Itemization and Class Balance - The BIG Picture - Lets think this through.

I am a big picture person and like to look at things this way. I have seen a lot of disturbing trends throughout the life of EQ2, some of them are still around (Avoidance/Accuracy/Strikethrough/Weapon Skills) and others had to be removed (Looking at you Crit Mit). Before I start into complaining, I want you to know I like the shift from Auto Attack damage to Spells/Skills, but I think it needs more looking at.

With AoM in endgame raiding and ToT all content the Dev's introduced group/raid procs that gave a massive % of CB and or Pot. these items where a game changer if you had and if you did not have. this is fine, encouraging group and raid itemization over selfish items, but it was a large source of Lag. So GU 100 comes around and the summer Ethereals, the Dev Team moved the CB/Pot you would be giving the full group on to the item its self. This gave some items 20-50 more CB or Pot over normal and others gained up to ~900 Pot and ~150 CB. This went a long way to get rid of the Lag from all of the procs and let people gear to be selfish again. The big problems with this is as follows.

1. CB/Pot/AB mod/WDB on items that are Legendary VS Fabled VS Fable Prestige. The itemization from gear does not have a progression from Common (Legendary) to Uncommon (Fabled) to Rare (Fable Prestige). If the itemization going into the future is going to have the CB/Pot/AB mod/WDB numbers that we see in the GU 100 gear, then it needs to be more consistent and more of a progression of Risk/time VS Reword. So this is a very large topic and we need the Dev Team to spend a lot of time on it for GU101 and the next Xpac (I hope you do).
2. Fervor is a flat multiplier to all damage and heals. This is a nice addition to the gear/stats and it looks like it helps all DPS equally. It affects the tanks only on hate generation. I think it affects Healers equally, but not their heals. It gives the same % boost to all heals but with the way heals are calculated giving Reactives and regens more room to over heal does not help them like it does Wards. The Dev Team seems to be addressing this in the Next GU… So I will say this seems to be working good overall and needs to be looked at after GU101.
3. Dragon Prestige Tree Conversion abilities. all classes have 2 of these Conversion ability’s, one to CB and the other to Pot. But they are not made equal. Some classes get CB/Pot from Weapon Skills, that have relatively low caps and low over all damage returns for them beyond the soft caps. Where other classes for CB/Pot from there CB/Pot they have.
   1. This gives the classes with CB/Pot from CB/Pot in a much larger Scaling damage curve than classes that do not. I think the classes that have Weapon Skill Conversion abilities need to have them changed into something that scales as well as CB/Pot to CB/Pot… like you know CB/Pot.
   2. This also puts Tanks at a very hard place. Tanks need to be given incentive to be defensive. All of the tank Conversion abilities need to be changed to things that the tank would be getting up they are gearing up as a tank. Abilities like Over all HP, Over all Avoidance, Over all Mit… the list is not all that long. What a Guard would need is not what a Monk would need and its probably different for a Zerker/SK/Pally/Bruiser… look at the tanks one by one and see what they need the most for survivability and give us an incentive to get the most of that as we can. Start a thread and the tanks will tell you what they want it to be probably.
4. Base Damage Distribution – basically where each class gets most of its Damage output. Scouts historically get most of their damage from Weapon Attacks and Mages get most of their damage from there Spells. With the capping of CB, and lack of scaling of Auto Attack damage, these classes (Including most tanks) will have a harder time scaling their over all damage and threat output up with the mage classes. So I think all classes need to have the base damage of the Skills/Spells looked at for balance.
5. Vulnerability – this is working just the same as the cumbersome group CB/Pot procs that we got rid of in GU100. Can we find someway to convert them to a static buff or Fervor, and get rid of this also.

The Big What for? Why does this all mater and what is the Big picture here? Class balance is important, and the EQ2 dev team has been doing it on accident and reactionarily. I have known a lot of people that have left the game over the years become of their reactionarily class over balancing. Classes are decently well balanced, but if the Dev’s want to be Proactive and not just reactive in Class Balance now and in the future we need to get to a point where gear affects classes predictably and evenly. So if we are having the Damage Spread and Scouts, Tanks and Melee Healers changed from 75/25 Auto attack/ Skills to 30/60 (Or so) then do it deliberately to all classes that are affected together. Do it in such a way that all classes are affected by the gear about the same. Leave room for creativity, flexibility and class differences, but they need to be balanced on purpose.

I like where is potentially going at the very least it could open up dev/player discussions on long overdue issues.

I like the rational and respectful tone of this post.

It's somewhat of a dead horse on these forums but I agree a revamp of prestige conversions for all classes could go a long way toward addressing many issues as you've stated above.

I've not paid attention to vulnerability lag but I'm all for reducing combat calculations.

'I am not sure if Vulnerability causes lag or not, but if it causes an excess of extra server side calculations... simplifying it could only help with lag.