Returning Player back to EQ2

Greetings Everyone,

After a long time I am trying to install the game as it is till F2P. I was thinking of buying the expansion and getting the subscription. But I thought let's just take a dip check at the game. I was playing on Nagafen and now on Skyfire server. I want to understand if we have active guild and players who are raiding and helping returning players. As I am out of touch and the game mechanics has changed will need a lot of help to get started. Please let me know if this will be a good idea to come back and play or just leave it. I focus on Raids and Heroic content not a big fan of PVP.

 

I tried to return when the latest expansion was released and managed to enjoy 1½ months before I just ran out of stuff to do and had huge issues finding people to play with. During launch and for maybe 2 weeks there were multiple overland zones where people did PQs. The game felt very much alive. After they changed how PQ rewarded celestial gear drops and people got their items the game died. Heroics were too hard for most people at the time.

Its very hard to return to EQ2. There are very few players on most servers, server merges have been requested for years. Obviously you got all the old content you can now solo, but group content in EQ2 in 2021 is kinda meh and the PUG scene is almost entirely gone on all servers. You need to be lucky to join a guild that welcome new people - but even when you do find a guild that is recruiting its very hard to break their clique and be welcomed to do group content.

For 99.99% people playing EQ2 in 2021 there are two ways:

Completely solo grind all the old content and do housing and dont bother with interacting with other players.

Go ham on expansion release, get the gear, get the meta collection done, group up with the guildies you played with for 15 years, then raid log twice a week until the summer update, do the summer update then wait for the new expansion and rince repeat.

Raid encounters are extremely simple for veteran MMO players. Anyone can do it. The biggest obstocle is an arbitrary stat called Resolve they just added to make content last longer and if the server is stable enough to raid for the night. 98% of all raid encounters will be cure, joust or stop attacking. Most raiding guilds also require all T1 dps p2w - And with the new leech even some supports might be required to do p2w to clear raid content. Lets be honest, the game is extremely P2W and the whales is all that keeps the game up and running.

TLDR; Its extremely hard to find people to play with and its even harder when you need to backtrack to do old content for adornments and achievement buffs. The story and quests have not been great for maybe half a decade, but if you want to do the signature line its still a decent game. Not a great game, just tolerable. I personally wish they never went down the signature line but kept it closer to original EQ2, but its what it is. The game isnt just p2w. Its p2w required for some classes.

Would I recommend people return to live servers if they took a break? No. Absolutely not. IMO the only time you can have a good time playing EQ2 these days is waiting for fresh TLE (progression servers). The initial rush is awesome and you see actual players everywhere and you are forced to group up. This also gets bland though, I played on all the TLE servers since 2015 and they keep opening new ones killing the old before you get to see the newer expansions (DoV+) and disabling avatars was in my opinion a major mistake.

 

You might want to post this on the official forums too so you can hear both sides, since this forum tends to be mostly people who have moved on from the game.

Personally last time I tried to get into EQ2 end game (a few years ago) I heavily regretted it, the game is infested with pay to win and unless you want to play a support class it can be difficult to find a guild. I had far more fun on the TLE server where the server starts at the base game and slowly progresses through each expansion, though that server is about at its end now. Hopefully there will be another one next year.

 

I agree with all of this. I started at launch and played until 2010. I was pretty hardcore for most of that time, including being part of competitive raid guilds. After I stopped, I returned while Kunark Ascending was live.

When I returned, I got a lot of enjoyment out of going through the old content. Nearly all of it is solo or molo-able. That lasted me a few months and I decided to sub. Then I got to current content and the competitive juices started flowing. I joined a raid guild and as a T1 DPS class I did all the P2W stuff that is expected. It was expensive entertainment but also a lot of fun. I wasn't blind to the shortcomings of the game, but my enjoyment outweighed them.

Since then, I witnessed the decline of the game to a point where I had to walk away. There is less and less content with every expansion. Signature questlines can be completed in a few hours. Side quests are not worth doing because the rewards are worthless. Basically you will complete the signature quest line in a few hours after launch and then spend the rest of the expansion running the same 12 instances over and over. Sometime over the summer they will add in a recycled old zone and you will run that a handful of times too. And this is assuming you find people to play in groups with. A pick up group of newbies will probably die in all heroics. The high end players are very insular so there is a huge gap in power.

A lot of progression is locked behind RNG. No matter how good you are, you are not going to outparse the player who has the Rune-du-Jour, and the only ways to get it are to run the zones and get extremely lucky or to buy it from someone in auction for millions of pp.

And, last thought, unless you buy the most expensive version of the expansion you are always going to be way behind.

TL;DR I cannot recommend anything beyond running through old content.

 

There is value in level locking and messing around with old quests and getting tons of AA and breaking the game but it’s definitely a solo experience. Trying to break into current content from scratch seems to end in frustration for most people, I would save your money. I tried to play on the first TLE but the game still felt broken. Maybe it’s at least passable now. Ff14 seems like the best game right now for cooperative content, there’s just the whole main story quest thing.

 

Passable is exactly the right word to describe the most recent TLE. It wasn't great but it was enough to enjoy it. For me anyway. If they fix the game balance issues with the next TLE it might be more than passable, but I don't have a lot of hope of that happening honestly.