Old Player Returning after many years. Thinking of doing a YouTube Series again.

Hi there I have not played EQ2 in almost 5 years and I'm coming back have a few questions thinking of doing a new Youtube Series on the game. Some these questions might be silly, feel free to skip them.

1) Is there a zone guide or progression guide for EQ2? Do most people do an entire zone or do they skip around a lot? I don't care about rushing to Max Level...

2) If you compared WoW to EQ2 with all the Quests and time to complete say the world of quests outside dungeons and raids. How much content are we looking at? What I'm trying to figure out is it worth attempting or trying to play the game 1 expansion at a time and doing all it's content? Can that be actually done or should I be playing one those special servers for that instead?

3) How much of the content can be done solo mostly? I'm planning on playing a SK and I think they were quite decent overall. Just wondering if I should be fine soloing most content in the open world?

4) Do Free (Silver?) Accounts have the ability to sell items? I'm a bit confused because I heard that might been a recent change, but not sure if anyone knows this for sure?

5) Can you still earn Coin in the game? I know the populations are not "massive" like they once were. I assume maybe 3-500 people per server at peak from my investigations. Is this still enough to make money on finding those ? around the world, farming resources, etc. Or is it now really hard for newer players to get anywhere? This the downside I seen in some MMO's is not just the inflation, but mostly for the fact end game players don't need anything a little player has so the little player struggles and sure someone might be happy to give me a bunch of free coin I actually enjoy working for my coin.

6) What is the Max level a F2P Player can get to? If I recall the biggest limitation was expansion pack I might have registered but also I think was master? or something skills that increases your damage a lot later game to continue doing harder content?

7) How does Mentoring Work if I decided to continue to Mentor and Finish 1 zone at a time but my gear starts getting outdated? Does the system scale and see if your mentoring to 30 and wearing mostly level 30 gear that the gear then does not scale or does it give like large punishment thinking you should be wearing say level 80 armor (because your level 80) and act like your wearing like level 15 armor or something silly?

8) Is there any new player guides and info on maybe where to get mounts in the world, things you should get or grab at certain levels, unlock etc. A guide on just good things maybe tips / tricks sort of guide. Some games might say when you hit level 10 do this one quest for this cool cape that gives you this or do that for this teleporter, etc....

9) Does EQ2 Expansions continue adding cool items / effects and special neat functions? If I recalled EQ2 was full of neat items sort of like Runescape to a degree. Where you compare game like WoW there might be a few cool kind of items most of them are just boring without functions where I felt EQ2 had a lot of random items like ones to teleport you, do special functions, etc outside of the normal PvE/PvP Combat actions..

10) Is it hard to find a family friendly guild and I don't mean PG13, I mean a group of people who are friendly and nice, might say hey Bob were doing an event come join us and such? Maybe encourage new players and assist them from time to time and I don't mean bloody handouts or power levels and crap. I actually like earning that myself.

11) The Community / Who system is there Anon users? As in they don't show up on the list? I'm going on to the 4? Servers and doing a quick check of the populations at some set hours to see what server I be most interested in.

Feel free to offer suggestions, advice, and other info you can think of <3
Thank you and hope to see you soon!

Hi there Stone, seems like no one has taken the time to respond yet, so here it goes. Keep in mind though that I came back about two years or so myself and am still trying to catch up and get back up to speed on a lot of things. Gonna have to go through this one quick, as my son is bound to wake up from his glorious siesta in a few minutes.

1) EQ2 Wiki, EQ2 Traders, EQ2 Zam, still somewhat relevant for the old zones, and ofc the forums here.

2) Hm, haven't played WoW in ages, but I do recommend starting from scratch and going through the game zone by zone, expac by expac and reliving both all of the old and new content. Qualitywise you'll find that some of the later and most recent zones have made a tremendous jump basically in all areas. For example, Sinking Sands (Desert of Flames) is still impressive - even to this day. Our new Kael lore server is great, if all you wanna do is have some fun. Seems to be pretty busy right now too, which means more ppl for you to interact with. If you don't like this type of progression / server type, go for the standard progression live server and find a nice guild or friends to play with from time to time. Sure, you could play by using a leveling guide for some additional guidance, but I don't recommend that. Just start from scratch and go with the flow of each zone. If you outlevel a zone, chrono or mentor down. If you sub, you're able to adjust the conversion slider and optimize your level experience even further. If I recall correctly, the conversion slider is stuck at 50/50 for f2p accounts. We have a very busy rl, which means that we are forced to take it reeeeally slow by just doing a few quests per day - or by playing around with housing every now and then. I'm still reexploring / revisiting Sinking Sands, after three weeks of reaching that zone, lol.

3) A ton. My wife got her new main up to lvl 95 all by herself - just by soloing the open world and some dungeons on her own. Sure, I helped her with some of the higher and later dungeons (Siren's Grotto), by mentoring down to her level, but you can do a lot of stuff solo. See here for example.

4) See linked posts further below.

