Suggestion: Remove required level on all items

You could go the turn in route, but having people do tradeskills is just going to make them quit. EQ tradeskills are awful.

True, turn ins would be easier, but I think most of the later expansions are made under the assumption that everyone can craft(to a certain extend). So you might as well learn it while you level up.

You’re just forcing people to buy Krono to fund leveling tradeskills. They wouldn’t set the trivial to 0 or as a no-fail.

Level appropriate rares should drop 1 piece of defiant along with their default loot.

It is not that bad to level tradeskills without kronos, the first 50 skillups are free, and many skills can be leveled to 150+ on cheap vendor-mats.

Although, I wouldn't mind if they improved the sub-250 skillup-rate to help newbies catchup.
Skill 250+trophy is too useful, to skip imo.

This gear is supposed to help the poor people. They’re already blowing their plat on spells, discs, and merc fees.

It is cheaper in the longterm to craft your own stuff, than to buy it in baz.

It is also easier to to gain tradeskill mats, than to beat a named loot-dropper, unless you have access to help. Nameds are not molo-friendly, and expecting newbies to invest in an entire box-group is not optimal either.

It is also cheaper to get all your gear as drops.

It’s why there needs to be an overhaul on how catch-up loot is distributed either bandaid fix with more rewards from hot zone tasks or something else. Just avoid using tradeskills as a source.

Well, they could let more useful loot drop from trash-mobs, they had success with that in some expansions.
Thulian gear in HoT is a good example, and Shards Landing had 2000hme items drop like candy.

There can be multiple sources for "catchup gear", the more the better!

How dare someone want to have fun in this game in zones that no one uses doing content no one cares about! These ideas that would have no effect on me must be stomped out! Risk vs Reward! Challenge! Reasons! Etc!

How dare people have different ideas about what is fun in a multiplayer game.

That is a great use-case for emulators. Nothing stops you from running your own custom server. You can add your own itemization and spells as you see fit.

Who knows? Others might join it too, if they think that kind of everquest is fun.

I can tell you one thing though: Tuning gameplay for fun, is much more difficult than it looks...

The outdated client is torture to play with after you play with the limited QOL features the modern game has.

True. DBG added a lot of cool features over the years, that we take for granted nowadays.

It's funny how 'fun' for some means making sure that something that has absolutely zero effect on them doesn't happen, merely to prevent another from having said 'fun'.

Has no impact on someone who could also be playing in those zones and having to compete with an overpowered twink? It is a multiplayer game and can be very easy for a simple change to impact players who want nothing to do with it at all.

LOL What? There's no one 'competing'. If you don't want to use an item, don't. I get that some folks post here just to argue but even in that context this is a stretch.

Who said anything about someone being forced to use an item? I am just pointing out that it a multiplayer game so there is always the possibility that a super twink (or just a high level toon) tearing through a zone will impact others who are in the zone. This is a multiplayer game which means your actions can impact others.

There's a reason WoW kicked Eq's when it was released.
There are many things WoW did much better than eq (heriloom stuffs for alts being one of them). The evolution of games I guess. Eq seems pretty content to just collect what money they can from folks who still pay for a sub while doing the minimum to keep the game running. I guess though, what does one expect from a 20+ year old game..
Eq did a good job for being one of the 'pioneer' games, but definitely didn't keep up.