I must admit one of the things I love doing in EQ live is camping named spawns for "that cool piece of loot". The thing I hate hate hate is grinding xp mobs.
HoThule on live was great for named frequency on ph's (actually as a casual, group player I loved that expansion in general). May take an evening or two, but at the end you will probably get that awesome aug, and have that big grin your wife doesn't really "get".
But then Diablo loot seems popular in EQEmu, for me it's just "won't try that server, then", so maybe I'm a minority.
What you want to avoid is too much difference in loot quality between group/"raid" mobs because otherwise it's REALLY hard to balance mob difficulty (which is one reason UF totally screwed over casual players, particularly non raid geared tanks).