Hello, I love Everquest for his huge world, graphic style and difficulty. However, I'm worried if the last few expansions made the game easier in any way, because I really don't want it to be just a wow dungeon experience where everybody rush like crazy into packs and don't even need to talk. So, how is the difficulty, at high level, both in the open world and in dungeons, raids ?
WoW-style reckless gameplay will not work in EQ, unless you are ridiculously overgeared/over-leveled for the content. A bad pull can still wipe your group in seconds if you are not on the ball...
It's not like WoW. At high level you have the same challenges that are present throughout EQ's history. Open world grinding is easy and can be handled by small groups of casual players. Dungeons can range from easy to hard depending on who you bring (group comp, skill level, number of players). A well-rounded group of skilled players should have no trouble crushing everything. Not sure about raids. You'll still see mobs as being dangerous especially if you're not well-prepared. A group geared tank with no cooldowns running can get spiked from 100 to 0 instantly by 3-4 mobs for example. It's always important to exercise caution and pay attention when moving around and doing things. There were some pretty difficult encounters and achievements in the previous expansion, TBL. The current expansion, ToV, is quite a bit easier but has at least one hero mission (Icebound Avatar) that can be difficult for an unprepared group.
EverQuest has much more complexity at higher levels than lower ones. More abilities to use, more emotes to respond to, you can die much much faster at 115 than you will at 15 given similar difficulty content. The difficulty, or danger, is on a pendulum. Think of the difficulty in this context as being a factor of how much hit points you have vs how much damage things do to you. The mobs in the burning lands hit like trucks at 110. It was brutal. Very very few people finished the smoke trials before they were nerfed, and casual players continued to struggle for the duration of the expansion. Torment of Velious however is much softer. The armor vs mob damage is more in the player's favor. An example is that my tank merc was 1-rounded by Glassbeak, a tier 1 named in TBL, while my tank merc tanks ToV just fine. But difficulty and complexity are not the same thing. The consequences of pulling multiple mobs in TBL and in ToV are the same. It's not like in TBL you pulled 1 mob and died every time and in ToV you pull 10 and yawn. The complexity and importance of playing well are present in both expansions, it's just that ToV is forgiving while TBL was not forgiving at all. You are not going to see people just carelessly running through areas and then fighting 10 mobs at once without crowd control like in WoW.
