Feldon 
From Kander on the EQ2 Forums:
Altar of Malice Rare Drop Merchant!
Coming soon! More info next week!
Short and sweet. Not that Kander is short. Or sweet. Unless you mean the colloquialism “sweeeeeet”.
He then added in another thread:
Going to say it right now. It will not include the ethereal weapons. Those effects will be readily available in expansion 12 on a new item tier. More info super soon.
Oh joy. I can get teh things I couldn’t get from running instances by spending the Ferrins I, uh, didn’t get a lot of because not many instances.
I bet the prices will be stupid just like everything else in this miserable Charlie Foxtrot of an expansion.
Great idea of course, just like it was last year. Sadly it is way too late in the year imo, with new content coming in a matter of weeks. It would have had a much bigger impact 2-3 months ago.
I hope they have a better healer proc in the new expansion/campaign, thingie.. the ethereal proc on the healer weapon is useless to druids and channelers 🙁
Ya the proc on Vashti isn’t so hot for druids but man, that proc owns for shaman/Templars.
So, having been away for a long time and now back playing on Stormhold … help me understand this. If there’s gear (presumably fabled) that rarely drops from bosses in instances, and you haven’t been able to get the particular drop that you wanted, you can just buy it from a vendor using some currency that you get just for running instances?
Good grief. It’s no wonder the standard servers are ghost towns.
They’ve been doing this for 4 years so congrats on being 3 years late to bitch about a mechanic that is overwhelmingly supported by players.
Of course it’s overwhelmingly supported by players. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for the game as a whole. Hopefully they’ll keep that sort of stuff away from the TLE servers down the road.
If you want everything behind an absurd RNG, then why aren’t you running instances for Ethereals and harvesting 12 hours a day for Spellshards? Oh that’s right, because nobody likes long odds RNGs, even the so-called diehards. Again, if the introduction of a vendor for rare loot drops shocks you because those who have run zone X a zillion times and are having bad luck on the dice drop are getting a break, well then you haven’t been playing the last 3-4 years because it’s nothing new. We had it in Sentinel’s Fate.
As for the first 5 years of the game, did people run the same zone 100 times to get 1 rare drop? Remember that zones had 18 hour lockout. Heck there were no persistent group instances until 2008.
Why is paying 1000 ferrin for an item bad for the game? If someone has earned that many ferrin without seeing the item they want drop then they have earned it more than someone who ran one dungeon and got it first time.
It probably would not have hurt to have released this a month or so ago, as right now it is 2 months away from another expansion. Although it is not too late, and since we have no further use for ferrin we might as well get one last set of upgrades and give it one last push for progress in the raids.
And yes I am enjoying this expansion, definitely plenty to do and a good challenge to it.
Oh I’ve no problem with them putting items up for ferrin. This expansion is all but over, so let them have at it. However, the price should reflect the value of the item, and there are some drops that shouldn’t be buyable for less than 10k ferrin at a minimum.
Wait it’s supported? LOL you must not be playing the same game as most of the population friend.