Please rethink this new TLP Daybreak Team...

So essentially you gave me a book of stuff I already knew and claiming I missed the point, but your entire point is missed while you still explained it...?

Saying gear level inflation occurred is accurate, yes. Saying gear level inflation from multiple expansions prior was the cause of the mid tier guilds death is wrong.

The first claim was current group gear was on par, or close enough, to the previous expansion gear. Not a single example you provided backed that up. TBS gear - FIVE EXPANSIONS and a level cap increase later - being on par with OOW gear wasn't the starting point of the death of mid tier guilds. That's BS. You know it. I know it. Stop pretending that it was. All group gear has to eventually be on par with raid gear. That's like saying OOW group gear being better than VT gear was the death of mid tier guilds. But let's go on. SoF group gear being on par with raid gear two expansions (and one level increase) behind also didn't kill mid tier guilds.

You said it yourself. What killed mid tiers? SoD being a joke of an expansion and the sudden power and skill curve needed to beat UF. Using your data. 59 guilds beat SoD in era. 5 guilds beat UF in era. 34 guilds beat HoT in era. 22 VOA in era What happened? UF caused the destruction of the mid tier guilds which the game never recovered from. The proof is there. You even said it yourself, HoT was an easy expansion. Why then did 25 less guilds beat HoT vs SoD? Underfoot.

By HoT every expansion is a gear reset. Still doesn't mean current group gear is equal to previous expansion raid gear. It NEVER was. The closest it has been was TBM raid and EoK group. Any time before that and after that there is a pretty substantial gap. It was never the reason for the death of the mid tier. It never will be. The joke that is SoD and then the steep incline in skill needed for UF is what did everyone in.

Also, let's not forget the exploity nature you could beat some SoD raids and in hard mode to give your guild end tier raid gear such as pulling all the dragons in FoS to demolish each wave of Iksars. People were so overgeared in SoD and they still got plugged by UF.

I have played most of the TLPs and selos was one of my favourite but that may because of the guild i was with. I for one would play a god unlock TLP or another selos . Hard as UF was HoT raids were just as hard if not harder when they came out first.

Your summary of how gear itemization has evolved in the modern game was excellent, but I have a quibble here. I've never been a fan of using "X guilds beat all content in-era" as an absolute measure of an expansion's difficulty, because it glosses over several other relevant variables. In this particular comparison:

GoD and OOW were six-month expansions in-era, while UF and HoT were both a full year. OOW suffered because so many were stuck "behind the wall", as it were, in GoD content. Since then, GoD has been extensively reworked, and is not regarded as being nearly so difficult as it was in-era. Since we are talking about how these comparisons play out on a TLP server, we should be looking at how they work TODAY, not many years ago.

In the current TLP cadence, UF is only an eight (8) week expansion, since there is no level increase. If only five guilds on all Live servers combined could do it in-era taking a full year, what do you think the chances are in an eight-week window?? We're about to find out what will happen on Mangler, and I'm not expecting the results to be pretty. An argument over the whys of guilds folding in UF in-era is irrelevant if the thing that does them in now is the cadence.

Reminded me of a post I made, August 23, 2010:

Prediction: Almost all guilds on Mangler will beat it in Era. Some already have.

Then I'm impressed. Of course I'm on Aradune instead, and I may be projecting my own anxieties.

It's toned down from what it was and the devs have doubled the key drops and tripled the loot in UF so everything progresses much more smoothly. It's still one of the hardest expansions but its for sure doable by almost any guild that makes it that far.

Truly question whether you actually played on mischief or just read the ignorants that spouted the 5-6x drop rate over and over.

The drop rate when the server first launched the drops were definitely out of control, but it's been nearly a year since it was anything like that. The increased drops were mostly offset by the more aggressive unlock schedule.

Purely anecdotal, but my playtime has been on the hardcore end of the spectrum for the life of the server and the only time I felt bis'd for longer than I would have liked was Kunark. With GoD one week away I am still missing 3-4 bis items that I wont attain due to 10 or so items in the expansion being extremely rare even with the increased rate.

There is just no way… if you did any sort of farming on the side, which I would assume you did if you considered yourself hardcore, there is no way you shouldn’t have bis by now. After about 3 weeks of pop, so about Christmas, I already had 34 heroic Stam for my warrior only missing 1 P3 item due to that not being random), plus a full BiS Druid about a week later.

Back before the changes made, 1 fire clear minus fennin ro was giving 7-8 p5/quarm tables per clear. And because of the gear level that was so high, it was easily doable with 12 toons between 5 people. We did that for a few weeks and started being bored seeing quarm loot and knew it was time to take a break…

It is very plausible that people aren't full BiS. We have had 1 Silver Hoop of Speed drop, and only 3 Bracer of the Infernos, and those aren't the only rare items we have seen very little of. Sounds like you and yours got lucky with drops, not everyone did. My guild didn't get more then 2-3 Quarms/P5s a night, even before the changes. My guild also didn't split raid to the point where we were bored and needed to take a break, we took it easy because this server makes that doable. So ya know, different strokes.

So go buy them.

Ok, thats fine that your guild didnt split raid and maybe raided 2 nights a week or whatever, but dont try to say "even hardcore people cant be bis because im not" because you are now saying that you took a casual approach to the server because of the ease of gearing...

But i agree with 2-3 Q/p5 after the fix, but before that it was much much higher

oh 2 different people, i didnt realize. so yea point wasnt that you arent cool cause you're not bis or anything, it was more a point of, dont say "its not easy cause im not yet" ya know what i mean?

This is what I'm hoping for and betting on.

2 servers, both FV ruleset, non random loot, one boxing and one truebox.

If they did fast xp and unlocks it would be even better.

Sounds like a RMT dream as they can lock down camps and sell the loot easier.

every new TLP is a RMT dream for the few actual RMT crews........

that shouldn't be a consideration for what rulesets they release.

But a free trade server where they can also dominate the camps and easily sell any normal no drop items will be much worse.

I disagree. Quest items are generally what are sold for kr, which is what it sounds like you are referring to, were kept to their same mob. Gimblox, begurgle, monk pipes and I’m sure others I’m not thinking of were not randomized. These (pipes at least) could be sold and resold in the tunnel, driving the price way down, and the cleric pieces were kept no trade on mischief just as they would be on other servers. Those prices to buy loot rights stayed high, because there weren’t people able to sell them in the tunnel for under what the farmers wanted.

You're comparing the results of super splitting raids and sharing loot between 5 people with guilds running the same content and splitting it between 30-40 people. A very large majority of a server's population isnt going to take your route.

Im not even saying your way is wrong, in anyway, if that's how you want to tackle content but to compare a situation the loot a 5 man clique's maintank gets to a normal raider is disingenuous. Our guild as a whole has seen about 5 hoops drop after 2-3 splitting time, solro, water, and fire weekly for the first 3 months so there are definitely ways of not being bis.

I am referring to all items that are normally no drop on a server that are tradable on a free trade server. We already see plenty of threads about items being hard to get due to them being perma camped and you expect it to be any better on a server that they can hand the item to an alt to sell off later?

I'm not seeing any posts about this on the first 3 pages? Maybe I need to go back further.

What are some no drop items that are perma camped?

Are there other camps that used to be perma camped on other TLPs that aren't now due to free trade? There's some items that were really sought after and perma camped on other TLPs but are meh and left alone now that raid gear can be traded.