5) Gonna ask my wife on this one as she is more the crafting and selling type. From my observations and broker experiences on HoF, I have been able to sell a bunch of old dungeon or random drops on just fine. Sure, prices are skyrocketing due to inflation, just like in the real world, but I always find a buyer for my stuff. In fact, just picked up 8000 plat from the broker the other day. I always try to offer the cheapest price possible versus everything else on the broker. I used to offer low lvl stuff, things that ppl are selling for crazy amounts of plat nowdays, for a handfull of gold coins in there in order to help the new and poor. Shortly after doing so, I realised that some vets will see this as an invitation or opportunity to capitalize / cash in on my nobleness efforts towards the newbs. Thus I started asking around in the global-chat for new players, in order to give them free stuff, that I don't need anymore. Also, a word of advice, if someone offers you some cash to begin your business on the live servers, don't hesitate. It's a good way to start you business and housing adventures.

6) Not sure if this is still accurate or up to date, gonna ask my wife about the resitrictions, because she's f2p premium as of this writing. We haven't been able to afford a second sub right now, after being blessed with our second son, but I might sell off all of my remaining game consoles and buy her a full year worth of subscription + the VoV expac in the next two weeks. She's been asking me indirectly, because she is also interested in getting some of our ideas realised somewhere down there line, and she doesn't want to hesitate now that we're finally getting 64-bit. This is the opportunity we have all been waiting for. That being said, a family friendly sub plan (restricted to the same household, like Amazon Prime) would be a welcome and useful plan for us family members.

Gonna quote some random dude from Reddit here, because what he writes is pretty much what I feel too: "Even as a F2P player, it is totally worth trying. Simply because there is just a TON of content, if you like questing, the game lives up to its name. There are also a lot of classes to choose from, and they're more customizable than ever with the AA system. Of course, one con is definitely that the game can be quite overwhelming to a new player. However, the player base is very helpful, and you can learn a lot by simply copying other people's builds via EQ2 wire. And the game just launched a new expansion, but it's really for 100 level folks, you really don't need to buy anything for the game until you hit 95. Which depending on how you decide to play, can happen really fast or really slow if you are more interested in experiencing story content."

Said it before somewhere here on the forums, will say it again, our f2p restrictions are more than generous, and I'm not alone with that thinking. Ppl are missing the point by questioning whether this game is "truly" f2p or not. It doesn't take a genius to realise that everything has to make money - in one way or the other. Take WoW's f2p trialrun and compare that to our f2p implementation, for example. Night and day difference. Also, I don't know a single person in my life, that would be willing to work fulltime and more and not make a single dime after all is set and done. As a father of two beautiful sons, I'd be crazy thinking that way. EQ2 is giving free players years of content for free to play - just like that. Honestly, the cash we pay for these games not only goes to development and future projects, but also to ppl literally earning their bread and water by soulbinding themselves to these games for years and thus quite literally working their hair off (I'm bald btw). And let's be honest here, paying a monthly sub for EQ2 and an expac once per year is like buying a pizza with extracheese and Pepsi once a month (now I'm hungry). I really want to see some things get done around here, so I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Last but not least, Daybreak / Darkpaw could reeeeally cash in on some of the ideas around here, knowing how much ppl love their chars and housing, like upgrading the character models and then selling new and beautiful "must have" appearance items on the marketplace, but they're not. Other mmo pc games, but especially games on Android, literally make millions by doing this. In other words, they're being gentle with this old community.

7) What my wife and I did in the past, when playing solo, was to use the Chronomage in order to lower our level to the appropiate zone or dungeon and just go for it. Had probs with gear once or twice, which we were able to rebalance by visiting an agnostic dungeon once every 15-20 levels. Again, twinking on our new Kael lore server would be a good idea for the adventurous ppl wanting to jump in and have fun, without having to commit themselves to anything related to guilds etc.

8) See post 1 further above.

9) Hm, not sure what you mean.

10) Nope, not hard at all. Found my super friendly and open guildmates within minutes. Shout in chat or check the guild-tab ingame. Some guilds are specifically looking for newcomers and returning players. I believe that I mentioned this in a previous discussion with you, not sure though, lol.

11) No idea.

Don't quote me on anything here though. Typed it down pretty fast and have been playing catchup myself, heh.

Hello there and welcome back! We've also recently returned after about 2.5 years away. I'll do my best to answer what I can.

1) There is a soloing timeline wiki which can be found here

2) I'm not a WoW player but there is a lot of content. If you're a completionist it could take quite a long time to get to max level. If you're only going to stay in zones until you level out of them, it might take a few months without xp pots, veteran bonus etc. It also depends on how much time you have to play.

3) Most of the content can be soloed all the way to max level

4) Do Free (Silver?) You can use the broker as a F2P player but you'll need broker credits and can't access it from anywhere, meaning you'd have to be in a city or GH with a broker NPC. Here are the benefits of the sub.

5) There is still money to be made as a low level player, I'd say mostly on crafting mats. Lead might be worth looking into because it can be used to level tinkering.

6) Level 100 is the max for F2P players

7) I don't believe your gear matters when you're mentoring. You'll basically one-shot everything depending on how high your level is compared to the mobs in the zone

8) See the soloing guide above.

9) There are still some travel bobbles, newer xpacs (depending on the level of xpac you purchase) come with houses and portals to the new zone.

10) Finding a friendly guild is easy, finding one with a ton of people can be difficult.

11) Anonymous players show up in the /who system. They show up like this [Anonymous] char name