Quote Originally Posted by Tonuss View Post
Gear was a pain in the ass to obtain. For years there was no real starter gear, and vendors sold crap armor for outrageously high costs. You were lucky to have more than a handful of pieces of gear with stats by the time you were in your 40s or even your 50s. Gearing up meant grinding mobs endlessly in the hopes of seeing a rare spawn which might drop the item you wanted. And since it wasn't instanced content, you were in one of probably several groups trying to grab that spawn. In your 50s there were (non-instanced) raid zones that you could attempt. A competent raid had 40-60 people working together for a few hours in the hopes of maybe a dozen worthwhile drops.
In vanilla EQ they introduced epic items for each class, long quest lines and raid objectives. They also introduced these planes, Plane of Hate, Plane of Fear, etc. The aggro radius of mobs in the planes were huge and there were a lot of mobs. Usually a class that could feign death would zone in first and feign death immediately and scan for mobs. Once it looked relatively safe the whole raid would zone in at once and start killing immediately. Usually it was a race to kill fast enough before you were overwhelmed. And once you zoned in you couldn't zone out. You needed a mage to port you out.

If you wiped you had to get your corpse back as all your gear is on your corpse. This means you had to get someone to clear the plane so you could zone in and you also needed a mage friend to go with you. Corpses lasted a week.