Greetings Denziens of Norrath!
I played a fair amount of EQ back in the day, leaving in 2004 when WoW was released (Didn't help that I was able to solo GoD raid bosses by dual boxing a cleric). I had used SEQ and MQ back in the day (though less of MQ, mostly made scripts for a couple of friends... they were crude but effective if you had the plat, mostly they were tradeskill scripts) and made some money on the side by selling plat. All of my plat gains came from playing the most ridiculously OP class ever put into an MMO... The Enchanter (dual boxed with a cleric of course for that Complete Heal action).
I just spent all night fighting with SEQ getting it running again (and having a blast getting it to work, think I might enjoy that more than the actual game lol), and my itch to play EQ hasn't been this strong in... well, a REALLY long time.
Several years ago I thought about returning to EQ and reactivated my account for a bit, but was pretty disgusted with the nerfs to Enchanters, mostly because of the XP nerf to charm soloing, as that was how I leveled that toon, and it made me easily one of the top Enchanters on my server (NO one could do CC like I could). Don't get me wrong, Enchanters needed some nerfs in a terrible way, but SoE nerfed the wrong thing (imo).
Anyway, I say all of this because I really had a lot of fun playing my enchanter, and challenging myself to seeing how many mobs I could kite at once, charming, dotting (lol sucky dot), aoe nuking (Gravity Flux didn't do much, but the spell effect was hilarious imo), utilizing my full arsenal of spells to pull off some really amazing stuff, etc. It was a blast (and honestly, even soloing a raid boss dual boxing a cleric was a blast, if rather ridiculous). But I'm curious about just how much EQ has changed, and if I would even enjoy things the way I used to. I can't imagine they left Enchanters as broken as they were, but at the same time that was part of the reason I enjoyed playing one.
This time around I'm looking to mostly bot, partially because I want to see if I can write a sufficient script for one of the bots available here that can do what I used to do, and because I'm rediscovering my love of breaking software and doing clever things with it (used to use hex editors back in the day to rewrite active memory of games I played to see what would happen, though never in EQ because... well, I just didn't, SEQ and MQ were enough for me and quite fun to mess with).
So given that it's been so long that I played, and EQ has changed so much, I really feel like a noob coming back in, and am curious about just how drastically things have changed, especially around Enchanters and charm mechanics (since that was what I enjoyed most about this game).
Another reason I'm planning on botting is I don't feel like starting over from scratch and grinding all the way to level cap then working on AAs and whatever else has been added. I don't have that kind of time anymore... but botting? That's just fun, and considering I work IT these days, well, I'm a Systems Engineer that loves to tinker.
So for the people that never left (or left for short periods but always returned), what's kept you coming back over the years? How has EQ stayed "Fresh" for you? How did the move to F2P go over? Any idea how many people actually still play?
For those that are recent starts, what brought you to Norrath?
Thanks for reading this wall of text. I now return you to your regularly scheduled forums.
PS: Mods my apologies if this is in the wrong section, this seemed the closes to a sort of general discussion area.
Edit: Missed the "Hail a Fire Beetle" forum section. Could a mod move this there please?
I played a fair amount of EQ back in the day, leaving in 2004 when WoW was released (Didn't help that I was able to solo GoD raid bosses by dual boxing a cleric). I had used SEQ and MQ back in the day (though less of MQ, mostly made scripts for a couple of friends... they were crude but effective if you had the plat, mostly they were tradeskill scripts) and made some money on the side by selling plat. All of my plat gains came from playing the most ridiculously OP class ever put into an MMO... The Enchanter (dual boxed with a cleric of course for that Complete Heal action).
I just spent all night fighting with SEQ getting it running again (and having a blast getting it to work, think I might enjoy that more than the actual game lol), and my itch to play EQ hasn't been this strong in... well, a REALLY long time.
Several years ago I thought about returning to EQ and reactivated my account for a bit, but was pretty disgusted with the nerfs to Enchanters, mostly because of the XP nerf to charm soloing, as that was how I leveled that toon, and it made me easily one of the top Enchanters on my server (NO one could do CC like I could). Don't get me wrong, Enchanters needed some nerfs in a terrible way, but SoE nerfed the wrong thing (imo).
Anyway, I say all of this because I really had a lot of fun playing my enchanter, and challenging myself to seeing how many mobs I could kite at once, charming, dotting (lol sucky dot), aoe nuking (Gravity Flux didn't do much, but the spell effect was hilarious imo), utilizing my full arsenal of spells to pull off some really amazing stuff, etc. It was a blast (and honestly, even soloing a raid boss dual boxing a cleric was a blast, if rather ridiculous). But I'm curious about just how much EQ has changed, and if I would even enjoy things the way I used to. I can't imagine they left Enchanters as broken as they were, but at the same time that was part of the reason I enjoyed playing one.
This time around I'm looking to mostly bot, partially because I want to see if I can write a sufficient script for one of the bots available here that can do what I used to do, and because I'm rediscovering my love of breaking software and doing clever things with it (used to use hex editors back in the day to rewrite active memory of games I played to see what would happen, though never in EQ because... well, I just didn't, SEQ and MQ were enough for me and quite fun to mess with).
So given that it's been so long that I played, and EQ has changed so much, I really feel like a noob coming back in, and am curious about just how drastically things have changed, especially around Enchanters and charm mechanics (since that was what I enjoyed most about this game).
Another reason I'm planning on botting is I don't feel like starting over from scratch and grinding all the way to level cap then working on AAs and whatever else has been added. I don't have that kind of time anymore... but botting? That's just fun, and considering I work IT these days, well, I'm a Systems Engineer that loves to tinker.
So for the people that never left (or left for short periods but always returned), what's kept you coming back over the years? How has EQ stayed "Fresh" for you? How did the move to F2P go over? Any idea how many people actually still play?
For those that are recent starts, what brought you to Norrath?
Thanks for reading this wall of text. I now return you to your regularly scheduled forums.
PS: Mods my apologies if this is in the wrong section, this seemed the closes to a sort of general discussion area.
Edit: Missed the "Hail a Fire Beetle" forum section. Could a mod move this there please?
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