Game Eras, Good and Bad

Classic/Vanilla Era

Classic was the immersive era. The game was played in first person view in the 640x480 stone UI. The lore of the game was the most detailed in this era. The game was new to all players and it was their first 3D RPG. It was arguably the era where factions mattered the most– Velious had a single highly consequential faction choice to make but Classic era had many factions to juggle. The design of the original game was much more focused on building a world that felt alive instead of almost entirely about giving players mobs to slay and treasure to plunder.

The Pre-Kunark leveling game was the hardest EverQuest ever was. Heal aggro was much higher then. Meditating blinded you, at least for some months post launch. The game viewport was small. Permanent corpse loss was possible. No warrior proc weapons. Exp loss on death was double until two months plus a week after launch. Clerics couldn’t partially restore exp on death until they got their level 39 spell. Some classes were incomplete for some time, such as magician pets not getting dual wield until around the time Sky opened. ShowEQ and cheats didn’t exist yet. The game was explored more slowly than it would be nowadays, and fan websites took longer to spoil the game. Back then people had their EQ binders full of printed out stuff about the game.

The Immediate Post-Launch Period

It’s difficult for me to pick my most favorite time in EQ. Classic, Velious, and PoP are all contenders. But eras were good in different ways. The post-launch period, EQ’s first weeks, was a very special time. If you play a MMORPG it’s just way better to play from game launch.

This was the unspoiled period. Everything was new. You could not Google answers to anything. There were no maps availble. You had to discover things on your own or talk to people in-game. Spoilers ruin a game in ways that I think are very unconsidered. This is why the earliest era is so special and can never happen again. Even a new game wouldn’t be as spoiler free as EQ was because of modern betas, data mining and social media. Exploring the world in the first couple of weeks was thrilling. The world was dangerous but rewarding in a way it would never be again.

At EQ’s launch I rolled an erudite wizard, even though my friends were on Faydwer. This inspired me to travel to Faydwer before level 12. I couldn’t bind myself. I couldn’t invis myself. I had no maps other than the one in the box. I had not played in the beta so I had no familiarity with the zones. I hugged the top of the walls in Beholder Maze while I saw evil eyes roam around me, while having night blindness. When I reached Rivervale I had to sit there and try and get a bind from somebody before continuing on. When I reached Butcherblock, somebody in the zone shouted “Wow, there’s an Erudite in the zone”. I was the only erudite in Faydwer (AFAIK) until the highest level wizard reached level 20 and teleported there.

Players don’t get group teleports until level 29. So until players hit level 29, the game had serious “meaningful travel” and this is something I strongly wish existed in much larger quantities in other games.

When I hit level 24 I cast Cazic Gate to see where it went and it resulted in a long CR to a place I had never gone anywhere near before. I had to fetch my corpse from the maze using invis without a map after running to CT from North Karana. That’s classic EQ for you.

The Pre-Raid Period

The period of time between the first weeks of the game and the raiding scene was one of dungeon crawls. This was before dungeons got so crowded that the risk went away. When I first started doing Lower Guk, hardly anybody else was in there. A few other groups perhaps, who were higher than us, but often we were the only ones inside. In this era groups did dungeons the way EQ was intended to be done: no camping, and moving through the dungeon from room to room. If you pulled too many or otherwise got in trouble, you had your wizard or druid evac out, then you went back in. Ideally this would be how everybody experienced the game, but unfortunately that wouldn’t be the case because the game exploded in popularity.

Some dungeons ended up uncrowded for longer, like Solusek’s Eye. I’m not sure why because all of EQ’s original dungeons were fantastic.

The first level 50s starting appearing about two months post launch. Most of them got there by kiting guards in outdoor zones or cities. Sony later nerfed these spawns by giving them magic resist and increasing spawn timers.

Classic Raiding

The Plane of Fear opening inaugurated raiding as a core feature of the game. Dragons had only started being killed on a few servers just days prior. Some servers wouldn’t kill a dragon for months after Fear opened.

Fearplane and Hateplane are both two of my favorite zones. Some of the best raids were the first. Designing zones to have hostile entry and to have a non-trivial risk of permanent corpse loss are both good design and it’s a shame this was abandonded. These zones were both challenging and farmable with a small force – as small a single group of expert players – making classic era raiding the most accessible to an extent.

