As long as it is done in moderation, giving out artifacts on gm events is a good thing. You just want to prevent what happened on AK, people exploiting an obvious script bug to farm artifact items. On top of that after it was turned off by the GM, people cried so much to Sony that they actually turned the broken script back on so everyone who was missing out could get a chance to get those artifact items, certainly not one of AK's proudest weeks.
I remember speaking with the person who used Oakwind, it was game-breaking and couldn't even be used at raids in PoP because aggro would be taken almost instantly even if the shooter started at sub 80% of the mobs health. It was an item added early on before archery skills were something to worry about. That would be the only item aside from manastone that I can think of that I would be weary about adding.
My understanding was that any ranged attack on AK did 1 point of hate regardless if it was 1 damage or a 3k+ crit? which was why rangers were such great DPS
No way is that correct. He ran me through the trial of execution using Oakwynd and the warrior grouped with us couldn't get agro at all.
In the grand scheme of aggro ranking, as soon as the MT died and we didn't have an ST, the summonings to be pasted would begin. The usual order was clerics, then magic DPS, THEN rangers, then everyone else. I'm not too clear on who would get summoned after me, because I would usually be standing around nekkid in PoK post summoning. Oops, I made a serious mistake on that list! First and foremost summons would usually be a chantie
With good archery aas and a solid bow I would get summoned pretty far down the list. Tank, magic dps and healers/slowers def came first. This way a ranger can do ridiculous dps without getting Much attention. Even in groups the charmer or healer or nuker would be higher on the list. Good ol level 1 spells we're needed to grab aggro from others, as all the ranged dps in the world wouldn't bother them much.
I really liked that infamous GM event we had on Al`kabor. I picked up a pretty bad ass sword. Would've been nice if I could've raided for it, but my guild didn't even hit the zone it dropped from until like 5 years later, or more? I put a ton of time into the game but just the scarcity of players made it impossible to gear up. At the time we had two raids per week tops, they might be 5 hours a piece, and we got maybe 5 pieces of loot in total. Getting a nice item just made it more fun for me to stick around in the game and keep playing. I don't remember the GM event with the script though, think I missed that one.
Archery did seem to generate less hate than one would have expected it to. I suspect it followed the same formula used to generate hate for ordinary melee attacks, which are based on weapon damage. That would skew the hate very low, since one shot with a 40 damage bow is going to do much more damage than one swing with a 40 damage 2HS weapon: all the modifiers (AAs, double damage for a mob standing still, crits, trueshot, accuracy bonus) are therefore "free," from an aggro-generating perspective.
I had a Manastone on AK. It was 100% from a GM event. I wish I recalled which one..it was not the "pick whatever you want from the GM in PoK" because I remember never being able to make that one. (Emp robe was on my wish list for that). I also had a Guise of the Deceiver. I'm pretty sure that one came from the event in the Arena where we were all turned in dragons.
I found some screenshots from the event. We were also turned into Efreeti's as well. One of the screenshots with chat showed GM Zatozia was there:
Yes! Zatozia, that's right. I got a guise of the deceiver as well. DE ranger ftw. She also rewarded titles in one of the events.
I was given a special title on al kabor through a gm event and won a unique item such as Holgresh Elder Beads, the item wasn't game-breaking but it was helpful and cool to have access to it. I think another item that was wanted as a special that was given out on al kabor were Circlet of Shadows with instant click. These items give an advantage but are not necessarily game-breaking or allow a player to own content.
