Nothing is worse than Shar Val. The home of the disgusting cat people in the worst expansion. Old Freeport was the pinnacle of town design in all of EQ. Perfect in every way.
I was partial to Old Freeport because it was where I started when I first logged into the game with no clue, and no nothing but a crummy club. One time, when I died way above someplace in Luclin, couldn't find my corpse, and had to go back to Freeport and kick rats to build enough dough to afford a weapon. I liked that zone. Imagine my shock and horror when I came back a couple of years ago and see what they did to it. I never go inside the gate any more. I just zone from POK and run like the dickens to the next zone. My "favorite" part of Freeport? "Mysterious Forces", blah blah blah.
Zigg Flinn was behind a door at least. Opal Darkbriar was in a room with boxes where I could safely camp every night. Not out in the open with all the other necromancers in a 'pit', like some peasant! And her awful hair cut! There were multiple places to gather, shoot the breeze, and pass out barbarian shaped cookies. The pile of poop in the road was subtle, not reminiscent of an emoji. Of course it's all about the nostalgia. And also I can't commit that abomination to memory for the life of me.
Mons Letalis Huge changes in Z axis every 10 feet, no real camps to speak of, just a bad version of Dawnshroud. Aside from running through to The Grey or doing a mage/wiz epic I don't think I've ever seen someone actually go there to xp.
Whoa time out. Kedge is one the best zones in EQ. You clearly never spent enough time there to learn how amazing it is.
Every LDoN instance. Especially everfrost, but really all of them. Repetitive, uninspired layouts and I just want the missions to end as soon as they start.
The zone I always hated was the Scarlet Desert. It was a long run to just get there. Corpse run anyone? It was an ugly zone. Populated by the Tegi. I despised that mob model type. Plus troglodytes, another mob model I didn't care for. The only time people ever went there, it seems was the VT shard quest. I helped guild members at the time get their shard, so I was there quit a bit and it was always unpopulated.
Every zone in Gates of Discord. Brown ruins on a brown or gray background (of ruins) anyone? Every trash mob is a glass howitzer. Are there plants in Taelosia? Yes but they look like brown or gray ruins.
My honest opinion. My least favorite zone in game.. Any and all monster mission zones . Those monster missions were able to literally build toons to (back then) current Max then Max out the aa in like five days after that. Monster missions were single handedly booming the whole sell an account after maxing a toon out in two weeks situation to the point it literally lowered the overall games "skill" per player to such incredibly low levels.. I loved through the storm .. and I for one hated every moment of it.
Everyone had one of every class.. and had little to no in game knowledge of how to actually play the toon.. And got upset when asked blatently.. how you got a Max lvl bard and not know how to pull with it ?? Gawds.. I hated those days and very happy eq nvr went back to that again..
Thinking back, I really didn't enjoy the sewer trials in GoD but I never liked sewer levels even ones full of spikey mario turtles The revamped Droga from EoK was pretty bad too, spinstun on aggro is entirely manageable but man is it the opposite of fun. My favorite part of EoK Droga is every time you mention one of the glaringly bad design choices about it (spinstun, see invis snare spiders roaming the zone, those nightmare-fuel needle-leg spiders that look like they spawned by mistake giving people heart attacks), a dozen people jump in and say "it's actually fine just learn to play" when the issue isn't that the mechanics wiped my groups it's that the mechanics are blatantly unenjoyable, which I feel is similar to the issues of RoS Skyfire with the drakes that highlight all the issues with flying mobs within the EQ engine
I like pretty much all the zones that people mentioned as either annoying/difficult, from PoWar to guk, to skyfire to kedge keep, caverns of the endless song etc. (Probably put at least half of those in my top 20 zones in EQ). Worse zone in EQ.. tend to agree with anyone that listed a revamp that replaced an original zone. You can't go around destroying ancient monuments like that. It's like the stripping of the outer casings on the pyramids at Giza.
I really really hate Gorowyn. It is easily the worst pathing in my opinion in EQ. And there are the sarnaks with pets, but the pets are hardly with them. So if you pull one, you aggro the other, which aggros more as it makes its way to you, then if it gets stuck in the bad pathing it is a mess. I understand why early expansions have bad pathing, but I can't understand how they designed a recent zone where you can easily get 5+ on almost any pull, usually due to really something that shouldn't be the player's fault. I hate Gorowyn at least twice as much as any other zone. Probably wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't there moloing and had friends. Maybe soon they can make an underwater Gorowyn so I can chunk my computer out the window in a rage.
High pass revamp really sucked. I used to live in that zone when i first started playing and now the new version sucks so bad.