Like any good addiction, EverQuest eagerly awaits your return

You’ve been my fave EQ content creator for a long time, and our journey through the years are similar, even tho I still haven’t played in a while.... still am a hardcore follower tho

The good news is that at some point you will find that you have more time to play. I played from early 2000 to 2004, and now at 61, I'm starting back.

Great video. I understand totally as I went through the same experience a few years back. I'm going to guess I'm about 10 years older than you. I returned to the game after years and years off and treat it like a single player game now with a chat. I have a great time playing again and I'm able to give back to the community with my videos. Good luck in whatever is next for you!

sad to see you quit. all your videos were great!

Thank you for those stories. Mezzinh big trains, trolling newbies, & the illusion trick. Didnt know you could do that.

King

You are a Legend

You can traffic control? I'm sold. Lol

Lol. I sat at the Oasis docks for DAAAYYYS as a Shaman. I'd just regen, sow, and Stat buff all the noobs. There was always some a-hole that would do the random "Shout" message that the specters were hitting you. You'd see everyone scramble. Them, after a while it became a "cried wolf" thing and people would actually die to a train of specters I always enjoyed the crowd control classes though. The shit would get intense, and was always fun when you had a good group that could just fight nonstop Then there was always the dingus that casts a DOT or AoE and breaks all the mezzed/rooted enemies

built my first comp to play this game when it came out ...

WB, wish you had got to enjoy classic, kunark etc. Better late than never friend. If you're on Blue add Overrated (60rog), Horribad (60 shm), Fahlen,(52 nec) Alleged (48 SK) & Fail (51 Rng). Currently doing a 2 group+ box team on PEQ due to burnout. Oh, add Haplo, & Darkdusts. Tell him you're a friend of me. Gl, have fun if you're still playing.

Everquest p99 is pretty brutal.

@@TheColdbrews It was, for years. Too much inflation of X items, in fact I want to see what Sks, Encs, and Shamans can solo now. Tranix and Hierophant were fun, didn't feel like blowing the $ on Puppet Strings for the Solo Achievement Award thing some kind soul did before green was around. Enjoy the difficulty while you can. If I ever saw first chars in a grp or running through a zone I'd always hook them up with weapons/armor. Haste items even, prob gave away 100k between plat and gear over the yrs. Cheers.

Hey how did you do it. Will it work on my hp notebook it's about two years old.

Yeah it's really fun to play with others

Thank you for adding that. Completely forgot about faction, diety, & race.

and Karana forbid you ever kill a bixie.

Nah, the consequences largely disappeared after the introduction of the Plane of Knowledge.

@@joejackson3091 this video is suggesting you play p1999, which does not have the plane of knowledge.

That's mainly because of PvP. Those games try to balance for PvP which is very different from PvE. You could see this perfectly in WoW where in the early years classes were vastly different but when they introduced arena fights and rankings etc. they also began to changed classes to be more or less the same. It's not JUST PvP, though. Unfortunately players also complained about things like classes like priests being hard to level because they take longer to kill mobs. In the end, players are always to blame. When roleplaying became mainstream, a lot of "players" entered the scene that want vastly different things than you and me.

Preach my brother. Modern MMOs are so watered down and boring

Nailed it.

@@pnmoreno Truth, then there are bards...not a single fucking mmo since original EQ has made a bard class that even comes close to being as amazing. I wasn't even a bard main back then and have always waited for another game to bring something like that back.

especially if you can't see in the dark.. cant count how many times i got lost from Qeynos to Halas because i couldnt see in the dark .. good time

I’m sorry maze like level design is a good thing?

@@Urothewarrior If you like a dungeon to be actually like a dungeon and not a hallway with monsters, yes.

​@@Urothewarrior The dungeon designs in EverQuest were literally my most favorite thing about the game. They were dangerous, risky to explore, loaded with secret passageways, and incredibly interesting. Here we are 23 years later, and it's almost impossible to find dungeons with designs as interesting. Dark Souls did a good job with dungeon design, but I'm having a hard time thinking of anything modern that did it as well as EQ.

Welcome back to the game. I'm glad your experience in P99 is fun.

Sadly it takes a ton of money for these projects. I was hoping Pantheon, or Reign of Darkness even, would be new 'hardcore' entries in this space but they seem to be bogged down in development cycles. It's a bummer as current games are sooo boring.

Yeah I feel you on the time sink part. Good on you for trying. If a new tlp server, you might want to try it cause it's more time friendly.

