Dear Devs, Grumble Grumble increase the drop rate or play uo.

[Kyronix]

Kyronix, remember also that you've made monsters harder, and someone holding a slayer will need to switch around (particularly someone like me who makes 100% elemental weapons just in the same slayer class) for optimal damage. Though the availability of weapons and armor makes low-end monsters easier than they ever were, I think it balances out with the hardest monsters. Balrons and ancient wyrms were the pinnacle of UO, but Hythloth 3 and the old teleporter room would have eventually gotten stale. I always thought imbuing was the best addition to the game in years, because players could finally make suits, not the very best but still extremely good, without having to spend hundreds of millions or real money for artifacts. How many others remember 2/4 duels for the first while after AoS, because not everyone had FC1/FCR3 jewelry? It still took a while before 2/6 became the norm.

Yes, any decent imbuer can make a 100% LRC, all 70s suit for a new player, but I'd say that ease only serves to keep a new player interested, rather than the grind of killing orcs and lizardmen in the hopes of enough gold for a few more tenths of journeyman magery. When I first made GM magery, it took 50 successful 8th circle casts for each of those last few tenths, and at a 50% success rate, figure I had to buy double the regs in the first place. And for characters with higher skill, LRC is also a necessity for all the casting we do now. We have so much mana regen now, even compared to when meditation was introduced.

For the most part, monsters have remained the same strength as when they were initially introduced. As new monsters were introduced, however, their difficulty was scaled to the current "power level" of the game. There is no silver bullet to reversing power creep (much in the way there is no silver bullet to "fix" the economy). This is to say that an earth elemental has been as strong as an earth elemental for a good while now. What hasn't changed, however, is the quality of loot that is obtainable at this low end. We hope to ameliorate that by rolling out "shame-style" loot globally as well as reworking how we display and educate item properties to try and lessen the learning curve so both the casual gear collector and the min-maxers will be happy.