The Bad

Classic’s biggest mistake was not opening more servers, sooner. 2000+ people logged in at once on one pre-Kunark server is too many. The game experience for new players is also far superior starting on a new server than a stale crowded one. Furthermore there should have been servers dedicated to non-English speaking communities. My server ended up being the unofficial German server and the result was a bunch of people I couldn’t understand playing in the middle of the night which is when I liked to play. When Sony allowed free transfers over to a new server my friends and I jumped at it and suddenly being able to camp Lower Guk at night with hardly anybody inside made the game a much better experience.

Kedge Keep was not itemized and fully populated until seven and a half months post launch. This really should have been done sooner because only two high end dungeons is not enough. If the game had another Lower Guk type zone it would have gone a long way to aleviate the crowding, but I don’t blame them too much because it was impossible to predict how popular the game would end up and players did level somewhat faster than expected.

Class balance is always an issue but in Classic it’s particularly bad. (pets were ridiculous) I will go over this in detail later.

Planar loot was a little bit of a mess at first with them quickly removing some of it and replacing it with class sets.

When Sky opened much if not most of the zone was intended for level 60 players and this resulted in some problems. One is that NPCs were immune to spell damage, making wizards in particular useless in the zone on anything difficult, which is a bit ironic since you needed a wizard just to get up there. Sky risk vs. reward was also terrible because the loot mostly sucked, but if the quests were completable by level 50s then the rewards kind of have to suck compared to level 60 rewards although the higher island quest rewards were also pretty bad.

Overall however I consider the original game to be highly successful. I quite like how hard the game was back then. I’m not going to nitpick game bugs. A lot of obvious things got ironed out in this time, like for most of this era group damage was not added up for kill credit which made kill stealing very easy.

Kunark Era

Kunark increased zone sizes considerably which was great. Kunark was not a small place. The aesthetic was great. The new race was great. Kunark may not win “favorite era” polls but it was still a great time. The game was still rather new and so still had the, “this game is hard, make them crawl dungeons” ethos. The NPC stats were jacked up which was great. Class balance improved significantly which was great.

What I particularly liked about Kunark was how unspoiled it was. Because game studios were smaller back then, EQ wasn’t a strict themepark game and Kunark was expansion content thus the network code and the like didn’t need to be tested because it already worked. They could test Kunark content with fewer, NDAed, players and lean on company employee testers instead of having a large beta. This allowed them to keep the content a secret until launch. Third party zone viewing tools didn’t exist until later. Players got to zone into Kunark having no idea what the zones looked like. I made my own maps of Kunark zones and some of them are still on EQ map sites. I really miss the days of games being a mystery until after launch.

Epics of course became a very notable thing aboout the game.

Kunark was actually rather short-lived compared to other adjacent eras, being only seven and a half months long.

The Bad

The biggest mistake of the era was not itemizing Chardok. A huge, huge mistake. The era had three high level dungeons and one was unitemized. It’s classic era all over again only classic eventually itemized Kedge. This was made worse by how difficult it was to get into Charasis, so the result was the crowds funneling into Sebilis.

I would say the second biggest mistake was not updating their systems so NPCs could have more than 32k hitpoints and delaying this until Velious. There is no excuse for this because even vanilla had to add Cazic Touch to bosses because of this 32k HP limit. This made raid boss design very tricky, requiring high damage AoE effects, and very short duration fights. Although I would say they didn’t do a bad job considering what they had to work with. They gave several bosses a 1500 point lifetap spell. Venril Sathir’s design is quite good– it’s a fight that requires some strategy and that smallish guilds could do if they played well.

Sony/Verant made a couple of design choices which could be considered questionable and were later reverted/changed. Evacs didn’t work outside of dungeons to force players to have to run longer distances to places. Zone keys were implemented without being soulbound. I wouldn’t call these choices entirely bad and it’s more a matter of taste but most players would say they were bad. Although soulbound keys are necessary for Veeshan’s Peak.

Rogue and monk discs on 32k hp raid targets was overpowered. Melee dominance started in Kunark, not Velious.

