AC81 wrote:
No offence taken, but what I dislike about this post is that you talk like your opinion is fact.
1. I've NEVER circle-grinded bosses, I've never had the PC's to do that.
2. I've never had loads of free time - I play at 9pm to maybe 11pm in the GMT+10 timezone, a very underpopulated timezone.
3. I've NEVER fought the White Dragon, not even once. I've fought the Balor once and died almost immediately. I've never fought the Dracolich. Most other bosses Draviir could beat although after the caster level fix I rarely bothered, too much effort for the reward.
4. Draviir is as RP as I wanted to make him - he had max Appraise, max lore arcana and some other lore skills to help with his merchant RP.
5. I have NEVER had a FS or Cleric. I briefly RCR'd into a Bard, then deleted him altogether. I've had a Druid years ago but hated buffing, never had a wizard or sorcerer. My three main PC's here over the years have been a crossbow halfling, an aasimar monk and Draviir, a human fighter. No magic for me ...
6. I could circle grind, and did in the past on my halfling, but honestly it's extremely boring. Also, by circle grinding you MAY gain epic items. You WILL gain gold, which you can use to buy epic items. You WON'T gain grandfathered items but you could use your newly gotten RIG epic items to trade for GF items. Which leads me to my last point ...
7. The best way to gain GF/High Epic gear is to trade. Karond told everyone how to do it but no-one really listens. It's the Red Paper Clip method. It works. Two years ago I gave away everything I ever had save a few items to equip Draviir with. Now, 2 years later, I have more and better stuff than before. You just have to trade. So literally anyone can do it, it's just that people don't want to offer up their good stuff, they don't have the balls. They want to have their cake and eat it too, they want to lowball. Karond once told me, "it isn't a good trade unless both sides of the trade are happy." No one likes getting conned, even if it's only a video game. So, you want good gear, put your own good gear on the line too.
So there you go ... all the above is FACT.
But it doesn't really impact the initial statement of mine that, you can be successful in a PvE environment with GF gear, epic hell gear, epic gear or basic +3 gear. FvS and Wizards don't need any gear, neither do Bards apparently. And all the GF gear in the world won't do you a lick of good if you build sucks or if a DM wants you dead. So leave muling as is, it's not as immersion breaking as many other aspects of our awesome game.
Alright, first off - apologies. I should have added at least one "as I see it" or "as fas as I can see" to make it clear that I do not hold the only viable insight to this topic (and I knew even before your reply that I don't!). Sorry.
A few comments, though:
6. I could circle grind, and did in the past on my halfling, but honestly it's extremely boring. Also, by circle grinding you MAY gain epic items. You WILL gain gold, which you can use to buy epic items. You WON'T gain grandfathered items but you could use your newly gotten RIG epic items to trade for GF items.
No idea what RIG means
- but as fas as my experience goes people are actually less willing to give away the non-buyable stuff, these days. I do not own a single epic item I found in loot, the epic items I have I bought from the hell shop.
I thought I own an epic item (that I actually bought from another player) but as it seems it's rather "worthless" (compared to "epic items for trade" stuff).
I also do not need to circle-grind to make money. Money is infact the easiest ressource to gain here (given the right kind of character) - but it doesn't help much in aquiring the "real" epic items.
(It feels odd to distinguish the items from the several epic shops from the epic items from the loot but since this separation is made by (most of) who own the epic loot, I simply follow there . . .)
The best way to gain GF/High Epic gear is to trade. Karond told everyone how to do it but no-one really listens. It's the Red Paper Clip method. It works. Two years ago I gave away everything I ever had save a few items to equip Draviir with. Now, 2 years later, I have more and better stuff than before. You just have to trade. So literally anyone can do it, it's just that people don't want to offer up their good stuff, they don't have the balls. They want to have their cake and eat it too, they want to lowball. Karond once told me, "it isn't a good trade unless both sides of the trade are happy." No one likes getting conned, even if it's only a video game. So, you want good gear, put your own good gear on the line too.
I read Karonds guide, several times. I have yet to meet the people he traded with, though.
People I meet are usually willing to sell their low-to-mid-level stuff, up to plain +4 items. They happily sell everything that I can get from a shop, too.
They usualy don't
sell anything epic that cannot be bought from shop.
They want to trade it with something of higher value (to them or in general) - which is epic loot, which people usually don't own, unless they open a lot of chests/kill a lot of creatures in epic areas. (Hey, did you notice? I totally avoided the term "circle-gri... damn.
)
I have no idea how you made it to "more and better stuff than before" without having any source of epic non-buyable loot in the first place.
If you really don't grind for epic items and didn't have such when you re-started you either somehow tricked players into giving away their stuff (which I doubt
) or . . . no idea, really.
"Starting from nothing and getting to high-end storage again with no source of epic items" sounds odd to me, really.
I should mention that I had one item I thought to be insanely powerful/sought after, since it keeps popping up as a topic over and over again: I aquired a Belt of Raumathar.
And since I direly needed money back then I put it on auction. Not for trade, but for money. For plain money!
I received one bid.
In the end, it comes down to this: Shea is a merchant (and mechancially focused on that, from stats to classes to feats to skills). She aquires mid-level items from other players (and sometimes highlevel items, too, for example if someone carries her dead body to the hell shop, revives her and carries her again-dead body back, then
).
She sells that equipment to others.
She's always looking around for opportunities and I very much enjoy her RP (as already stated).
After about half a year of serious merchant RP I feel safe to say, though, that Kel or Karond or Draviir were/are playing in an own league, a league I will not aim to join. Just to avoid frustration.
But it doesn't really impact the initial statement of mine that, you can be successful in a PvE environment with GF gear, epic hell gear, epic gear or basic +3 gear. FvS and Wizards don't need any gear, neither do Bards apparently. And all the GF gear in the world won't do you a lick of good if you build sucks or if a DM wants you dead. So leave muling as is, it's not as immersion breaking as many other aspects of our awesome game
And this I can simply agree with.
In the end it just boils down to the feeling of "we came too late to be part of the real party, we have to live with the remains they left for us. Oh and we need stronger PCs and way more time. We need to grind to get the real stuff."
A seriously exaggerated statement, I know. But considering several of the posts here in the forum, several tells ingame and several PMs it is a common feeling that most probably holds some truth nevertheless.
Our server population and activity have been higher in the last year than they have since the very early days of the module, but we're not going to base our decisions on whether or not it might cause someone to go play on another server. I can respect the fact that you prefer the way ToA was run, but this is not ToA and I have no desire to make it such. If many people leave over it? I'm okay with that, too. 
This isn't even some kind of humble-brag, the more players we have things become harder and harder from an administration standpoint (and it becomes harder and harder to make anyone happy!).