My love for this game goes pretty deep, so I've tried a lot of private server options. Live is just too extra for me these days with the insane power scaling and the absurd AA bloat. But the OG game and the early expansions are all pretty compelling. P99 is a great way to revisit it that's rather authentic to the original experience, but it's a toxic cesspool at max level if you want to do raiding content. "No life" players is exactly the right phrase and the way the server exists compels these types of players to play in extremely unhealthy ways. An example of this would be camping for coveted items, especially those that are patched out as the server progresses along the timeline to its final state. When the green server launched, the Mana Stone camp was disgusting. I knew a number of players that got it and the worst camp was ~50hrs. If you miss one afk check you lose your spot to the next person (and there's always a next person). Those checks come at 10-15min intervals, so the longest you can be away is about 8min safely. That's a long time to be forced not to sleep and sit at the keys. You can make the argument that no one had to do this, but that ignores the obvious psychology of your playerbase that is desperate to min/max, be the best, and get those items they always wanted two decades ago when they played this game on live in era. The Evil Eye died on spawn from the minute someone was able to kill it on server launch until the minute the servers went down and its drop table was patched in the timeline. That's the kind of thing P99 actually supports by being completely unyielding in its quest for perfectly faithful recreation without any other consideration. The only change they made was instituting the afk checks, which supports this gameplay and is really just a conceit towards their own convenience in not having to police endless player disputes about whose kill it was by camp rules. All this to say that it's not a community worth subscribing to in my opinion. I personally have chosen Wayfarer's Haven to scratch the EQ itch and it might be more up your alley as well. They allow 3-boxing there, which means you're not waiting as much and you can chill with 1-2 other people to accomplish most any group content (2 and even 3 boxing is quite easy for such a slow paced game, so it's not as daunting as it may sound), and it allows you to experience multiple classes concurrently and be engaged more since you have more you can be doing, but rarely have to in order to survive. It doesn't take much attention to run a healer in early game content for instance. The community is also far more relaxed and even the high end raiding isn't toxic, which is helped significantly by having instanced raid content. The petty, toxic, king-of-the-kill, zero-sum game types aren't incentivized to exist here and people are almost universally helpful and encouraging. I'd call the demographic mature adults. I don't know how game-inclined your wife is, but there are a lot of couples that play together and some families (I know half a dozen people who play with their kids, but young and adult). Anyway, here's a link www.wayfarershaven.com/index.php in case you found any of this interesting and want to revisit Norrath in a healthier way that respects your time. Also, sorry for the long reply. I had more to say than I realized

@@Chris-eh8mi I apricate the long reply! You know, multiboxing might be something I would consider. I 5 boxed WoW:WotLK for a while, and it was good fun. Maybe I'll give that other server a shot. I was playing an enchanter on p99 because I heard they could solo just about anything, although it's an intense play style. Really sounded like a lot of fun. I just never really got high enough to try it I don't think.

@@corgibuttz2550 Enchanter was my main in vanilla and is part of my trio. Charm dps is top tier for group content (and raid content where pets are available) through the era on WFH. As a trio, you can have snare with a druid or ranger, and a tank to keep the mob you're killing from also going for your enc on charm break. Pal/dru/enc is a great combo for this, but you can charm without snare once you get the hang of it and easily go with any tank + any healer + enc and make it work. I'd say play what sounds fun. As you said, charming can be pretty intense because those pets will eat you alive when you give them two weapons and haste them, but it's a lot of fun. Anyway, something to think about. Have a great one!

@@corgibuttz2550 Enc soling was a ton of fun, an interesting mechanic for it on EQ live is that charmed healer mobs actually heal you, your group and themselves and you can give them mana regen too so they have plenty of resources. This really ramps up the soloability of chanter. But there is nothing like P99 Enchanter group play, locking down a room full of mobs and saving your group from certain death all the while keeping an intensely dangerous pet around to do your bidding that could kill you in a few hits is a great feeling and can be intense af. When ur solo charming i keep the mob im fighting rooted usually, that way when your charm breaks you have only 1 mob hitting you while you re-charm. Of course eq utility spells like root have a wonderful knack of breaking fairly often, so relaxing because you have something rooted is definitely going to blow up in your face :) Leaving your group to finish RL stuff was heart breaking sometimes, especially if your deep in a dungeon, a group losing 1 man (especially a chanter) could be the difference between staying in a dungeon and having to leave by death or choice!. But that's cool that you care, the community was and is great because people actually care about each others experience in Old EQ and P99 and in a lot of cases went miles out of their way to help out without expectation of payment, i think it just comes with a tough unforgiving world, we have all walked in the shoes of someone struggling on EQ and because of that we help out when we see someone in need In saying all that i havent played in ages, but I'm backing Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen and looking forward to calling it my much more casual but still deeply loved 2nd home for all the reasons and many more mentioned in this vid

