Yeah mage pet research post 39 wasn't working and vendors didn't have the pets

I see. I'm assuming the Mage research past 39 not working was just a bug that a while to be fixed, right?

However the vendors not having pets is intentional?

So in the next iteration of Green, it would be safe to assume that getting Mage pets won't be as hard as it was in Green 1.0, because research should be working correctly?

Yes it is intentional. A lot of the best int caster spells are researched spells.

No. In the next iteration of Green, it is safe to assume that getting mage spells will be just as hard as it was on Green 1.0 because research not working correctly for the first few months is also intentional. It is not working, as intended. It was a bug in 1999, it is a feature on p1999

There weren't many mages at Green launch, there will be even less mages at Green 2.0 launch

A part of the issue was like 2/3 of the most active/aggressive levellers were mages, and many of them refused to work together.

This meant even once research was patched in mages were overlevelled. They needed a back log of pets to get to their most uptodate pet. There were far more mages than there were components dropping.

The scarcity of mages pages (or rather the excess of magicians) was compounded by everyone trying to level research - many useful pages got burnt trying to level up skills / brute force combine.

Exactly the same is likely to happen on a new server - mages are fun and effective (as highlighted by the proliferation of level 30 mages complaining the game was too hard while melees were all still stuck at level 13 with a Minotaur axe if they were lucky).

Would love to see an eq style server start with just the most basic classes - war, rog, cleric, wizard and add the deeper ones later.

I made a mage and was part of the problem. No ragrets tho.

It was difficult, there was some confusion with the Devs how exactly the researched pets versus the vendor pets worked. Unless they mimic the original launch with research/vendors not working right, it will be correct next time around. The issue was that there were no vendor pets ( should be two every level until 44/49 ) at all past 20? I think? and that research was broken past 34, the combines didn't work because there were no vendor spells to 'level' up with since each combine takes the previous level spell.

There were never research combines for some of the spells, so when they removed the vendor spells it broke everything. I'm not sure I'm explaining it well, but that's the gist of it. It was fixed and should be different next go around, how exactly it will look I'm not sure, but I would find it safe to assume there will be more pets available then with the original Green launch.

I started day 1 and what I did was hit every merchant in neriak (rolled dark elf) and freeport that would sell to me and find the mats for the 16/20 pet spell combines, which isn't as bad, I just had to buy words of dimension for the 20 spell. I used the 20 for a while till 29 or so before I could get the 24 pet made. Generally I was always a spell rank behind pet wise. The best way I found the mitigate that was to use nukes to kill the mobs for exp. It worked well, I was level 42 or so before they patched pets back in and I was able to get a level 39 pet.

It was still difficult because the words you need drop off mobs higher level then the spells, so generally you would need to buy the words because you can't really camp them yourself just yet. And they were expensive!! I made do with the 44 fire pet until 49 because it was just cheaper and I failed my earth combine. 49 was such a relief because the earth pet was on the vendor.

TLDR:

If you like mage and want to play one at a Green launch, they will work fine, just be aware that without focus items or having every pet at every spell rank, it will be a slower and more difficult leveling process than you might want it to be.

I'm pretty sure it was intentional because apparently Mages were broken that way when EQ launched in 99. I wouldn't know though because I was a warrior in 99 and I don't think I hit 30 until Luclin lol due to altaholism