Thinking about checking out PoP, looking for some feedback.

I played EQ2 pretty hardcore from launch up until the Sentinel's Fate expansion. I quit because my very longtime guild split up and I was pretty heartbroken over it.

I tried to return for Kunark Ascending. A lot changed in those years that had passed but I gave it my best shot. I read a bunch of guides, then used my level 100 token on a Fury and spent the next few weeks leveling up all the necessary things and doing pre-requisite quests before jumping into KA.

After I had finished the signature quests though I was a little lost. I didn't have enough potency to be able to join dungeons, and I didn't have enough plat to buy adornments or upgrade my gear, so I started grinding solo dungeons. This was both incredibly boring and incredibly lonely. I never did get to do any of the KA group dungeons. I spammed LFG all day but no one ever wanted to do them? I don't know if there was something I was missing, if the dungeons were just that bad, or what. But after about a week of spamming LFG and getting nowhere I got kind of bored and left.

It definitely didn't help that the guild I had joined seemed to be full of soloers. Maybe that was my problem?

Anyways, with all of that said, I would really like to give it another try but I'm worried I'll just have the same experience again in PoP. I have a few questions if you all don't mind.

If I resub right now and get to work, how long will it take before I am able to group with others? Is grouping even still a thing? During KA it really seemed like people only grouped up for epic quest updates.

Is Ascension still a thing or was that phased out? Am I going to have to grind solo dungeons forever to level these? I only ever got one ascension class to level 4 and that was painfully boring.

I tried asking about the expansion in general chat and was met with a ton of people telling me not to bother unless I have a high credit card limit. What about the game is P2W now and can it be avoided/is it necessary? I don't expect to be a top end raider, just want to be able to do group content.

Thanks for your time!

Ascension is even more A Thing. However, leveling Ascension, adventure, and crafting is almost breathtakingly fast in PoP. Using a Hastened Learning potion makes it even faster.

When you start PoP, at the wizard spires where you zone in, there is a box with starter gear. This is sufficient to get you going at level 100 into the PoP Signature quest line... which you must do in order to get access to the dungeons.

If you have level 100 crafters, I'd recommend running all your crafters through the PoP Tradeskill quest line before anything else. It takes me a day or day and a half to run a single toon through these, and with a potion running, I'm hitting 110 on the second quest in the series. Once through the TS questline, your pack pony is upgraded, and hopefully you have some harvest potions on hand from your Tradeskill Apprentices. Use a potion, and spend the whole time it runs harvesting your tuchis off to get rares. Mastercrafted armor and jewelry made from refined rares, then Experimented five times to Visionary quality is extremely good... certainly good enough for Heroic dungeons and even beginning raids

Even if you don't craft, running the Sig line is pretty easy with a Mercenary. Remember to gear your merc, and train them.

Where I find I have to grind some solo instances is to get transmutable stuff to crush to get fragments for this tier. Killing overland names and doing the key quests overland gets you plenty of crushable materials, but not for fragments. If you completed the TS line, you can mass-produce Tome of the Planes and transmute those to get manas and infusions.

The hardest thing, for me, is getting orange adorns for everything. You have to win one in a Solo,Heroic, or Tradeskill dungeon to be unlock that adorn. I need six orange adorns still, and each takes like 7 fragments and 100 infusions.

How hard would it be to catch back up if I never really did the previous expansion? I think I leveled to 100 but I never really finished anything. I still need to pickup an Ascension class.

"the high credit card limit" is definitely true if you mean to be doing much of anything except solo. That's why there are so many solo-ers.