Do Players Still Do Hero's Journey?

I always follow Hero's Journey with new characters. Doing those quests guides you on a somewhat level-appropriate path and is a much more fun and probably faster way to level up than grinding trash in hotzones. Plus the achievements get you a free armor upgrade at every step so you don't even have to hunt or shop for those. Expansions The Serpent's Spine through House of Thule was the best era for EQ IMO.

I've actually never cared for boxing in EQ. So this will be a single character only at a time run through.

Thank you everyone for your replies. They have been very helpful!

It's easy to drag around a SHM, BST etc to cast slow and it is free, so I think it is worth the hassle, if you are stuck doing molo, but I understand why people don't want to box.

I'm going through the Hero's Journey for the first time ever after returning to the game since original Planes of Power and have been having a surprising amount of fun doing it... but I completely agree with you about some of those major power spikes. It doesn't make any sense and I wish Daybreak would go in and just nerf some of those targets so there's not a huge brick wall for players (especially new players like me) to complete:

• Stone Hive Queen - too difficult for the achievement target. Luckily I had a friend that could come help after I was woefully unsuccessful.
• Goru'kar Mesa - Drakkin invasion is impossibly hard, too, for the level range and trying to do it legitimately. I just waited for everything to spawn, Feign Death'd, and then pulled the captain target solo to complete.
• Blackfeather Roost - everything was fine until it was time to kill the Captain + 5x Royal Guards. The Captain shredded my Journeyman tank merc in about 15 seconds (~1300 dmg per hit). Got some high level player help on this one, thankfully.
• Blackfeather Roost - the Queen and all the see-invis stuff inside. She's level 70-71? I forget. There's no way anyone is doing this w/o high level player help given the achievement level and the Hero's Journey itself. By the time someone would be able to do this legitimately, the rewards for doing so have long lost their usefulness.

I'm about to head to The Steppes but am already concerned with the massive power spikes. Luckily I'm in a position where I do have a couple friends I can ask for help but I'm imagining what someone not in that position's experience may be like? Just a hard brick wall and hope that they continue on elsewhere/break the continuity -- or, worse, they just stop playing?
Daybreak can easily improve this experience for new players by just nerfing these brick walls of difficulty. I get that EverQuest is far more difficult than other MMOs on the market by sheer threat of enemies, but when it's something that requires grouping in zones where you never see another player it becomes impossible and that's not fun. Finding high level player support to just come in and obliterate it gets the job done but there's no achievement to be had. I didn't earn that progress -- it was just given to me and that also feels bad. I also was unable to find help from people I didn't already know. No one responds in general chat about it so it's not as-if it's a "community-building" opportunity either.

This may have been changed since your post but some(??) of those you can just hand the ingredients in to an adjacent NPC and they make the end result for you. Specifically the satyr camp I was able to do that -- was just the tiniest bit of text in the quest objective that made mention of it.

Also, Daybreak, please fix the hit boxes on destroying the harpy tents. Wow was that ever frustrating!
Apologies for the wall-of-text + bringing up a 1.5 year old thread... but was really relevant to what I'm going through as a new player after a decade.
I don't know how active anyone from Daybreak may be on perusing the forums, but bits mentioned above are some really low-hanging fruit to (hopefully) not be a game-induced reason for new players to quit out of absolute frustration.

Hi Tsudy, my experience has been quite similar. I just got back into EQ as well after being away since POP.

When I first logged into my old level 70 druid I felt completely lost! My character was tucked into the corner of some random building in the Plane of Knowledge. The user interface was a mess - all of the windows and key bindings had reset to the defaults to put it kindly. I honestly spent the first hour or so back in the game just looking through the various menus and musing about things like "What are all of these spells?" and "Why is there a single fire beetle eye in my inventory? Why the beetle eye!?".

I decided to start over and make a new character. I've been following the Hero's Journey after completing the tutorial to reacquaint myself with the game as I level. So far it has been a lot of fun and the rewards have kept my character way ahead of what I likely could have achieved on my own.

The first wall I encountered in terms of power spikes was with Defan the Watch Captain, having absolutely zero knowledge of the fight's mechanics heading into it. This one killed me half a dozen times before I realized my apprentice mercenary wasn't up to the task, and that I hadn't set their role as Main Tank to gather all of the adds that spawn. These two changes allowed me to burn down the boss on the upper floor despite still not really understanding the mechanics of how the torches work exactly.

I've slowly been able to work my way through each of the quest achievements from Crescent Reach to Stone Hive with the help of the journeyman tank mercenary and a determination to work through the tougher fights using trial and error and brute force.

With that said, I've personally struggled with the game design quirks more than the power spikes so far. One example was the quest to escort the thralls out of the Bixie farm area in Blightfire Moors. I handed the first one a powder to start walking back to camp which summoned a guard. However, a nearby Bixie warrior also respawned and joined the fight which in the chaos somehow caused the thrall to completely stop walking even after both of the enemies were dead. After some time waiting around, I decided to go on freeing the other thralls in the area and walking each back to camp one by one (I didn't know any better and feared another thrall might glitch out just like the first one if I wasn't careful to pick up any adds). I soon realized I didn't have enough powder to complete the quest. I tried killing the still-glitched thrall hoping the quest powder might drop as loot but no such luck.

Thankfully I was able to loot one of the prerequisite items from a few steps back in the questline and turn that back into the alchemist NPC at Crescent Reach for another stack of powders to ultimately finish the escort quest without having to start completely over. The missing/extra powders for the escort quest leads to another issue I've noticed with the overflow of quest items in general. My bags are full of random wolf heads, Bixie wings, and treant staves simply because it's difficult to know which ones can be "pre-looted" for turn in prior to accepting the quest; or if the quest is repeatable; or if there is a separate upcoming quest that uses the same items for credit as the ones I've already completed; or if it's just extra and can/should be deleted (which is what I wind up doing anyway).

Annnnd that's when I remembered that little fire beetle eye on my druid. I feel like that is just the chaotic nature of questing in Everquest and has been apart of the game since the beginning.
/facepalm

Nomeregard's (post #4) videos on YouTube has helped me a ton with relearning some of the details of gameplay, and with keeping my sanity when the quest content isn't making much sense. When I saw him attempt the same escort quest and set 3 or 4 of the thralls free at the same time, I needed a moment to calm myself!

My necromancer is now level 48 on the Luclin server and just recently zoned into Goru'Kar Mesa to continue questing. I'm hopeful the game-induced frustration is kept to a minimum, but I also just watched another video of Nomeregard trying to loot the fruit from the ground spawns outside the tents for about 10 minutes with no luck...