p99 is cool but I was disapointed they don’t have the secret passage behind the waterfall in Neriak that goes to the hidden room with Blossom the Ogre prostitute. The fact that an accurate 1999 Neriak doesn’t exist is sad to me. Neriak was spot on accurate to Salvatore’s Drizzt novels. what Daybreak did to it was a crime.

@@Dunning-Kruger-effect well Mr. Salvatore plays p1999, so it's not all bad.

I also played on P99 and some of the things I noticed that are different: Experience is way faster. 300% ZEMs were not the norm 20 years ago. Everyone knows that Monks, Enchanters, and even Hybrid Tanks are good -- and these classes are everywhere. 20 years ago I was the only monk over level 40 on my server. They weren't a popular class to play due to their restrictions, and no one on my server really understood the power of Enchanters until several years after the game had been released. Shadow Knights were considered one of the worst classes in the game 20 years ago because of the slow exp, and the fact that people didn't know how to play / players didn't realize they could use low level DoTs to become aggro kings etc.

@@BoomerElite4u Yeah, I forget which patch but they did away with hybrid exp nerf sometime after kunark. That is the patch level the game is based on. The main reason I don’t play is the planes are perma camped by guilds just like in 1999. It is too close to original lol.

@@Dunning-Kruger-effect It may be now, but when P99 Green launched, Hybrid tax was still in the game for quite a while. I had leveled a few characters to 50, but when I tried to level my Troll Shadow Knight it felt like this epic under-taking. I genuinely think I spent more time getting to level 30 than I had getting to level 50 on other characters. Even though I played a lot, I never grouped with the same players twice because everyone I grouped with would out-level me and leave me in the dust. I know they eventually removed it either in Kunark or Velious, but I remember 20 years ago seeing all the forum posts about how terrible SKs were because most of them were trolls with no mana pool and only had enough mana to cast 1-2 of their max level spells. Players back then didn't realize that the best way to play an SK is to use their low level, low mana cost, fast casting spells for aggro and just assumed you would want to use the highest possible level spells at all times because they were perceived as being better. And yeah, the P99 politics is what killed the server for me too. I don't mind competition, which is why I enjoy playing on TLP, but on P99 competition is strictly forbidden unless you're in which ever guild the GMs prefer, in which case you can do whatever you want and if anyone contests you, they will be banned accordingly. The PNP had killed virtually every classic zone too. When P99 Green launched, no one leveled in Guk because of the fact that each group is essentially only allowed 1 camp, which at most is 3-4 mobs. Not enough to actually gain decent experience on. Was so refreshing to play on TLP where you actually go to Guk and level there because you're allowed to pull more than 1 mob. Was much closer to the EQ I actually remembered and gave me nostalgia from leveling in Guk 20 years ago. Something like that was again, forbidden on P99 Green -- the staff took it a step further and even lowered the natural exp of Lower Guk to dissuade people from leveling there, which is like anti-nostalgia.

It's not fear, it's adrenaline rush, emotions, I loved it but I hated to get huge death penalty such as losing EQ or skills/levels. Higher you got, more you lost. Losing too much is not fun. Still risk/reward should be a thing. In WoW all you lose is durability which you pay for with gold. Gold doesn't mean much as it's never scarce so you don't care. Travel time is not huge due to teleports being available everywhere, flying so you don't care either. I don't know if you lose anything in FF XIV, do you?

Oh that's the best scenario

To add to this, I loved that classes weren't balanced against each other. Instead they were just made to fill a role, appeal to different playstyles and be fun to play. It was primarily a PvE game so who the hell cared if Class A was better an one aspect of the game than Class B, I never did. I mean a Cleric was OP as hell as a healer but that was balanced by it not being able to solo. Enjoy Solo, whelp you had the the OP solo Necro but no one wanted them in a group. Want a jack-of-all trades, well you had the Druid or Shaman to cover you. Wanted a class that could solo and was highly demanded in groups, bring on the Enchanter which was balanced by it being extremely skill intensive to play well. Each class was designed to appeal and accommodate a certain type of player and playstyle at least in the early expansions pre-PoP anyway. Now everything has to be "Balanced" because it is unfair if a class can solo better than the one you choose or is more desirable in groups or frankly can do anything better than your class, even if your class is better at something they aren't.

