Need help deciding on edition for item

[Melcar]

Strictly speaking, there's no dialogue between editions. This means you can't simply 'use' a 2e or 5e item in a 3.5 game, and there's no 'right' answer as to which item to use because neither is in the rules. As you're the DM, you would be homebrewing the item, so it's actually a "do whatever you want" scenario. If you feel the 2e version is better, cooler and fits more in your campaign, go with it and tweak the effects for the 3rd edition.

In terms of power, 2e is much closer to 3.5, so the tweaks would be minor and feel more like translations than anything. Porting something back from 5e tends to result in an underwhelming item or in a lot of work to make the item worth it, at which point you're basically designing from scratch.

Ok right, I thought there might have been like a conversion thing or something... either way, I feel its more natural to port in things from 2nd edition than 5th. We have been using tons of lore from 2nd. and the two versions of the game - in terms of magical power level - are a lot closer than 3.5 to 5th.

Also the idea that one would use the latest published version, up until and including 3.5. That might not be a rule, but it seem logical somehow to me, that you would go backwards to find a version than forwards...

This is pretty much exactly what I was going to say. 2E is full of super-powerful crazy ****, and so is 3.5, it's likely to be a lot more similar than the 5E version.

Right, the item can basically be ported in directly... very few things needs to be adapted, so its makes perfect sense to use the 2nd edition version...