Hello all, Level 70 warrior and Master Artisan Gigantuous is back again. I was on Povar from June 1989 to about the end of 2008. Then I took a very long break. But I am back now. What are the new changes I should look out for?
Nothing has changed in 10 years... You kill monsters, you get loot and XP. There are some raids you can do if you find others to do them with you. Same with group missions. You are always chasing the carrot at the end of the stick, never actually obtaining said carrot for 99.9% of the population...
You left right around the time mercenaries were added to the game. That's a pretty big change. I would recommend creating a new test character (any server is OK if you don't plan to keep the test character), going through the tutorial and doing ALL the quests and reading ALL the walls of text that will be thrown at you.
For the sake of not retyping my response from my previous comment in the newbie area here is a copy and paste. As others have suggested start with a fresh toon and run them through the tutorial. You don't necessarily have to play this new toon and ditch your old toons but doing the tutorial at least once if not a couple of times is very important. It will explain to you many of the new features that are available in game that were not around when you last played. These features are huge QOL improvements and will make your gaming experience much better if you understand them imo. When you log into a toon you should see a yellow message on your chat screen that say's "you have available veteran rewards for this character" or something to that effect. Its been a while since I claimed any but I believe its /vetreward. Don't claim these until you are sure you are going to play that toon though as you can only claim one toon per year based on account age and if you delete a toon that has claimed them you don't get it refunded. So if your account is 5 years old you can claim a max of 5 toons until your account is 6 years old and then you can claim a 6th toon and so on. Mercenaries are covered in the tutorial zone I believe but if you go to POK there are several mercenary npc's that you can go to and hire a merc. When you click on them you will have options depending on your account status. FTP and silver will only have apprentice mercs available to them while all access (gold) will have both apprentice and journeyman mercs available to them. Journeyman or J1-J5 mercs are better than the apprentice or A1-A5 mercs. Even a J1 is better than an A5 so keep that in mind. You will also have four classes to pick from to assist you. Tank, healer, caster dps (wizard) and melee dps (rogue). http://www.eqmaps.info/ is a good site to download maps I believe. You will want to download these before you enter the game. Once in game you can hit M to bring up maps. There is a find feature which is on the actions box. When you select this it will list npc's and zone destinations. It should make a beam of light leading you to your destination. In some cases you will get a message "your destination can't be found easily" or something to this effect. Usually this means the zone you are trying to find is accessed via an npc or an object. If you look on your map after using the find feature it should place a red x on the map in case the beam of light does not show up to guide you. The EQ button has a drop down with lots of different options within it. I would play around with it so you can see the different features and functions within it. Things like extra hotbars and target windows can be found here along with achievements windows and lots more. If you click on the top part of a chat window you can bring down an options box that will allow you to create another chat window. It will also allow you to set filters so you can have tells, group, guild, /ooc, and general chat go into one chat box and filter all of your combat spam into another chat box for example. Lastly search online for everquest macro's. There are lots of good pages out there with some helpful macros that you can utilize in game. A lot of them will explain to you how to make macro's also in case this is foreign to you. Check out zam, eqresources, raidloot.com, fanra, almar's guides, eqtraders and I am sure I am missing some as I just finished a weeks worth of 12 hour shifts and am running on fumes. As always feel free to ask questions and do a search on Tunare for auranecrotile my sk. If you need some low level gear I might have something collecting dust that could be of use to you. Good luck and welcome back.
I would highly suggest reading through some of the threads created in the newbie area as lots of people are asking questions that you might have with lots of answers for several peeps. As always ask away and we will try our best to help you when we can.
Welcome back! You have the option to make your toon lvl 85 by becoming a heroic character also. That will help you catch up. Research it before hand to make sure it's the road you'd like to travel. "Journey before destination" and all that...
Auto Grant AA's are now a thing. Don't bother getting AA's at first, just click the auto-grant button in the AA window. Every time you lvl, you'll get all of that lvls AA's up to a certain expansion. There are some exceptions, but for the most part you'll get all of the relevant AA's.I forget when the cutoff is, but once you start getting into the 95+ lvls you may have to start buying them. If Mercs weren't in the game when you left, that will be another big change. Grab the best healer merc you can get and that's the start of a group for you. There's a quest in the new Feerott that unlocks the best Merc's, but I think you might need to be lvl 85 to do it. Being a Master Artisan will give you a head start on all of the new TS quests/gear. If you never did the original Prayer Shawl quest in Velious, that is the start of the first TS aug quest, Sacred Prayer Shawl of the Duke. There's also the Artisan's Prize, but that one you might be better off waiting until you're higher to take on. Povar has a good community, if you have any questions just ask in the general channel. There's always someone in there willing to help.
