EQMac.com

duel me zoot.

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WoW is amazing. The quests are interactive, they vary and some of them actually require some thought to complete. The instances remind me of LDoN, which I absolutely loved. However, EQ Mac doesn't have that expansion, so there is no comparison in the Mac world.

I'm trying to remember the good things about EQ that I really enjoyed, and it's tough, LOL. I remember it was the first 3D MUD that I played. I was shocked & had a ball just running around (dying of course). I didn't like their death system, nor the hell levels (although this was allegedly fixed), nor the AA system, nor Luclin, nor their raid system (on PC EQ, never did raids on Mac EQ) as it took hours to set up & hours to complete (going on 8-10 hours for a Quarmm raid), their PvP system was lame (that's why so many people left the Zek servers after a few months...) but Mac doesn't have that either, and their quests absolutely sucked, even the epic quests. I guess that I really liked their community. I loved the guilds that I've been in over the years.

EQ is definitely for the power gamer... WoW is more for the casual. I've always been the casual gamer, regardless of the hours I spend online, I just would rather look, sometimes, than do. Both have their good & bad points, and, as such, will appeal to different audiences.

Most of the good stuff binds on pickup not on equip.

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Elder SunRa Wosret, Khati Sha Feral Lord
Killer of gods, eater of gnomes.
Venerable Sekhmet Geb, Woodie Storm Warden
Killer of grass snakes, baker of gnomes

Live fast, die young and leave a magnificent looking corpse.

skipped to page 5.. I can imagine Lozoot said a lot of "Blah blah blah, I Heart Slizzy, blah blah blah"

I like the way everything in the game is set up.. the Only complaint I have is the lack of quests from 35-40 Horde.. well, there are enough quests.. but you get spread out.. I have quests in Arathi, Desolace, STV, Tanaris.. hell if I went to Feralas, I could pick up a quest there too..

The funnest time I had in this game was 10-20 in the Barrens, back to back questing, often 3 or 4 of them at a time, when I hit STV.. I thought Oh! Cool! Like the Barrens with a lot of angry mobs, Alliance, and trees!

And then you get through the first hunting quests, troll quests.. and then.. bye bye.. you get stuck in a rut again..

Heh, oh well.. It'll pick up eventually, I just want to get to 60 before Battlegrounds comes out.. that's my goal in life

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Voidripper Life'Reaver 30 SK
Mystique N'Identity 26 BL
-SBA-
Slizarus 65 Arch Lich
Crusaders of Greenmist
Retired, Moved to WoW to stalk Vance
Fuzzlecutter 5000, Know what you're drinking

WoW and EQ are completely different games once you get past the fact that they are both graphical, 3D, multiplayer, and on-line.

The guild management system is much more flexible. You can define up to ten ranks in a guild and assign them permissions within the game. This lets you manage an explicit in-game chain of command for eventual raiding and other purposes and have it supported by the server.

The non-elite quests are usually solo-able. The elite quests really need a group unless they are too low-level for significant experience (the experience reward is greater if the quest level is above your level). The best equipment comes from the elite quests.

If you are wanting to make your character the best it can be, you will have to do the elite quests which require a group. To get the higher level elite quests as soon as possible, you don't want an ad hoc group. You want a group that knows itself. In WoW, I've grouped with the same people for almost 40 levels now (since mid-teens -- I'm 54 at the moment). We know each other pretty well and work through the quests together.

A lot of the elite quests are in instances and are only doable with at most a group. If you are in a raid, the quest items and requirements will not drop or be met.

The instances teach your group how to work together as you level up together. Deadmines gets your feet wet and makes you realize that 5 individuals really need to be 1 group. Razorfen Downs gets your group to realize that you need to be 5 individuals aware of what everyone else is doing so you don't all try to do the same thing at the same time -- 5-6 mobs of different abilities all attacking at once requires some split-tanking and healing. By time you get to the high-end content, you will know your group and its abilities just as soloing will teach you your class. A raid can then be made from a group of groups with the groups learning how to work together -- we're still working on figuring that part out.

Using the talent points, you can mould your character to your play style. I am a hunter. I put a lot of points into beast mastery because I rely on my cat. At 53, I finally got my 11th talent point for marksmanship, which gave me Aimed Shot. My beast mastery gave me Spirit Bond around my mid-40s, after I got mail and before I could afford my mount.

I chose leatherworking and skinning. Skinning maxed out in my mid- to low- 40s since I skin just about everything I can. Skinning higher-level mobs will give skill increases more quickly. Leatherworking is almost 270, but it's becoming more difficult since the components are more difficult to get and more expensive.

The high end skill allows specialization, which helps divide up the people that know the skill to help reduce competition a little. The high end recipes are either uncommon (or rare) drops off of mobs or are infrequent pops in vendor inventory. To get a full recipe list, you have to search for them (or buy them for a lot of gold in the AH if they make it there).

Everything seems designed to teach you your class so you will be ready for level 60. The goal is to max everything out so you can enter the real game, which I haven't seen yet since I'm not there. Upcoming expansions and additions will probably be part of that, e.g., the battlegrounds. Skill levels will matter less than strategy.

At higher levels, leveling slows down a bit. In an hour solo, I was able to grind out 15% of my level to get to 53 to get Aimed Shot. I had one camp in Winterspring that I kept cycling through. I didn't have to wait for pops. There was little to no downtime and I even got some useful drops. The only time I grind xp is when I'm close to a level and I have a reason to get there. Otherwise, I just play and the levels happen.

Can anybody update me on Warcraft, good and bad? I saw it in the store and was thinking about giving it a try. Does it work ok with Leopard, etc.?

