I usually spend 8 hours a day at a location for a week straight before changing spots. It's lead many on my server to assume I am AFK and harass me - but it's because I like doing that before writing a guide about the location. What I meant was, while leveling 70 - 100 you're probably going to have to stop along the way and hunt relatively weak enemies - or - an enemy that gives you so little XP you don't even see your bar move with each kill. Every single server I have played on, I have had to hunt relatively weak enemies at some point because I couldn't gear out my characters. Except FV (which is largely why I play there now). When you spend a week hunting the same location and every 7 kills you get 1% of a level... Your moral starts to plumit extremely quickly. That's the same wall all of these people hit who bring up this problem. It's more a gearing problem than it is a mob difficulty or leveling problem. EQ is so gear dependent and the game just takes a massive spike in difficulty 70 - 90. Most people don't realize this because they don't know much about EQ and they buy every item they can out of The Bazaar but it's not enough. So, mobs just roll them repeatedly and it forces them to hunt relatively weak enemies and that's when the burn out hits. I've seen it happen to so many people so many times and it's why I have so much detail in my leveling guides urging people to gear up and telling them about the obstacles they'll encounter as they level. I still need to improve my guides though, I don't have any idea how to easily gear up at level 75 - 80 which is when things start getting really bad. You can use defiant gear and stay in PoP EASILY in Plane of Fire up until level 75. Then you hit the wall since most people skip ahead to TSS
Not all expansions of the same level are equal, they tend to get harder as you head towards a level increase. That said the early zones of a new expansion are normally easier than the harder zones of the previous expansion. Make sure you have auto grant on and gain those AAs as you go along. Take a look at Heros Journey and follow its suggestions for your level. Do quests, some expansion have a lot of exp from completing quests especially if you complete a set ie mercenary/partisan and some very nice rewards as well. Do the Hot Zone quests every day, once at a level you can request the HA tasks do those as well, some of them are harder than others and you will either love doing the same ones over and over or hate them. Enjoy the game for what it is, don't rush to level, trust me the end game isn't the be all and end all. Try not to look at the mountain to get to the end look at the path you travel. My fav expansions to level up in The Serpent's Spine Seeds of Destruction House of Thule Rain of Fear Most importantly have fun.
What is the problem with TSS? You can level there from level 1, there are lots of quest with good gear rewards, I don't recall gear being a problem going that route. The only real pain I remember was Blackfeather Roost, as it was rough for its level. That was the route I went when I started a char on Vox with no PP to purchase things in the bazaar with.
I agree, the amount of effort Sony put into TSS and the associated Hero's Journey quests is just amazing. If you do 10 levels in the Tutorial and then come out and jump right into Crescent Reach quests and follow the HJ progression you level and gear up extremely well. There's more content in any single zone in TSS than in the entire last expansion. And all those quests give decent Exp and level-appropriate gear. My only complaint about Crescent Reach is the stupid elevator. It get's tedious.
If you go into Icefall Glacier with full defiant or The Steppes, you get beat up pretty darn good. Not many people I have talked to do Hero's Journey, which I would assume gives you TSS equivilent gear. Boxers avoid the quests cause - ack - doing tasks on 6 characters a time is a chore. And most people returning to the game don't even know about the quest line/don't pay attention to the tome OR (much more likely) they would prefer venturing back to old zones and just grinding the ol' fashion way with a merc. The people who grind in old zones and buy defiant gear are the ones who will encounter the problems I talk about, obviously people who twink their characters or go out of their way to do quests for gear aren't going to have the problems people with less gear will have.
I think Almar has already kind of mentioned this point at around level 60 which is about where people would enter blackfeather the mob difficulty scales way up vs some of the older expansions like POP. I think this is by design if you think about it. Leveling in TSS from 1-60 by design is fairly fast. The expansion was designed as a way to get more new players into one concentrated area to level up. At the same time it would have been foolish to make the entire expansion trivial because the vets at the time would have been standing around bored for a year. I leveled 3 toons to level 60ish in TSS zones only when I came back. I maxed out all of their AA's along the way. I was hitting a wall though and that's when I came across his guides. It was after leaving TSS that levels came much faster post 60. I got to around 70 when I finally decided to pay for some power levels and got to around 90 while also trying to focus on AA's along the way. Once 90 I found my current guild and was able to actually get groups. I love TSS it is easily in my top 5 favorite expansions but post 60 some of the quests are nearly impossible without a raid of appropriate level or a high level character to come in and destroy things. The queen for example in blackfeather is a wrecking ball. Even her guards outside are no chumps. Sunderock springs and direwind has the open world raid mobs which would again wreck a toon but they are needed for the heros journey quest line. The mines require a group even at 110 to actually complete and they have to be present and Ashengate well forget about rolling through that place without a good group. In short its an awesome expansion, amazing experience from 1-60ish, but if experience is the primary goal I think there are better places to get it at this point.
