Please no, it is a pain as a group running just through one expansion for some partisan quests. That said if it is done similar to the quest in Aalashanti which sends you all over the place and is soloable by all classes I could go for it. But I wouldn't want to see it with more than a couple of quests.
You're off by an order of magnitude with your "30 hours". A raid event is typically an hour counting prep stuff & admin. But that's not "a" player putting in an hour, that's an hour each for 54 players. Uber guilds can go faster, but plenty of not-uber guilds go slower, so we'll "ballpark" that aggressively to a plain hour. A raid event produces 1 item's worth of currency smeared across all those raiders, and another 4-6 direct loots. That's 54 player hours for a tenth of them to get a loot. If you count the spells, it gets up to ~1/6th of players get a loot(yay!). Setting aside that there's a large chance of complete failure with no progress, the raw number then is about 300 hours for every player to get a loot. Some loot. May just be a 2% upgrade on a spell, or a bit of armor with no focus for their class. Just something.
As has been mentioned before in the thread regarding solo-able raid-quality loot, Artisan's prize, rallos zek earring and the 4 evolving TBL chase-loots from Fight Fire, almost qualify. They are still relevant even for current raiders, (although the TBL-chase loot is mostly for the effect on the augs, depending on your class). They are also quite time-consuming, and is more than 30 hours of work. But they were very popular for the players who wants to dedicate extra time to the game. Admittedly, they do require group-work, but they are accessible to non raiders...
Unless something has changed dramatically since the years I raided nightly (I play casually now) raid gear does not fall like rain from the sky constantly in raid content. Raiders spend a great deal of time and effort gearing up each expansion to ultimately defeat the toughest content the game has to offer. They aren't getting any special treatment there. I can tell you they earn that gear and it takes a long time. Nobody in EverQuest gets a free lunch by any means and I don't think there is any favoritism either. Those folks put in a lot of hours developing both their characters and their skills at playing this game to the level it takes to raid successfully in EverQuest. I have enjoyed this game tremendously from various places in the social caste system if you will. From lowly naked cleric in Greater Faydark spending weeks to get his first quested set of armor (friends were asking me, are you okay? are you going to leave there?) to being privileged to raid with two end game guilds on two different servers who taught me how to play at that level. Then back I went to a more casual life although I think I spend about as much time playing. Now though, I enjoy tooling around with alts and other pursuits, like visiting Felwithe because I like to. You know, you should go visit Shar Val. Enjoy the music, look around, maybe find something to do there, make a new alt and start them there and quest in Luclin zones. Why not? You can do whatever you like. It's all there for the taking. All the old quests are there. If you weren't around that long ago you wouldn't be able to appreciate that defiant gear in the early going already is like God mode compared to the original experience. Now, the most important point I wanted to address for you is the age old thing about how come only raiders can have raid gear? How come we can't get at least some raid gear too? Well, here's your answer to that: Raid gear does not drop in group content (normally) because nobody playing the group game needs raid gear to survive the encounters there and to progress though the group game. Making the equivalent of playing in a sort of God mode for everyone would trivialize content that should offer grouping players challenge. There is excellent gear for the content available in the group game. There is plenty to pursue there that is really nice for the content but can be attained on your own independent schedule. There is the trade off right there. If you want to play the group game in raid gear you can but you will need to earn that gear the same way raiders earn it. If you are not raiding, you do not need raid gear to survive and beat content you are in. That's okay. It is how it should be. Remember, this is coming to you from someone who does not have raid gear either because I don't raid anymore. I vividly recall my first experiences raiding where the guild I was in went out of their way to get me some badly needed upgrades rapidly because I was unable to survive