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Human wizard from Qeynos (Garrickk)

Holy thread necro, Batman!

There are thousands of sites out there which will give you far more detail on WoW than you could get here. WoW is an actively maintained game with well over 10 million players, about 10% Mac users, so yes, it will work fine on Leopard, etc.

On the other hand, you're probably going to get much more emphasis on the negative, and how (Mac-) EQ is the better game/community, etc.

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Nikolai Lianfyrr,
Khati Sha Feral Lord.
GM Tailor (250), GM Smith (250), GM Brewer (250), GM Potter (250), GM Fisherman (200), GM Jeweler (250), Fletcher (220), Chef (200)

I was thinking that seeking positive aspects from those who would tend to see WoW negatively might be useful (sort of like Devil's Advocate).

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Human wizard from Qeynos (Garrickk)

Wow, way to revive a 4 year old thread

WoW has nice quest writing and no-wait combat...
which is also its weakness - with no need to
rest between fights, groups do not talk much.
Add to this a lack of General chat outside cities
and it mostly felt like a single player game to me.

I left WoW for EQmac like two weeks ago. I had tons of fun raiding as a holy priest for many months. It's a fantastic game with lots of content.

But even with a great guild, the basic annoyances still persist; hand-holding, horrible community, and repetition in the end-game. Instances get boring after a dozen times, people are jerks, and everyone and their mother is a radiant beacon of transcendent power mounted on a glowing tiger shooting stars.

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When I played WoW I really missed the sort of friendships you tend to make in EQ. That was probably my biggest complaint. Like someone else said, you tend to talk less to people.

You still have all the politics with any sufficiently large group of people.

You have a lot of children playing: average player maturity is fairly low. Of course, you get 5-year-olds (literally) as well as grandparents.

When I quit, I did so because I got too frustrated with some aspects. The camel's back was broken by the daily quests. Or more specifically by the crowding to do the daily quests. I got tired of spending an hour doing something that should take 15 minutes because of the number of other people who I was competing with for limited spawns. Sound familiar?

But there are things I like about WoW, too. For instance, I like the way they handled raid instances. You could zone into a raid instance and zone out, but if you zoned in and killed a mob, you were locked to that instance until reset (weekly resets). So you could spend several days crawling the zone, but you could only kill a particular mob once a week.

There are downsides to this, of course. No system is perfect. If you have 18 people who want to raid, you're out of luck. The "beginning" raid zones were 10 people, so 10 of you would be locked to one instance. Now, you can swap out 8 of those people for the other 8, and now all 18 of you are locked to that zone. But you can't all go at once. And if you go to two instances, you'll have 10 locked in one, 8 locked in another (maybe with guests), but then the next night when you go raiding and 3 people are gone, now you only have 7 people for a zone that really does need all 10. You can start to see some of the implications.

And because the zone had a capacity, you couldn't zerg an encounter.

PLing was possible but tricky. PLing normally took the form of babysitting -- healing someone from out of group, for instance, and handling overpulls.

WoW did a good job with transportation. I won't get into the details.

I hated some of the graphics. Especially stupid are the shoulder slot items. Good lord, you put on a decent shoulder drop and it's like you grew wings. Who would fight in something like that? It all looked ridiculous.

The PVP system was pretty good -- certainly far far better than ours. You didn't have to PVP, but it was a constant option. The battlegrounds were fun. I didn't have much luck with arenas, although I actually had fun duoing in the arena. There would also spring up random world pvp -- some guild would decide to raid an enemy town in hopes that people of the opposite faction would defend. That could be a blast. Typically what happened was a very one-sided fight on the part of the attackers until suddenly a bunch of high levels would arrive and suddenly the attackers were all dead.

Biggest complains: Politics, immature players, overcrowding in some areas, less getting to know people than we have.

Biggest enjoyments: raid instances, the pvp system, travel done well, same server for both mac and pc users.

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Sinnder, Enchanter of Destiny
Joshore, Druid of Destiny

I have to agree that WoW seems like a single player experience to me mostly because the people suck. I soloed most of the time. Though I find it is made for the lowest common denominator player, in the sense that leveling is easy and no one is affraid of dying in a terrible place, those things are what make it enjoyable to a large degree.

Little thinking, lots of fast playing, and a reward every way you turn.

I think they got a lot of things right.

Their crafting interface is a wet dream.
Their class versatility is also fantastic IMO. The player actually gets to have some choice about how they want to play the class.
The graphics, though cartoonish, are gorgeous and theres pleanty of eye candy.
Questing actually matters and you can do it forEVER.
Instances, though they take the politics and the fun out of interguild competition, also make it easier for everyone to enjoy the content.


Those things I enjoyed.

I would also argue that on the surface it's easy , but class versatility and gearing are actually quite complicated. To this day I don't think I've seen better discussions about game, strategy, class than on the Warlocks Den website.

At the end of the day it doesn't hold my attention. I always drop it after a little while.

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I really can't contribute here, other than to say that is damn funny.

WoW is terrible, but so is EQ. You should not play either imo.

This is me. Small part of the issue is the graphics - they're not really my style.

Larger issues is that I don't like the class makeup - there was never a class I really liked (hint I play monks in EQ and VG - hunters aren't really the same).

Largest issue was some combination of too much soloing while leveling/too many instances/endless dull quests/and worst of all the "on the rails" feeling.

I'm glad I quit when I did - I gather that every expansion is a gear reset - that what drive me bonkers. I appreciate that gear shouldn't last forever, but some (not all) top end gear from one expansion should be useful for a while - the EQ epic weapons are a good example of this.