Somewhere during Luclin's development is when an important part of the core development / design team left Verant / SoE, and it really showed. Because of this Luclin deviated quite far from the game's original vision, and the later expansions continued down that route.
Nexus ruined the idea of travel meaning something, made the existing world feel much smaller, and made travel through old-world zones completely trivial. It didn't entirely ruin, but certainly damaged the player interaction of finding ports and helping other players by giving them ports, thus killing one of the greatest aspects of Druids and Wizards.
Nexus (bazaar) also ruined trading by removing almost all of the individual effort and player interaction required to be a successful trader. All but killed EC / Gfay / North Freeport trade-hubbing in a single fell swoop. A huge amount of my time played during classic EverQuest was wheeling and dealing in Gfay (the trade hub on Xegony) and in EC on Fennin Ro. To see those zones become almost completely barren within days of Luclin was a massive disappointment for me.
Mounts, while potentially a neat feature and improvement to the game were done in such a way as to require many players to use them, and as such, use the Luclin character models.
The Luclin character models were higher polycount with higher resolution textures, but lacked almost all of the 'character' and charm of old-world models. Myself and many of my friends at the time hated them, and turning them off on P99 was one of the first things I did when I started.
Kerran race and Beastlord class I could go either way on.
AA's were a great improvement to the late-game and end-game, hands down my personal favorite feature, and something I felt EQ needed for a long time before that... Something to spend time on at lvl 50/60 that wasn't raiding the game's very limited raid content.
All-in-all, I would not say I hated luclin, nor did any of my friends at the time, rather it represented the beginning of the end of what was our obsession for 3+ years. I played several months into Luclin and enjoyed a lot of the time grinding AA's and raiding Ssra / keying for VT. I never personally made it into VT raiding, as I quit before it was really doable on Xegony.
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