I got fully equipped for my character by level 7 with player crafted gear and a couple spell slot items and I've not seen anything better from level 7 to 13 and I dungeon run many many hours a day every day.
(Enchanted) Crafted gear will always represent the end of the line. If we introduced items for level 10s that were flat-out better than crafted items, then level 10s would no longer need crafted gear which would dramatically lower the incentive to get into crafting.
Loot you find will either represent a mildly weaker version of what the craft system can build, or a sidegrade that is only situationally useful, or something with noticeable penalties. With the items I tailored, I picked from all three choices. There are lots of items added with only minor penalties or no penalty.
This said, with GMW, steel longsword for example is basically the same as a normal, non-steel longsword. So it follows that even a +1 acid damage longsword is actually better than steel longsword if you can count on buffs.
The penalties offered in exchange for the most miniature bonuses makes 99% of everything I see look cancerous.
I've recently said this really many times to various people, but please try to be mindful of your tone. No one wants to take criticism when it's delivered with descriptions such as "cancerous".
So far the best loot drop I've personally found that could be considered 'good' had -4 reflex penalty on it. Another situational item to clutter my bags. I wish to stay positive but I also do not wish to blow smoke up your butt. I'll give you my honest opinion and in my current experience so far on the server, my honest opinion is the loot is just not good as a whole.
-4 reflex is rarely very big a risk though.
I have to agree with Keyser a bit. Some of the new items I've seen have been neat but I've yet to pick up anything that I would actually use over the gear I already have. J'qarr got all of his gear by level 5. Since then, I've acquired a couple situational pieces, but that's the extent of it. Given that this server requires me to have the sum total of my possessions on my person at all times, the amount of situational gear i can actually carry is extremely limited. I can't imagine how much worse this would be if I actually needed armor or weapons. J'qarr is already nigh-permanently encumbered just from crafting supplies and a couple robes.
There should be weapons you can acquire that are better than steel-silver weapons, but they are
very rare, since we don't want to replace steel-silver weapons.
For armors, there's not many options if you don't need MS or Hide, but I'm adding a few. Again, they'll not be better than enchanted armors, and when they are better than standard steel armors, they will be exceedingly rare.
I'll write a little more about my thoughts relating balancing loot and crafting, appliable to both Viktor's and Keyser's criticism.
For loot, there's four distinctly different ways to acquire it; Find it yourself, buy it from a NPC merchant, buy it from a PC merchant, or get it from a friend.
What I'd like to be the two most common scenarios are the 1st and the 3th. Now the dilemma is this: If loot is too common, then PC merchants are not incentivized to keep a shop because everyone will either find the loot themselves or buy it from NPC merchants. On the other hand, if loot is too rare, then people who don't dungeon a lot or don't ninja will not find interesting loot.
The unfortunate reality of this dilemma is that majority of players kind of have to end up buying the majority of their items from PC (or NPC) merchants. The only way to both try to maintain a PC economy as well as try to make loot rewarding is for loot to be very rare. When we look at our playerbase, there are players who only do dungeon like, every few weeks. And then there are players who, every day, ninja 10+ times. We're looking at some players having
hundreds of times higher total chance at finding rare items than other players. A single player who frequently ninjas can supply for several players who dungeon infrequently. So the latter group wont be finding much from dungeons for themselves to use. Instead, they'll buy it.
When we consider crafting and loot; If there is something very rare but very useful, it will almost always eventually end up available to relatively low level characters. It doesn't matter if it's part of the 1% loot. We don't have item degragation, so the total looted item amount can only increase after time. Very few pieces of gear have managed to escape this faith. As a result, crafted gear must be better than almost all items you can find from loot (though GMW and Magic Vestment make some lootable items better than their crafted alternatives). If not, then when that looted stuff starts pouring down, you make crafted items obsolete. We want to encourage crafting and PC merchandising. Making loot too strong would be counter-productive to that.
It would be really cool if we could make balanced decision between various sort of items. But NWN, actually DnD itself, is not really complex enough to allow this. We work on very limited set of variables we can tweak. For a longsword for example, the possible damage bonus we can give is +1, +2, +1d4. The possible attack bonus is +1, +2, +3. AB decrease can't really be used for balance since it's overriden by GMW. Since by now veteran players know what immunities are common, what are not, and what stats are often needed and what are not, it's usually pretty straightforward to put items to order of power. It is very difficult to make real alternative items that are all equally strong without one being clearly better than others.
Due to the above, we now arrive to this conclusion; Looted items must either be very circumstantial (such as +4 AB vs Shapechangers), or feature a significant penalty (such as -2 constitution), or they must be in some way weaker than a crafted alternative (such as +1d6 elemental damage on rarest possible bastard sword, while enchanted bastard sword is +1d6 divine which is not resisted by basically any monster).
It's not easy to create items that meet all the criteria we have while also feel like they are worth while to use. If you think you can design such items, you are free to suggest your designs.