RetiredRaider

Years ago a friend turned me on to the second iteration of a massively multiplayer online roll playing game. He told me about the original where he was in a guild called Legacy of Sorrow. I was told stories of dragons, contested mobs and gods. So when the game finally opened for play I rolled a mage to back up his guardian. We played quite a bit in the beginning and he even managed to get me to leave my first guild, Southern Cross, for a new LoS that had formed; however as time went on he lost interest, yet I remained.

I stayed in LoS for a long time and had made many friends there. Then one day a drama whore managed to tear LoS apart. So with my fiancé and another couple we moved to yet another great guild, Allure. They were awesome people, but raid times were offset from us as they were Australian and we lived in California. While tier 5 was still end game and I was only level 45 we left for another guild better suited to our schedules, Second Dawn.

In five levels the game changed so drastically for us that it seemed to be altogether different. Instead of a simple quest and grind it became challenging. Twenty four would enter an instance and fight for the honor of a few bits of fabled gear. This gear didn’t drop outside of a twenty four person raid and its benefit was obvious in mitigation and stats. Very few had more then a few pieces outside of our guild, and our guild’s quest was to become completely fabled.

Then tier 6 hit and fakebled gear was introduced. It said fabled, but the mitigation and stats left a bit to be desired. Flowing thought was once rare, and now it dropped like candy. Not all was lost however. Epic weapons were still very hard to get and the encounter to get the final update was indeed very difficult. We left this tier with a feeling that it was worthwhile and still a challenge. We were rated in the top 5 guilds (some would say we were evenly placed for 2nd) competing for world wide first raid kills (NPU was number one).

The next tier only made things worse. Fakebled trash was common. You could almost become completely fabled without a guild; all you had to do was put in the time. Gear was off the hook and the differences in gear were so slight that it was sometimes difficult to tell what of two items might best go in a slot.

Now in tier eight almost none of my friends from tier 5 even bother to play. Then something happened that reminded me of words I spoke to a fellow guild member way back in middle tier 6; that EQ2 had become like little league baseball. He complained to the guild that the game had become too easy. Now that everyone could get fabled, and the game started to feel like WoW to him. While this was true at the time the day they broke mythical took the cake.

Mythical gear in the beginning was almost unheard of. It only dropped once, looted by one person in the 24 player raid. There was only ONE on the server unless someone moved an uber toon, and if they did there would be a server that did not have that item anymore.

Now, like candy, it drops to everyone who spends enough of their life committed to a quest and able to attend a fairly difficult raid. What I had told that friend so long ago was that much like little league it is as if they stopped keeping score. That way everyone wins and everyone gets to take home a trophy. In my opinion it has made the rewards as worthless as participation awards. It has completely removed my drive to raid or even play end game content; making the game little more then a chat room to catch old friends as they reminisce of olde.

Take care and be safe. ;)

Tristen

There is only one problem with your statement. Mythicals are not one per server, artifacts are. Its a tag like Lore. Upto T8 all mythicals where artifacts, hence the confusion

Vakitton

Hmmm...I believe I had a similar convo with a guildie about this topic a couple of months ago where he shared similar views and has a similar background. Could that be you mister anonymous?

Febrith Darkstar

Bye then /waves

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Cats Like Choo-Choo Like EQ2 too!

firamas

I echo your statements, and I can only hope that with the next expansion this fall and the one after that (when they likely raise the cap to L90), there will be an actual attempt by the lead devs to keep their teams communicating with eachother so we have itemization that actually makes sense again. That's all it takes, communication and coherent vision. All of this mess could have been avoided.

The best course of action right now is to just wait patiently ahead to T9 and pretend that the disastrous itemization/progression of T8 doesn't mar the future landscape of the game. I think that'll likely be SoE's last chance to impress us... if T9 opens up and we're faced with another year or more of horribly tuned progression, they can expect to lose a lot of subs. The raiders will quit because there's little point in raiding for gear, and the casuals will remain engorged with overpowered solo/duo obtainable loot, get bored with the game after their 3rd fully geared alt, and then quit.

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Entropie N'evrending-- Unrest -- 80 Mystic
_Become Death -- Nagafen -- 80 Brigand [The Kraken] ...retired
__Firamas Slytheryn -- Unrest -- 80 Bruiser [unguilded] ...retired
___Firamas Shadowstrike -- Tarew Marr -- 70 Monk [Enlightened Dark] ...retired

Firza

the problem is not that Mythical is getting more common (goals should be achievable, and become more achievable as time progresses),
the problem is that there is nothing to replace the "mythical" item tag

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Firza this one sucked.....next pls

serum321

In the words of Arnold, "Quit whining."

Seriously, how is raiding 40 hours for x amount of weeks or 20 hours for 2x amount of weeks to be able to obtain your mythical "little league." I agree itemization is a bit screwed up, but you still have to kill end game mobs to get the best loot so your fabled is better than their fabled.

Pinski

I think the problem is that people think tags matter. Item quality should matter, not the tag.

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Kall

I bet if they changed Tangrin and Avatar loot tags to Mythical, it'd please a lot of people even though that change would be essentially meaningless.

Firza

Names never matter, they just make speaking about stuff easier.

of course quality of items is the underlaying value.

(edited to make it say what i wanted to say, lol)

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Firza this one sucked.....next pls