I never understood why people raid in EQ, in Kunark or in the base game. The drops prior to NToV are just utter dogshit from raiding.
Who the fuck is going to even want to get a hierophant's crook, or a dragon bone bracer? The items from Plane of Sky quests suck too, aside from some outliers like the haste belt.
Planar armor can be one grouped, so that doesn't count.
There's really no reason to progress in the raiding game - even if you get those slightly better upgrades, they don't really boost your character significantly. Raid loot only lets you do content you could do previously more efficiently, and at that point why are you even playing the game?
It isn't until NTOV that you see items with significant HP or stat gains. Pretty dumb.
And let's not even get started on the horrible itemization of planar stats. Why the fuck does Valorium Greaves, for example, have INT? Literally does NOTHING for that class.
https://wiki.project1999.com/Valorium_Greaves