Dethdlr’s Dungeon: Itemization Hopes for this Expansion
I’ve got big hopes for EQ2 itemization and what we’ll see in the “Everquest II: Itemization Evolves” panel at SOE Live this year. For me, there are several things that go into itemization. It’s more extensive than just the items themselves. Here are a few notes on itemization that I hope will be included in that evolution:
- Go back to the days when gear was less cookie cutter. The days when you looked at more than just the Stamina stat to see if you were already wearing better.
- Bring back heroic zone progression meaning make the top level heroic instance hard. As in “need to gear up in the easier instances before you have any chance at clearing it” hard. Remember zones like Palace of Ferzhul, Estate of Unrest, Tower of Tactics, Elements of War? This was something we used to work towards so it gave us a goal. Lately, we can clear the harder zones the first or second time we go in. If we can clear the hardest zone, what are we working towards?
- Put the items in places that make sense. If zone X is required to get access to zone Y, and the quest sending me into zone X rewards me with boots, don’t put worse boots in the loot tables for zone Y. Nobody will ever wear them and it makes it seem like nobody was paying attention when placing the loot.
- Put ultra-rare items into the heroic zones again that are desirable even by raiders. This gives us something to do. I remember people asking to run zones like Cella, Maidens, Najena’s Hollow Tower, even Obelisk of Blight way back when because they wanted an ultra-rare item that dropped in there. Quite often the next GU or expansion would come out before everybody got what they wanted out of all the zones. Again, this gave us something to work towards.
These don’t sound like difficult things to do and they used to do things pretty much like this until the last couple of years. Hopefully they go back to this way of doing things and will give us heroic group runners something to work towards again other than Obols, Spirits, or whatever other new currency they come up with.