The statless class armors kinda sucked.

Veeshan’s Peak’s design was rather dumb. You could not teleport out of the zone, so you had to either kill one of the dragons deep in the zone or make corpses and resurrect yourself outside. This made no sense because the difficulty of the content made zoning out “legit” basically impossible as the chance of a guild successfully killing Silverwing, Hoshkar and one of the back dragons without raid wiping on their first attempts was basically zero. Forcing the entire guild to duel their way out is terrible design. Hardly any guilds did Veeshan’s Peak in-era. The itemization of the zone was also poor, with many of the drops being useless weapons in the same expansion that put in epics. Trash mobs respawning in two minutes is also highly questionable design.

Another huge error that was made was giving VP dragons a much larger forget radius than the trash, which allowed them to be pulled from across the zone and all of the trash that would have otherwise came with it just ignored the puller, allowing the dragons to be killed at the zone in without killing much trash.

Velious Era

Velious is a lot of players’ favorite era, and for good reason. The raid game in Velious was excellent and Sony/Verant really managed to nail the difficulty of the encounters for the most part. (Vulak aside) The Avatar of War being a super hard chase boss that wasn’t farmed until Luclin was pretty great. The zone aesthetics were great, which is saying something for an ice continent. The lore was great. What’s particularly remarkable is that the expansion provided players a lot to do without raising the level cap. Velious really was the model expansion.

Velious segregated content based on a faction choice players had to make, and this was brilliant design. This split the playerbase up which reduced contention for spawns, although the final content was on dragon faction. It’s unfortunate that factions weren’t used more in later raid design.

Velious was the first era with high HP mobs. They also hit a lot harder. The strategy players came up with to deal with this new challenge was the complete heal rotation/chain. Sony/Verant didn’t anticipate players using this tactic and had to crank up the damage bosses did to counter it. Despite this, the Velious content ended up being challenging and most of the world first kills ended up being spread out throughout the era.

Serverside filtering was put into the game a bit less than four months into the expansion era. This addition allowed raid sizes to be much larger. Before this feature, raid sizes were limited to about 30 if they used dial-up modems, which many players (most?) did at the time. This is largely why raid content was not beaten so quickly. During longer encounters with many players present, the modem players would lag and the game would become less responsive and the player would be seeing events after an increasing delay.

The shawl and ring quest lines were fantastic. The ring war in particular was brilliant and it’s a shame wasn’t used as a model for more events like it. Not just in EQ but other games as well. If I made a custom server I’d make many ring war type events.

The Bad

A big, underappreciated mistake was Sony/Verant not itemizing Siren’s Grotto well at all. It’s a beautiful, well architected and challenging dungeon that went to complete waste. Visually and aesthetically it’s one of my favorite zones. (admittedly I have a hard-on for water zones) It could have been a great zone for guilds who did not have enough players to take on the raid content.

Waking the Sleeper permanently disabling the four Warders without the event unlocking equivalent new content was stupid. I am very much in favor of making events where players can permanently modify a server’s environment somehow but this has to be done very carefully and the Sleeper was just not a good idea.

DPS class balance was very bad in this era. Caster DPS was far below melee with the exception of wizard banes which actually made wizards very good for the first time on raids. Sony/Verant had to reduce resists on NPCs multiple times and even adjust the spell resist code to mitigate this problem, but caster damage scaling didn’t really get fixed until late Luclin.

EQ stats not doing anything had been an issue since launch but it really started showing itself in Velious, as gear had all these stats on it that did nothing, including resists. More about stats later.

Velious was somewhat unfinished at launch. (a common Sony theme) NToV was not properly itemized before FoH starting killing dragons in there. Afterlife got cloth caps in Sleeper’s Tomb. The quest armor sets had poor stats until they were fixed. Gems for the tunic quests were extremely rare for months. Zlandicar was depopped by GMs for a couple of months. Yelinak was undertuned.

Vulak was never tuned well. They made him slowable but since slow is so OP in this game, it made Vulak too weak. I think they may have underappreciated how players using geometry to block AoEs also made the fight easier.

