Naggy wasn’t that hard for us (in our defiant armor, natch); the problem was splitting him from the adds. And even when we did get an add we could sometimes get close to winning.

Leveling to max level with all the important AA’s is also easier with Defiant than without. Again, the top guilds are less likely to take you in if you don’t at least have all the AA’s critical to your class.

With Defiant armor you can bypass huge swaths of the game and get into one of the more recent expansions quickly with one of the more casual guilds so you don’t lag too far behind. Players who lag behind are more likely to quit in frustration and less likely to buy expansions since there is so much game world that they haven’t seen yet, so why should they add more to it? Anything that they can do to shortcut people to the top of the game can only help the game as a whole since there will be more expansions bought and more subscription fees brought in. Allowing people to lag behind like they did for the longest time can only kill this game not make it better. I know that when tradeskill items starting rivaling raid loots those at the front of the game screamed bloody murder and I’m sure some screamed about the Defiant armors, too, but it’s either that or watch EQ continue to lose it’s customer base to frustration until it is no longer viable and the servers must come down.

Naggy and Vox were meant to be done by level 50s in Sol B/LGuk/Planar gear. They themselves are level 54 iirc. They have 32000 hit points, a dispel that wipes a buff, and a elemental-based AE. Vox complete heals herself. Naggy can heal if he chases someone into lava. Both dragons have fast-respawning mobs in the area. Vox, again, is especially bad for this, since the tentacle terrors scattered around the room can fling you through traps that bring you to a basement filled with mobs, which usually kill the flingee and then come on up and help Vox eat the raid.

Circle of Summer/Winter and Circle of Seasons can help a lot with resists. Farming the shrunken goblin skull earring in Warslick Woods can help with keeping the buffs. It is important to (a) do insane DPS, the dragons should die in less than a minute, and (b) resist the damn AEs. How many dragon raids have I gone on where all the dps dies in the first AE? Lots. I remember how bad that was with Sontalak. Level 52 players can take many high level buffs, which would again be key to survival. With sufficient DPS, and high level buffs, a two group raid could even eat several AEs and still win.

I love dungeon crawls, and I’m really indifferent to whether or not I get any gear out of them — gear is nice, but the crawl is the point. I’d actually like to see us push the boundaries a bit and try zones originally aimed at groups 5 levels higher — we *are* getting good gear, leverage that by going on the edge a bit more!

Heck, we were still largely in planar gear at that time.

I’m trying to think of the equivalent analogy as to what devs could do in WoW, but they have already substantially made purples easier to get, which is essentially what has happened here. Purples dropping from trash mobs. How would that go over in WoW? Why raid? Why PvP? Why do instances? Questions that might be asked, should this happen in WoW. If you can get the best gear in the game by choosing any random zone and killing trash… what does that do to the rest of the content?