Honestly, if you liked EQ1 and want to play a MMORPG like it, you really have no option anymore.
None of the newer MMORPGS have the same feeling of EQ1. The reason for the feel in EQ1 is simply a death penalty. You go somewhere, you get whacked my monsters and die, you have to get your corpse and lose exp. It felt fun because there was a danger element to it.
This has been completely removed in newer RPGS. For example, Age of Conan, there is absolutely NO penalty for death, you just respawn with all your gear, and all you lose is 5% of your attributes for 30 minutes or less, but attributes mean nothing in that game. A player with 100 intelligence is not really any different than a player with 150 intelligence. In EQ1 that meant alot of mana, in Age of Conan, stats mean nothing, and by the time you get back to your hunting grounds, the penalty has expired anyhow.
WoW, same thing. No game can replicate the feeling of EQ1 because every developer is too stupid to put in a death penalty because they feel they will lose subscribers.
Trust me, if you liked EQ1, you will be bored out of your mind playing WoW. Its just whack a mob over and over and over with no penalty, so it feels like a 3d Gauntlet game. I tried WoW because of all the hype, got to lvl 62 with a rogue and I had absolutely no interest in playing that game another day or another class. I played it for a few months, and did every dungeon, and I was bored the entire time.
Plain and simple. Don't waste your time with MMORPGS anymore until a good one comes out, and I don't see any in development which even include a death penalty.
Other things to consider in why newer MMORPGs suck:
1) No drop gear. Everything is nodrop these days, so you can't really trade gear. Which takes out an element of camping monsters and selling loot, or finding a rare mob and making money doesn't exist anymore.
2) Monty hall gear drops, an uber item drops all the time so whats the point of buying it when you can just walk into said "instance" and get the item whenever you want, since its never going to be camped anyways from someone else since you have your own personal hunting ground.
3) Stupid AI. AI is dumped down to run and attack you until it dies. EQ1 had mobs which sat back and casted spells (and eventually ran away) to running mobs, to mezzers, buffers which you had to anti magic, aggro range, managing pulls. None of that exists today. You usually always know what you are going to get when you pull and in some games, it even tells you what you are going to get, and every single time the mobs run up to you and start whacking. Monster AI has taken a severe nose dive, and tactics in battle just don't really exist. Its tank do an AE attack to get aggro, cleric heal the tank, everybody else nukes/attacks monster until they are dead. So you have a tank, healer and DPS. Thats it. EQ1 every class had a point and they were all useful in some way. Big deal, rogues can mez in WoW, hunters can lay traps on ground to root the target... But it only really matters when you have 2 raid mobs to fight that would normally kill the raid. There is nothing "epic" about the battles as you would see in EQ1 raid zones. Especially when planes of power game out, which really required some brain knowledge on how to kill raid mobs.
4) Instances... Personal playgrounds for you or your party, no camps to fight over, personally dungeons for you and your group. You always know whats going to happen. There is no fighting for a camp spot, there is no help from outsiders in case of a wipe. They removed the social element to the games.
Honestly. They are removing the social elements (which can be positive or negative, but anyway you look at it, the social element either way is fun.) The closest thing to EQ1 is EQ2 these days, and that is a big leap, EQ2 has all those things negatives listed above, but it does have a more similar feel to EQ1 compared to the rest. Go with EQ2 if you have to play a newer game, but you are better off not doing anything.