Luclin Era

Luclin was a hugely ambitious expansion that I think is not appreciated for what they attempted to accomplish in one year. They simply bit off more than they could chew on this one. If they had more time I think it could have been great, however Luclin rates perhaps the lowest out of the first five eras for a lot of people (myself included). Although I’ll take Luclin over any of the modern slop nowadays.

Luclin: added a new rendering engine with culling tech; added new models and animations for all player classes; added a non-linear character progression system which is Alterantive Advancement Points; added a new class and playable race; added a modern customizable and skinnable UI; added focus items; added bane weapons; added the Bazaar; added mounts; added mp3 music. (then forgot to include it in the client, oddly)

AAs I think were a great addition to the game although this design had some downsides. MMORPGs need things to keep players busy year-round and this did that. The non-linear nature of them allowed players to prioritize what they wanted which is novel. My major gripe with them is some of them were just way OP. Exodus for example being instant cast is just way too good, as was Channeling Focus.

One change Luclin made, albeit late in the era, was adding a large experience bonus to killing high level mobs. This was a great change to the game because prior to that the best exp was always killing the lowest level dark blues as exp per kill scaled very poorly with target level at the higher levels but NPC difficulty scaled non-linearly. (the opposite is true at low levels)

Luclin raid design started to force guilds to use multiple tanks which was something the game badly needed as a single warrior tanking everything in a raid of 50 people is not ideal. The ring events had issues but they did put all of your tanks to work. The Emperor fight I feel is well designed. (after replacing the DT) Unfortunately Vex Thal bosses were more of the standard single tank affairs.

Focus items were part of the class balancing of the game as caster DPS did not scale like melee DPS did and they sorely needed something. The big problem with focus items is that they removed equipment choice from the game as players were now forced to select the items with the focus effects on them and anything else was vastly inferior. It’s an imperfect solution but it does do the job of allowing casters to scale with gear.

Casters grew in power over the era because of higher mob AC, focus items, AAs, flowing thought gear made to stack, new spells, resist changes. This was badly needed as the game was highly melee-centric prior. This included NPC casters, which had improvements made to their AI.

I particularly liked the Bazaar as players becoming shopkeepers is just more cool than making some kind of auction house. It’s more MMO-like. WoW-like auction houses are too impersonal and mudflate the game faster. I quite like the old Bazaar zone and the new one from Dragons of Norrath is a war crime.

The new UI was a big bright spot for the expansion. Keep in mind that before this UI update, players had one chat window for all text. Much of the rest of the expansion was rushed but this feature was well implemented, granted it came out mid-era.

The Cazic Thule zone revmap I think was fairly well done. They made it quite difficult and the itemization was done well. Honestly I’m left wondering why they could do such a good job on this zone but the other Luclin zones were lackluster. I think it’s a shame the zone wasn’t visited more often, but this was because they didn’t give it a ZEM and the loot rarity was just too harsh. CT 2.0 was the only serious, “90 minutes to get to the back of the zone and have evac ready or we’re screwed” dungeon crawl zone in either Luclin or PoP.

The Bad

Oh boy, this will be a long one.

Honestly what I dislike most about Luclin is they made the leveling game much easier by messing with EQ’s core mechanics. MMORPGs end up with a problem where new players need to catch up to higher level players after years of expansions, so designers ‘solve’ this by making the game easier. I reject this solution. Challenge is what makes games intersting and if you just put Time-level gear on hill giants and give players pets that can easily solo red cons then you’ve made Progress Quest. (that was a joke ‘game’ which played itself) Worse, some of the mechanics they fiddled with ended up causing serious exploits, like pet pulling. Mudflation gives newer players a big advantage in the leveling game so even if designers had done nothing they would still level much faster compared to new server players.

They also massively jacked up ZEMs in a way that caused issues like making High Keep the best zone to level in for like 30 levels. Although broadly raising exp rates is far preferable to making combat easier.

A lot of Sony/Verant’s staff left the company or went to work on different games after Velious and frankly it showed. EQ’s original design ethos started to really fade at this point. Dungeon crawling stopped being a major thing. With some exceptions like Akheva Ruins and Ssratemple perhaps but these are largely raid zones. There were no real dungeons to crawl in Luclin in the same vein as Guk. Exodus AA took a lot of the risk out of crawls and I have a hard time believing that Brad would have OKed this AA. Instead of dungeons Sony just put the casual armor on outdoor Umbral NPCs.

