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Top notch?
Think again and decide which areas you want to have covered best (100%), ok (>85%), medium (>60%) or can live without it.

Areas are:
- Stats
- Melee/Caster boni
- Hits
- Resists
- Skills

Quite frankly it isn't possible to have a template that covers all top since TOA.

Good items for NS would be Golden Spear (not sure how the champ weapon compares to this) and some of the drops in Co5 (Circle of Five) raids are good in that they have good resists, one stat or hits and some minor TOA boni.
Sure, then again you could go and farm the heck out of ML9 and other places (Leviathan / Kraken) for which you will require quite a few people (most often more than 1 fg).

All depends how much time you want to invest to get top gear.

What DR really changed is that it made basic templating much much easier.

The new epic armour, champion weapon at CL5, & the Co5/new-Legion/Crom accessories provide you with a basic template which you only really need to complete with a decent 2nd ring, a decent 2nd bracer, a decent cloak, and for some classes decent secondary/tertiary weapons/shield (& maybe replace 1 or 2 of the weaker epic parts) to get a template which is 95% as good as those of people who spent xxx plats & xxx hours getting artes & rare drops.

I'm not sure if this really applies for all classes, & of course you can still improve it if you're willing to invest the time, energy & plats, but I've been very surprised & happy with the results thus far.

Singalong!

lo pio