[EQ2] can't win up

I'm not sure about the highest levels of this game but in the 30->70 range I have found that a team can't "win up"
the game seems to be blocked in groups of 10 like 20-29, 30-39, 40-49 etc
if you kill outside of your teams range, you get crap.

for example: a team of 49-ish going to the Mines of Meldrath will NEVER get an exquisite drop because the mobs are in the range of 50-59.
as soon as someone on the team is in the 50s, then exquisite's start to drop.
you are better off taking a 95 and exemplar it down to 50 just to open up the loot table.
it doesn't matter that the 95 hits like a freight truck, exquisite's drop because a 50 is on the team.

I'm not 100% sure but it looks like if you kill over about 4 levels you get crap, so a level 50 team doing the Court of Innovation almost never gets anything worth going there for.

each dungeon has a sweet spot that gives good drops (when everyone is the same level), too high or too low and you get crap.
for example Deathfist citadel sweet spot is 35-37, almost every other kill is exquisite but by the time dungeon finder will send you there at 40, you get crap.
Mines of Meldrath sweet spot is 50-51

So it doesn't matter how proud you are that your level 50 team can kill 63's, you get crap for having done so.

bummer... i did not notice that when i played.. but i was not paying that close attention.. What server you on?

A lot of the early level dungeons are deep. Like Runnyeye: the top is one level group, the next level down is +5 levels, and the bottom area is +10 levels and the raid boss is like +13 levels. So by the time you get there with the dungeon finder, it wants you to be able to go for the boss so the top two levels are already grey.

Honestly I gave up trying to deal with dungeons and such. I built my own using the dungeon maker. A three man group with one merc summoned was the best xp per kill that I found where the merc just slaughtered everything. The dungeonmaker points gave me plenty of fable gear to handle anything outside if I chose to quest up. Back in the day you just spent the points on mystery boxes for like 30 points or something and they dropped all the expensive stuff. Equipped what you wanted and the rest sold for a lot of plat. But I think they nerfed the value so you can't make easy money that way anymore.

wow, my experiences with the dungeon maker were TERRIBLE.
the dungeon maker scale up to 95 is just wrong and it's 100x worse the more players you have.
1 player = easy
6 = impossibly hard hitting almost tripper epic in strength, you can not take on more than 1 mob at a time.
my teams are doing much better now and I can usually stay up in a dungeon maker of my own design where all of the mobs are single pulls.

I was using a team of 6 and the first few tries of groups I could press the ranged attack button and my whole team would be dead before the twang of my first first bow shot.

Yeah, it scaled really funny like that. I did a lot of testing when I did my dungeon and the ShadowKnight merc just melted everything for easy xp. So a group size of four: three pc and the merc. This upgraded the mobs from solo to group and bumped the xp gain by quite a bit, from 300xp a kill solo to all three getting 421 for the same difficulty.

XP actually dropped after that if I had a full group, but I also ran into what you're experiencing and the mobs all becoming raid level and they just one-shot everything.

A slight update to the win-up, since i posted this I've actually got 3 epic chest in the Poet's Palace with a group of 52s ( killing >60 ) . None of which had a reactant in them so it was a cheezy win-up.
it's the only place I've got an epic chest by killing over my level range. I've gone to other places like the Ancient Table and that mesa area via pillars of flame and got crap for having bothered to go there.