Been away for at least five years, how is the health of the game? I'm not looking for consistent group content btw. Just is the latest expansion finished or buggy? Quests still up to the old quality or have they become shoddy as the company goes through turmoil?
Hahahahha, classic... Lots of bugs have been worked out over the last six months as the Dev team has been frantic with patches and nerfs. Solo content will last you about 2 weekends at a very slow casual pace. Then the questing ends outside of the ethereal grind event that just started. IMO quests are about 10% of the quality they were at the peak of EQ2. The turmoil is evident everywhere. Like any company, management can ruin good people. A conversation had by many, in many arenas. DayBreak has become DarkPaw for the EQ product with a minor change to the "Top Dog" I guess you would say. The game is still fun but can be very frustrating at times. Prepare yourself, I am probably going to get bombarded, but I noticed no one else had responded to you. Best of Luck.
You'll do best if you join an active guild of any size. Otherwise, you may end up wondering why you're playing, unless you're in it strictly to solo old content. The quest stories themselves are good, but they've been short - anywhere from one day to one week to complete, if that - and consist of going into the same three to five zones repeatedly. Still, if you want to putz around and do quests, there are around 6,500 of them in game, which will take a while to do.
In all honesty the latest expansion is the absolute worst to date. There are no lengthy quest lines to sink your teeth into and running the same instances day in day out get old very fast. I still haven't made sense of gear progression and I've played since BoL was released. The new solo zone gives better gear than running heroics, and to me that makes no sense at all. Also crafting appears to be an afterthought in this expansion, nothing you can craft with the exception of spells is worth dot. The recipe books for expert spells, they come from what is now classed as quest content, Overseers. Overseers is like a free game you'd find on Apple Apps, and is pretty much only good for filling your bags with crap. If you're happy to take your time leveling up and enjoying earlier content, you'll be happy enough. You may need to level lock at various stages to make the most of it.
Asking this question will give you a million opinions... People who are upset with the games direction will try to steer you away and people who love the game will try to pull you in... I would make a character and try it... Only you will be able to say whether you want to return or not... Yeah BoL had lots of bugs in the beginning... Some have been fixed... Is crafting great... Not really at this time... You can log on to your acct as an ftp and just kinda run around and see what you think of it... I wanna say MajDul and Halls of Fate seem to be the busiest live servers... Kaladim is a busy TLE server from what I hear... As for grouping, I see pugs but mainly I would say if you are in a busy guild you are gonna have groups... That's probably the key to most grouping nowadays... I didn't hear anything about the company going through turmoil... Also you can listen to the podcasts that dreamweaver and kander do... That will give you some insight to the BoL expansion and what their plans are gearing towards...
Parissa pretty well nailed it. Crafting is of minimal use outside of scholar to raise combat arts and spells. Once you get into Luclin doing the introduction quest it takes an hour or two to get to 120. You do not even need to leave the starting area which gives high experience point repeatables. The adventure signature line can be done in a day - after that comes a new Diaku Corral instance after which there is little to do that gives any value. You don't even need to do dungeons any more to get good gear - Overseer missions give gear up to resolve 180 and after you do Corral once all characters can simply buy 165-170 gear for seven slots if they do some solo weeklies to get the currency.
But, this is the easiest xpac ever for getting into raiding. A group of 4 one-legged blind incontinent old ladies could clear Twisted Vista with nothing but some bad language and a bag of out of date cough candy, probably flawless.
For the price of two movie tickets, you can buy the latest basic expansion. There's little downside if you want to play casually. From Vanilla EQ2 to current EQ2, one pro is you don't need to spend a lot of time on catch up for the casual player. If you want to be a T1 raider, expect mega time sinks or to spend $$$$.
Well crap... guess this leaves me out of raiding since I can see, have both legs, don't pee myself and am not that old yet.... Guess I shall return after I have aged like a good bottle of wine, manage to lose a leg and find some huggies....
