Unfortunately GoD was right around the time I quit so I didn't venture into that content, but I will say this: if there were zones/content that were only reached by a small fraction of the player population, I'm okay with that.

I'm about as anti-SoE as they come, but even I can recognize the impossible situations they found themselves in. If people conquer an expansion too quickly, accounts are cancelled and/ or there's constant griping on boards about how there's nothing to do. At least with GoD it sounds like some people were humbled a bit and that's a good thing.

That's pretty much how I feel about it too.

It's either content completed too fast or not enough content, and with this it was "too hard, make it easier". What can you do?

The difference was that the expansions before GoD had something to do for everyone. When Luclin released, Emp and LIS where considered nearly unbeatable encounters, but there was a ton of raid content that was easier: Shei Vinitras, Greig, THO, etc. Even the very first introductory raids of GoD: Ikkinz 3&4 were hard as fuck. Whereas a low end guild could complete the first few tiers of PoP progression, even Time guilds could easily wipe in Ikkinz. Shit, I remember near-wipes just clearing trash to get to the zone ins. And the next tier, Uqua, was infamously about 10x more difficult than anything before it. To make things worse, you were pretty much stuck in elemental/Time gear until you beat Uqua and unlocked Qvic. Things actually got a little bit easier once you gained Qvic access and began farming that gear. But very few guilds could get that far in the first place.

Not to mention the style of the expansions really hurt a lot of classes. The game completely switched from calculated, marathon raiding to fast and furious fights. As a shaman, I felt more useless than I ever had before. If a mob miraculously wasn't immune to slow, it was at 25% before you could even land a slow anyways. And forget dots. Anything that wasn't melee dps, heals, or buffs was basically useless.

So 95% of the playerbase that purchased GoD either a) couldn't utilize anything in the expansion or b) wiped repeatedly to every raid encounter they came across. Pissing off 95% of your playerbase 9 months before the release of WoW wasn't the best move on SoE's part. Especially considering the large amount of players who read FoH daily at this time. Furor was on his mission to get everyone to leave EQ for WoW during the end of PoP, which was a way more popular expansion than GoD.

No guilds beat it. If you're talking about the progression server that doesn't really count because all the raids had been nerfed many times over by the time it came around.

Yeah, you can't really compare GoD to any other expansions that might have had one impossible zone. The first roadblock (Uqua) came way too soon when you look at the overall scope of the expansion. It would have been like the equivalent of being unable to do anything in Kael, Skyshrine, West Wastes or ToV because you can't even obtain the key to get to them due to some impossible boss. I mean how many more raid zones did you have to go through even after Uqua? Inktu'ta, Qvic, Txevu. Then when you finally get through all that your reward is the rape that was Tacvi. You figure maybe you get in and you're rewarded with a boss or two that are just loot pinatas right? No, even the first boss was rape. You had to be nearly perfect or have superb dps to down that guy. I think more people probably quit my guild once we reached Tacvi than from Uqua, the zone that caused many guilds to leave EQ altogether.

Add in the fact that holy trinity was as necessary as ever for the group key stuff, and this expansion just wasn't fun for a lot of people.

As difficult as Tacvi was, it was a hell of a lot more fun and less tedious than Uqua, even.

GoD was the last expantion I bought. Only thing good about it in my mind was the fishing, once they nerfed that I never went back.

I thought the Barxt fight in Uqua was a lot of fun, actually..

The thing I hated most about GoD was how... un-Norrath it was. The mood of that expansion was entirely unlike anything that came before.

EQ up to Velious involved a large world ripe for exploration. Travelling to the Moon wasn't even that strange to me, and I don't think it was terribly done. My biggest gripe with Luclin was how it became the only place worth going, once you had the expansion.

I liked PoP. I hated the end of it, but I liked it, from a raiding standpoint.

But GoD? What the hell did that have to do with ANYTHING AT ALL? We caused a crack in reality that allowed the Bondage Goat/Dog-Baby/Marilyn Manson Monsters to attack some frail, vaguely Babylonian-themed midgets on yet another undiscovered continent? Please.

WRU OP POOKAS!!!...WTB a enchanter to push me through the trials.

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I didn't spend much time in either expansion, but aren't their lore completely different? Isn't one set in Taelosia and one in some sort of parallel universe? Could someone who knows the lore shed some light into this?