Sounds like you played it a good number of years! But yeah it is a different game now. I think it starts you in a tutorial dungeon and I think you can skip that by clicking a box when you are creating your character. At least that way you get to start in one of the original starter zones. But even then it still isn't the same. All the low level areas are empty of players, xp is so much faster, mana/health regen is so much faster, it doesn't have the same challenge or feel, there are NPC's you can hire which are overpowered and trivialize most of the game, etc..etc.. Also they remade a bunch of old areas and totally ruined them. Cazic Thule was a great place to level from about 18 ish to 30 ish and they turned it into a high level zone. But then more recently they remade a lot of the other zones including Freeport and now it is a huge sprawling city of brown, a chore to get around and lost all the old charm.
Yeah, we played many, many years. Had a pretty steady group I ran around with. We were all pretty much idiots, but we worked well together anyway, so we got to do alot of content we probably shouldn't have been able to do, considering we were all individually pretty gimp.
OUr main tank, a troll warrior, was kind of, well stupid, and he rarely would look at the chat box, so he never had any clue when crap would hit the fan.
Our go to back up tank, when the main was absent, was a dwarf warrior, who was actually pretty smart, but he spent more time starting flame wars in general chat than actually, you know, playing the game.
We had an iksar death knight, that drank heavily while he played. He generally ended the night face down on the keyboard. No amount of calling him could wake him up.
Our cleric was actually pretty popular in real life, with people just showing up at his apartment at all times of the day. You could usually tell, because he'd suddenly just be on auto follow on me, without him saying a word. Mid pull, running to a camp, mid sentence, didn't matter. He'd be gone for a little as 5 minute, or maybe as long as an hour.
We had an enchanter who was pretty good, but she was extremely opinionated, and was NEVER wrong, no matter...which led to some nasty arguments.
Of course, there was my shaman....i'd like to think I didn't suck, but I'm sure I did
The last spot, which was pretty much the only real dps in our poor little group, usually rotated around various other friends, who'd hang out with us when they were bored. Heck, sometimes we'd do without a real dps, and go out with 5 peeps. Talk about some slow killing.
You know, looking back on it, it's a wonder we ever got anything accomplished at all.
Oh, I will note, before I quit, I think they had already started revamping some of the older zones like ct. I remember going there a few times to farm some crafter ingredients, I think, after the revamp...i think.
Oh, speaking of crafting, EQ was the game that broke me of ever being able to like crafting in an mmo, or a regular game. Alchemy suuuuuuuuucked