difference were hit points and epic weapons, which thankfully remained relevant for a long time, considering how painful it was to get them (it was not fun at all, it was a fucking anal rape from big huge monster cocks, period).
It was only with Luclin and with items having Flowing Thought and several clicky effects that caster received a nod. The release of PoP introduced other modifiers (and cleric proc hammers!).

Gear was relevant for a longer time, because by itself it wasn't that relevant to begin with. My cleric for example was geared with Vex Thal and PoP gear on every slot but one, the cloak. I had FT15 and various mods so all I needed was more hp and mana at best, I still had my Hierophant Cloak from Sebilis Crypt (4wis 4int and 75hp/mana if I recall correctly).

WoW gear resets are not really resets, if you were in Naxx gear, you took no upgrades until level 70 dungeons, unless you wanted badly the double stamina offered by new items, in fact halving stamina budget value was one large change they did at TBC launch. Of course if the player desire is to keep an item forever or for 3 expansions or more, well that's definitely not WoW. Now I don't specifically remember the other xpack transitions, because I honestly stopped giving a fuck, but in the end all this discussion is the same that my guildmate started in 2003 during PoP: "fuck, we farmed Vex Thal for months and now I have to change all this shit again", in a game where very large guilds had to live with minimal loot drops per week.

I kinda got used to change loot often, it's disposable, so what? My characters are what they are, not what they wear. I still remember some piece of gear from my old EQ characters, yes sure, because I never got an upgrade in years, see Tunare earring just to name one.

The point is, some gear was kept relevant and some of that didnt require a raid to aquire.
JBoots, Eboots, FBSS, Box of Abukar, Manastone for example. Some other was later even used in epic quests so players got to farm some more of that like pegasus feather cloak.

I think theyre just looking for flare items that mean something again. Incarnadine BP was nice because a Warrior could cast invisibility. Pegasus Cloak was nice cause it could cast levitate. Jboots were nice because of Spirit of the Wolf. Those items, and items like them didnt make you any better as a player, but it made your life inside of EQ easier. Instead of going balls deep every time I ran through Sirens Groto, I had levitate, sow and invis and could get through there unscathed. Instead of running past Sontalak and possibly getting killed and training ToV entrance - I was invis and could run right past him. Just examples but it just goes to show that those items, even though they were from Classic and Kunark, were still relevant and very handy deep into SoV expansion. Hell, when I made my Ogre Warrior on P99 - I never knew how much of a pain in the ass it was to be a large race until that point. So the Mask from Lguk was something that wasnt "required" but it made life a fuck ton easier.

If you get anything that makes life easier in an MMO now, the effect isnt very good and even worse - the item has limited charges usually. I dont have time like a teenager anymore like most people, but you can bet that if I could get a clicky item that supplied me with +run Speed that wasnt weak or had limited charges - Id spend the time farming it. If the game has factions and I could get a mask that would allow me to disguise myself so I could enter a city and just bank there, Im camping it. This shit isnt rocket science. People just want items that make life easier inside of the game and make other people say "Wow! Where did you get that? How did you do that?!"

Daidraco_sl said:

I think theyre just looking for flare items that mean something again. Incarnadine BP was nice because a Warrior could cast invisibility. Pegasus Cloak was nice cause it could cast levitate. Jboots were nice because of Spirit of the Wolf. Those items, and items like them didnt make you any better as a player, but it made your life inside of EQ easier. Instead of going balls deep every time I ran through Sirens Groto, I had levitate, sow and invis and could get through there unscathed. Instead of running past Sontalak and possibly getting killed and training ToV entrance - I was invis and could run right past him. Just examples but it just goes to show that those items, even though they were from Classic and Kunark, were still relevant and very handy deep into SoV expansion. Hell, when I made my Ogre Warrior on P99 - I never knew how much of a pain in the ass it was to be a large race until that point. So the Mask from Lguk was something that wasnt "required" but it made life a fuck ton easier.

If you get anything that makes life easier in an MMO now, the effect isnt very good and even worse - the item has limited charges usually. I dont have time like a teenager anymore like most people, but you can bet that if I could get a clicky item that supplied me with +run Speed that wasnt weak or had limited charges - Id spend the time farming it. If the game has factions and I could get a mask that would allow me to disguise myself so I could enter a city and just bank there, Im camping it. This shit isnt rocket science. People just want items that make life easier inside of the game and make other people say "Wow! Where did you get that? How did you do that?!"

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Exactly. I was a wizard, so most of my gear before SOL and POP was just +mana. However, items like a mana stone, FB earring, and Jboots were essential in order to make the game that much easier to play (not having to beg shamans and druids for SoW was heavenly). Then there were other items that were mostly cosmetic, but made other players incredibly jealous, like the GBS and SMR. The stats on the SMR weren't even all that impressive, but they sure made you look cool, and all the casters in the game wanted one because of it. You throw in all the clicky items in the game (I still remember getting my deceiver's mask), and you had items that people coveted and were worth camping.

It's definitely interesting talking about some of these items. The fact that 15 years later I can still remember the stats for some items (Miele mentioning the Hiero cloak above), the icons, the way it looked on the character, is pretty amazing. I sure as hell don't remember any stats from my gear in any game I've played in the last 5 years.

Hell, I still remember the fact that on my druid I had a PoF bracer and Mithril Bracer (from solb) for months, until I had a corpse dupe which allowed me to get the 2nd one. Who remembers crap like that? In fact, I could probably list out 90% of my gear at any one point with accuracy if I really thought about it, despite not having seen those items since I became an adult.

