Was total BiS a thing during live?
 

I’ve been “hardcore” raiding for about 14 months, and I still don’t have a toon even close to BiS. I have spent time gearing more than one toon, so that’s not surprising, but I feel like even if I had spent every bit of my DKP on a single toon, I still wouldn’t be close. It makes me wonder how well geared those top raiders were during The Velious timeline on live. I don’t recall ever seeing someone geared out like I see some of the people on p1999, given that they’ve had almost 4 years to acquire loot. Does anyone remember seeing someone in full BiS gear back then? I feel like the top players I remember seeing all had what would be considered just average ToV gear on p1999. I’m excited to see what people’s toons look like after only having a year in kunark and a year in Velious come green. I’m interested to hear stories of your servers most elite!

Alts are looting vulak if that explains it

To give you perspective from someone who was there the average lvl 20-30 twink on blue has more and better gear than the average lvl 50-60 main on live in the first year of velious outside of possibly one guild per server.

Generally, to hit full BIS, you’re talking multiple drops from Vulak. Vulak’s loot table has 25ish items on it. Vulak drops 2 items per kill, unless you get lucky. Even if you killed Vulak once a week during Velious era you’re talking roughly 104 items. RNG would indicate it’s pretty unlikely anyone is hitting full BIS on Vulak items - and that doesn’t count getting the right KT/Tunare/AoW drops you need for full BIS. Many servers did not kill AoW or Tunare in era.

I believe some guilds may have focused on gearing a couple of main tanks, those toons might have been the ones most likely to be close to Bis?

In some top guilds people did do things like "god looting" (thats what we called it anyways on live on Povar) where certain key players in certain key classes were geared out. It was usually the main tanks.

The thing is that depending on your server there weren't many guilds clearing the entire expansion before Luclin. Most servers had 1-2. If you are racing and sharing the spawns the odds of anyone being totally BiS before Luclin is pretty rare...at most 1-2 people per server. Most players didn't even know what BiS items there were for their class on any single server.

I also have to add that it wasn't even a goal for most players. EQ was still getting its boom of population during Kunark and Velious---the majority of players were just leveling or socializing or exploring. The game wasn't about gaining X item for most players. At least it wasn't in my experience. I was happy to have a few NToV items and my epic during velious.

Can't bid on vulak loot for alts in AM tho :confused:

No, my memory of any of the classic era is that no one had close to BIS. I don't think people even knew what most of the BIS loot was in the first place. As mentioned, Vulak has a massive pile of loot but only drops 2 at a time, so for a while you didn't even know what Vulak could drop. And that's just one mob.

I would imagine a lot of BIS loot wasn't even considered for a lot of classes that can loot it. ALL/ALL +100HP items were probably just considered tank items.

I don't know how every guild's loot system worked obviously, but the idea of getting full BIS in any DKP system, from Velious's start through Luclin's release, seems impossible to me.

Live guilds were generally shittier for a number of reasons. A lot of folks had dial up, almost nobody knew shit, there were relatively fewer folks interested in hardcore raiding, and more. And that's besides the timeline differences.

It makes sense that fewer folks had uber gear back then.

I think expansions came too fast to get fully BiS.

Another thing I don’t recall was ever seeing someone use a primal weapon during live. I feel like a primal would have been useful pretty much forever. 100 attack is great at any period of the game, but I don’t remember ever seeing one