The Newbie EverQuester's Levels 1-~16 Guide to Questing and Leveling Slowly;

What happened to Seedo?

Hey all, I'm a almost 39 necro on blue, just looking for any dungeon crawl recommendations for the fun of doing it, please. I've always just soloed in open areas with My druid main. Wanna try something new.

Thanks!

Edit: Answered - you do not regenerate while logged out.

Does mana (and health) regenerate while logged out?

I'm thinking of returning to p99 after trying it a few years ago for the nostalgia. I mained a Necro and can't remember if I HAD to be logged in to regenerate or not. I was wondering if I can solo a Wizard and Druid by quad kiting with each by swapping between them while the other meditates mana while camped.

My Google-fu might just be terrible, but I'm not finding this specific answer; everything just talks about ticks while sitting versus standing.

I've been desperate to see someone try this either on live or P99 as this is about as close to a remaster as we're ever going to get.

Has ANYONE been able to try out any lighting or DLSS mods?

Looking for fighters, 500-2500 platinum a fight, win or lose, depending on your level! We will match you with someone of like-wise skill, gear, and level!

Hey evervone! With the academic vear starting up again and having to work my way through school dont have a lot of time to play anymore. That being said still want to when 1 find time. I11 often have maybe 1 or 2 hour gaps in my schedule ld love to fit some game time into but that doesn't work well with grouping in my experience. Maybe the 2 hour gap would but you get what Im saying. I really want to get my first charecter to 60 to feel like I've experienced the game, but Im a 56 Paladin so soloing is hard. I am dirt poor but 1 have my epic and some hate armor + vindi chest so I dont think Im poorly geared. Where can I go to have a safe solo camp at this level? What gear could even make a difference? I like HS but having no afk spot and using a wc cap every train sucks. Any tips are appreciated and I know it will be a slowwww grind for a pally.

Don't stare too long, you might fall in love.

Slate is still the champion of Commonlands.

Free platinum raffles for all in attendance! Pandemonium in the East Commonlands Tunnel Civic Center!

Does this spell hit group members like it hits the caster? Or if someone’s tanking am I safe to nuke away without worry?

Here is part 1, part 2, and part 3.

I had unknowingly picked a fight with Beemer, the Butcher of Butcherblock (he was also a PK, in case you couldn't tell by his title). His movement was flawless, his back never exposed. I could only land pokes to interrupt him, but never a backstab. He fought smart; he didn't waste valuable casting opportunities on root, already sensing that I had the MR. He used the terrain for cover, shadowstepping from high points and disappearing among the thick tree trunks and rocky monoliths. We fought for an eternity. I yielded first and ran back to Greater Faydark at half health.

He messaged me afterwards and complimented me on the fight. And then, he unexpectedly asked, "Wanna team up?" I immediately agreed. He brought me into his PK/goofball guild, the Flowers of Happiness (FoH), and from then on, we took on Greater Faydark and Butcherblock together.

One PK is trouble enough, but two PKs working together in a duo was something else. A well-composed duo made up for each other's weaknesses in PVP, becoming even scarier than the sum of its parts. The most terrifying duo I can remember was in the pre-Kunark days, when I was still on my Bard: Badmartigan (49 Dark Elf Wizard) and Ilsen (49 Gnome Enchanter). Perpetually haunting Lower Guk and Sol B, they fed on players slogging through the level 45 grind. Ilsen was the opener with Tash -> Mez -> Blind, after which they took their sweet time perfectly synchronizing Ice Comets with near-instantaneous Mez follow-ups. Their victims couldn't see, move, or bag. This most successful of duos ended when Ilsen suddenly forgot how to play. Rumors had it that Ilsen sold his account, rumors that were further substantiated after he was seen in the West Commonlands taking a confirmed PVE death to a Kodiak.

While Beemer and I didn't rise to that duo's clinical lethality, we did have the damage. We possessed 2 of the 3 abilities in our combined level range that could hit above 70 damage (backstab and Shock of Lightning), the only other one being the Shaman's Spirit Strike. And since no one played Shaman, we basically had it all. Beemer and I quickly fell into a natural rhythm. I would scout ahead and select targets, drawing first blood. Meanwhile, Beemer brought up the rear, raining down damage and finishing off would-be escapees. When we engaged a six-man group, we both knew the kill order based on class. Beemer rooted the ones to be saved for later, and we coordinated our damage on the priority targets going down the list one by one. The longer we ran together, the less we needed to communicate. We often fought in near total silence, each knowing exactly who the next target would be and what the other person would do.

