If you never played, you should take your time and enjoy old Eq as long as possible. The new stuff is crap compared to what the game offered back then, you really don't want to reach expansions like cotf or tds before you absolutely have to.
It is easy to go all the way with proper class picks and planning. I would suggest best class for a perma silver player would be either Necro or Mage, because a silver player get exactly the same pet as a gold one, and you can get non prestige EM items (that power up your pet) up to at least EM12, maybe better. The other thing i suggest to people who want to play for free is save all your plats as you level up till you get to level 90, then buy a Krono in the bazaar and "sub" for one month (or if you want to save plats spend $14.95 and sub for one month). Click on the auto AA feature and you will get about 5-6 K AA's instantly which you get to keep when you return to silver.... spend the rest of the month you have "gold" grinding AA's and you should be able to add a few hundred more. This should give you a well rounded avatar that can survive quite nicely in up to level 100 content.. As for mercs, use warriors until your pet can tank for you, then swap to healer. Even a A2 merc cleric can keep a pet up with a little help from the player with pet heals. you may have trouble with named, but hopefully by that time you will have an established social network that you can call for help.
Just play on the TEST server everything you pay for is FREE All Access Subscription you can copy anything over from live and /testbuff a toon to level 25 with gear and all expansions and veteran rewards are auto granted and nothing is blocked.
It used to be that the defaults for looking up and down, at least in first person view, were the 9 and 3 on the 10-key number pad, but I'm not sure if that's still the case or if you have to set them manually. Also, the 5 recenters my view.
Theres only 1 problem about what people said about silver you cant get it anymore was abolish when all-access came out at the end of april 2014. So his AA gonna be lock at 250 i believe for f2p. Some people go all access for 1 month that way no need to use unlocker when u r all-access u can add those aa.Prestige gear is a problem if you are high enough though.Like some people have said some classes would have a easier time.I can imagine a mage or a necro not needing too much aa and still be able to advance but you dont want to roll a tank because by the time ur 60 u gonna need extra aa and you gonna have a hard time killing stuff also.Mercenary is another consideration i believe f2p have only apprentice lvl 1, 2 and 3 to work with.Needless to say mercenary wont be able to do too much at those levels.Good luck and welcome to the game.