@@bengaming3649 don't forget that REALLY good bards could twist enough songs to make up for not having a chanter or various other classes in the game. It just took a ton of skill and specific song setup for that role. Soloing as one would be like half the zone but would need to be specific zones and take a ton of skill.

Yeah definitely. I like your answer. Combat was slower & methodical. It wasn't about grinding through endless repetitive questlines.

@@IonBlaze1 unrelated, in a prior video you said your dad lead a guild on Bertox. What guild did he lead? I played Bertox 99-2011, beginning when I was about 13 and on and off therein.

@@Melchior11 yeah you're right. Warlords of Steel I think

how the fuck did people figure out any of these quest with ultra specific placeholders and no rent

There was no map or youtube. You couldn't even tab out of the game, and logging in and out was a lengthy process in the age of dial-up and slow computers. You had to basically learn everything on your own. The only way you got to see zones is if you actually went there and explored them yourselves, there was no videos or anything. As a kid I remember day dreaming about what certain zones must look like inside since I hadn't got to see them, lol.

Whats tlp? Im coming back to play

@@chilledgamezone4950 Time Locked Progression server. They basically start out in classic EQ then every few months open up another expansion. Unfortunately they newest one they have is like 5-6 months old. Best time to start back is when they open a brand new one.

@@bengaming3649 when will they open a new one. Any idea,? So when it starts from the beginning there is no mercs?

@@chilledgamezone4950 I am hoping sometime after the first of the year but there is no news of one at the moment. Also, yes it starts at the very beginning, back when the game was actually all about cooperative play, something I really miss in today's MMOs. From a nostalgia standpoint I really miss it. Each server could only hold about 3,000 people at a time with a max population of probably 10k-15k unique characters. Being group-centric and with such a small population, reputation actually mattered and because the game was so punishing, you had to know your class inside and out or fail. If you sucked at your class or where a pain to deal with, no one would group with you but on the other end, if you were a really good player and knew how to play your class to the max, you became famous and had people sending you dozens of tells (PMs) asking you to come group or raid with them. No other MMO has ever captured that aspect to my knowledge.

Best investment ever was an MMO mouse. Gonna show using it when I reboot EQ adventures.

@@IonBlaze1 The luxuries we have today. I was organizing guild raids over the phone and through emails. Then using a mechanical keyboard with no macros and a mouse with a fucking ball in it.

Welcome back. Yeah a lot of handholding now. More of an endless quest grind now to level. I miss the zone immersion from exp grinding in groups.

@Ion Blaze true, going from zone to zone /ooc "lfg" or "camp check" was both annoying and fun. Along with the occasional "train to zone". Those days are probably long gone. I highly doubt that any MMO will ever get that. Now it is a race to max level and raid content/end game, and less about the journey, which is really a shame.

Eh, I'd play again but have no idea where to go anymore 😥

Sounds a lot like Vanilla to BC WoW - they greatly simplified the game as its userbase grew, which I think is why the social aspect of the game died so long ago.

Black bear pelts - 30p 🤣🤣🤣

Us playing the game from start in '99, loved it because it was hard. We hated the CRs, but later hated they removed it.. and so on.. Still log on from time to time, but the charm has disappeared..

@@randzopyr1038 BC is basically the same game as vanilla. Really no quality of life changes were made until Wrath, with dungeon finder.

Thank you. Yeah that was more of the idea for the video. What I wish other MMO's would bring back.

@@IonBlaze1 your content has been great, it'll be sad to see you leave EQ - I'm on a time-out, I never leave for good! Look forward to your other KZfaq topics!

New tlp servers in May :)

Thank you for sharing that Thomas :)

Thank you for sharing that Rekaert. What people went through has been lost to time.

