My very first character was a Qeynosian Monk. I decided to stop playing that character when I grouped with a group heading to Paw to level and found that I actively ran slower than everyone else despite all having SoW from the same caster. My computer that I played that character on was so bad it actually affected my in-game run speed.
I rolled a HIE Magician after a computer upgrade. That's when Evercrack really got me. Despite having to stare at my spellbook to regain mana (the joy I felt when they made just sitting down activate meditate is illegal in 53 countries) I was having an absolute blast. The costs of spells and malachite, though, kept me pretty broke until I could start killing dwarves at the docks in BB, and gradually I became an overall better player once I could stop worrying about getting my spells and keeping enough malachite on hand for whatever I was doing at the time. I remember being dismayed when I found out they stopped selling all my pet spells at 16 - then, taking my first trip to Ocean of Tears to pick up the pet spells I couldn't otherwise purchase, because inventory management was, and still is, a game I suck at and doing tradeskills sounded like absolute torture to research my own spells - because what kind of spellcaster doesn't have every spell? Once I picked up my new 16 spells there, I immediately made the great decision to start killing the Sisters and making sure I could never safely go near Kelethin again.
Around the time I hit 35 on that magician is when they made level 35 the level you no longer had to stare at your spellbook and the aforementioned illegal joy sprang up inside of me. The muscle memory, though, of hitting Ctrl+B and hitting the meditate button took a long time to shake off.
My first LGuk group was a doozy. Party had to talk me through swimming down through the tunnel and into the bedroom, where our camp was. I stayed there til about level 40, just shooting the shit with party members or sitting on waiting lists.
Waiting lists. Fucking hell. Remember when groups would put together waiting lists for replacements? I still see it once in a while on TLPs.
I remember soloing all my Temple of Solusek Ro items, and doing all the foci. I was skeptical about them making pets stronger because there was no indication on the items then that they had any kind of focus effect at all - coupled with random pet levels on summon. At least they had insta-Reclaim Energy if you got a bum pet and you could get some of the mana back, if not the precious malachite, when going for a max level pet. Summoning pets over and over again, sending them against level 1 mobs to see their max hit so you knew what level they were. I finally convinced myself the foci were doing what people said they were when I stopped seeing the smallest max hit I'd figured out on pets per level. I was so proud of myself for my Robe of the Elements. It looked so cool. Buying random giant toes off vendors or players was an entertaining game, and tracking down griffons without track became frustratingly difficult, since whenever I didn't want a griffon I'd get one in my face while trying to med up or when I was under level 20, but the moment I wanted to find one, they had an extinction event.
I also entertained myself by figuring out the best way to get bolt spells to hit twice. Elevation differences and slopes, how the fuck do they work? Nobody at Verant seemed to know, but I had a pretty good inkling, and I could pretty regularly, if zone geometry permitted, to get a bolt spell to hit twice 90% of the time. I never did check and see if arrows had a similar logic and double-hit thing that could be pull off; I figured it'd probably be possible, I just wasn't gonna level up a Ranger to test, no matter how cool they looked in Thorny Vine. I still can't get them to on P99 or TAKP, though - probably because the bug was fixed by the time the Titanium Client and EQMac were a thing. (Fun fact, levitation made double-hit bolts way easier to pull off, and many Rings of Levitation got burnt through for it.) I doubt I could manage it now even if it did work; young me was a clever little bitch that found tons of exploits in all kinds of games. Old me just plays things the intended way cause fuck that noise.