TL;DR I keep notes when I play. I consulted my notes before making that post. Those numbers are real, and are from the 2013-2015 timeframe. If you dispute them, then go run a Teek under Lesson with a level appropriate char, and tell us what you see. And note, I haven't told ANYBODY not to listen to you or to not use your guides. I am a fan of your guides. I'm simply pointing out that leveling (just leveling, not grinding AAs, doing tradeskills, etc) doesn't take as long as you claimed, if all you're doing is trying to level. My real beef is with the EQ dev team picking stupidly inaccessible zones for people to use for hot zones. Hot zones are for people behind the curve to catch up. Make them easy to get to, and easy to hunt in.
TBM gear is probably the easiest and at 75 the amount of currency needed should cost you under 150k pp (FV) or honestly small enough amount getting it for free is pretty easy. It brings Tanks up high enough that my 3 box team (SHD/ENCH/CLR) easily did all the named in HOT/UF for AC aug farming and HA's. Which your guides already cover this gear so you know, the biggest problem is you have to do Temple B, which 3 box and Tank merc it was slow...but fine. (note the SHD could not tank it in defiant...had to use merc). And its not a free to play option. QFT, the DA Daily ports the group to the location...why not Teek? (At least if it's some 15 zone run).
There's lot of great ideas in this thread, including some of the back and forth that is sort of contrasting each other. Kunark was great in its day (and has some replayability even on live... is also fun to super-overpower). TSS was a stroke of genius, has aged relatively well but the group & raid needed bits aren't serving as well now that population is so much farther on. Everything since is higher level than 75. This makes sense... because the vast majority of playing population is +75 (and most activity if you want to group is 100+). But then... any timesink tedium in leveling 50-95 seems kind of pointless. Sure, people should have to option to go do old slow things if they want (if it is possible to do them) but there really is no benefit to the way it currently is. I wonder if tutorial-leveling mechanism that took a few interesting zones and made a fast-level ladder out of them. How I would have done mission content... You hail the PoK NPC and it ports you into the special instance of Crushbone (let's say). If you port in with a merc, it fills out the other 4 group spots. If you port in with a group of 5 it gives you the 6th. The NPC henchman work like mercs for AI, but only exist in this zone. You get XP for killing in the zone, but doing the task objectives (Kill slaver, Dvinn, Darish, Crush,etc.) gives you a level worth of XP. The tutorial mission would be repeatable and feed you the 5-10 levels until ready for the next one. The NPC henchman would be tuned for you to succeed barring total foolishness. You'd do 10-15 in Crushbone. Or... on live servers just put a song buff on characters under level 95 that gives them 300% XP gains. Every time you login it applies, but you can click it off if you don't want to lava-fast level.
Here are my notes from a few years ago when I decided to work on my then-level 67 Monk when XP was boosted. The Monk had basic Velious-Luclin-PoP gear which was not nearly as good as Defiant. Day 1: Plane of Innovation: 67 to 68.5 (no merc except when fighting a named mob for fun) Day 2: Grieg's End (mass pulling with GL buffs): 68.5 to 70. New armor and weapons. Day 3: Crypt of Decay and Plane of Tactics: 70 to 71.6. Day 4: Crypt of Decay: 71.6 to 73 Day 5: Plane of Fire, C1: 73 to 75 Day 6: Plane of Fire, C1: 75 to 76 Day 7: Plane of Fire, C1, then C2: 76 to 77. C2 is noticeably harder. Day 8: Plane of Fire, C1: 77 to 78 Day 9: Plane of Fire, C2: 78 to 80 Day 10: Plane of Fire, C2: 80 to 80.65 Day 11: Plane of Fire, C2: 80.65 to 81 Day 12: Plane of Fire, C2: 81 to 83 Day 13: Katta: 83 to 84, then Oceangreen Hill to 84.37 Day 14: Katta: 84.37 to 86 Day 15: J5 Merc quest and Katta: 86 to 86.74. Also worked on the Epic and the LDON augment. The XP bonus has ended. Day 16: Tosk: 86.74 to 87 Day 17: Gribble: 87 to 88 Day 18: Gribble, quests in the Old Bloodfields and Hills of Shade: 88 to 88.5 Day 19: Gribble and the J5 merc quest: 88.5 to 89 Day 20-23: Quests in Dream Feerrott for faction and augments: 89 to 89.7 (didn't play much due to illness) Day 24: Quests in the Lower House of Thule for faction: 89.7 to 89.9 Day 25: Gribble: 89.9 to 90 Day 26-27: Gribbles, Lower HoT: 90 to 91 At that point things slowed down because I was maxing out important AAs for each level. These days Auto Grant goes all the way to 100, so it shouldn't be an issue until then. Almost all of it was done solo by playing a few hours (3-4, I guess) per night with a few marathon sessions. Not all of it applies any more because the game has changed (Gribbles). Also, I already knew most of these zones from previous experience, so I didn't waste any time. Still, it gives you an idea of what you can expect with a DPS class. Having FD also helped.