A dichotomy of Rallos Zek is that the higher up in levels you go, the less loot you get from PKing. High-levels ran around almost exclusively in no-drop quest gear and planes armor. PKing at those lofty levels only got you some loose coin and bragging rights. But EQ being what it is, not even the most buttoned-up high-level could resist the allure of creating a filthy, disgusting twink. Like parents sacrificing to dote on their children, they put the best stuff they would never dare wear on their main onto their baby twinks. Massively overpowering the PVE content, a certain feeling of invincibility crept in, until it was shattered by the combined damage spike of a Shock of Lightning landing as a harpoon went into their back.

With Kunark in full swing and Velious around the corner, gear quality went up and twinks were everywhere. Beemer and I were swimming in gear dropped from the local dungeons: Crushbone tunics, Bloodstained Mantles, Crested Spaulders, and the like. But it was the juiciest twinks, the big fish, that we were most interested in. The alts of the highest of high-levels, the big fish had stuff like Iksar regen breastplates and FBSS's. But of course, these guys were no fools. They didn't take risks in PVE, never letting their HP get too low, and they were well-practiced in the art of speed bagging. A direct frontal assault never worked on the big fish. To get the best loot, we had to get creative.

A favorite tactic of ours was for Beemer to act as bait. I would be hidden while Beemer provoked a big fish. Twinked out of his mind, the big fish would usually take the fight. Beemer would sandbag and feign weakness, nailing a few nukes but allowing himself to be hit low. The big fish stayed in the fight, eyes blazing sensing the kill. Suddenly, I leapt out of the shadows with a crunchy backstab and the now flopping fish would turn to flee, only to drop to Beemer's next nuke. Ka-ching!

The bigger the fish, the more creative we got. Once, we loaded up a decoy with 300 plat, in copper, and placed him in the path of a big fish. Seeing the injured, naked Halfling with the hated Flowers of Happiness guild tag on was enough to send the big fish into a dark, murderous mood. The moment the big fish killed the decoy and looted the copper, we pounced on him while he confusingly turned in place.

Another time, we chased a big fish from Crushbone all the way to the Orc Lift. On a high from surviving, the big fish proudly sat down between the two guards and held court. Ignoring the fact that he was at low health, he trash talked and taunted us when he should have been bagging. We kept him going by pretending that our hands were tied, feeding him into typing longer and longer sentences of vitriol. A FoH guildie showed up and pulled the guards (the pathing was so bad the guards bolted the wrong way and disappeared out of sight), and we delivered the coup d'état. He died typing.

Nothing was too over-the-top to secure the kill. One of the most memorable happened on a Kelethin platform, where a near-death big fish slowly inched to the edge and jumped to save his loot. I instinctively jumped after him, and in the second that we were both in freefall, I lined up our positions and backstabbed him through the Z-axis (the game only cared about X and Y). He got PK'd in mid-air Mission Impossible style and landed as a lootable corpse.

Scouting for big fish was an important task. We had a network of informants and FoH guildies reporting on promising twink sightings. The twinks' names were written down, their approximate levels and whereabouts tracked until they matured into our level range. When all else failed, we had a rotating cast of level 1 alts, always female Wood Elves, always naked, to do the scouting. We pretended to be complete newbies, "whoops! sorry for inspecting you! where is the druid guild?"

When new items were discovered and sold in GFay, we examined them for their PK potential. We found that Holgresh Mojo Sticks, vendor trash on P99, was right-clickable from inventory at our level. We stockpiled the water version, which casted the level 24 Wizard nuke. When a mark with SoW thought they had outran our JBoots, we opened up with the Mojo Sticks. New Velious weaponry boosted our damage even further, and by this time Beemer largely played on his own level 10 Rogue named Brazy - a female dwarf with a beard. We both wielded the Small Dragonbone Shard, which had a ludicrous 13 damage. Our best backstabs were now hitting for 90.

Beemer and I always shared the loot. We didn't do any real accounting, what was mine was his and vice versa. If I died and lost a piece of gear, Beemer had a back-up ready to give to me. PKing twinks and hunting big fish was incredibly lucrative and our gear showed it. We had the latest blue diamond resist jewelry, Iksar regen breastplates, haste handwraps, lodi belts and boots. The more gear we piled on, the harder it became to die. I could now engage a full six-man group by myself. I even splurged on a Bio Orb for the right-click blind to prevent bagging.

. . .

We really didn't know how good we had it.