and be useful in that setting in group gear. I had what was nice gear for level at the time too but I was frequently getting one shotted by various AE spells, etc. A dead cleric isn't much help so thanks to their kindness to me I was able to become strong enough to earn my keep over time. Later, I can tell you that I waited weeks at a time for a new upgrade. At that time jewelry in particular was precious and the members of my guild who'd been there the longest got that stuff first when it dropped and rightly so. They had earned it. It is in fact entirely fair to restrict raid gear to those who raid. These are the people that require this gear to raid successfully. And these are the people who put in the time and effort to play at the highest level of challenge EverQuest has to offer as a highly coordinated force that truly earns this stuff. Allowing somebody like me to acquire raid gear outside of raiding would be wrong. It would trivialize the game, it would reward me unduly for something I had not earned and thus it would be detrimental to everyone ultimately. When you have earned a complete set of the best group gear in the game in every slot then I would suggest enjoying that and maxing your AA if it isn't already, spending time with an alt or alts like my suggestion to roll a new one and go do Luclin content from level 1. You can. It's your choice to make. Lastly, you could raid but I would caution you here in one very important regard. Make sure if you decide you want to app to a raid guild at some point that your driving motivation is to be part of a team that tackles the toughest content in EverQuest in a special and unique way as an organized raid force. There's nothing else like it. I miss it sometimes. But don't do it for the gear. That's just stuff you need to play the raiding game. Make sure you have your priorities right there and you'll do well for yourself and your guild. I wrote all of that because I could answer you as someone in your boots but also as someone who's been in a raider's boots and so hopefully you don't think of my reply as coming from somebody with an elitist attitude or something not that most raiders here that I knew were ever like that. They were more inclined to be good to others who didn't raid, helping them to do stuff they might be having a hard time with. Way back when, a raider single handly killed a mob my little casual guild was stuck on which led to my cleric getting his epic 1.0. I still remember that. I still remember them.
This is because of the raid guilds. They recruit everyone as " casual players " to maybe fill in an empty raid day. Thus, population doesn't create other guilds and build up normally as you would fit in, instead... these casual players get the chat rooms and aid (once in a while) to get the ore to make pieces of gear. Sometimes they get a piece of raid gear. But this is not like the old days of 'taking care of your guildies' by making them set up with gear right away so there are no excuses of failure except the player behind the keyboard. So to answer your question, it is a 2 group team of players that try to dominate you guild to break up and get them in as a recruit, then casual player. There is a bunghole plug in their progression as well. Population times also has a factor, who wants to play when you play. Today, the guild discord is completely dead. (if you are a true EQ player by now you would have lost your spouse by now WTF newb!) But yeah, my server sucks. I didn't mention 3rd party programs and what GM's do about it ..This has ruined the game a lot.
I can't speak for every guild, but our hard and fast rule for the better part of a decade was "if you can upgrade a slot in the bazaar, you arent getting a raid drop for that slot".
A whole lot of conceptual points in this thread that I think look at things backwards. If you are raiding to get gear you're looking at it all wrong, I gear as well as I can to be able to help with beating raids. Beating raids is the fun part for me, gearing up is just a means to an end. Looking at raid gear & thinking you deserve a way to obtain something like that without having to raid is like wanting the most badassed 4x4 off-road amphibious-capable vehicle ever when you only ever drive on the smoothest cleanest tarmac in your pink Nissan Prius & cry like a baby to you local council every time you run across a tiny pot hole on you way to work 1 mile away.
I'm trying to decide if any part of this makes any sense. I guess "But yeah, my server sucks." does because that is your opinion and from your point of view it might... but the rest of your words in this nonsense order really doesn't say anything.
