I will admit, when I first heard about EverQuest Legends, a reimagined version of the classic MMO as it existed at launch, I had some trepidation. For years I’ve told anyone who will listen that what made EQ special was the friction. Slow resource recovery, meaningful danger just getting around, and extreme penalties for death and carelessness made it important to work together and gave us downtime to build relationships. I still believe all these things, but having spent the last week playing the Legends closed beta in advance of its July release, I believe something else as well. Smashing hordes of mobs is fun.
You get to load your character up with three classes in EQL, and for my first run I chose magician, shadowknight, and wizard. Not because I thought they were a particularly strong combination, but because they were iconic to my experience with EverQuest. My first ever character was an ill-fated high elf wizard who wasted most of his time looking for a crimson robe instead of a green one, my main man back in the classic through Planes of Power era was a shadowknight, and the little dude I spent truly obscene amounts of time on during the pandemic was a mage on p99 Green.
The start of leveling was a very familiar experience. I ventured into the noobie area outside the gnome starting town of Ak’Anon and started hunting skeletons, kobolds, and clockworks. Cast a little nuke, send pet, and commence beatdowns. Very quickly, however, I started to notice my strength. Instead of being just a squishy mage, when I pulled agro off my pet I was tanky enough to beat the mob to death with my sword. I had lifetaps and harm touch to go with my mage damage. And at level 10, I got access to wizard with even better nukes and access to root so I could split packs.
You choose a primary class, which is locked in until you get an unlock token at level 50, but you can freely swap your secondary and tertiary classes as you like. All classes get XP until level 10, but after that you only level up the classes you have equipped. This lets new players do tons of experimentation as they start their journey, not that I did any of that. I was too busy blastin’.
I leveled to max with my first three classes in about 50 hours, which included a bunch of dinking around and taking notes. By the time I hit my final ding, I was pulling huge packs of frogs or kobolds or whatever, blasting them with a supernova, and shrugging off all their hits with planar armor while my water pet shredded them with dragon loot and they broke themselves upon my damage shield. In short, I felt like a god. And that’s without playing enchanter or bard!
All systems go
This isn’t to say that I spent all of my time alone, though. I felt totally able to do what I wanted to do by myself, but I also spent tons of time in groups. One of the brilliant things they’ve done is to give every player credited with a kill the loot. We kill the frenzied ghoul, we all get a shot at a Flowing Black Silk Sash. This made the usual problem where surly neckbeards sit on rare camps just… not an issue. I would roll in somewhere, get an invite, and we’d just jam. I didn’t have to have any loot arguments with anyone, no one was /randoming for stuff, and there was just way more gear to go around.
All of this extra gear doesn’t go to waste. With a system called item merging, you can feed additional copies of duplicate items to one another to level them up. They go from +0 to +10, and gain additional damage, AC, and stats as they do. You can also crank up the difficulty of zones, which makes the monsters stronger and gives them a chance to drop higher level items. Challenge difficulty 4 zones and you’ll find +4 items as well as higher level currency items called motes of potential that can be used to level up your gear.
This is all very helpful when you want to start leveling additional classes. At any point you can go to a town and swap your loadout to change things around. When you do so, your character level becomes the lowest of your equipped classes, but you keep your alternate advancement (AA) points and equipped gear. This arrangement ends up being not only lots of fun because you get to experiment with new things, but also serves as a recycling system to get max level players back into lower level zones so there’s more people to group with. You also make tons of AA experience when you do this, so you’re adding to your overall character power at the same time.
Going in, I thought the item merge system was going to be a balance nightmare. Couldn’t we just merge a bunch of common, low level items together until they were OP and circumvent the best parts of EverQuest, like finally looting that Ykesha? In practice though, I’ve really enjoyed it. Not only can you level items up, but hitting certain level thresholds lets you pull out their procs or focus abilities and stick them in other items, and that opens up a whole new world of customization. The yak I got in Lower Guk I picked up was useful when I got it, but it was even more useful when I merged up a +7 Footman’s Sword and socked in that stun proc. I’m sure the system won’t be perfect, but it’s enough fun that I think we’re solidly in the realm of worth it, and the devs have been very active in the beta tweaking and tuning things.
All in all I think experienced EverQuest players will find a lot to like here, and it will be substantially less intimidating for new folks. Old heads like myself will appreciate the classic zones without weird updates like the Freeport overhaul or *shudders* Luclin character models. New players will probably appreciate the fact that they can start their enchanter without having every level 1 monster be a mortal threat, as well as some other modern quality of life features they’ve included like spell loadouts and a group summon ability.
EverQuest Legends isn’t slated to release until July, and I’m sure there will be lots of changes in the intervening time. Major systems like raid instancing are just starting to hit the beta server, and lots of questions remain. I know a lot of folks, myself included, would love to hear an announcement from Darkpaw about a brand new EverQuest game or a true remaster, but until that magical day comes I think EQL is going to be another solid way to enjoy Norrath.