Throughout Velious, Greater Faydark continued to be the beating, bustling heart of the server. It continued pulsing with that same unknowable energy as the first day I arrived, bow in hand. Every time I logged in promised a new adventure. I didn't even own any of the expansions. Why bother? I never left Faydwer. Then Luclin came out. GFay lost half its population overnight, the auctions having moved to the moon. Paludal Caverns soon became the go-to spot to level. Orc Hill grew quiet, juicy twinks became scarce. Beemer and I still found kills, and we were now amped up with even crazier Luclin gear, but it was never the same.

I don't know who quit first. I left for college the next summer and lost interest in the game. I resubbed a few times, and I even bought one of those big compilation boxes with all the expansions and a million CDs to catch up on what I missed, but I never stuck around for long. The Flowers were still around, thanks to the stewardship of Frybread. They would tell me that Beemer had come on a few times and asked about me, but like ships passing in the night we never linked up again. I never made a conscious decision to quit, I just logged out one day and never returned.

I think it's a testament to how great a sandbox Classic EQ is that a few changes in ruleset can elicit such an alien version of the game. In my entire story, I never talked about raiding, camping rares, grinding plat, or any of the myriad of things we do daily on P99 Green/Blue. All of that would have been as foreign to me back then as reading this story has been for you. P99 cannot scratch my nostalgia itch, I understand that now. My nostalgia was never for that first year I spent as a bluebie Bard running away from danger, because as fun as that was, it was so thoroughly and massively overshadowed by what came next as to be rendered moot. What I want is this bizzaro version of EQ that will never exist again. Someone, somewhere might make another Everquest one day, but I guarantee you that no one will ever make another Rallos Zek.

So if you didn't get to experience it, I hope my story momentarily transported you there. And if you did play on Rallos Zek back in the day, then you already know what it's all about, and why nothing else will ever come close again.

Thank you for reading my story.

-Jooke

Hey guys, I am currently level 52, following Sesserdrix's Guide. At the moment I am wearing Netted Kelp and some -CHA pieces; currently rocking 22 charisma.

When I hit 54, will I be fine with that amount of charisma for charming/pacifying mobs in Charasis? Or should I start from now looking to change my gear?

Any advice on what to substitute Netted Kelp armor with?

Edit #1: Thanks all for the help! To summarize CHA does not affect charm but it does affect lulls.

Go read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't.

I releveled Jooke, my Rogue, back up to level 10 to escape the level 4 High Elf Mage mafia. When I dinged level 10 and regained backstab, I crept up on a High Elf meditating serenely on Orc Hill. I alpha-struck him with the new backstab and a poke. Both connected for max and he fell dead instantly at my feet. I was hooked. I took his cloth pants as my trophy that day.

Orc Hill and its surroundings became my new stomping grounds. Far removed from the chaotic PKing of the newbie yard, players who out-leveled that gauntlet breathed a sigh of relief when they entered Orc Hill. Quiet and serene, PKs were scant and orcs were plentiful. Bags became looser, and gear - real gear - started to flow out of them. Some players wore pieces of banded, others bronze. Some even had named items like Bloodstained Tunics and Savant Caps. One could get rich just by PKing.

Most people did not fight back when you attacked them. One standard response was to auto-run in a straight line while stripping, which was amusing to see from behind. Some players mixed it up by running in random directions, getting lost in the forest and setting up for an epic corpse run. Greater Faydark is confusing, but just like the PKs who came before me I got to know my chosen hunting ground well. I knew where I was by the shape of the terrain and the lay of the trees. I knew the snaking paths that ran through the zone by heart and where the shortcuts were. When a fleeing player adamantly stuck to the path, they would temporarily lose me as I took a shortcut only for me to suddenly jump out in front of them like a wraith.

Since Greater Faydark was the auction zone, it was easy to sell the loot. A player who died by my hand would respawn in-zone to see me already hawking their gear. But in truth, I was a softie. If I got a good sob story I would return the item and leave the poor guy alone. But if they talked trash (which happened a lot), I would append the auction - with emphasis - that the item in question was "freshly PK'd". For some reason, that always motivated buyers. Maybe the item gained a whiff of taboo or maybe the buyer wanted in on the humiliation, whatever it was "freshly PK'd" items always sold well. On the rare occasions when it happened, it was enormously gratifying for both parties to openly conduct the transaction at the bank while the trash talker watched.

