Welcome back!
The free 2 play life is quite enjoyable when using automations. I've been doing it for a few years (stopped feeling challenged on live with krono).
Here's a couple things I learned:
- there's no reason to wait to add more characters. For the early game, yeah, you can solo/molo, but when you get to the difficult content, you're going to be glad you brought the group up with you, rather than having to repeat the content. costs ya nothing but compute, and with framelimiter, that's pretty cheap lol
- prepare for a *GRIND*. Using automations the grind isn't as bad, but sometimes the gap in difficulty between expansions is pretty massive, especially if you don't have powerleveling toons. Grinding a camp from dark blue to deep green is something I'm quite familiar with... You get lots of mats tho
- speaking of mats... barter for plat. Usually f2p gear is cheap, but without being able to access baz yourself to sell, you're either going to hella stockpile, or make use of the mats yourself. Don't let them rot unless it's some kinda obscure item used in 1 recipe worth 1cp or something (in which case grab a stack before letting it rot, you never know when someone will be paying 10k+ pp per mat so they can finish their AP). I have geared multiple toons in BIS F2P simply using the barter method. You can even plan your leveling routes around what people are buying.
- be wary of everyone, be nice to everyone. Chances are that they won't be at a camp nearly as long as you.
- if you accidentally kill steal something from someone (happens when the mobs turn lb and you don't notice some lowbie came up to your camp) apologize and pay them an amount of plat that would be deemed ridiculous (you'll barter that plat back anyways and you'll make a nooby's day)
- document your process, what works and what doesn't, what manual steps you had to take, then automate those out for when you inevitably do it again.
- you said you had to patch some things in the tutorial Lua, which is great energy. If you like optimizing stuff as much as me, You're going to have to patch and/or make a lot of custom stuff yourself. Whether it's turning in a quest or creating a custom pull routine you'll find yourself making custom things a lot. That's where the fun really is, tbh.
Good luck
Honk Honk
