Why EQ1 was better then WoW - Fear.

[Ualaa]

The hell levels...
Or camping in Ocean of Tears, for the Ancient Cyclops for the underwater breathing earring.

The epic dragon you had to camp, in the fire zone in Kunark... my roommate camped that for six days straight and lots of coffee, I think it was for the Shammy epic.
Or Raster in Guk, that was a fun camp; split the seven Frogloks but you could not AFK or there would be too many to handle again.

[Kromtor]

Indeed. I do miss being scared in MMO's. The closest thing I have to being scared is waiting to see if it's gonna be the bridge arena. BLEH

[Sam DeathWalker]

Ya I remember the big thrill I got when I killed a skeely in the DE starting zone and it droped a staff I sold for 1 Gold! That was like the highlight of my life that week.

LoL when I quit I had 6 million plat ....

I remember running along the coast and something killed me so fast I didnt know I had been hit but I was dead so I sent a tell to the guy that I would get him. It was an npc lol .......

Ya camping the ancient cyclops so many articals written on how to spawn him.......

Some rogue (dougie) kept killing me in the starting DE city that I finally moved elsewhere, somehow he had high faction.

On Sullon Zek (every greifer in an MMO went to that server) you had to be so on your toes every second.

[Malgor]

Breaking into the Plane of Fear meant that if you failed as a group you had to wait for a high level guild to come by and save you.

There were only two guilds doing Fear when my small guild teamed up with a couple other small guilds and decided we could do it. The leader of Jaded Souls, Paragon, had been on a few Fear raids with those two top guilds so felt he could lead us to victory.

The key was you got invisibility cast on you which was no guaranteed set time, so sometimes it would literally last one second. A monk would enter the zone and feign death so he could see the one mob that saw through invisibility that pathed near the portal entrance. When you were told to enter you had to no matter what. And for most of us we'd never been in the zone before and were told to immediately turn left and run to the left wall where there was a "safe" place.

If you got agro along the way from the see invisible mob or your invisibility dropped (as usually was the case) you were supposed to just drop and die and later they'd drag your corpse to be resurrected. Our first Fear run however didn't go smoothly. I remember it was a Sunday night and our raid started at 6pm and we'd planned on five hours of raiding.

Needless to say we wiped so many times trying just to get to the safe spot that people were getting frustrated which just made it worse. Back in those days you would lose experience upon every death, could even lose levels, and you couldn't enter fear if you dropped below level 48. After countless deaths we had to call upon one of the big two guilds to come bail us out -- this was 12 hours later and I was dangerously close to losing level 48 and becoming level 47. After a certain amount of time, corpses were no longer resurrectable and you just had to eat the experience. The main thing everyone wants on wipes like that is your gear back because you couldn't get it unless you looted your corpse, a painstakingly slow process.

Don't get me started on the Plane of Hate. I never knew how to get where our staging spot was for the first four months doing Hate. Our monks basically zoned up into the plane first and all we did was zone up and die. They would drag our corpse clear across the zone to a non agro area and use that staff of resurrection on a preist and we'd all buff up and pull to there. Long process, but a fun as hell zone.

I started playing EQ with a friend right after Beta ended on the Prexus server with my first character a wood elf druid. The first original level cap was 50 and later became 60 with the first major expansion. I still have all the expansions up until I quit playing in a box. EQ was the first game I multi-boxed playing a team of four toons that could clear many dungeons with just the group I played. That was fun and got me hooked on playing multiple toons. Sadly after six years and when WoW came out the old players I'd spent years with all slowly drifted away so I took up WoW.

I'll never forget Orc Hill, the beautiful level 50 red-haired female wood elf, all in Rubicate who came and saved us from a Sand Giant stomping us into the shores of Oasis, or falling out of the trees of Kelethin my first day because I didn't know what I was doing (and spending an hour to find my corpse). Lockjaw to this day is still one of my favorite rare zone mobs that would eat lowbies for lunch.