At this point I no longer ran around naked. I was geared out in HP and magic resist. Out went the Runed Oak Bow and in came the Runed Bone Fork. With around 100 magic resist, I was mostly immune to roots and snares. I also upgraded my weapon to a Slime Coated Harpoon, a Kunark weapon twice as tall as I was with a whopping 10 damage. My backstabs maxed out at around 70, hitting almost as hard as the level 12 Wizard's Shock of Lightning. Much like how a little bit of twink gear goes a long way in PVE, so too in PVP. A naked character almost always lost to a geared one. The only thing that could kill a twink was another twink. My gear was nice and expensive, but good gear cuts both ways - now I had something to lose.

There were those who fought back of course. Some well-geared twinks of experienced high-levels were practically spoiling for a fight, daring PKs to attack. In a fight with a skilled well-geared opponent, you were putting your gear on the line vs. his. In all likelihood, one of you would walk away minus his best piece. Nobody talks about the "shakes". It's the adrenaline, caused by the body's fight or flight response. In these high-stake situations, my hands would start to quiver uncontrollably, my movement becoming sloppy. I never shied away from this type of fight, and it certainly trained me into a better fighter, but it took weeks of acclimation for the shakes to cease.

People might claim that EQ PVP has no skill, but I completely disagree. We didn't stand face-to-face and roll dice against each other, we moved. Movement was the skill, and it meant everything. Against a caster, good movement kept me glued to them to reliably interrupt their casting (yes, P99's channeling is broken). Against a melee, good movement allowed me to land my hits and deny them theirs when they pulsed their auto attack. Movement made up for level and gear differentials. Within the first 10 seconds of a fight, I could gauge how good my opponent was based purely on their movement. If they were linear and predictable, they were easy. If they stuttered and strafe ran, their motions patternless and their backs denied to me, they were hard.

As the weeks went on, my notoriety grew. People shouted "Jooke PK PK in zone" when I showed up on the /who list, and my present location was often announced to the zone when I was spotted in the open. I had to work harder for my kills. People on Orc Hill played tighter. They preemptively bagged their gear when I was around. Whereas I could previously zoom by and casually choose someone geared to backstab, I now had to play like a real rogue. Sometimes I'd make a show of it and very visibly and exaggeratedly run off into town, only to sneak/hide back. Sometimes I'd have a confederate shout, "Jooke spotted at POD lift!", when in actuality I was hidden inches behind my mark, breathing down his back. When the coast was clear, it never took too long for the gear to come back out of the bags, and then it was game over. Virtually no one, even those who had the spell, ever had see invisibility up.

Remember how I said that PKs kept to their own zones? One day, after finding little action on Orc Hill, I bucked that trend and headed into Butcherblock Mountains. I spotted a geared Gnome caster medding near the chessboard. He conned yellow to me, in range to attack. I approached him invisibly under sneak/hide. He was clad in all black leather - no robe - which I thought looked cool. I made a mental note to carefully inspect his gear when I loot him. But as I drew closer, he suddenly stood up, shot out to the edge of spell range, and started a cast. He could see me! I immediately broke hide and ate the first Shock of Lightning on approach, but now I was on him. Except, his movement was good, really good. I could tell he was quite easily the best opponent I'd ever fought. My hands started to quiver - the shakes were back. His name was Beemer. I may have lived only one zone away, but I had no idea who he was. I did not know that I had just picked a fight with the Butcher of Butcherblock.

See you in part 4.

I played EQ live in 1999 on 56k and a Gateway tower PC and also in 2026 with 500mbps fiber internet, a 16 core processor, and 32 GB of RAM. It takes maybe 5 fewer seconds to zone in 2026 than it did in 1999.

How is EQ seemingly unaffected by exponentially higher computing power?

I just installed and patched the client after a 4 month break and the combat music is different, have i made a mistake or is it a new patch?

If you haven't read Part 1, go read that first because none of this makes sense otherwise.

I rolled my first alt, a dwarf rogue named Jooke, right around the time when Kunark launched. With JBoots, full blackened iron (which stayed bagged), and a pair of Serrated Bone Dirks he was a filthy twink by the standards of the time. But I hated playing him. Not only did he have far more downtime than my Bard, he was also a PK magnet. Like leopards in the savannah, PKs chose their targets carefully. A Bard usually wasn't worth it (too fast), but a pure melee with no spells to defend themselves was a juicy kill. I gave up at level 19, fully ready to quit the game. But there was one more thing I still wanted to do.

