Armor and you

As you can tell, I was having fun this weekend. A lot of fun Guild ding 21, and DING 50 Mystic. I was trying to get a good screenshot of my level 50 sadly however, there was a bad corpse in the way so you will have to enjoy the frog on frog action...

This weekend was a great weekend and there was a lot to be done and a lot did get done. But, I was looking around and noticing DOF and the SOGA upgrades. While some were great and some where a little not to my taste over all I enjoy these changes. I took a paticular look into what is my biggest peve about EQ2. The Armor models, I have a 48 Armorer and I enjoy tradeskilling her from time to time. Though, I would like to give people a good product, it's hard when there is 550 other's out there doing the same and driving my prices down; that's a differnt post all together.

Lets look at Bucklers, Used by Priests up to Fighters. After Tier 3 they are all the same from the Oak buckler up to Ironwood, they look the same. taste the same, everything but the stats are the same; they all have little Trojan warriors with spears on them. Yeah! To add insult to injury they take Wisdom off the last Tier of Bucklers seriously, does SOE think that anyone other then a Priest is going to use the buckler? Ok enough about bucklers, change the look or this priest wont be getting an update to my Oak and SBS bucklers.

Now lets look at Chain Armor. Speaking from a Mystic point of view most chain is designed for scouts. Rarely is there good wisdom on the pieces and rarely do I wear it on big fights because of power. But, it's not the stats I am complaining about, I use Chain if I'm going to be in situations where I solo or know the tank sucks at keeping aggro and or I'm going to get hit alot. My chief disappointment with chain is that it's all the same from Fulginate up to Cobalt short of Dye and stats. Granted Fulginate don't look bad but, would I like to burn a few Plat. For the same look only blue? Is it really that hard for them to make Cobalt look different from the other chain, my answer would be yes it would take time and the design team to put an effort to make working armor. However, the rewards for making 50 to 60 would be much better sought after when upgrading armor other then for Blue with stats. I know before Ebon was exactly like Fulgiante in look and style and it was a nice change to make it black. Which overall I like, but then we go back to Indium(sp) which is exacly like fulginate except stats and Cobalt is blue, like Ebon only change is the tint and stats. Ok call it vanity but isn't there or shouldn't there be somewhat of a change other then level spells and stats between level 50 and 60?

From what I can tell Vanguard is exactly the same way except Indium is more of a grayish type color which is fairly nice. Sadly the overall design of Ebon, Indium, and Cobalt is exactly the same. Fulgiante has some differning style to it and actually looks much nicer then the later 3 Vanguards; pure preference alone though. I do however like the fact that the little dress on the Leggings has basically gone away since the SOGA update. I'm not sure why it was in their from a design point of view I guess I just don't like the dressings. I mainly didn't like it because Vanguard on a Female Highelf was really choppy around the waste and I know it wasn't just my computer.

Overall I do enjoy the little changes here and there nothing that a few updates wont fix as well as a good Armor design team.