With the focus effects being locked until Luclin, what is going to happen with the archaeologist quest rewards? As a caster its not even beneficial to be a dark race as it gives a focus effect, compared to the good classes DD clicky.
To be fair, that item is bad with or without the focus. Edit: The raw stats are actually decent compared to some other quest rewards.
Also, there are still a few race/class combos that can't use any of those items (Gnome Necromancers most noteably).
The items are only okay. You certainly wouldn't entertain choosing your race based on this item with or without focus effects.
Indeed, all the more reason that at each possible race/class combo should be able to use at least 1 of the rewards (especially considering that there are a few race/class combos that can use 2 of the rewards).
Depends if other archeologist quests are planned for early eras...? -------- Look at the race/deity restricted cleric clickies and such... mostly in original, but still lingering into Velious was this idea that was the idea that not every choice opens every door as far as itemization goes. I get it that modern (as in post-TSS if not earlier) EQ had to go templatized [or at least that seems to be the wide belief --not going to debate that] but I am okay with early EQ still being goofy. Put a great rogue dagger in that you have to be aligned with the Kaladim Paladins to quest for, small race only warrior breastplate for working with the Qeynos Necros that illusion jello cubes you... or whatever. Just an examples.
Not very likely. These quests were added shortly after the Empires of Kunark expansion went live and afaik then nothing about either the quests or the rewards have been changed since. I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say with the rest of your post, but I get the impression that you don't really know much about these fairly new quests or their rewards. Zam's list over the Archeaologist quests.
They took some unfinished questlines and finished them in Kunarkian flavor --albeit some are much nicer than your typical EQ quest effort to reward payoff (certainly for that era). First to do them on a server gets/got a title. They are Retcons. now, they can say the only "unfinished quests we have a jist of were those ones" and we don't even have to dispute if that is true or not. There are many incomplete things in the game... you go down the retcon rabbit hole you can arguably do whatever you want. If it fits the lore/era it probably is liked by many players. What I was getting at in my first post was in that era not every class got everything, and there was fun in "only race X gets to do this" (or deity, or class or combo). A little bit of this flavor in retcon stuff isn't a bad thing. They aren't going to get carried away with it simply because it mulitplies out to be too much work (and if you make it too unique no one will even do it... like those evil erudite only quests for lowbie quality items that you can't do very well as a lowbie). --this is entirely contrary to the way quests/itemization has been one size fits all (or all of a type) for some time in EQ now. Now if they get to 50 retcon quests have been done and none of them are useable by a gnome necromancer --then that likely needs addressed.
Let me stop you right there. We only have their word for it that these quests ever existed until they magically appeared in 2017. Until that happened the quest NPCs for starting and finishing quests were not there, most of the required quest items required had not been dropping, most of the named mobs dropping the various quest items hadn't been spawning and some of the effects on the rewards was of a type that wasn't added to the game until Luclin (Primal Essence spell and Focus Effect). There really is no valid argument as to why gnome necromancers should be left out as all other current race/class combos are able to use at least one of these rewards - and all it would take to fix this would be to add GNM to Arcane Orb of the Dark. Fixing the exclusion of Vah Shir (especially odd considering that Frogloks are included on all except the rewards for monks), Beastlords and Bersekers also wouldn't really require more than adding classes and races to appropriate rewards, but I guess there are probably better/easier options available by the time these appear ... still - I am not sure that is a valid reason for excluding them altogether.
Prathun… how did you not consider the possibility of magic being involved? Let me guess, your go to is Warrior, Rogue or Monk isn't it....
I think my argument was valid (in short: they used to restrict/exclude all sorts of things for flavor). Main flaw in my argument would be what exactly is the lore/flavor that only specifically excludes gnome necros? (rather than all necros, all gnomes, all necros but one deity, etc. as that was the traditional semi-logic applied in exclusions). I haven't read all the new quest write ups but I predict there isn't a storyline reason that makes excluding gnomes clear. I concede readily that adding gnome necros (and any other "missing" representation) would likely be easier, especially since gnome/necro in this case just seems like an omission not an intention --If they aren't doing any more retcon quests... then your request is even more logical (because if they were they could give gnome necromancers a really nice just for them quest, but if they aren't and the exclusion doesn't have a lore logic/flavor behind it... then you are right to call for a "fix"). If the devs tell us "we discovered old unfinished quests and finished them our way" I don't really care if that is a true story or not --they made us shiny new things. Great job, more please.
The item rewards for these quests were modified a bit by our itemization designer. He added some effects that he felt were appropriate for the era and the difficulty of the quests. Other than that, the item rewards were in the same state that we found them. It was not a goal of restoring these quests to ensure that there was something for everyone. We can maybe look into tagging more classes or races to the rewards at some point, but this isn't a high priority. We have restored some other unfinished quests from Kunark and Velious since these. Admittedly the more recently added quests were smaller and not nearly as compelling. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact amount of time involved in restoring the Kunark quests, but I'd guesstimate that it was in the neighborhood of 6 weeks. (Edit: It was 3.5 weeks.) This was originally slated as anniversary content for the year, but we had enough stuff already that we opted to release them early since they were ready to go early and it let us spread out the addition of new goodies. We don't always have weeks of free design time to spare outside of our normal yearly initiatives and we also don't always have half-finished quests to dig into. Edit: Dug back through my dailies from early 2017. It was 2 solid weeks of implementation followed by 1.5 weeks of bug fixing, documentation, rewards, polish, messaging.
Lol yes, fair enough. I didn't mean to imply devs didn't put in the time to make these most welcome quests and their content balanced rewards for the Kunark era. Merely that there were no real clues that they ever existed until 2017.
