The Pinnacle of Everquest (In your opinion)

[Gustoo]

Pre Kunark is the best by far. The content was balanced and meaningful at all levels. I can now solo boss mobs like arch magus and frenzied ghoul as a cleric at level 60. That is in kunark era. Previous high end items like SSOY becoming garbage and amazing zones like Lower Guk being sidelined means that the new expansions are basically dumb, despite the things they bring to the table.

Overall game balance and correct playability is best pre-kunark.

If expansions, then velious by far is the best, because luclin and future expansions damage as much good old content as they create, and for PVP in particular, the bazaar really trashed the game.

POP broke the game with insta-port books, basically destroying community and the large world travel experience, and the dependence on nice druids and wizards to travel quickly.

For me, the less expansions the better, but Velious by far is the last good expansion, because at least kunark is still viable and it doesn't really do much to degrade the already degraded original game content. With Luclin, majority of leveling was done on the moon where absurd EXP bonuses and centralized PC really made the real everquest world a ghost town.

If P99 goes beyond Velious, it should be with custom content to create a more unified and meaningful game experience, rather than just leaving old content in the dust.

It could finish off some of the uncompletable quests from the classic game, give meaning to random items that are good for nothing, and a host of other things. Personally the best would be Classic game, and then open up the dungeons to deeper exploration and add more richness to original content. You can imagine someone found a random hole and was able to go further into Guk and find more mysteries. Ideally, all content should remain relevant. The fact that in classic an SSOY is one of the best 1hs weapons, and in Kunark it is vendor fodder makes it apparent that the expansions were not done the way they should have been.