The Spirit Realm

I'm just really intimidated to pick back up my shaman, lvl 65 during OOW. I never got the slow from that expansion and it drove me nuts that BL had great slow that seemed so easy to get while our seemed so difficult. Anyway I'm rambling. I've read about Mercs and all that from SOD and it sounds really nice. I have a few questions,

1) How difficult will it be to gear up at this point?
2) What would be a good place to start leveling again? The last place I remember going was PoE and PoF.
3) Any good UI's still being updated?'


Thanks in advance for any advice.

I'm just back in as well, still setting up hotkeys and stuff. Tablets is still regularly updated. http://www.eqinterface.com/downloads/

SoD made it a piece of cake to go from gimp to uber in very little time and effort. The groupable gear you can farm is on par or better than MMM, second to last raid zone in the prior expansion. Most if not all spells are easily acquired as well. None of this having to loot such and such an item which you hand in for your spell at least for the first and second ranks. Just about any clicky you could want is available now from groupable gear as well.
I have pretty much either looted or quested every aug that my shaman uses as well as most of his gear in group content and currently buff up to over 3700 AC 32K hps and 27K mana. Add in the fact that Malo Single target and AE Slow are now all AAs and our primary 4 buffs are an all in one spell ......

Hot zones now go to lvl 75 and if you can get lucky enough to pick a location where rangers can use Headshot AA etc the XP just flows like mad ... Last time I did a lesson burn was with 3 rangers in the group and think I netted 30 or so AA in an hour.

Lot of folks I know use http://forums.theconcerthall.net/viewtopic.php?t=3583 and http://www.eqinterface.com/downloads/fi ... hp?id=4620 personally I mix and match bits and pieces from various people.

I have been considering a return as well, but I'm a little farther along than you are: I stopped playing in July 08 when my guild was working through Solteris and preparing to start SoF raids. I can't answer 1 and 2, although I have been told that once you reach level 80, you can level up with relative ease in SoD by doing the Void flag progression.

As for the UI question, I did a little looking around when the idea of coming back first occurred to me. My favorite UI is no longer being updated (and it just KILLS me) but, as mentioned above, Savok's and Sparks' UI are both quite good and are updated extremely quickly in the event of a patch. I prefer more minimalist UIs, though.

Thanks for the advice. I guess the other question I would have is what are the server populations like these days? Would it be worth starting over on Mayong?

Edit:

Almost forgot, do you need to pick up the current expansion to start using the Mercs?

I think I'm going to come back too, been about 3 years for me !

I wonder if anybody is still around from the old days.

Do you still have the serverwide crucible channel?

Hah, nice old sig to the ol magelo and guild, guess I should get rid of that...been so long since I posted on here !

Yeps, same channel.

I would love to come back, but my job only uses macs, and i cannot bootstrap windows ><

I think the Mac server (Al Kabor) is eternally at the PoP release. But it's there.