[GenomeReseekwensed]

Now - I've not made it into any of the new zones as yet, so I don't know what the relative difficulty level of the mobs is like, but...

Having taken a peek at some of the items appearing from the new expansion, it looks to me like the single groupable gear in SoF is significantly better than a lot of the raid content gear, in the raid content that we've been working on.

Have they finally broken itemisation, in terms of raid/group content?

D.
_________________
--
Decimator Genome Reseekwensed , Warrior

[Gravidon]

Alot of the new GM stuff that players make is better than the raid items from solteris. I think they are trying to blur the lines between the raiders and casual players. It MAY be an attempt to attract more of the older accounts or something of the sort to attract players in general. Everquest is not the time sink that it use to be.

[Shieara]

Yes a lot of the gear makes our raid targets obsolete...though I still want to kill Sendaii for the flagging if nothing else.

We've been talking about it but no final decision has yet been reached. We need to see more of the expansion first.

[Culdahl]

This is just an early suggestion, but I'm thinking people need to flag for Crystallos (top end SoF zone), so we can farm the "supposed" groupable mobs there. They drop very high end gear and are meant for groups in Solteris gear. The downside is that you're talking about static spawns that drop 1 piece of loot each and I believe some are tied to armor in lower tiers (power-up type stuff). We'll have to wait and see how it shakes out, but that seems like a possible thing for us to do on some nights.

Just keep in mind that "group" mobs in SoF are almost equivalent (or harder) than raid mobs we're facing now. Fort Mech is only tier 2 and the named's there (top level) completely raped me the other night. They hit for 6Kish, quad, spawn adds and have a nasty AoE....this is Sony's tier two GROUP mob /sigh.

As for mudflation: The idea here is thus - The GM armor is bad ass, but it's only 8 slots, so even though it may be on par with high end raid gear, you won't reach end gear status on more than half of your slots. Also, the raid gear from SoF is fairly crazy, so you can't base the non-raid gear on older raid content. The problem is that we had several expansions come out on a 6 mnth cycle, which means that although we may be breaking into Demi, we're actually 3 expansions behind the higher end folks (actually 4 until we beat the queen). This is the case for many mid-tier guilds as well. TSS was a LARGE power boost as compared with demi and PoR, which put the high-end raiders a good deal ahead of the mid-level raiders and WELL ahead of non-raiders.

Thus, we need some "catch-up" gear to close that gap a bit or we'll find ourselves in a similar situation to our pre-PoP days in which the average raider was light-years ahead of us.

Sony typically goes with a 60%-70% ratio on raiding gear to group gear and that gap is off atm (especially HP/DPS wise). I think, in the end, the gap won't be bridged as much as we think, because the SoF raid items will be a significant boost to the current stuff being farmed in TBS. The high-end raiders will still have gear 30% better than us even with a full set of GM armor and farming of tier 4 group content.

[Ardnasc]

I still think it is a good idea to progress and gear up in each expansion. It looks to me like the game is designed that way and personally I'd really really like to see the top end raid zones in each expansion!

Have Fun!
Ardnasc

[Imp]

As far as group mobs goes -- a large part of it is about resists. If your resists aren't there, you got a problem. Also being on the DoN Vish is dead resist table is a significant factor.