New on the server, went for "the challenge"
 

So I'm totally "enjoying" my 68% experience penalty as an Iksar Shadow Knight right now. Not so much on the fact I lose more experience than I gain when there's no groups to be had, because necros prefer soloing and high levels are in Field of Bone powerleveling their buddies. Ah well. ;)
Despite how I feel from playing EQ Live, Iksar really is the "master race" due to the permanent AC increase they get which will carry forward forever. Plus there's tails, and that's worth something too!

I was able to help a human warrior out last night, and ran to purchase him food/drink/bandages, and that made me pretty happy. I am anticipating the difficulty of existing in a world where my options are limited, albeit Velious changes that all a bit, and if ever Luclin and PoP come around, it's a moot point in that realm.

I had a nice higher level hand me a SK piercer (nothing fancy, just substantially better than the tarnished slasher I had before that I pried from a skeleton) and an assortment of merchant-purchased cloth/leather gear. Playing low levels on Live servers is a different realm as I would typically throw a Hiero cloak, Fungi, some Luclin weapons, etc to newbs to help them out. In here it's all about low numbers plowing it out against low numbers.

I'm an experienced EQ player, and will hopefully be able to stick with this and enjoy the raiding game in the future. It's exciting to start fresh!

Send ' Dermal ' a tell in game and say hi. I have silks and bone chips! =P

Well met Dermal,
Take your time leveling up dude & enjoy the grouping fun like BITD.

Welcome to the server. A couple notes:

Keep in mind that shortly in to Velious the hybrid class XP penalty will disappear, so in maybe a year from now you'll only have a 40% penalty.

That won't happen here; the developers of Project 1999 HATE cats on the moon with a passion. We might see custom versions of some Luclin/PoP zones someday many years after Velious is released, but that's so far off in the future as to not be worth thinking about.

I am often on Heroclitis, Iksar shaman (14), and I'll keep an eye out for you. The penalty isn't so bad with a partner to help with downtime.

Also I'm a blacksmith so I can make banded armor and cultural weapons and armor. Ironically there are no shaman usable cultural weapons so forged spear it is for me, but for you I can probably do better.

And Iksar are very much the master race. On Live I played from beginning of Kunark to LoY before leaving to greener pastures, and my first and main character was an Iksar Shadowknight, and I could do things none of my other friends could, like solo in one-way dungeons for xp without dying...just laying there FD and ticking back up in HPs and mana. With invis v undead, gather shadows, FD, locate corpse, all those HPs and all that AC, I could really do no wrong, from Kurns to Dalnir, to Kaesora. Sarnak and goblin mothers warned their brood about me, the wielder of Greenmist. I XPed 1-50 without leaving Kunark, just beating things to death in my scale-y glory!

This is one of the reasons I chose the rough road, so that I would be more powerful in the end. ;)
Thanks for sharing!

Pro-tip: your level 9 disease cloud is a huge aggro magnet. Always have it loaded and when taunt fails, of if a squishy caster or cleric gets aggro, use it once or twice to get whatever baddie you want beating on you exclusively. Disease cloud's insane aggro generation was nerfed later on when a line of SK aggro spells was introduced, around Luclin-era I believe.

That's actually my planned pulling method (as opposed to running up and getting proximity aggro, or bashing it and taking the melee damage) once I hit next level. ;)