EverQuest Necromancer/Enchanter:
The game provided lots of spells and tools for each class, mostly like AD&D but it worked in its own way so it was unique and players figured out ways to play that the devs never even thought of. This is called "emergent gameplay" and very few games are broad enough to do it.
Part of what made it different to other games is that every enemy in the game (mobs), were designed to be fought by groups of players, or at least 2 or 3 players teaming up. So soloing wasn't even possible for a lot of people. Some classes couldn't do it at all, and some were better than others, but it was only possible by using magic to its full potential. Just a single mob that is same level or even a few levels lower, could kill you in a few seconds if you tried to fight it face to face. Also these tactics and therefore how you play the game, would change drastically as you went through the levels so it didn't get boring by repeating the same thing over and over, which is one of the things I hate the most about modern MMOs and RPGs.
Necromancer:
Being new
At low levels to solo stuff you have to share the damage with your pet and time your spells to cast in between enemy attacks so you don't get interrupted. A single mob can kill you if you don't time things well and balance your damage to share aggro with your pet.
Kiting
By level 20 something, the mobs are starting to hit so hard that neither you nor your pet can spend any time fighting a mob face to face, you just get torn apart. So you have to give up on your damage sharing thing with your pet, those days are gone. You have a lifetap spell that drains health from the mob and gives it to you, but mobs hit so hard now, even the lifetap wont keep you alive long enough to fight toe to toe with an enemy. You have a pet heal, but it isn't strong enough to keep the weak pet alive while it tanks for you either. So there is really only one way you can solo through these levels, and that is kiting. You have a spell that slows the movement speed of the mob. It doesn't slow it very much, but it is enough that if you run for a while, the mob will have fallen behind. You also have to stand still when casting a spell so it is scary, you snare the mob and then run away and you need a good distance so you can stop running, and start casting the spell and hope you gained enough distance to finish casting it before the mob reaches you. Then you start running again and try to get more distance to cast another spell. And the snare spell only lasts about 30 seconds so you have to make a mental note to cast it again after about 20 seconds otherwise the mob will catch up and rip you to shreds in seconds.
Fear Kiting
By level 30 ish, you are tired of kiting because it is hard work, and it requires big open spaces, but you now have some new spells that change things. Your snare spell is stronger so the mobs only walk now when you use that. But you also have the Fear spell that makes mobs flee in random directions. So first you cast the snare spell, and then you cast the Fear spell, and the mob will slowly start walking away in random directions and not fighting back. So now you get to chase the mob and stack your most powerful spells on it, and have your pet attacking it, and you can kill mobs pretty easily like this. Fear can break randomly but also any can be resisted, so you can get unlucky and get a bunch of resists in a row and you will often die because of this, but the rest of the time you are succeeding so overall it is worthwhile. You also have interesting spells to cast, various damage over time spells (disease, magic, poison, fire, cold), and you have a lifetap to recover any lost health, a big instant one, and a more mana efficient lifetap over time spell. You also have a spell called Lich which drains your health constantly and converts it to mana. It can be dangerous and you can die from it, but if you regularly lifetap you can recover your health and end up with a bit more mana than when you began. And if all else fails, you can Feign Death which means you pretend to be dead and the mobs give up on you and walk away. You basically reset the whole thing and get to start again, very powerful trick. But this can fail for a few reasons. You can also use a spell called Gate that lets you teleport back home, but takes a while to cast so it is hard to pull off in combat, and also it means you have to run all the way back.
Aggro Kiting
At higher levels some mobs are immune to fear, so the only way to kill them is to do something similar to the basic Kiting method above, but it is a bit more controlled. Your powerful snare spell still works to slow them down, but fear wont work, so you start with snare, then you instruct your pet to not use his taunt ability, and send him at the mob to do some damage. And then you cast your biggest most damaging spells on the mob to piss it off enough that it will chase you and ignore the pet. But it is walking slowly, so you run and keep ahead of it, and keep blasting it with your best spells while remembering to keep the snare spell refreshed. It isn't as easy as Fear Kiting but it works, just have to be careful with your timing of the mob catches up to you and you can die in 3 seconds. You also have to kite in circles so you don't get the attention of any other nearby enemies.
