+1 to this discussion.
for a long time I believed that epic is the kind of things that on one hand starts with a promise of power and on other hand quickly fades into a "useless time sink" as new content becomes available.
Taking WoW for a example - in times of vanilla, Sulfuros was simply UBER and took many many raids for just one person to get the components, and those raids were 40-man base at the time. With BC, people pulled equivalent or better weapons from BC end content with only 20-man raids, and those were regular raids, where new cool weapon could drop normally.
This of course made all the people who actually quest for Sulfuros pretty sad... Which leads to ultimate conclusion that drawn-out epic quests with epic rewards eventually result in epic frustration.
Of course almost 2 years passed between vanilla and BC, but eventually it will happen. And as game progress and adds more content and more max levels, equal gear becomes even easier to obtain.
Of course having Sulfuros back in vanilla at lev 60 was way way more prestigious and powerful that having some random "Lightning Sword of Vrykyl" that can drop from 1-group common name at lev 80 4 years later.
You must also keep in mind that there are raiders and there are casuals.
It was never feasible for a casual player (or say casual non hard-core raider from family guilds) to get an epic in EQ (and for some classes much harder than for others). Not during Kunark, not Velious, not even Luclin. But with PoP Tier 2-3 gods dropped weapons that were of equal quality. So for a casual raider, playing during PoP era, leveling to 65 and going to a God raid was much easier to obtain epic quality item without spending months camping ultra rare items in obsolete zones, and specially dragging their entire guilds with them for a single drop (try getting the Sk sword of golems in Fear, with only 10% drop rate and 1 week re-spawn time, when there are 25 other guilds and 200 other SKs are all after it)
And finally my ultimate problem with epics is - yes have the uber weapon and you stuck with it forever. The whole game is driven around upgrading your gear. Its always exciting to get new upgrade. Especially when its a WEAPON upgrade! But if your epic really uber - it will never upgrade - where is fun in that?
My position is: yes let there some tough quests with some nice rewards that stand above concurrent content, but don't make class specific/restricted. If its a 2-handed sword - then let all primary melee classes use it (ok if its a Holy sword, then probably exclude the SKs to make it lore-realistic). If its a Wand - they make it all caster wand.
At the same time - don't make just one quest for a single 2-handed sword - have 3 such quests and 3 different 2-handers - let people choose which one suits them better, or even let them go after all 3. This will create much more class/weapon combos at the end, so all warriors in the end game do not wield exactly the same item.
Ok enough babbling for today. Night
