Can the Hero"s journey be solo'd all the way through and is there any reason to do the tutorial if I already know how to play? Thanks.
Yes, absolutely do the tutorial. The gear set is equal to lowest level Defiant and can actually serve you well through 50+ if you continue to add upgrades as you see em. The tutorial is also kind of fun, more so than grinding 1-10 in newbie yards, really. Hero's Journey, I will let folks with more experience comment there. I did it for the first time on a few fresh characters, without much if any use of mercs. The problem with that is that you outlevel the fun of the content because of how many steps require x2-10 of things and you have to do that twice, or three times for three characters, etc. Because of the grindy-ness of doing that on content that I felt was trivial I wouldn't recommend it for leveling more than one character.. it might be more balanced / challenging / fun if you did it solo, but I have not.
IF you want to feel the old Everquest (skipping the very fast progression to newest expansions) after the tutorial - skip the "blight-fire moors" map and head on to old maps like "karana".
Skip the tutorial, especially if you plan to do Hero's Journey. Hero's Journey starts with level 1 quests and can be done solo. There are technical caveats to mention. First, and most important, a few of the final quests in a zone are rough and you will likely have to wait for a few levels (another 10 levels in some cases) to be tough enough to handle the "boss quest". Blightfire Moors, Stone Hive, Gorakura Mesa, and Blackfeather Roost all have these. Just keep progressing thru the quest lines for the next zone though and backfill the old quests a bit later. Second, there is at least one quest (in Steppes) that requires a group of three people to request the instance to complete a task. Once requested, you can solo the actual quest extremely easy. The devs should fix that quest line to stop requiring a group to access the instance. Just ask in general for someone to joint your group just to get the task and beat it solo in 5 minutes. Third, there is a quest in Sunderock Springs that is a "hunter's quest" type. One of the named to hunt is notoriously hard to kill solo. It is a named turtle that swallows you whole, nigh instantly, taking you out of combat and allowing it to regen back quickly. It can be beaten solo, but it can be somewhat frustrating. Going through the entire Hero's Journey quest line is very long. You can use it as a target list for leveling where XP is completely secondary (XP will come). You will also get equipped on the journey, enough so that you could technically not have to bazaar buy anything until the 70s to 80s when taken to the extreme.
Tutorial will get you a free merc. Haste totem. Charm. Good armor. And it has really nice scenery since the update. If you go to POK there is a finishing tutorial given by Scealana next to the Cresent Reach stone called "out of gloomingdeep" that will get you free bags, houses, a generic guild if you need one for porting, free trader bag etc. So the question is why not do the tutorial? You will learn something and get cool things and both of them take about a day of playing. Of course most people just flash thru the quests which is why they are still asking in chat how to get a merc and what level. And the second tutorial "Out of Gloomingdeep" is part of the Hero's journey.
+1 Catspaws. It is easy to switch back and forth between Tutorial and CR. I think you can cross between doing the Tutorial and CR newbie quests up to level 14. The 'Good Stuff' in CR quests is usable at level 5 so it is a good time to go out and grab a decent weapon, belt, and face armor IIRC. I think the Tutorial SoW Totem you get for just answering questions/walking around. I don't leave home w/o it. Ditto for the Kobold bane weapon augmentation. I don't hunt a lot of Kobolds but heck, it is free. Things like the SoW Totem are less important if you are a SoW class like Druid or Shaman. There is a certain Zen to using the Totem: You click it as soon as you get to PoK where spells don't wear off. You do your business buying spells or selling loot while the cool down timer is wearing off. By the time you head out to the zone you want to get to, the cool down timer has reset so you get an immediate reuse of the SoW when you need it.
