Does Gear Matter?

Just ran across these WoW players that went out and proved that the gear one wears is not that important to success. At least, not in that game, on that boss.

Is this true in EQ2? It used to be the case that you could be successful in all aspects of the game with nothing more than Adept I spells and Treasured gear, as long as you shopped a bit for the gear that best suited your role.

I'm not sure this is still the case. The bar for success in the non-raiding game seems to be Adept III (or whatever it's called now) and Legendary items. In fact, while leveling up in Kunark, I would routinely see Legendary drops for my character that provoked lots of yawns.

But the Kunark encounters were still very tough, even with me in that gear. I'm not at all sure that you could handle the shard instances at level 80 with only treasured gear, no matter how good you were, and how well you knew the encounters. The lower mitigation and healing resulting would make defensive play that much more knife edged, and the lower dps would mean every encounter would last longer, allowing more possibilities for mistakes, and increasing fatigue. If the mitigation/avoidance/healing could hold the mobs in the first place.

As to raiding, forget it. Many encounters are dps races.

Now there's a point here. How you spend AA's and equip matters a lot to your good functioning. And the tactics of doing dps (or tanking for that matter) matter a lot too. When I went though this process to enhance my dps, I improved hugely, 2-3x my dps, just by changing my AA's and how I did things in battle. So, it means a lot. But do any of you think you could handle the tough stuff with only legendary gear? (I'll allow you a Fabled epic weapon, but not a mythical.)