The new player models were not well received and many players prefer the old models. (myself included) The animations are atrocious. I think they would look a lot better if they were just animated well.

Frankly the entire expansion’s aesthetic was questionable at best. I suppose it’s hard to make aliens look pretty. Vex Thal being nothing but robes and four-arms in copy and pasted hallways was highly uninteresting. We went from killing dragons and giants to this. Aten’s model and Shar Vahl weren’t bad, but slaying a giant woman is a bit weird. Ssratemple was decent. I do not like extremely oversized buildings.

Keys keys keys. You needed keys for Emperor’s room, Seru’s building, Vex Thal and Acrylia Caverns. Keys for zone entry had been done before but Luclin cranked it up to 11 and this was done to delay guilds from reaching unfinished content in an incomplete expansion. More time sinks for the expansion known for time sinks. On top of these you needed to farm bane weapons. The Arx key had 10 charges at first. VT had no-rent keys for the doors inside as a final F-U to players.

Vex Thal was a terrible end game zone. I’m all for making players clear some trash before the pinatas but this zone was rather nutty in that regard. The challenge to this zone was staying awake during the clear; although pulling rooms could be tricky. The bosses were mostly unchallenging loot pinatas with a lot of hitpoints and AC. The boss fights were clerics doing a complete heal chain for twenty minutes, mages just dropping mod rods on the ground the entire time, and DPS pressing their one or two buttons over and over while they stared at the NPC’s back which looked the same as the last one. Emperor being the hardest boss of the expansion was dumb, although it was good that it was difficult.

If this expansion had more time to cook and had put in the Plane of Shadow as the end-game zone, and Vex Thal had much less trash clearing then this probably would have gone a long way to saving Luclin’s reputation.

Itemization in this expansion sucked. Sony in thier infinite wisdom decided to put all of the weapons outside of VT. Cursed ended up being the most important boss in the expansion because of its loot table which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Items in this period started the trend of putting some of every stat on every item, which prevents items from having much character or uniqueness. There just aren’t many notable items from this era. The raid loot had terrible stats until Sony updated them mid-expansion.

The mid-level armor quests were completely botched. This is the poster child for how not to make quests. The rewards were simply bad to start with. Secondly the NPCs were just some dudes standing around with no lore, who gave out requirements for armor with no backstory, with each armor piece needing four quest drops with very generic sounding names and nothing is provided to the player as hints for where to look for them. Players needed to kill four rare spawns in various zones, making these pieces difficult to get, for armor nowhere near worth the effort. The labor involved in making these quests must have been significant, making four rare NPCs and quest drops for each armor piece times the number of armor pieces times the number of classes. This labor could have been much better spent making fewer, better made quests for wearable items. These quests were so difficult to finish that Sony ended up making shared quest item teasure tables such that every rare mob dropped multiple quest items and the quests were still hard to complete after this.

Jaggedpine quests put a bunch of obnoxious mobs into the old world which made leveling in these old zones more annoying.

Bane weapons ended up being uninteresting because the design is such that it required the weapons to be either terrible on non-bane targets or overpowered on bane targets, so they could only have a small bane damage value on them. Making these do something akin to Slay Undead instead would have been more interesting/fun.

Luclin had four notable ring events excluding Grimling Forest, Inner AC and ring of slime. One was obviously the Ring of Fire in Acrylia Caverns and one was put into NToV to spawn Vulak. Vulak’s ring was 3 hours long and very challenging. This essentially shut Vulak off as a loot source unless you really wanted to do it as a novelty. Although a benefit was it kept top tier guilds out of NToV which allowed mid-tier guilds a shot at it. Ring of Fire at least made sense to be long because the loot is essentially infinite there. Ring events should really be designed with aspects to keep them from becoming monotonous. The other two were the burrower event in The Deep and the avatar of fear room in revamped CT. The CT ring was/is also overtuned and rarely done.

