Any suggestions for attempting a progressive character on a normal server?

Good day! I'm attempting to develop an "all-in-one" character that will use every class/persona to work through each expansion in a progressive manner. I fully realize that having access to out-of-era things will likely cheese and trivialize much of this, but I'm still hoping that the idea here will be reasonably feasible.

Quite a bit from the earlier expansions has evolved or simply been deleted, too, so I'm finding it quite challenging to find gear for each class that would remain true for each expansion. Searching through P99 guides will often include a number of things that have been deleted here. Then looking at a good number of TLP guides will tend to include quite a number of things that weren't available during the real eras. Would anyone, perhaps, be able to point me in the direction of a guide or list towards gearing up characters of different classes that would remain true for each expansion? Would even premium search filters at Zam, perhaps, work for this purpose? Or would those, too, include many items that didn't really exist during the real timeframes for each expansion?

I can sell you my Maps of Myrist book, but not before you beat the Luclin expansion. You will have to use hand drawn maps and https://eqatlas.ca/atlas.html until then.

Must print them up, and organize in binders, by continent. For immersion and nostalgia.

From my time trying a TLP, I discovered 'Zam doesn't always have an accurate note on expansion content. I suspect that's because the idea of knowing what expansion a particular item came from wasn't really a necessary aspect to record until the TLPs came out. They also don't have any expansion guides for the earliest expansions. I'm not really sure there ever was such a guide written at the time of those expansions. Zam does have an archive of release notes if you really want to dive that deep. I tried to figure out a bit of that when I was making my blog post pre-Oakwynd launch: https://rijacki-game.blogspot.com/2023/04/eq-tlp-diary-oakwynd-pre-launch-so-when.html

While Live has a lot more QoL changes that do affect the early expansion content, even TLPs have a many of them available from launch, no matter what point they start. Some of the QoL changes were enacted in the early years of the game, so you would have to determine which of those would fit to your specifications as well. A few can be disabled, such as the targeting ring, but others cannot, such as not losing XP until level 6. From memories of playing way back when, not losing XP until 6 was added between SoL and PoP, and the targeting ring was added after PoP but before GoD, might have been around the time of LDoN or maybe LoY. Those are two that impacted my game play then in significant ways and were not in an expansion patch.

From what I have been told, even P99 and other emus also have their own QoL changes that aren't the same as official EQ (not deleted, never existed) which makes their guides not always reliable either. (Plus, a word of caution, any time I accessed one of the more popular P99 sites, I got deluged with a bunch of spam. It died out as soon as I stopped accessing their site. It took me a while to figure out the relationship, i.e. which site was generating it and I am not sure, at the moment, which it was since I am no longer interested in TLP.)

Thank you for all of the replies. I'm finding that I get rather lost when content (or items and recipes in this case) has simply been removed. Attempting to stay true to classic era, it's near impossible to find appropriate gear anymore on normal servers. For reasons that baffle me, many of the older recipes were simply deleted. I'm unsure, too, how true any of the progressive servers are to the *real* classic era. Or even P99, as a lot of things were likely deleted all together there, too.

I suspect recipes were removed or marked as TLP only (i.e. enchanted jewellery and alchemy) to steer players to use items in the new itemization on Live servers and/or to allow running single code on all servers (i.e. 'new' research vs the original).

i found that attempting similar self-imposed, nostalgia-approved journeys through the earlier expansions at appropriate levels, on live servers, is near impossible. Simply due to the fact that experience was ridiculously ramped up several times over the years.

You can still do old content like quests and camping namers and items in low level dungeons, but you will VERY quickly outlevel the content you are in, no matter how you approach it. Typically, i'd go into a dungeon to camp an item or hunt some named monster, and long before i got it to drop, or spawn i'd have gained several levels and everything became trivial. So, it starts to feel like wasting time.

I know this is late, but I was the "rich one" of us 3 teens sharing a townhouse all 18-19 and long time friends. (Basically I was the Burger King Manager while they were just little McDonalds Employees) so that meant I had my own printer, AND it was in color. I could afford the ink of the Bubblejet 360 or whatever it was (lol, I'm telling you. 99/2000) and I can't tell you how many times they came to my room to knock on my door to look at all my EQ Atlas maps printed out because there was no alt-tab in Everquest.

I share that knowing that there is a bazillion others that have this memory, or did this thing.

This. I REALLY REALLY wish there was a way to turn exp off. I think low level content would get alot more playtime on live if you could go to an area and not completely outlevel in 1 session.

I worked part-time at an office tech store while I went to school, after getting out of the Army. At the time, I had some of the best hardware for home use, as well as some for the office. Bubblejets were indeed the thing, but inkjets were also coming around. Ink cartridges were pricey, but if you had a Canon or I think Brother printer, you could easily refill them with bulk color ink. That's the main reason we could afford to print so may pages in full color. It was three of use, guys from my D&D group, that played EQ together. Great times man, great times.

And have to use old hardware like a Pentium 100, 15" CRT screen, 33/56k modem, and Windows 95/98 for classic EQ. Have to upgrade the hardware and OS for each expansion to stay true.

Would be nice but DBG does want to sell expansions and subscriptions. It would be time for some fresh ideas like low level expansions on special TLP servers, or by revamping the shroud system, so that everyone could participate without having to create a new account or a new persona.

Even a new world with completely new (player) races could be created that way. As a spin-off project or a successor (EQ3). It could play in the past (between SoD and original EQ) but could be also positioned between EQ and EQ II in the timeline.

Other fantasy worlds like those from the Might and Magic universe (Isles of Terra, Xeen, Enroth) could be added and re-awakened on their own servers. Forgotten Realms, Bard's Tale, Dragonlance, and other D&D worlds, Ultima 3D, etc. EverQuest licenses could be traded in exchange for those. There are so many possibilities and it could evolve the whole fantasy MMORPG market.

Adding a level/exp lock feature to personas would boost the persona feature sales.

LOL even back then, a CRT was giving me migraines. Turns out I am sensitive to high frequency oscillations of light, such as the screen refresh on a CRT, or overhead fluorescent lights. As soon as a 15 inch LCD monitor became affordable to me, I made the switch, and never went back. My addiction to EQ isn't so strong that I would go back to a CRT if every LCD screen and TV in the world suddenly and forever stopped working.

The older CRT screens had a frequency of only 50-60 Hz in europe. Might had been a little bit different for the US energy system. 50-60 Hz does get recognized as flickering by most people. Late high end CRT screens, like from Samsung in 2002, went up to 100-120 Hz which was about flickerless. Not really of course. Modern LCD screens often only have a maximum of 60-75 Hz which does still create eye, brain, and nerval problems. People are not sensitive for high picture frequencies, but for low ones. Same for LED bulbs which are usually of very poor quality with heavy low frequency flickering and a bad (small) color spectrum.

I didn't know it at the time, but I have MS. I don't have eye strain, or get migraines from screen refresh, on LCS/LED screens like I did on CRTs. And I'm in the US, so power system isn't a factor, since the technology at least for fluorescent lights, is Chicago World's Fair old. Thanks Tesla! Anyways, before I got my diagnosis and started treatment, even average sunlight would often trigger migraines. I still have to wear polarized sunglasses to drive, shoot, or hunt.

Well, LED screens are LCD screens with an LED background lighting and much more dangerous for the eyes than the old LCD screens with a halogen background lighting, which got banned from the screen market, even that their total energy consumption wasn't that much higher. The whole LED technic is very unhealthy and suspicious, not only for man but also for insects and animals who often do avoid such light sources. It might even cause and forward MS as a nerval disease.