Amazing to see Snowbound armor become worthless

For the first 2 weeks I sold full sets of this for 3-5kr, after that it was 1kr a set. Now you can buy the whole set for under 15k

Welcome to everquest. New round here i take it?

You're right, but the only fun part about that mission is running around chasing him as he flies. Note that I haven't fought him since they gave him a minimum grounding time and I look forward to resubbing again to see how quickly I can blow him the hell up.

To continue the pinata metaphor, it'll be like a family reunion where you're a grown-azz man now and get a chance at the pinata with your jerk uncle who made you look foolish with the pinata as a child

Grik is a big source for me personally flooding the market with Tier 1. It's to the point that my friend who runs the trader has said it's not worth sending him the visible pieces. With 5 characters, I need 100 plus ore pieces to get fully outfitted in T3, not to mention getting the ore for guildmates. Upping the drops to 2 has helped no doubt but I'm still throwing out a ton of T1 farming ore. Being a non-raider, I did overpay for the T1 visibles in the beginning to get the gear for my Paladin to be able to tank the mission. That's pretty standard for me though; buy the gear for the tank at the beginning of the expansion and then farm it for the rest as I progress.

As for Grik itself, the one mechanic that I changed to get him to drop, is making sure that I start the mission right after he passes over the static group. I use gmarknpc to see when he flies directly over the group, wait 8-10 secs and then trigger the mission. I don't know why that works but as long as I do that and have all characters under his pathing, it triggers almost all the time. I typically set up just past the log on the hill to the right of the entrance with the tank slightly up the hill to draw the adds away from the group.

As for the aoe and adds, I have an enchanter and with group rune and mezzing, it's fairly easy to beat. I'm not sure how I would do it without the enchanter, though. If I'm able to burn before he mounts, I usually end up with 3-4 adds, 8-10 if I don't get him on the first pass.

Overall I'm happy that T1 is readily available. My only knock on the gear for this expansion is that the T3 stats don't seem to make sense between brilliance, adroit etc. Maybe it's intentional for the stats not to clearly align to the classes but I personally would prefer that it did.

It hasn't, but bugged named that spawn like 10x too much for like a month or so at start + generally easy missions floods the market extremely hard

Agreed, raid gear stats have been spiraling out of control for years now.

Somewhat related question on Snowbound armor. As I said before, I don't have ToV yet. I hadn't been pricing Snowbound, since I couldn't go to ToV to get the refined velium needed for the combine.

Last night I saw some Snowbound refined velium up in the bazaar. Didn't know it was tradable. So, can one obtain Snowbound armor without owning ToV?

yes .. as long as your 110 .. you can buy the ones in baz which are usually higher priced .. or if you have a friend who has ToV give him the pp to go buy it for you from the merchant in ToV so its cheaper .. you need 8 pieces and iirc cost is like 167k pp or something, but if bought from baz its usually 20 to 30k more ..
and you can buy the snowbound armor in the baz , so you can get T1 ToV gear even if you DO NOT own ToV .. Yeppie

Snowbound should be 113 or at the very least 114 recommended. Does it make sense to have its best stats just at the time it will be replaced?

The devs will likely say it is good at 115, so you can finally get the items needed for the next tier, but it doesn't often work that way in game.