Acrylia Caverns was straight-up an unfinished raid zone because the designer left the company. The Grimling Forest war events were so terrible very few guilds did them. Events where you have to keep an NPC alive but which you cannot heal are very frustrating. The challenge of the Grimling Forest events was to quickly target and aggro spawns which rushed toward the NPC you had to protect from a short distance. The highly random nature of the boss spawning can make these events go on for a very long time before you complete them and they are quite monontonous.

Sony put in death touches back, in an era known for having super long boss fights. This is a bad way to allow other tanks to do something. This was so dumb that Sony removed DTs from mobs that used to have it: Cursed, Emperor, Underking. Emperor’s 95% aggro reduction spell is a better solution.

At the end of Luclin Sony heavily altered the resist logic. Sony had to do this because resists were useless as resists over about 100-150 (depends on the level of the mob) did nothing or almost nothing (I’m not sure if they added a softcap at some point) and this just wouldn’t work in PoP. I would say this was a good thing but it had big downsides. They completely removed the resist floors and this made charm, root, fear and blind much better. Charm became overpowered overnight. This made spells cast by players land much easier in general and spells cast by NPCs land easier if the player had a resist value below 2x what the old cap was. But since it removed the cap it allowed players to resist a lot of things they couldn’t previously. Bard resist songs went from not very important to extremely important. These changes increased caster DPS considerably which allowed them to keep up with melee in PoP. They also changed lulls from being useless to being overpowered. Unfortunatley all the emulated servers ended up using this logic so they all ended up being significantly easier than EverQuest used to be. (this includes P99)

Planes of Power

This expansion was the high end raider’s dream. Almost the entire expansion catered to the raiding guilds. I do rather love how this expansion just flips the bird to the argument that content must be made for the majority of players otherwise it’s a waste. As a top guild player it was very enjoyable to be in zones that only your guild could enter.

The aesthetic was also quite nice. After Luclin’s four-arm land, you go back to killing epic looking things. The only things more epic than dragons are gods.

PoP’s design was to make players fight fewer, harder NPCs and be more rewarded for it. That’s a somewhat obvious route given that the zones are now god planes, however it still was a very good direction to take the game. This made grinding for exp much more enjoyable. The experience bonuses in the elemental planes were also a great feature and nicely rewarded guilds who progressed.

The flag system I feel was great. Some might debate me on this but I like everything about it. Backflagging is a little annoying but if your guild had leaders who weren’t jackasses then you could negotiate with other guilds to trade flags for new members.

Boss design improved over Luclin. Fights weren’t 20 minutes long anymore. (Xegony aside) A lot of the fights had cool gimmicks to them. Actually I would argue that PoP’s boss design gimmicks were better than a lot of WoW’s designs, for the reason that WoW leaned so heavily on fire-on-the-ground avoidance mechanics, which I find obnoxious. PoP elemental bosses and Rallos Zek in Tactics in particular were interesting.

Itemization improved over Luclin. Warrior weapons were where they should be and they were very distinct. The way to make elemental armor was nice because it minimized pieces going to waste because the drops weren’t only for a single class and kept the treasure tables nice and clean. PoP was such a target rich environment that loot felt like it rained down. The AC softcaps were made softer so AC was valuable to get on gear again.

Class balance was perhaps better than it ever was before during this era. (Charm and swarm kites aside, granted these are big) Although rogues were still the top DPS with Time daggers and certainly with LDoN augments, plus warriors had their little protest late in the era.

Honestly PoP was a hard act to follow and the subsequent expansions were quite disappointing in comparison. Lore wise it’s rather nonsensical to go from killing all of the gods to… whatever LDoN and GoD were. PoP’s content ended up staying relevant for a long time after its launch, and Plane of Knoweldge stayed the game’s main city for the next 20 expansions and counting.

The Bad

Charm was stupidly overpowered in this era. Sony curbed it somewhat in the middle of the expansion but the resist changes at the end of Luclin combined with the stronger non-summoning NPCs made charm insane. Charm was not usable in most raid situations however, but in exp groups it was bonkers. At least Sony had the sense to disable NPCs equipping weapons on most mobs. Sadly charm trivialized the Rallos Zek encounter in Tactics which I think is rather unfortunate considering he is the gateway mob to elemental planes and the fight is actually really cool if done legit.