In complete agreement, and I've literally been doing it the last two days. The TBM HA's are easily the best xp I've seen at 75+, give a piece of gear in the chest at the end, and some of the achieves give like half a level or more per. They're also no f'ing joke. If you aren't on your game depending on your group setup (and they can be spikey on damage), they'll own you. You'll have to know how to split or CC 3 and have your group survive. So high risk, high reward. Also.. the item in chest at the end of each, which if gearing through TBM I believe you do have to do the HA to get... I don't see that gear on vendor yet. I assume it flags you for it at some point, but the currency isn't of much use until you get pieces of gear to put the augs on. As you gear into TBM, as Ceff said, it should be rolling downhill anywhere else. Also, you'll get a ton of level 100+ spells this way, which will save you money later.
The Deadhill's HA are actually much easier (they tend to scale to dark blue/white mobs) and are way less spikey. Roughly 15% XP in 30 minutes still at lv 90, easy. TBM has the problem that named mobs can still cast level 100 spells at 75...but there are 4 missions that are really doable. You have to do the quest/HA Into The Temple B for the gear/aug merchant to show you stuff on Plane of Health. The set you can buy isn't much worse than the set that drops, but if you go a head and do Temple B, and get a full set of augs (technically on FV you just have to get someone to trade you the stuff) you'll be way stronger. Also I'm pretty sure visible slot gear (crypt-hunter) only drops from named not the chest, but once again the vendor bought stuff in Plane of Health is good. And you guy buy crypt-hunter in bazaar if you really want. The easiest missions are (in TBM): Into Temple B (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8081) In Defense of Health (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8082) We Make Our Own Rewards (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8052) Fate Rewards the Bold (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8060) Lxanvom Labors (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8087)
105. Auto-grant now goes to 105, though not all of them, just the ones from TDS. (and yes, confirmed. On TBL launch day, I did get ~600 points worth of AAs, all from TDS).
I got about 15k on my toons I finally decided to farm AA's on last month. Got the first 4k on them doing only AA's after TDS and then did autogrant and they are both now close to 20k.
OK, as a test, with current data, I logged in a warrior I haven't playing in several years: https://www.raidloot.com/Profile.aspx?id=6235 He's level 74, and had a decent # of AAs from previous auto-grants, though he's F2P now, so, 223 AAs he can't assign, and an A5 healer merc. Went to Teek, picked up the level 65 daily (Barren Coast), already had a level 70 daily for Arcstone, honestly don't know if that's still the current level 70 daily of not, he took the quest a long time ago. Ran to Barren Coast (PoK book -> Paineel, run to Barren Coast). Had no idea where Kerrans were, saw a named Kerran on my map, so now had an idea where to run. Killed 2 (forgot to cast LotD before the pull, almost didn't get it to channel before the first one died), then the next pull wound up with two names, plus a couple more. No idea if this was doable, but was not in the mood to find out. Trained to the Toxx Forest zone line, and then zoned back in. Had to kill ~5 mobs on the way back to the Kerran area (I miss invis!), and then got my last three kills. Note I know little about warriors, so besides auto attack, I used kick, knee strike and vortex blade, and nothing else this whole session. No 'leet gameplay here. Next, Throne of Heroes back to GL, then to PoK. Then had to spend a minute figuring out where Arcstone was Then to W Freeport, and to Arcstone. Again, map showed where firetails might be. Got there, did a 3 pull, and they each cast a pet with firetail in the name, so killing those was enough to finish the quest. Total time: 24 minutes. Total XP: 17%, under Lesson, with a merc. Also note, the total gear, and no knowledge how to play a warrior, and using an A5 merc, there was no problem with any of this, difficulty-wise. Edit: LOL at asterisks for the word g.i.m.p That's a bad word?
Neither of the first two HA's have names at the end. Two-boxed that. Temple B opens up the aug vendors. The planar group gear guy shows nothing. Each chest drops a visible and some spells. I don't know what exactly is needed to get the group gear guy to show stuff, but Temple B doesn't do it. You might need to finish each of the four main missions that drop a spirit clickie before the group visibles open. I've done both In Defense of Health, and Lxanvom Labors.
Sorry, gear is sold in Plane of Tranquility not Plane of Health, I think one merchant shows stuff before Temple B and the other is after Temple B. But Plane of Tranquillity has a full set of gear for you to aug. Then crypt-hunter drops from named and non visible mission chests. I still don’t know what unlocks the group gear one in PoH yet.
Accounts without LotD will be much slower though. My 3rd box doesn’t have it (3 months in an only counts 10 days still, I should probably check that out). Trying to keep that account equal leveled with my other two sucks, have about 300 AA banked and usually don’t blow my lesson lots of nights.
Well, there will always be variables. The vast majority of accounts have LotD. It's the first vet AA.
