I have recently returned to EQ and back to my old level 85 Shaman, but I very quickly was overwhelmed by his inventory, the bank, and the endless amount of content to jump back in to. So instead, I made a second account and got my wife playing EQ too. So we are currently running with my Bard/SK and her Druid. We have been appropriately upgrading Defiant gear as we go along, and found ourselves at a steady pace up until now. We are currently level 75 on the EMarr server, and I’m not entirely sure where we should go now, and the levels past 80. I had stopped playing at 75 10 years ago, then returned and boosted the Shaman to heroic. So I don’t even remember where I leveled with him. Since I’m still relatively fresh, I haven’t fully caught on to all of the expansion/zone initials, but I was looking for some zone advice starting from level 75. Or, something else for us to do to keep XP steady. Any advice is welcomed. Thank you in advance!
Welcome back! Look into progressions for TSS (The Serpents Spine, maybe SoD). Content will be fairly easy for heroic toons, but it will allow you and your wife to XP as re-familiarize yourselves with classes, game changes and such. if you want to just XP, then Hotzones and the Franklin Teek daily tasks are good. i believe @ lvl 80-85 House of Thule armor and zones will be better stat/XP wise, but you can always just move to the xpac (Seeds of Destruction -SoD/HoT or later). it really depends on your preferred game, and style of play. upon returning, my wife and I just started at HoT, and explored content by xpac. currently on TDS and having fun again
Now that you are 75, you can start doing Heroic Adventures (basically scaling missions similar to LDoN but with different mechanics) in the Call of the Forsaken expansion. They have been re-tuned a number of times, but last I heard they were still good XP between 75 and 100. You can start with the 3 Gribble HAs, which are fairly linear and straightforward, and then add more HAs to the list as you get more comfortable with them. Note that you get the vast majority of the XP when you finish each mission, so don't be discouraged when killing a white con gives a small amount of XP. Also note that the rest of the expansion is tuned for level 95-100 characters, so you'll need to stay away from regular mobs. There are ways of getting around safely once you learn where the See Invisible mobs are.
For a significant jump from Elegant Defiant, start doing Seeds of Destruction (SoD) progression. Have Druid port you to PoTime and from there to Void which is SoD hub. Just getting Oceangreen done will get you Paragon (900hp class) gear in about 2/3 of your slots.
Paragon is nice, but my guess is that they will find it difficult to do more than half the quests. No harm in trying, of course.
So, I decided to head to Oceangreen and try starting that. Better gear seemed like a good idea in general for moving forward. The mobs there, eat me alive. We were able to get to quest 4 or 5, the one where you have to fend off the waves of Cultists. Couldn’t do it. So next time we hop on, might try again, might go somewhere I KNOW we can handle and just grind XP, and then come back in a couple levels.
You may find this recent thread helpful. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/lvl-75-gear-xp.246744/