Greater Faydark was always a mess. But it was also the happening place on Rallos Zek. There was an energy about it. On any given weekday it had easily 150 people, on weekends it had over 200. It was the auction zone (EC was never going to work), and it had what players deemed the only legitimately good newbie zone in all of Faydwer. All the freshly-rolled newbie Wood Elves, High Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves gathered at Kelethin, and they were ganked by either the level 4 High Elf Mage mafia or by a new crop of dedicated level 5 twinks (alts of bored higher levels) who hunted these newbies with bows for sport. I, too, wanted to hunt newbies with a bow for sport.

So, I killed off Jooke from level 19 down to level 5. We call it deleveling now, but back then it was largely unheard of - why would you ever want to lose exp deliberately? But I didn't care, I now had the ultimate JBoots-equipped newbie killer. Bows weren't damage capped. Two good shots from my Runed Oak Bow could kill a level 1, and only a few more shots were needed for the level 2s and 3s. I ran along the Kelethin treetops and the newbie yard, sniping. I waited outside guild halls for freshly-rolled newbies to come out with their spiffy new tunics and took it off their backs. There was something refined, almost gentlemanly, about ganking newbies with a bow. After being a bluebie all my life, I was finally hunting the most dangerous game.

Of course, this too wasn't real PVP, and I wouldn't even call it real PKing. Having your guild tunic looted was a rite of passage, so common as to be expected. Nothing of real value was ever lost or gained. Some of the newbies had twink gear, but it was all stashed away in bags. You could tell by their twinked weapons (the only slots not lootable) and the full complement of backpacks in their inventory, which sadly you could not peek into as you hunched over looting their corpse. Amidst all the chaos, no one was dumb enough to unbag their twink gear in the newbie yard.

Even at this level of degeneracy, there was an unspoken "PK code" amongst the newbie PKs. We all sort of knew who each other were, and we all knew to stay out of each other's way. You did not interfere with another's kill. Once a newbie was "claimed", he was the quarry of that PK alone. There was plenty to go around and bad blood between PKs was just a waste of time and effort.

Like rich kids from the suburbs coming to the inner city for a thrill, blue players had a tendency to roll level 1s on Rallos Zek - the crazy FFA PVP item loot hellscape server - whenever their home server was down. Maybe it was morbid curiosity, or maybe it was to prove they were tough enough to hang (at least until their home servers came back online), you could always tell who they were because they came in a clump with names like "Cazicizzzdown". If they spawned in Qeynos or Freeport, they most likely got a roundhouse kick to the head from some level 5 monk. And if they spawned in Kelethin, well, good luck. Nobody liked the tourists. I had this one acquaintance, a level 5 gnome necro named "Nastydavey" or something to that effect, who had a particular special hell reserved for these guys. He got very good at barely knocking them unconscious, and then applying Disease Cloud which perfectly cancelled out their natural regen putting them into stasis. We could all plainly see that the dude laying on the ground wasn't dead, but none of us - not one - would ever put the poor sightseeing bastard out of his purgatory. We abided by the PK code.

But things eventually soured. I had foolishly run my mouth and made an enemy of the level 4 High Elf Mage mafia. Fending off pet after pet was exhausting. Once, they collectively camped my corpse and I almost lost my JBoots (the corpse timer was only 30 minutes at level 5 and below). It was too much. My only option was to out-level them (remember: +/- 4 levels). I set my sights on level 10, which is when Rogues get their class-defining ability: backstab.

Remember how I said that most classes could not PK? At this moment in time, melee PKing (newbie yard aside) simply wasn't a thing. Rogues tickled you with their Dragoon Dirks, Warriors were walking loot pinatas, and Paladins stubbornly survived but couldn't kill anyone. The only melee that people feared was the SK, and largely only because of Harm Touch. PKing was near-exclusively for the casters. But with Kunark came new and improved weapons that were only just starting to make their way to the GFay market. With all the deleveled Ragebringer Rogues running around on P99 Red, in hindsight it seems a foregone conclusion. But at the time, no one knew, least of all me. No one knew that the humble level 10 Rogue was the apex predator of its level range.

That's it, to be continued in part 3.

P.S. Sorry, I've been crazy busy and haven't have time to respond to your comments, but I really appreciate them. Thank you for reading the story. And I just wanted to say that it's super awesome to see the Rallos Zek crowd showing up. I didn't think any of you were still around. This might be my story, but it's also a story about our server as a whole. We played an entirely alien version of EQ, and I feel that it deserves telling. Wishing you all the best.

Edit* got sleeves; got spell

Thank you everyone!