I'm finally pushing into CotF and looking through named targets on EQResource, and I cannot believe how poorly itemized the mobs are in Ethemere Tainted West Karana. Out of 17 mobs, 7 drop cloaks, one with a Type 3 slot and one without. There are also 5 named dropping ranged items, again, the only real differentiator is a Type 3 socket. 14 cloaks and 10 ranged items, with virtually no differentiation. Are you really that lazy, SOE? Cloak droppers: Crazed Scarecrow Gelden Oklaric Roon Shoon Skretch Torishal Range droppers: Brodhas Grawarararwr Lava Mantle Soul Sifter Stix
Welcome to Cloaks of the Forsaken. In case you didn't notice, the expansion's mascot dragon is also wearing cloaks on her face.
Itemization in general has gotten really lazy. They need to stop this scourge of all/all items and start introducing interesting class specific items again.
The weapon graphics in CotF were also lazy throughout Tier 1. The Warrior hammer looks just like the priest hammer, all the 2 hand blunt weapons look the same, just boring.
The T2 weapons are no better. No imagination and completely void of fit for the class. The rogue weapons are giant, bejeweled, shiny gold things. Rogues should have small, stealthy weapons. Something you can sneak up behind someone and stab them in the back with. Everything I've seen from graphics tells me they want to sell hero's forge and weapon ornaments.
Yet you know we will all buy the new expansion and support more of the laziness. And laziness in itemization is nothing compared to how poorly done the tradeskill recipes are. The cloth recipes use ore, the bag recipes were using last expansions template recipe till it was pointed out. Wish we had Ngreth in charge of tradeskills again but oh well, one can only hope.
it is because they released half of T1 and split up the armors visible and non visibles and because each non visible also gets a type 3 version you end up having 2 that are nearly the same of an item from the same npc the items are optimized by class stat wise but made all/all so people do not need to hunt around to get the item that only they can use (and also because all/all makes itso there is more equipment for just everyone [woot wizards with +backstab mods])
Itemization also seems to recognize that certain types of gear are more important and desired than others. Foir instance, cloaks generally only maintain buff duration foci and include DS clicks. Weapons tend to be among the more important so are more strategically placed, as are BP items. This may explain why, due a certain amount of laziness and lack of content to spread things around in, cloaks are among the most readily available gear types early on.
The cloak drop rate is a direct response to the rarity of the Ancient Cloak of Flames item. Cloaks for one, cloaks for all! (Actually, it's a stupid result of half a tier of gear being released. Let's hope never again)
Half a tier of loot, and ~22 non-vis items per a slot. Excessive number of templates, plus Type 3 and non-type 3 versions of each.
Not to mention t1a has as many names or more than the rest of the "expansion" combined. T1b is 15, and 20 more with t2. So they ended up with too many mobs early with not enough slots to have them drop. Hopefully never again....
