I would caution anyone that enjoys playing EQ as it was intended from playing on the Mischief/Thornblade servers. Randomized loot and tradeable loot will spoil you and it will be hard to ever want to return to traditional servers. While there are some pretty serious flaws with this ruleset, it’s quite addicting to be able to purchase the best gear in the game from the Bazaar.
Most of us that have played in the original EQ era aren’t used to being able to completely deck out our characters in full raid gear without raiding at all. You don’t even need to farm the platinum anymore; you can simply just buy Kronos with real cash and exchange it allowing you to buy your characters into the best gear possible.
I will warn you that purchasing the best gear available isn’t cheap by any means but just knowing it’s possible for you to get this gear without having to sink time into raids and DKP is just a crazy new aspect they added with this ruleset.
It’s not all fun and games though.
After playing through several expansions with this ruleset there are some serious flaws with this system, most I’m hoping were unintended and just poorly thought out.
The biggest thing is the market is completely unstable and the expansions drop way too fast to have any stability at all so you either pay an enormous amount of money at the start for gear or wait till the end to get into the gear when it’s less useful.
When Darkblade of the Warlord was first for sale on Mischief at the beginning of Planes of Power it was going for over 50 kronos and by the end of that expansion it was down to a few kronos and then by the time it was replaced with the Brutish Blade of Balance in Gates of Discord it was selling for the equivalent of less than half a krono.
If you convert the Kronos into black market real dollars at ($10 a krono) we’re talking about a single item costing about $500 and then plummeting to $5 in the span of just over 3 months.
I should briefly explain how Random Loot is set up before I lead into this next part. With Random Loot enabled what they have done is linked loot tables together across several mobs typically grouped by level range or difficulty. When you kill a rare npc there is a chance that you get into a shared loot table that includes similar mobs of that level. Meaning you could get a Flowing Black Silk Sash to drop without having to kill a frenzied ghoul and without having to even be in Lower Guk.
This has somewhat prevented those bot farmers from sitting on individual mobs to own the entire market for specific items. The extra drops create extra supply rather quickly that can be sold so you never have to farm a camp or even a similar rare camp to get an item you want.
I’ve noticed some things that I refuse to believe are intended unless they’re just trying to make a joke out of their game and make it really really easy for everyone to gear out.
For example, the Plane of Fire minis(and other minis or weaker mobs) were linked to as high as Phase 4 Plane of Time loot. So while on a live server with a normal ruleset, most of the stuff they drop is usually trash, but guilds are compelled to chain farm these1-2 groupable mobs just for the gear.
This does not sit well with me, I think it’s fair to have the minis linked with other minis loot tables and I think it’s fair to have Plane of Time tables cross linked across Plane of Time bosses, but putting up to Phase 4 Time gear on PoFire minis makes it so there’s less of a need to go into Plane of Time at all. Of course there are items in Time that are BIS that will be farmed to death till enough drop but having Time items drop outside of Time makes most of the boss loot useless in a way. By midway through the expansion even people who have never raided are decked out in Plane of Time gear.
Also in the Planes of Power, the Shade from Plane of Nightmare has access to as high as Plane of Time Phase 4 loot tables as well.
This is a mob that can be easily duo’ed and even solo’ed in era so people were farming this trash mob for its random loot table. This made really good gear easily accessible which caused the markets to plummet for such gear. Most of the people I raided with had 6-12 characters in groups of 2 that would farm this mob every week.
In Lost Dungeons of Norrath the amount of augs that dropped on raids was so ridiculous and because many were lore it really took awhile to figure out who could hold which gems in the guild to pass them out later.
In Gates of Discord, not only do the Primals in Yxtta (all one groupable in era) have access to Ikkinz 1-4 raid gear, but the wandering shapeshifter mob in the tunnels that’s on a 2 hour spawn also has the same access.
I saw one guy farm this wandering mob basically the entire expansion he literally sat there and waited for it to spawn. If you think about what that means, that means 12x a day (every 2 hours) he’s getting rolls on Ikkinz 1-4 raid gear and quest items from Cragbeast Queen and other high end quest items were in this table. This created such a flood of gear in the market that you could gear up pretty decently for really really cheap.
If your goal is to rapidly and effortlessly get the top end gear with very minimal effort, the Random / Tradeable Loot ruleset is for you. However, most of us that played EQ expect some type of challenge and something to work toward.
The biggest problem I’m seeing is the willingness to return to the original game once these progression servers get past the popular expansions. How does one reroll on a regular ruleset classic server and find any joy?
They basically fed us crack and if they don’t release Random Loot servers every 1-2 years, they will end up killing off even more of the lacking subscriber base.
Hopefully the next Random Loot server either has properly linked loot tables with comparable mobs all the way around or if high end items are going to drop off lesser mobs it would also be cool to see the random loot table become No Drop and locked to the people who killed it in the raid so it can’t be sold off to other people to come loot.
In other words, if you’re going to get a Dark Blade of the Warlord off a Plane of Fire mini you better hope somebody in the raid can use it or it will just rot and not flood the market.
Tell me what you think in the comments below? Are random loot servers good or bad for the game?