Raiding has always been a shitshow on P99. Only 5% of the playerbase gets a chance to do it because there's about five times as many would-be raiders as the content can accomodate, and there's no inherent purpose to it even if you can raid. You're not gearing up for some new challenge, you're just pushing a button to get your weekly dose of Pavlov's medicine. What does that ToV gear do? Velious has practically no solo content.
That's why five years of Kunark was the best thing that ever happened to blue. In Kunark, almost nothing is no_drop outside of quest rewards, VP, and a select few drops off of VS and Trak. Everything else can be bought. There isn't some huge divide between the haves and the have-nots. If your dream is to coast around on a fungi monk or get your epic or whatever, you can accomplish that in a couple of months of work. You can achieve almost anything without being a slave to the FTE batphone circus. But once Velious rolls around, that stops being the case.
Velious creates two populations: those who raid ToV/ST/whatever and those who don't. The ones who don't no longer count for anything. Once we're in Velious, you're a FTE batphone slave or you are nothing. In Velious, you cannot accomplish anything worth being proud of without succumbing to the poopsocking life. If you're not one of those 5% NEETs, you are practically stuck in Kunark forever. Velious offers almost nothing but raid content, and if you don't have access to it, you're worthless.
This is why I think it's such a shame that Kunark will last only seven months on green. It's by far the best era of the game, but it's also by far the shortest. Velious turns the game to shit for 95% of players. If you're not a raider, you get... what? Velks, a few worthwhile quests, and a set of faction armor. Meanwhile, in Kunark, the only thing that can't be obtained by literally anyone is VP weapons and the epics of maybe three classes.
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