One of the main things that irks me about most current MMO's is the focus on getting new gear with better stats.

Sure, a lot of people play these games for that reason alone; to loot. I personally always hated it though.
To boost the stats your character needs to play the way you want, you must find gear with such and such pre- or suffix.
And once I would find stuff that were actually good, it would look like crap. Nothing I'd really want.
So I would always have to choose between betraying my visual idea for the character, or be gimped.

A lot of games solves this by using a cosmetic system, such as LotRO which lets you use a cosmetic layer in which to put
whatever you want, and that's... okay. But it's not really a solution to the problem.
In LotRO, this didn't apply to weapons. Any weapons I liked visually, were low-lvl stuff and had no practical use later on.
Things like these always annoy the hell out of me, and it's mostly MMO's that suffer from it.

The problem, in my opinion, is how they have taken away the freedom for you to grow your own character the way you want.
Instead doing it for you by handing you sets of stats on a piece of gear.

In all these games I wish they would just give me xx amount of stat points with each level to spend as I wish.
Remove them entirely from gear, and in particular armor and clothing.

Armor should protect you from harm, with the trade-off being less mobility, depending on type and your character's skills.
That's it.

If you want magical enhancements on armor, at least have it make sense. Better fire protection? Fine. Scale armor made from some kind of wonderful materials by a master smith, resulting in a much lower weight and less penalties, but having the same defense as a normal suit? That's also fine. You know... stuff like that.


Cause the way it is in MMO's these days (WoW, LotRO, TOR, etc.), take away your character's armor, and he's utterly useless. Even if he's allowed to keep his weapon, his damage will be completely crap.

What I'm saying is, let us grow our CHARACTERS, instead of relying solely on gear with the right stats on them.



Seeing as this is essentially a spiritual successor to DAoC, maybe the gear will work similarly to that game.
Can anyone enlighten me as to how it worked there, since I only tried the game very briefly years ago, and don't remember?



Anyway, what do the rest of you think?