Did they ever streamline tradeskills? I played at launch and seem to remember that every single thing I wanted to make required many, many subcombines from other specialized tradeskill types such that I couldn't actually do anything without a load of characters. One dude processes the ore, another dude makes the ink, another dude makes the paper, another dude makes the quill, etc.
Yup. Just goes from raw materials from harvesting into final products. No more crude, shaped, normal, or pristine quality items. It's either pristine or you make fuel as a result. Inter-dependency was one of the first 'complex' systems on launch to go, along with spirit shards to remove experience debt, shared experience debt among other dumb punishing systems.
Can you solo somewhat effectively in EQ2? I haven't played EQ 2 in 15 years but I recently quit EQ and still have a bunch of subtime left on my remaining account, so I thought I might fuck around here for a bit.
Every class is capable of soloing to varying extents. You could, in theory, get to 50 (the classic lvl cap) on any class without having painful downtime.
To solo content intended for a group... that's where the challenge comes in. Necro is by far the best single character soloer for all content on launch, excluding raids as the pet is just hitpoints and zero mitigation and raid targets hit far too hard.
It's a fun game to fuck around with - to be honest, some of my best experiences in this game are just doing a full 6 person group on heroic content like Blackburrow, Stormhold, etc with at least a tank, healer, and 4 dps. So pick whatever you want and play it. You'll find people ingame to group with and straight up grinding instances and open world is the best way to level.
How are enchanters in EQ2? I rolled enchanter on Aradune and for all of classic I felt like a pretty girl on Tinder.
They're okay, but the metagame in this game is to blindly AOE NPCs. They offer solid group utility - ie; deal damage on any spell on hitting a target for the group, adding dps or haste buffs while in the group to 1-2 members, and coercer has possess essence (a copy of the target as a level appropriate pet with its spells) & charm, and illusionist can summon a clone of themselves.
Out of the two, I'd say neither really shines until the new 52/55/58 spells in DoF, KoS class AAs, and further with EoF subclass-specific AAs. They're boring as piss to play in classic.