>And of course the other question is would you want to go up
>against those same two paladins if one had defiance and the
>other was wielding spirit breaker or humansunder? I don't see
>how getting rid of one defiance makes that big a difference in
>the grander scheme of things.

Yeah, I've always come to a similar conclusion when I've thought about making Defiance or Heartseeker unique. I'd like to just for the style of it, but the gear in the game just still skews so much more towards evil in my opinion. Good has a few great things that it's hard for neutral or evil to match, but overall their situation is still significantly worse. For example, there's really little good-aligned equivalent of something as non-flashy but unquestionably all-around solid as the set of darkened armor.

The other thing you have to factor in, and maybe there's a good solution to this that I haven't yet seen, is good characters that aren't really interested in PK but still soak up a metric ton of top gear. I'm not going to mention any names because I can't think of a good example off the top of my head that aren't still current characters, but you know the kind of thing I mean. This is a conundrum for me because, really you should be able to play a good-aligned character who's froofy or just plain not all about PK. (Or is useless in PK.) That's not a role type we should discourage. We shouldn't be trying to force that kind of character to only wear unlimited gear, because there's more to the game than PK. At the same time, it really sucks if you're Iramath and could desperately use a pair of hummingbird pendants to fight Granaak, and Jezerael is hogging them. If you're evil and another evil (or anyone) is sitting on gear you want, you have options. If you're good, you really don't have many good options that are in keeping with the way you should RP.