WoW addressed some of the critical MMO features in a different way to EQ.
The most obvious, and arguably important, was simply that of aggro management - EQ"s philosophy, oft-stated, was mob aggro is a group function - it is the responsibility of everyone to manage their own aggro relative to the tank.
WoW (I like to blame Furor, but it was in the game when he still doing PR work for WoW on the FOH forums before WoW's release) had a warrior taunt that worked - that alone shifted the goalposts for all group activity. Every warrior could hit an ability that (in almost every case, excepting high level raid mobs at the time and even then was successful upwards of 95%) guaranteed 6 seconds of aggro, on a 6 second cooldown.....eternal focused aggro for the tank. No more furiously hoping for a proc, or a successful taunt, or for the other group members to have clue....it didn't matter anymore.
Groups thus become less about synergies of competency but simply how fast could anything be burned down. The metric shifted from nuanced, risk-management to just.....faceroll. With enough DPS, anything could be overcome.
The fact the the world of EQ is put together to present challenges in every zone, that travel is inherently dangerous and death is costly, was once one of it's greatest attractions...WoW catered to safety being the norm and a ridiculous ease of resumption after dying, enabling the faceroll philosophy - just pew pew till its dead and if you die....NBD.
It was great fun....but by the third expac, I'd already quit twice, as had most of my guild - we moved as a guild from EQ1 to WoW, so competency/efficiency/content devouring wasn't an issue. It just became.....stale.
The best WoW PvE players would have zero chance of achieving anything in EQ - however, the reverse isn't true.
When there's almost always a mistake you can make in EQ that will lead to a lengthy CR for yourself if not a bunch of others, in addition to a progressively more punishing XP penalty....death is something to be avoided at all costs.
WoW made death less than a minor inconvenience and consequently suffered as a result. The design philosophy at the time took advantage of the time investment that EQ required and went the other direction - make everything easier and more accessible to the casual player.
Was itemization done perfectly where you felt compelled to chase upgrades? not until level 60 and gearing for raids...and you would be in much the same gear as the next person of your class, with the odd exception.
What was the social interaction like when trying to put together pick up groups? Easy, but there was little incentive to make friends from that - instances were over very quickly in comparison to a good xp group in EQ.
Identify some of the most sought-after pieces of equipment that would leave a noobs mouth agape when they saw somebody with it equipped. What were the hurdles you had to jump through to get those pieces of gear? How difficult were the raids, the group content, etc.. The original game had MC and Onyxia as the 40 person raid zones. MC was accessible after doing 1 quest in a 5 man group instance. Ony was a bit more involved, requiring a successful kill of the final boss of what was then a 10 man (2 group) dungeon instance.You could do both in a day, if you were anything like organised. With the tank enjoying the benefits of an almost unresistable taunt, and AoE being telegraphed, there was therefore no requirement for everyone to load up on a set of resist gear for example. Once you had 40 people it resumed the DPS is king approach....as with most guilds, we would give priority on gear upgrades at each new tier to the DPS. Tanks got the tank pieces and healers had to wait until the DPS already had the piece of gear. That approach is still widely adopted by raid guilds today, as out-healing spike damage is not about gear, but about using abilities....and spike damage is all that matters if you have sufficient DPS to burn anything down before the healers go OOM - extending a mana pool or increasing healing efficiency is secondary to 25-30 people doing 2-3% more DPS. They introduced DPS check mobs in the second raid zone, BWL and those became the bottleneck norms. Every subsequent raid zone had a DPS check raid boss.
I've seen a few videos from various streamers and YouTubers where it seems like loot was distributed by the raid leader based on only their discretion. Is that accurate, and what about that process made it fair for people? No, we did it the same as we had done it here - a combo of raid council and DKP
Was PVP toxic? Were there meta classes and skill configurations that you felt obligated to use to avoid being steamrolled? Of course lol.
It was certainly fun, but I often recall my guild leader from EQ saying to me in our first weeks on WoW....'It has no depth'.....she was damn right.
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