The current state of EQ2 is awful, but outside of the Launch + first 2 months of the game, EQ2 was probably the absolute best MMO of all time until Velious released. Merc's killed the game again, adding in a bunch of flavor races, cash shops, flying mounts, "cataclysm", arena and arena gear, daily quests etc just made it a terrible and different WoW clone.
That being said the TLE beta has been surprisingly good. I played EQ2 for 6 years and find myself still seeing instances and zones I've never seen before on the new beta server. The pvp servers are fun and they have been constantly releasing fixes (even on a Sunday at 2 am). There are some things they cant fix, item revamps and things like that making stats so inflated, but even with that some of the content is surprisingly still difficult. They've tweaked exp; you basically have to group to level, and there's just a ton of shit to do.
I'd recommend the TLE servers once they come live, DBG seems to actually be listening, and the game really will give you a ton of hours worth of content. You can mentor friends and go back down to lower level content, there's housing and tradeskilling with tens of thousands of recipes. Citizenship quests, betrayal quests, upgrading your spells, there's just so much to do even if some of it is meaningless in this day and age of the game.
Graphics hold up surprisingly well to modern day mmo's and looks really good on extreme quality. Gameplay wise it's smooth and doesn't feel clunky at all. I'd recommend it to anyone who played EQ1; seeing Rivervale as it is in EQ2 and finally getting to do a bixie bee hive dungeon and just the multitude of random shit was fun, but clearly I'm biased and rambling at this point.
edit: I'm talking about the new progression servers if anyone is confused about my comments on the current state of the game.
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