I have fond memories of before Luclin and shitty memories from during and after Luclin. The official pronunciation annoys me. Outer space doesn't mesh well with high fantasy for me. Power creep got into full swing (on live, anyway; the extended timeline has power creep in full swing since a 6 months into Velious on here or something like that), both in the gearing treadmill sense and in the "there's now a ridiculous gap between the casual players and the hardcore players that wasn't very pronounced in classic and kunark (and velious on live, generally, but not on here)." Nexus and bazaar removed a lot of positive flavor elements from the game, or at least relegated them to backburners. If they had forced those awful new models on us back then, that alone would have been a dealbreaker; wow, they were awful... and not in the nostalgic, cute, oldschool kind of way.
Yeah, beastlords were pretty cool. I don't mind the cats in and of themselves. Bazaar was a time saver. AAs could have been worse (I enjoy multiple avenues of progression, not just a gear grind that is present once you max out in classic EQ). But the negatives far outweight the positives, imo.
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