[Messianic]

I think there's a dimension people are missing with the whole "EQ was about quests" statement. It's somewhat true if placed in context of where EQ started. For its time, it had a lot of quests. Pretty much anything you played in that same time period hadn't developed the multitude of, nor the depth of specific individual quests and subquests (soulfire, epics, monk robe quests, etc) EQ had - as rudimentary as they seem to us now. At that time, people did rave about how many unique quests and NPC interactions you could complete that would affect your gear/gameplay, etc.

WoW Vanilla basically took what EQ did there and massively multiplied its applications - be it quests for useful trinkets, gear, money, or exp; or even epic-type quests (think Hunter Rhok'delar). They did it really, really well, too - so much so that it outshined the quest aspect of EQ by a long shot.

But Quests were the intended focus of EQ (Ever-Quest), it was just the way people thought at the time that pure grinding (i.e. sit in dungeon X and kill as many mobs as quickly as possible) was a necessary evil and was unavoidable to make the game "challenging". WoW and a number of successors changed that thinking.