Ideally, if I went this route, I'd also like to... reinvision some things. Not much per se, but I'd expand the sol ro armor sets so every class gets a full set, then move/rename the quests/armor pieces in two areas:
Temple of Sol Ro and Temple of Prexus. I'd divide up the class armor sets between these two. Putting 'good' class armor quests in ToP, leaving 'evil' in ToSR, dividing the 'neutral' classes between the two. I was thinking ToP could be build on Erud's Xing, making the zone worthwhile for a change ;p
I'd also open up class/race/deity combos, but leave some restricted partially(i.e. restrict SKs to evil/neutral deity only, restrict paladin to good/neutral only). With racial stat weighting, while some jackoff will probably roll around on an Ogre paladin of mithaniel, it isn't optimal with ogre's wisdom stat. (Edit: Could restrict evil races to evil/neutral deities, good races to good/neutral deities, leave neutral races open to all deities). I'm not sure how much coding this is going to require, but I'd like to see it happen. Some things never made sense to me: like half elves can't be SKs, but they could be half-tier'dal.... Or why can't I be an SK of Veeshan, I can see the wurmqueen granting powers to somebody to keep the cattle in line....
As for the instancing, I was thinking along the lines of the dz system they added in Gates. For some of the zones this will be fairly simple: Planes, when you enter it spawns the dz, for others it'll require finagling: Naggy and Vox are going to require just the boss area to be instanced, while leaving the regular zone available to xp/farm. (Edit: I realized that this may make planar armor sets more difficult to acquire so either drop rates would have to be tweaked, or mini-named would need a static loot table of 2-3 random for a specific slot, appropriate to the zone)
Future-wise, I'd like to see Freeport remain unchanged with Prophecy of Ro release, and keep 'lateral progression' post-PoR by deleveling some later things. I found that 4 expansions at level 70 was, in many ways, one of the best periods in EQ history, so I would tune the next 4 expansions post-PoR(that'd be: TSS, TBS, SoF, SOD?) level 75.
I'd also drop mercs in from the get-go, people have a love/hate relationship with them, but I'd rather have them in(but not allowed in raid content) than have people stop logging in because their class can't solo well.
As to hosting: I'll probably be able to set up a small server around christmas-time, but before then... Assuming a development time frame that lasts until December, and a locked server with only developers having access, I could just host the server on my old laptop during development phase. Unless somebody else has a better solution?
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