Erronius_sl said:

I don't even know how serious to take the Naxx gear argument when IIRC only a very small subset of serious raiders spent a lot of time in there with the expansion on the horizon and complaints about raid-stacking. My guild at the time wasn't a zonebreaker guild and we just said 'fuck it'. How many people were rolling around in full sets of Naxx gear when TBC hit? Could it have even been more than an infinitesimally small number of people? It just seems weird to argue that WOW resets weren't resets because of basically what was an extreme outlier in raid gear and content. (unless I'm completely misremembering, which is possible)

TL;DR: I'm willing to wager that for 99.99% of the game's population, it was totally a reset.

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Of course you are correct, it was a reset for the vast majority of people.
If we for a brief moment fly with the fantasy, imagine TBC released 2 months after vanilla Naxxramas, it'd have been called progression instead of reset maybe
Anyway I understand the feeling, but after all, do you really want to keep your gear forever? It annoyed me in EQ to be honest. Oh hell, it could have been made more relevant in case of special stuff, like vanilla weapons or legendaries (especially legendaries), but their plan was to make sure anybody could pick up the game in no time and be on par with other players.

Today you have a fuckton of clickies in WoW, but none of them really alters gameplay: bank, repair, travel gadgets, illusions, etcetera. Hell an engineer rivals a mage in terms of available port locations.
EQ items were definitely memorable, you kept them for all your EQ life: Jboots were slower than SoW (35% vs 55%), but still amazing, Staff of Temperate Flux was a must have for any wizard with its instant cast ranged debuff that was used to pull the typical 4 mobs, FB earring, Goblin Skull Earring for a junk buff, Coldain Ring and Coldain Shawl in Velious, Kunark Armor or other special pieces, JJB for shamans. Damn I remember a lot of them, but they are too many to list

Miele_sl said:

Of course you are correct, it was a reset for the vast majority of people.
If we for a brief moment fly with the fantasy, imagine TBC released 2 months after vanilla Naxxramas, it'd have been called progression instead of reset maybe

Anyway I understand the feeling, but after all, do you really want to keep your gear forever? It annoyed me in EQ to be honest. Oh hell, it could have been made more relevant in case of special stuff, like vanilla weapons or legendaries (especially legendaries), but their plan was to make sure anybody could pick up the game in no time and be on par with other players.

Today you have a fuckton of clickies in WoW, but none of them really alters gameplay: bank, repair, travel gadgets, illusions, etcetera. Hell an engineer rivals a mage in terms of available port locations.
EQ items were definitely memorable, you kept them for all your EQ life: Jboots were slower than SoW (35% vs 55%), but still amazing, Staff of Temperate Flux was a must have for any wizard with its instant cast ranged debuff that was used to pull the typical 4 mobs, FB earring, Goblin Skull Earring for a junk buff, Coldain Ring and Coldain Shawl in Velious, Kunark Armor or other special pieces, JJB for shamans. Damn I remember a lot of them, but they are too many to list

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I really strongly disagree with you because the spot where I draw the line on progression vs reset is when the items you had before aren't really helpful or necessary for getting the next set of items. Inside of an expansion having the BIS gear from the raid is a big advantage going into the next raid, it allows your progression to move at a pace that is weeks or months faster than if you started in quest gear. But at expac launch all that raid gear is worth maybe a few hours of faster questing, if you can't see the difference I don't know what to tell ya, but those resets are a big part of the reason I drifted from wow.

And there is a middle ground between gear resets in wow and gear being bis for years on end like in early eq.

When WoW devs deliberately nerfed the Admiral's Hat buddy system we knew they would never have clicky items of value. Hell, I remember getting that one ring from LBRS which had an activated barrier with mana regen on a 30 minute cooldown. Equipped it, clicked for the effect, removed the ring and watched the buff poof. Completely worthless.

Creslin_sl said:

I really strongly disagree with you because the spot where I draw the line on progression vs reset is when the items you had before aren't really helpful or necessary for getting the next set of items. Inside of an expansion having the BIS gear from the raid is a big advantage going into the next raid, it allows your progression to move at a pace that is weeks or months faster than if you started in quest gear. But at expac launch all that raid gear is worth maybe a few hours of faster questing, if you can't see the difference I don't know what to tell ya, but those resets are a big part of the reason I drifted from wow.

And there is a middle ground between gear resets in wow and gear being bis for years on end like in early eq.

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I actually agree with this. You bust your balls doing the hardest content available only for the last raid to be a worthless experience by the time your 3/4's into the new content. Its not like you dont experience the new content, because you have to do it to level anyways. The gear your replace it with looks horrid and needs to be transmogged 90% of the time on top of that. If you're doing Heroic Raids, I think you should at least, with the correct strategy, make good headway into Normal. If you're doing Mythic, then a little bit further into Normal. Gear replacements starting at Normal Raid Tier for Heroic and Mythic. (I know Mythic and Heroic tiers change names constantly, but you get my point).

Malakriss_sl said:

When WoW devs deliberately nerfed the Admiral's Hat buddy system we knew they would never have clicky items of value. Hell, I remember getting that one ring from LBRS which had an activated barrier with mana regen on a 30 minute cooldown. Equipped it, clicked for the effect, removed the ring and watched the buff poof. Completely worthless.

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I had completely forgot about Admiral's Hat. That shit was still cheesy though lol.