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I know this has been brought up a few times, but none of us could give a concrete example of what was going on. Let me go into detail a little bit about this problem. Sometime after F2P and later in the game's life, a lot of items were re-itemized and given what most of us felt were ridiculously overpowered equipped effects.

They were so powerful, in fact, that raiders were camping level 30-40 dungeons to get these items to wear full time. They were literally taking off raid gear to get level 35+ items. That statement alone should prove how ridiculous it is.

Here's a comparison of two items with the same equipped effect. (We don't care about the rest of the stats, and I'll go over that in a moment).

[img]http://www.jakkal.com/vanguard/BadEE.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.jakkal.com/vanguard/vg_item_1621.jpg.png[/img]

The item on the left, the mask, is from a level 35-40ish dungeon. Note the required level of 37. This came from one of those islands in the Dragon's Backbone/Stranglewater Shore area. I think it's the Isle of Madness, but I don't recall off the top of my head. It's the one with all the Xennu fish dudes and their abhorrent pets and stuff.

On the right is an item from a group mob in City of Brass. This may have been group content, but it was one of the final content pushes in the game, and these mobs were hard as fuck. If you weren't in POTA T3 gear with epics, you can barely even go in this place, let alone kill these mobs. Note the item level, 55.

Notice how they both have the same equipped effect? Now I know there were raid drops that have the same EE, but I couldn't find any in my admittedly hasty search on Xanadu. But this is an example of the "Bad itemization" we talk about when we complain about that itemization sweep that went through last minute.

I feel like if this was a mistake, then the effect of Fury II should be lowered and the higher level content should have Fury III.

Okay so what's the big deal? Why would any raider switch out their gear for the lower level one, just for an EE?

Here's the mask that most raiding melee DPS wear:
[img]http://www.jakkal.com/vanguard/vg_item_1502.jpg[/img]

Look at all those cool stats! Why would anyone want to trade out all those stats for the lowbie mask? The answer is very simple: Those guys are capped in almost all of those stats. The activated ability was fucked up with the rest of the clickies, (Another rant for later), and so it was hardly ever used. And if you had an epic bard in your group, THAT ability was also useless. Rogues also hated it because it broke stealth.

Suffice to say that the reason so many raiders were camping late 30's dungeons for loot was that they were already capped, the raid gear they were getting was not adding to their character at all, and these equipped effect buffs DID NOT CAP. So making your DPS go up by 100? Very significant. Any stat that wasn't capped was a worthwhile tradeoff for damage going up by 100.

I know John asked us for an example a while back of these bad EE's that we were complaining about, and I finally got one to drop on the test server, so I took a screenshot and found a comparable item that had the same EE.

I hope this helps people understand why it was bad.

/agree, except that, the effects were actually really good. Too good. They started showing up on green gear on trash mobs around Cragwind Ridge and continued through BoE orange gear on Isle of Madness, which, among other things, meant that 55s would sit there solo farming the bosses, blocking a regular group's progress. That meant I could be 37ish and go to the auction house for an item that would regenerate both 10 energy and 10 health per second. Mostly this stuff was all too powerful for 30s, and, wow, if people were shucking raid gear to use it...that's almost blasphemous. While it's perfectly cool to pick up an effect here and there, it should be tuned down to match the level, and most of the pieces should be made to bind on pickup. Seemed to all be part of the F2P power levelling scheme that SOE thought would save their game, which, I told them, would snuff it. Visor of the Crashing Surf was definitely such an item, there are many more, and they were not very hard to get. You'd see three or four of just that visor listed for sale at any given time.

IMO this is the order of how equipment power should be and also should go by level of the item. There will be exceptions to the rule for instance a epic quest line to get weapon/armor should have the same power as a raid item if the difficulty is the same.

Vendor Items -> Normal Mobs -> Dungeon Mobs -> Quest Rewards -> Dungeon Bosses -> Reputation Item -> Raid Mobs -> Raid Bosses/World Bosses

Now for crafted items it should be along the same route based off grade of the item and level.

There should be no reason someone would want a level 30's item over a level 50's item period.


Disclaimer: This is just my opinion while I rip my eye's out looking at crafting related packets.

[quote]There should be no reason someone would want a level 30's item over a level 50's item period.[/quote]

On PVP servers the CIS see invis helmet was a lifesaver. Other than that though, I agree. the stats on equipment seemed to need some rework/tuning for endgame, often capped.

That being said, having armor at that level with stats like these DID make it nice when you wanted to play around with stuff, like use your warrior as a surprise dps monster and equip rogue/ranger armor, or sorc armor on a cleric and 2 shot people, etc...

No practical use though for endgame other than stacking secondary stats on characters for funzies, since VG doesn't really support specializing outside of your box.

[quote="Xinux"]
Vendor Items -> Normal Mobs -> Dungeon Mobs -> Quest Rewards -> Dungeon Bosses -> Reputation Item -> Raid Mobs -> Raid Bosses/World Bosses
[/quote]

That's the way most of us saw it too, or at least, that's the way we thought it should be. POTA kinda broke that dynamic. By Sunset the best of the best gear (overall) came from POTA T3, which was mostly group content. The epics required a 12 man raid. That raid was really unfun and unepic. They continued this track with City of Brass, with group content and one 12 man raid.

The 24 man raids still had very desirable stuff, but most of the progression became group or smaller raid content. But the group content from POTA and City of Brass was on par with or better than the first tier of raiding (APW and the overlands around for APW). I felt like Magi Hold was the right direction (Solo, to group, to raid). But City of Brass came out and it was grouping and a single 12 man raid.

With the lack of people in the game, I thought POTA was a nice touch, it allowed people to get raid ready gear in groups, or even individually (To earn the gear). And then that would allow them to move on to the more difficult raids. But I'm digressing. The fact that raiders were taking off raid loot to permanently put on level 30's stuff was just a nail in the coffin of what VG had become.

There were some objects that raiders wanted that were lower level or not raid begotten, most of these were clickies, such as one of the Cragwind weapons had a damage boosting clicky (From what I recall), some of them gave you invis, or levitation, and others did damage. But mostly raiders weren't using these permanently, they were using the clickies.

Cragwind weapons clicked for a 10% damage bonus; people would macro the weapon change, weapon being the gear you can change in combat.

I can see a limited amount of old items being useful at 50+, but the large array of EE gear is out of control, both at its level, and as a replacement for high end gear. Without a level increase, Vanguard backed itself into a corner of having no more loot to give once you capped stats, which I believe is why CoW introduced new stats that only worked there. Makes more sense to move the level cap to 60 so you "deflate" a little and rebuild.

I tend to think that rewards from an "epic quest chain" should be above, or at least a different kind than, stuff I could get if I just join a group, get summoned down, and kill a boss.

As for top end progression being scattered across designs for 6/12/18/24, I am not sure numbers always correspond to difficulty, but the 6 or 12 person stuff is something we can just do more often than the bigger ones. You're pretty much pigeon holed into RI/CoB for the hat, PotA for six more pieces of armor, since those are direct quest rewards. The rest of it seemed like random attempts.