I feel like this is just another person wanting the game shaped to the incredibly obscure way they personally play it. The first post is someone claiming they've been playing for years and is level 45, what the have they been doing? Without any twinking or powerleveling or anything these days you could get to level 45 in under 20 hours. So it's kind of hard to accept the premise that someone is looking to do some sort of long epic quest series when they're not putting in minimal effort already. But as a returning player myself, EQ always has ways to progress your character, but it's not always going to be a piece of raid gear. After returning from about 5+ years off, I had 2 priorities, first was to actually level up, and I have absolutely zero regard for someone that is claiming they want to improve their character or get better gear when they're refusing to do the absolute core of the game and level to maximum. No other thing progresses your character more than just levelling it. The 2nd priority was going back to see what I could do in those old expansions that still had value, and it turns out there was a lot. I went back to get trophies, several of them I use in Tribute stuff, Got 30ish levels of the Hero's Fortitude, Resolution whatever stuff from completing older quest lines, which its certainly much slower than just grinding XP I found I could pick up 200AA a day or so from doing old quests. That's only equivalent to a half hour lesson burn, but still its something extra while doing the content. I think its silly to expect that doing content made for a level 90 will give 'epic loots' but I do think its cool that doing old content in expansions I didn't get to play at the time does give improvement to my character. I also think at one point Everquest really did put a big effort into revamping old content and making things massively better for lower level players when they introduced the Drakkin and Crescent Reach and so on, you can level from 1 to 85 in the TSS Expansion. The massively changed things so every class can solo, made hundreds of quests focused on lower level players, made getting gear and money a seamless part of levelling up. Later on they also now added all the achievements and rewards too, including the whole 'Hero's Journey' thing. But to somehow expect that that should reward you with CoV equivalent raid gear is just a weird expectation. But I think the reality now is you can get really good gear that is totally accessible to you even if you play the game entirely solo. The gap between the 'group level' gear and top raid gear seems to have gotten smaller and smaller over the years. It used to be that raid gear was at least twice as powerful as groupable gear and had effects and clickies and stuff the group gear never had. That's just not the case anymore, and your top groupable or tradeskill gear is about 80% as good as the Raid stuff. There's certainly nothing in the group content you require raid gear to do. The one thing I do think would be nice is if they did go back and add in some sort of rewards for overall achievements especially really old ones. Something I did find fun when I got back was doing the exploration achievements, just the fact it made me run through old zones I hadn't looked at in over a decade as well as explore expansions I missed. But I think it'd be nice if they added something, some sort of AA or extra progression or improvement based on total achievement points or something, to encourage people to do some of that stuff. I think too another thing that sometimes solo players, returning players and just non-hardcore players tend to ignore too, is there's always some value you can find for other people. There's a lot of old things anyone can do that are still very valuable to more hardcore and richer players. You can farm tradeskill stuff, you can go into old instances and get collection items that sell for 50-200k+ each. A lot of the game is player driven, if you go find something valuable to other players, you sell that thing, then use that money to buy parts needed for your own gear improvement, that's your quest.
noone asks, but why? Why do people have to pay to choose an old school start city at creation? It's just a dumb rule to begin with. One might assume, the majority of those who would go out of their way to choose Neriak 3rd gate as origin would know the difference. or a new returnig player sussing out if they want to return permanently might prefer the known content upon returning over the unknown later release. It also says hell no to any returnig player who wishes to avoid defiants and so on and go old school / roleplay Just stop it already, it's pointless.
Oh and props for finally making CR tradeskill questors talk to non CR origin toons. A welcome change that happened sometime along the way while I was on TLPs
I think it all changed because of a variety of factors. One was that it was easier to find groups at lower levels if you stayed near your hometown. Another was that corpse recovery was MUCH easier the closer to town you got since you sometimes needed help getting your corpse (and possibly were still bound at your hometown)... and of course someone to rez it if you couldn't do it yourself. On top of all of that, the further out you go the greater your chances of dying often is. Anyway, a ton of this concern I think disappeared once we had the POK/GH for getting to those locations faster and the GL for recovering your corpse. All of that said, by lvl 45 I don't remember anyone ever sticking around their hometown that often. I remember almost always being pretty far from my hometown at that point.
Once upon a time you could not play EQ without paying, that time was when those zones were created. The game went Free to play in 2012 with Veil of Alaris, be grateful your starting point is Crescent reach and not somewhere like Argath. You pays your money to gets your choices, if you don't then you won't, and Free to Play is generous enough already.