Plane of Knowledge basically killed what little remained of “meaningful travel” in the game. Teleports stopped being needed for the most part. The older games get, the more they need to do this kind of thing I suppose but I’m not sure I like PoK books that much.

The non-raid NPCs in PoP zones were almost entirely dumb warrior NPCs with small aggro radii. There were few caster mobs and most didn’t even summon. This brought back kiting as being something that had extremely low risk for the reward, particularly since mobs were now huge exp bombs. While NPCs did a lot of melee damage, the zones were largely single pull fests making most zones somewhat unchallenging for exp grinding.

There were some mini-raid events intended for raids of about three groups, which would otherwise have been great for smaller guilds except they were poorly implemented for the most part. Few players ever heard of some of these because they were just so badly implemented with terrible rewards. (e.g. Mujaki, Falto, Lord of Thunder, Overlord Banord Paffa)

You can tell that some of this expansion was rushed or incomplete. The Plane of War was never finished so one of the cave stones in Plane of Tranquility doesn’t work. Some of the treasure tables were bugged for many years, and drops intended for more casual players were never obtained at the time. The Plane of Time wasn’t ready until six months after launch and Sony had to make the Rathe Council unkillable to block players from entry. Parchment drop rates would be something you would expect to have been a priority and done before launch but Sony neglected to put parchment drops on many NPCs in tier 1-2 zones until a week after launch, then in tier 3 zones two months after launch.

Graveyards removed a lot of risk from PoP zones. They were necessary for some raid zones but the days of wondering how you’ll get your corpse back were long over by PoP. Not everybody would call this a bad thing however and the counterargument is that it just saves you the trouble of bothering a necro, but it’s still a drastic reduction in punishment of failure.

Invisible zone walls were easily exploited across, either by levitation or /corpse.

The 61 to 65 grind was way too short, lasting all of a week.

Many of the raid bosses in this expansion were very undertuned for some time before they were fixed, ruining the significance of being the first to kill them.

Quarm’s final state was too easy.

Everything After PoP

I don’t have much good to say about the game after PoP. Six month expansion cycles resulted in a drastic reduction in product quality.

Legacy of Ykesha launched four months after PoP and was essentially a concurrent expansion with a handful of zones nobody visited. Kicking the trolls out of Grobb and having them use Neriak as a city was both terrible and lazy and terribly lazy. They increased bank slots and added charms just to force all players to buy it. Without the bank slots nobody would miss this expansion if it had not existed.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath was a train wreck: the zones were generic layouts with copy and pasted rooms and hallways; the raids were overtuned with comically bad loot such that the vast majority of raid drops rotted; hours of trash clearing of dangerous mobs that could result in no reward because every raid had a time limit and death limit so a caster sitting down at the wrong time could end the raid; instances are cancer; Vie buffs trivialized PoP raid bosses to the point knights could tank Time Rallos; and augments made rogues ridiculous.

The LDoN raid cap was 36 which was a criminally insane design call as guilds were rostered for raids of 50+ since Velious let alone 60+ for PoTime and this caused large amounts of drama and alienation as not nearly everybody could get into the raids. These raids were much harder than PoTime which meant doing two raids was not an option as a B-team raid wouldn’t stand a chance. However because PoTime was such a loot pinata zone and LDoN raids were loot deserts full of trash clearing, it eventually resulted in guilds having major attendance problems (at least mine did) for LDoN nights, so even the players who wanted to raid LDoN often couldn’t because most of their guild didn’t show up.

Gates of Discord was somehow tuned for level 70s even though the level cap wasn’t raised until Omens of War. This doesn’t seem like something that could possibly happen, and yet it did. Although it was kinda fun to be the best tank on the server and have people beg me to get through their trials. Uqua made me quit the game however. I found GoD’s aesthetic and lore to be rather awful but it’s tough to come up with something after slaying all the gods.

WoW’s success made Sony decide to turn the game into WoW. A ’task’ (quest) system was added in Omens, and Serpent’s Spine added fast out-of-combat regen. They also started revamping older zones which I hate, Freeport in particular. Seeds of Destruction added mercenaries and that really turned the game into Progress Quest, at least for the first 75 or whatever levels. Combat had been made much more fast paced as well, requiring quick healing, because everything has to be the same nowadays.