Yeah. You hit it on the head in your first little bit. Back in the day, we had sanc. LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of sanc. You could buy it. Or you could just c tess hobgoblin and kill that guy for one... unless you for some reason (after a crash) went to the wrong hobgoblin. You could EASILY regear before you unghosted with a 23-29 dam roll AND a good weapon. Now I've YET to regear after a death/full loot before I unghost. I usually unghost at the weapon part and then I run around with a weapon and no armor trying to get a newbie set while avoiding people. The problem with the game as it stands now is the time sink. Back in the day there was NO time sink. You logged on for 15 minutes, ran around and bashed shit, got bashed. Logged off and went to class... a little late. But you STILL went to class... sometimes. Now, you HAVE to be logged on for at least 30 minutes or people start bitching at you and the gank squads aren't as common as they used to be. You don't see 3 people running to the hidden forest to summon and bash down some newbs. You don't even see evil rangers going back there to smack down some chumps. What you get are a bunch of whiney little bitches going "I want my I WIN button back".

The game back then was more broken, but it was more fun because it was less serious. Remember when ABS weren't limited and you could stock up on bunches and bunches of it? Oh how I miss the supple pine staff in Ysigrath. Put that back! It was an awesome talisman and it wasn't easy to get and getting caught in there trying to get it sucked cause you couldn't word or anything. It'd give swampdwellers somewhere to stalk that's actually a swamp!

And yes, shield spell at level 25 helps a LOT. Now they need to make it so you can just simply buy a shield wand since you already get the class spell.