What if Mage summoned weapons didnt suck?
 

I feel like when they first made EQ the mage summoned items were supposed to be somewhat decent for people to use. like better than what some folks at the same level of the mage might be using. I feel like this is a missed opportunity. There are tons of "missed opportunity" type things in EQ. What are some things you guys wish P99 would alter for the good of the game?

edit- why i think they were meant to be decent: the items were usable by normal race/class combo's. So they expected players to equip and use them. Although i think it was mean of them to make the haste mask pet only.

Back in 1999/2000 wipes in the planes were fairly common and sometimes involved complicated CR's during which melees were given mage summoned weapons. So it definitely had its use back then.

Nobody wipes in planes today or at least not without a quick CR plan.

Twinking wasn't as common or as extreme then and the standard for gear was lower at any given level, so mage weapons would have been better by comparison. Keep in mind that SSOYs were pretty much top melee weapons in vanilla.

Devs were also probably expecting mages to give the summoned weapons to their pets.

Dang how cool would it be if masks were player usable , that would be incredible

In original EQ the summoned weapons weren't bad at all. But with Kunark melee weapons got waaaay better and mages obviously didn't get new spells.

I remember a time back in live when I was totally new and had no idea what "no rent" meant- a mage had given me a sword that was really nice in comparison to what I had already. I was super-stoked.

Of course in the days of dial-up and no split-screens, the first thing I did was log out and search online for details on what this uber weapon was worth, etc.

SONOFA...

Summoning Gift of Xev and loading it up with summoned crap for a noob was a good thing WAY back in the day, like Izmael mentioned, but it soon became obsolete because people were giving away Kunark/Velious crap weapons to noobs.

I am pretty sure Velium Swords/daggers proc worked at level one when released. I remember a Woodelf Warrior running around destroying everything in GFay.

I've actually given mod rods to lowbies so they could kill wisps.

Mage summoned weapons are great!

The line just needed upgrades during kunark/velious that were of similar relative power as the vanilla classic ones were.

For a new cloth caster to outdamage their pet from levels 1-8 (or 12 in the case of Necromancers), they have to get off their butt and get into melee. It's just how it is unless they want to eat a 50% loss per kill. Their spells suck. The mod rod solves the problem without question. Saving it on a corpse between play sessions for the whole day or two if you're not turning in bone chips / CB belts is one less headache to juggle.