The Pinnacle of Everquest (In your opinion)

[Danth]

I prefer the pre-expansion game most, and the classic era in general, but I agree with Daldaen when it comes to building groups: Putting together groups was far more annoying than it ought to have been. It was tolerable only because most game servers were overcrowded, hence zones usually had sufficient people to build groups. P1999, with its lower 1-50 population, suffers much more. There's nothing wrong with liking something in general whilst accepting its faults, and even at its best I've never thought of Everquest as remotely near perfect. Rather, to me it's always been a case of taking the bad with the good.

I consider some other faults of the early game, in no particular order: Lousy class balancing (never really fixed), terrible user interface (eventually fixed), Lopsided risk vs reward (never fixed), horrible new player game experience (half-hearted improvements came too late).

Note that I permanently quit EQ-Live in spring 2004 so I have zero knowledge of the game past that era. I know some folks on this board stuck around far longer.

Danth

[douglas1999]

Originally Posted by Daldaen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

that actually means I have to spend like 30 minutes running from KC -> DL -> FV -> SoNH -> FoB -> EJ -> TT -> Seb.

No need to hit FoB or EJ just run through the river tunnel in SoNH that leads to TT.

[webrunner5]

Originally Posted by Zuranthium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Increased as compared to the shit state the game was in during Luclin, maybe. You might as well be playing Starcraft, sitting in the virtual chat lounge before entering a match. There's no more true fantasy immersion or adventure game left at that point; everyone in the world beaming up to some "plane" that feels like you're all floating around in a weird box up in the sky where a bunch of random vendors have taken up residence and everyone can just beam down almost anywhere at will.



There's other places to go. City of Mist. Burning Woods. Chardok. Skyfire. Howling Stones. Do a /who all, ask people in the zones, and/or put your own group together. Granted that's less options for the Seb area but plenty for the other side.



That's not how raids are supposed to operate, though. They should be epic, not something routine.

Oh come on. The average person did not want to be stuck in KC, Seb then, no more than they want to now. That was the reason for all the expansions, Boredom. I liked Luclin, and PoP, and a hell of a lot of others did also. So I am not knocking it if you like playing in CoM for 2 years, but don't knock people that want more new content. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[eqravenprince]

Pre expansions was when EQ was the best for me. Take away most of the raid content except for a 2-3 raid bosses for Kunark and Velious, then they would also be just as good as the original game.

[SCB]

Originally Posted by Zuranthium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That's not how raids are supposed to operate, though. They should be epic, not something routine.

In what way is meeting in one place in PoK to go raid the homes of the gods less epic than meeting in one place in WC to go raid the homes of the gods.

I just don't follow.

[solias]

IMO it was Kunark - Velious and PoP added cool stuff for sure, but for me Everquest was all about the dungeons and small group stuff - raiding was sorta fun in it's own way but also a huge mess in many many ways. The best part of Everquest was going to a dungeon with some buddies and just crawling through trashing the place, pulling several rooms at once just for the extra challenge, maybe getting some loot maybe not but just having fun playing the game. You didn't need to farm a ton of sweet gear to do anything, gear definitely made stuff easier and made you feel good, but in that time I never felt like I NEEDED to get a piece of gear just to do things. With Velious and beyond it was so much more raid oriented, sure there was some dungeons and group stuff but it seemed so much more raid-focused, then of course Planes of Power was almost all raid stuff and even the stuff that was group oriented was just not fun at all... Luclin was somewhere in there and it was alright, but I didn't like the new models at ALL or the new graphical style they were going for, which was a big factor pushing me towards WoW instead of EQ2 or Vanguard (ignoring any other discussion on the merits of those games).

ANYWAY. That's a lot of words to say I really liked the Kunark zones the best, even as a Erudite Enchanter I bone chipped my faction in Cabalis up to be friendly to everything, even the necro guild which took a lot of extra time because I spent so much time there. And frankly, everybody knows the froglok dungeons are the best, guk + sebilis for life. I certainly had fun in Velious and Luclin also, just not as much as with Kunark. Then PoP sucked the last enjoyment out and EQ lost it's magic for me.

[Danth]

Here's a chart which approximates how I feel. I feel the game peaked in early 2000, in the period around Kunark launch, and remained pretty good through until Luclin launched.

[Slathar]

i woke up on the floor in a pile of shit feces and throw up and carried my bloated sausage body to the computer to play 19 hours for another day. i have a nice gamer film developing on myself.







NEXT

[Whisky]

Didn't care for anything after LDON so it's what I chose. It was fun having lower level mission grinding groups.

[Alanus]

I am in the minority, but I think PoP ruined the game with three things:

- Highly-inflated stat items
- Easy to get AA
- Tuning content to fit AA instead of the other way around
- In raising the cap to 65, you had to exp in PoP from 61-65 (this didn't ruin the game, but I didn't like it)

Because of PoP, we got items that increased ridiculously each expansion and we had to grind out more AA. That is what killed the game for me. You miss one expansion and you are screwed. You don't grind tons of AA and you are screwed.

I did like the content itself, though. Excellent zones, easy to get groups, etc...

I also think Luclin was underrated -- again, excellent zones, easy to get groups. The downside is the time sinks and Vex Thal being broken.

Velious had time sinks, too (see: faction) but it didn't seem as bad since you could kill SoRZ to get real quick claws faction or WW dragons for giant faction.

The epitome of Everquest to me was classic, but I voted Velious since that was the most fun for me.