It's almost as if we're playing a game in which we play imaginary characters in an imaginary world. Do you know of the game Guild Wars 2? It's a low time commitment action MMORPG to get to "good enough" gear. The rest is mostly about min/maxing and fashion. So much for the cash store is mostly about fashion. And that's what they run the game off of with no subscription. I'm not saying that's feasible for EverQuest, of course it's not. But the fact is people care about dressing up their characters. If you're trying to mock that on an MMORPG message board, you sorely underestimate these things. (That's ignoring the silliness of acting as if the same people would work on implementing this as deciding how to rebalance classes.) Look at a game like Final Fantasy XIV. You will be annoyed probably, but the fact is people care about these things. Behold, an entire website dedicated to in-game fashion: https://ffxiv.eorzeacollection.com/
i feel like you would not have to make another item/ornament for every weapon in the game, you just need to trick the game into thinking that you are holding something that you are not, as far as the character display goes. They would have to make some other slot that the game can read: oh this is item -2347529834JAt0-BigBlueLightSaber_03 and display that rather than whatever it is you have equipped. Unless the item you have equipped is somehow unbreakably tied to the way your character is displayed, and i don't see why it would have to be.
Personally if I were to code it up I'd make it a slot in the "/keyring". Drop the primary / secondary you want visible into the boxes and have the rendering code check those before what you are really equipping. While it kind of sounds nice, there are a lot of other things I'd rather have implemented.
Create a new ornamentation slot where you insert a weapon of the same type into it and it uses that item's look instead of the current weapon.
Many of you may have already seen this, but, presented for your enjoyment: Be sure to read the comments, it's pretty funny
GW2's endgame being around fashion and "horizontal progression" makes everything sooo much simpler to develop for. EQ has some goofy barriers to this (limited ornaments, all the sensible players using original models instead of Luclin models), but if they could smooth those edges out and get us grinding for fashion they could make a lot of $$$ without making the game even harder for new/returning players to catch up. The legendary items in GW2 typically eclipse the requirements needed to evolve the chase items in EQ and they serve an additional purpose of consuming resources / currency in the game (instead of EQ where stuff typically just stacks up on player's accounts). Using chase items as a resource sink in EQ would solve a lot of problems and people would 100% do it, especially if they got a cool animation for it. My favorite is what I got for the one legendary I got in GW2 that gives me cool orbs that orbit my character.