Thanks for the memories EQ. I still get choked up thinking about the friends I made in that game (a group of us met for 6 years in a different state once a summer before it all ended. I got to host the last event in Oregon at the beautiful Oregon Coast up in Lincoln City where we all had a great time).

-- Oh Ualaa reminded me -- I camped my epic for my priest for 4 days straight with no sleep. On our server you formed a line and waited there with two or three other priests.

[Mosg2]

My memories coincide pretty strongly with Malgor. I get choked up just thinking about all the friends I made and the sense of wonder I found in EQ.

[Khatovar]

I don't go in for nostalgia. I can go on and on about the Reedshark that ate me so many times that I rerolled, or that time I took the random portal to VoD and got wasted by a swarm of Banderlings, or those Hollow Olthoi that came out of nowhere and melted my face everytime I tried to get into the guild house. But it's obviously not that great if we're all talking about the good ol' days in games that still exist but we don't play.

Fact of the matter is, It sucked spending half an hour buffing. It sucked having to waste an entire pack's worth of space to carry Death Items so that when you DID die out in the middle of nowhere, you didn't drop all the crap you were wearing. It sucked having a death penalty and no longer meeting the requirements for your gear, so you had to go out there far less powerful, in substandard gear, with no buffs and a Vitae Penalty to face a mob that just kicked your ass in hopes of getting your stuff back.

I had plenty of "fear" situations in WoW. Especially in Vanilla when I was using a druid to heal my husband's shaman "tank." Or when we went in to the newly released WSG in our handful of blues and faced the Helmet Crew, the #1 progression guild on our server. Ahh, those were the days. Back when druids were only resto and only for Innvervate. The real healing was left to priests. The real tanking was left to warriors. The real DPS was left to mages and rogues. If you were real nice, they would let you raid with them. If they were real desparate, they'd let you run a 5man with them.

[katsurahama]

I forgot all about the death items.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Some valid points. Mostly nostalgia. My EQ Ranger had 168 days played before I quit the ever crack. However compared to other games. EQ1 was just mean and brutal. Having a mob jump out and loose hours of time is not fun. Loosing a corpse and all the gear that took the last 2 years to acquire is not fun. Non instanced dungeons that had each mob camped regardless if it dropped gear or not is not fun. Dying and loosing 10% of your xp that you spent the last 2 hours getting, not fun. You dont have 1000aa points so you cant join the raid is not fun.

Level 15 in Oasis and hearing the stomp of a Sand Giant was scary. Getting 1 shot by anything 10 levels higher than you was scary. The quest system while flawed was very cool. Having to talk to npc's and figure out key words was cool. Learning to keybind auto attack off of the A key was fun. Nothing like typing out "hail" and the merchant one punches you in the face, when press the 'A' key.

Wasn't it Kunark or the one after that had the sleeper zone boss and once he was killed he never spawned again? Ahh the good old days.


Im enjoying wow far more than I ever did eq. I like that it doesnt require 40h a week. It used to, but im glad blizzard changed it to the more casual scene it is today. Also I get to enjoy and see the game, something I never got to do in EQ because It took 2 hours to run from Qeynos to Freeport, then another 30 min to get to Unrest.

[Mosg2]

Nothing in WoW has ever felt as magical as the time I played EQ. Starting with PoP the game lost some of its luster for me so I moved on. WoW is better than post-PoP EQ for me but nothing has compared to that first year/year and a half when everything was new. I still remember my first 30 hour binge for raiding Hate--I was the guild Monk. Fun times!

The fear thing is pretty significant. The consequences in WoW feel so unthreatening that they're laughable.

[Fat Tire]

I look back with the same fondness for certain things in wow as I do EQ. I miss the crossroads raids, the TM/SS battles and in general the smaller world instead of the huge monster azeroth has become. One thing I will always miss and look back on with great fondness is doing the quest line for the Lok'delar, Stave of the Ancient Keepers. To me that was an epic journey worthy of anything in EQ.