Everquest II

Leveling is pretty slow but I like the pace of it better than the regular TLE. You can actually finish quests and collections. The collections give a ton of xp and decent items.

I'm enjoying the game. I haven't played since 2007 when Vanguard came out. It's almost like playing a whole new game again.

Seems pretty fun to me, would say this version of the game is actually pretty good. Similar to how WoW Classic and SoD versions were pretty good.

Crafting is currently fucked up. No writs, and you don't even break even selling the shit back to the vendor, so it's a money sink for marginal reward. There are a ton of players on this server, so lots of shard hopping, which makes farming nameds and getting elite gear/spells much easier. This also adds to crafting being borderline pointless due to it being a money sink with little demand because everyone is getting drops.

Outside of crafting, which could be fixed to a large extent if they just tinker with sell back prices, the rest of the game is pretty solid. It's just not a solo friendly game, so you either need to make friends, which, lots of people playing, or you run your own Necro/Conjuror army and box. The server is already usually "Full", and I think they had to build this server just to run this old version of the game, so not sure if there is actually a cap or not that can be reached. They do the shard thing, so there are usually a bunch of identical instances of each zone up all the time, each filled with people.

As far as bugs/lag, not having any issues, even with everything turned on and cranked up. As far as cash shop, it's minimal. The biggest annoyance is having people buy horses off the website which gives them run speed a little faster than a bard. But, outside of travel and harvesting, not a big deal. But annoying when harvesting.

I feel like I can get 3-6 months at least out of this. This server attempt is not perfect, but I guess it's as far back as they can go. This might be as good as it gets for this game, which in the current MMO environment, might be one of the better options available for a bit.

The lack of crafting writs is definitely an annoyance. I'm completely broke from levelling armouring. There's definitely a healthy community though. Multiple wailing caves, stormhold, fallen gate instances running.. I saw 7 WC instances at one point. Finding a group is pretty easy, there are constantly people advertising.

If I remember correctly crafting was net loss in classic eq2 and was not till they came out with a revamp later that brought in the “actually good” armor across the board that they then went back and changed things where a product would vendor for at least the vendor of said items.

Crafted items used to sell to vendors for the cost of the fuel to make it, raw mats being worthless. It was still like that at the beginning of origins beta but they increased the price of fuel in an early patch.

Now it costs for example ~10s in fuel to make a carbonite armour item or ~20s for an imbued one, and they sell to vendors for a little over half that.

Or you can sell it on the broker for maybe a few C or 1s more than the vendor price. Either way you're making a huge loss crafting items, with a few exceptions. You can make small amounts of money on bags and slightly better money on totems, drink and some rare items.

I've played multiple TLE for EQ2 and they always scrap them around or before SF.

Most people disliked SF, and I don't really disagree for the most part, but it has one of the best MMO raids I ever did, which was Rohen Theer, maybe it was more fun/intense because I was a dirge having to revive folks, I dunno. Even the easy mode was fun at first. I've never been able to really replicate the experience solo, I'm sure the TLE experience would disappoint, since it would be far easier than the original raid.

Every once in awhile the EQ2 devs came up with some really good content, problem was it was always burdened with some really shit content too.

Anyone recommend a guild? Not sure if I'll raid much or not but definitely like to group, dungeon crawl, and work on HQ's.