So Bango claims he solo healed 4.3 fight with a paladin 5 years ago which makes the fight still pretty easy ~ The game hasn't been constant. My take away point is that after 5 years of playing this game and the nerfs that ensued after Bango ruled 4.3 is that we still aren't at his level when he was able to solo heal 4.3. Now we are being hit by another nerf, why can't we solo heal still? How many years of new content before we are able to do that? /ooc Hey, OP items back then allowed stuff like this if it was true. Vah Back used to have a 2 minute duration which made most end game content of your time playing for when it was relevant, easy...
SOD history has always been to make new content with something overpowered that doesn't get addressed until new devs start working on new content and the OP items now become a nuisance. The SOD players have become accustomed to these items even though they knew pretty well it was inevitable and it just hurts. The hours that went in to acquiring said items - hurts.
The gear isn't the problem as much as class balancing, defining their roles and giving each class something that makes them desirable so you don't prefer to have just one particular setup for a 6man that owns, and don't prefer to have 3 rogues, wizards, rangers for a raid. I'm a freaking mage, that pisses me off. When you fix this, item fixing shouldn't be a big deal, you would know what dps you want each class to be putting out and what that % should be for a certain boss fight. As staff/developers you should know what each class is bringing to each raid fight and trash clear. If bards are good for support on an encounter, they don't need and shouldn't be expected to be baller dps. They are supposed to be doing something for that encounter/trash clear.
As a mage, I was constantly annoyed, I'll be blunt...whenever "enchanter" utility was needed for trash/boss fights because then I cannot do that one thing mage can do which is to rain him/her self silly trying to dps the trash or boss at a certain distance so I don't kill myself and don't wake up the precious. Did that make sense? It should have. Small rant, sorry.
Summary: Please, please, please halt the new content making and the gear nerfing. Fix the classes and balance them so at any point any class and any number of them up to 3 can be taken to a raid without feeling like, well, those classes don't bring enough to the table. You can't get it perfect but sod needs some classes to be looked at and improved upon instead of giving them new toys with each new content rolled out and then nerfing it all when the next content is thought about.
I'm at work but will try to post later.