Yes it sucks today, and the quest is too hard for what you get by today's standards, but in the early days there weren't as many quests that you could do like there are now and there was no Defiant gear dropping. The original dev team didn't believe in handing out insanely powerful items for doing practically nothing like they do in EQ today. (Kill a level 1 snake and get a piece of Defiant gear, seriously?) You had to work hard in the original EQ for only minor gear upgrades or a few coins to buy your next round of spell scrolls. How many rangers ran around with the Short Sword of Morin for a long time, which has an even worse dps than this has, before upgrading? Or Barb Warriors using the Langseax? Or some other really old school weapon that nobody would even consider in 2019? You have to consider this before posting comments about how bad a really old item is because they weren't bad when they were new. Looking back, I think Bazaar really spoiled people. It opened up access to other players hand me downs to an extent that wasn't possible previously and killed prices on many items to the point where a new player with just a few hours of play could buy gear that was better than what you could potentially get on an old school boss mob raid. Entire expansions were made obsolete because you could buy better gear in the Bazaar than you could make, hunt or quest for in the old content. Before Bazaar, you had to go to wherever the trade zone was set up on your server and deal with people directly instead of with a selling mule. This limited your choices and kept prices high when there were only a coupe of dozen sellers at most instead of hundreds like in the Bazaar. A newbie wasn't going to be buying high end raid loots from 3+ expansions higher than the content they were currently in for next to nothing like they could do when Bazaar came in.
Edited, Nov 10th 2019 2:57am by animekenji