Thank you :)

Thank you Blue Energy :)

Thank you for sharing that Binary. Rare to hear how the game used to be like. Magical

@@IonBlaze1 Glad you appreciated that. :) Probably my greatest moment was finally getting keyed for the Plane of Valor, back when all but 4 of the PoP zones were locked behind quests. At the time it was VERY difficult to pass that trial, so PoV was an exclusive place to be. A right of passage even. Everyone you grouped up with in that zone was guaranteed to be a high speed power player who could single-handedly carry a normal group in a normal zone. There was almost no chance of grouping up with someone who didn't know virtually everything about the game. That kind of thing emanated throughout the entire game from about level 20 on. The overall difficulty served as a filter to weed out the faint-hearted and those who couldn't handle the complexity, frustration, and stress. So the higher level you got, the more likely others your level were great players to group up with. At max level, you could put together a PuG just using the /who list and be confident that everything should go smoothly, as long as nobody bought their character on Ebay lol.

@@binarydigit0942 Yeah I like how you put that. You get better as you play. Higher level people tend to know what they're doing.

@@carolinaraeper That would be an amazing coincidence, but sadly no, this was on Zebuxoruk (before it was merged with, I think, Xegony).

I am working for higher and higher salary so I can say "bye" to work for rest of my life. Earlier retirement if you may. It is an idea but also has it's cons.

@@lionart5230 Sugar-Daddy me and let me be your EQ Felwithian wife forever. LoL jkjk~

Thank you Doomeniek. What do you mean by Holland & pro English?

@@IonBlaze1 i am from the netherlands and english isnt my native language, i learned english by playing the game! This gave me an advantage in english class :))

That had to be a long time ago. Nice of them not to steal.

​@@IonBlaze1 oh yeah it was. They removed that like halfway through the year 2000? It was a thing for like a year after launch and it was a significant problem with people trying to say they will drag your body to you. Thankfully, GM's actually did stuff back then and they did not tolerate that shit whatsoever.. unlike nowadays all they say in games is basically "sorry, we can 't help you."

Yeah not as big of a population as say Pre Wow but still strong on new servers. P99 green & new TLPs can hit 1-2k players. I think 2k is actually the server cap. Just gotta get in before it's too late.

Except for raids, unless there is LFR and you don't care about higher difficulties (WoW, FF XIV etc)

Run all that way just to miss the boat and have to wait another half hour 😂 I played for 16 years with a Barbarian Shaman. It took hella long to get my class epic weapon. Say hello to Tundra Jack for me!

I just started playing EQ1 on the Yelinak server and I'm having a blast. I played EQOA and EQ2 so I'm familiar with the lore, but it's been a lot of fun to see how it all began and there's a sort of mystery to EQ1 that I only felt with EQOA. This video is spot on too, I recommend trying it even in 2022 if you prefer gameplay over graphics.

How was it ranked? What decided on number other than level (since every top player would be max level)

Yeah you're definitely right about live & later tlps. P99 is much more social. I intend to discuss the major problems of all servers soon.

Can't argue with you there haha

On live servers they added mercs. Extremely powerful at low levels and hold their own at higher levels.

@@jda072482 good to know. They did have anything like that when I played in the early 2000's.

Yes, the original peanut butter & jelly or bacon & eggs. Combos that are timeless haha.

Yeah they all played EQ from the WoW devs to Dark Age of Camelot.

You've nailed my biggest complaint about old school EQ. Yes it was ground breaking and social and hard but there were some aspects that just made you waste hours of time without any enjoyment. Anyone who has done CR on raids will know the pain as well as having your corpse unfindable and then disappear with your raid gear :(

That's one of the reasons why I am playing the p99 server. I like that there is a penalty to dieing by loosing exp, and also corpse runs. Been playing p99 on and off for 8 years now.

Modern MMOs don't feel rewarding to play. When I level a new character on EverQuest, even at level 20 or 30, I have a chance of making some decent platinum if I get a good camp. Rare items may drop that even level 50 players will want to pay large amounts of money for. Every time I play a new character, the way that character plays feels drastically different, and the areas I level in may be completely different than the areas I leveled in with my other characters. I generally make friends and meet people who I will level with for the next couple of weeks. On WoW, nothing matters 1-59. The loot is irrelevant, the experience is irrelevant, and if you've done it once, it's the same exact process over and over again. The exact same boring quests over and over again. All characters play the same, and you never make friends until you're level 60 and start applying for guilds.

@@BoomerElite4u You are right (unless it's about Classic, then low levels mattered for social aspects, you still had to form a party, go to dungeons together, some items from lower lvl Dungeon (pre 60) were still good at max lvl (Maraudon ring for dps as example). In retail, nothing matters except Mythic raids, maybe Heroic but I did Heroic raids in PUG in Legion and it wasn't too hard so idk.