Well i noticed that all the gear can drop anywhere but some places more than others, i dont like this to be honest, the gear should drop from certain mobs, and of course there should be some kind of drops that can drop everywhere like Wooden rings, iron, etc, but you have to set up hard hunting grounds where only high lvl drops apear and not that frequently.
Examples, the whole group of players already have like 3-4 sets of lightning and some spectral, if karl/Joe remembers, people would grind for ages to find the high lvl stuff on alpha, i f.ex grinded for like one week to be able to buy the skullsword, and on XEN you would actually have to trade for these items because some of them were so rare that they dropped like 2 times a year or something.
What we have now:
Aslong you are willing to grind for about 2 hours you will be able to find almost anything the game has to offer atm.
This is negative because on other games people actually use quite a while to find the "Rare" items which they seek, some times on f.ex xen you would never find Rare gear, i played xen for like 3-4 years and i found a "omni sword"(extremely rare gear) Once, and i grinded constantly each day..
The rarest game ingame ive never found, EVER, not even sure my friends even found it, and we were 7 buddies gaming together, we always had to steal/trade for stuff thats how we got the high lvl stuff.
imagine.. an armor that only drops 4-5 times a year, you might not pick it up cause you didnt see it, and there is like 80 players on each server playing really active and are among the high lvls.