I haven't posted on these forums yet, but I have to chime in here.
Regardless of all the opinions of how terrible and rushed the Luclin "Upgrade" was, the fact is they erased the prestige of Velious armor completely. When I had my 60 Rogue decked out in Assassin's armor and other characters with Ry'Gorr and other velious chain/plate and I ticked on the new graphics (which lagged the hell outa my 256MB RAM machine
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]) I noticed all the chain/plate looked exactly the same....with different colors. That is why later on, they must have decided to give everyone the option to dye all armor, because they took away the pretty textures that people were so proud of earning.
If I have the old models on and everyone else has new models on, or even just my race... I looked like a n00b with dark blue chain on my chest, when in fact it made me really stand out with the old graphics on. And I have to say when my character sat down after the "Upgrade", he wondered from time to time what sausage really tasted like.
Yes, I know there was a way to go into the eqclient.ini and force the velious textures with new graphics, but it didn't match up right and NOBODY actually used that "hack" so I still ran around looking like a moron weather I wanted to or not. Being a Rogue and having cool new armor, I couldn't wait to get new illusion masks and see what the Phase Spider Carapace looked like on a Erudite for instance. They simply needed to implement ALL previous textures if they were going to release higher polygon models. I'm just stating some facts for people who may not have played through Kunark and Velious just to visually be on par with a lvl 5 Vah'Shir who has just started. I now wonder what the playable kitties would have looked like in full armor if they had used the Kerra Isle models.... Might give the devs on this server something to tinker with after Velious is released. A proper Luclin release minus the Bazaar? I won't even get into that argument, lol.