Root Rot
In tight spaces and especially indoors like a dungeon, you can't use any of these kiting methods. So instead you have to use this other method. You have another spell called Root which stops the mob from moving and you can now stand a bit away from it, both staring angrily at each other, while you load it up with spells. But its not as easy as it sounds, because the Root spell can break randomly, and has a very high chance of breaking if you use Direct Damage spells. So you have to get some distance, and then use only your damage over time spells (hence the Rot). So you stand at some distance and start stacking all these spells on it and watch its health slowly drain away. But if you are casting a spell and the Root breaks mid cast, the mob can just sprint at you and tear you to shreds in 3 seconds. So you have to react very fast, as soon as it starts moving, you have to crouch to cancel casting whatever spell you were doing, and instantly cast your root spell. If you are lucky you can land the root before it reaches you. If you are unlucky, the mob will be hitting you while you try to get that root spell off again. Now you get some distance and frantically cast your lifetap to recover some health for the next time the root breaks. It takes time to kill a mob like this so it is a tense fight. This method also can't be used against spell casting mobs because stopping them from moving isn't a problem for them, they will just stand there and blast you to death in no time. Also originally, the snare spell would not stack with the root spell, so it made it very dangerous. When root broke, the mob would run at you at full speed and in a few seconds would catch you and start ripping into you, and a few seconds later you were dead. So reacting fast was essential, as was making sure you kept the maximum distance you could manage.
Make it up as you go:
You could sometimes mix one or more of the above strategies with your own tricks to win a fight.
I figured out a few great places to hunt that nobody else used to go to, and once I met an uber guy and we shared a few secret hunting areas. His place was really tough but rewarding. There was a dungeon called Charasis that was designed purely for groups, and nobody would even think of going there solo. When you enter the dungeon you fall from above and land on a tall pedestal that doesn't give you much room to work. But the plus side is that if you keep the Levitation buff active on yourself, if you ever get in trouble you can just step off the side of this pedestal and you will slowly float down to certain death below, but if you cast the Gate spell while you are floating, you can teleport out of there while you float. It is a pretty sure escape. But actually succeeding in there was hard. When you first land there are 2 enemies that can kill you in 2 seconds. One of them was a Barbed Bone Skeleton which can Harm Touch you for 90% of your health instantly, and the other is a slime monster. So usually you will get blasted almost to death before you even hit the floor. So you have to instantly feign death and lie there for a while waiting to regenerate some health, and waiting for them to move to the far side of the pedestal. Then you have to stand up and cower in the corner while you regen, and keep on feigning every time they wander close. When you are ready you have to charm the skeleton to fight the slime, and keep both snared so they don't run anywhere. Then release the pet and kill it. And now you can kill all the nearby mobs which are great experience. And you have to set a stopwatch to remind you in 30 minutes when these first 2 enemies will respawn and you need to be ready to eat the Harm Touch again.
Another location had a famous boss mob in a dungeon that was very hard to kill but I worked out that if you snared him and put all your damage over time spells on him, you could lead him down a corridor that split two ways. I would lead him down one of the splits, and then jump across a gap (he couldn't jump), so he would then slowly start backtracking to take the other path to reach me. As long as I kept him snared, the time it took for him to backtrack to get to my path, gave me valuable seconds to sit and recover some mana, and then when he got close to me, I would jump across the gap again and he would head back the other way. He had so many hit points, I had to do this for a good 10+ minutes and ended up using all my mana, but eventually he would go down.
Charm Kiting
The Necro could charm undead mobs, so there were times he could do this other method. But I'll describe it in the next bit:
Enchanter:
The Enchanter was probably the hardest class to play. It had not much in the way of damage unlike the Necro, and it couldn't drain life back either, but it had more ways to control the mobs. This made it extremely tense though because one mistake and you took a lot of damage, and then you had no way to recover it...
Up to level 30 ish had to be done the same as the Necro above, tanking the mob yourself and then later on you let your pet do some tanking and then you jump in to share some of the damage.
With no snare, kiting beyond this point isn't possible, and your spells aren't good enough to blast stuff to death, and you have no pet heal either... Your only option to solo as an Enchanter at this point, is to charm a mob to be your pet. This is very powerful because mobs are very strong so you now have a very strong pet, but it is also very dangerous because the charm can break at any time, randomly. It could last a minute or it could last 1 second. The idea is you charm a mob to become your pet, and then send it at another mob to attack it, but if the charm breaks at this point, you now have 2 very angry mobs that will come at you. Bear in mind that 1 mob could kill you in 3 seconds, so 2 mobs means almost instant death. So ideally you charm a mob, and send it at another mob, then you root that mob in place. So now if the charm breaks, at least you only have to deal with your former pet.
So anyway, you charm Mob A, and send him to attack Mob B. You then root mob B to hold him in place, and also maybe use a spell that slows its attack speed, weakens it, or does some damage. You just want it to be at a disadvantage to your pet so your pet will win (even though they are the same creature). When your pet kills Mob B, you get experience, and now your pet is injured, so you cast invisibility on yourself to break the charm, and now you kill the injured Mob A. It is stressful but you kill 2 mobs in the time it takes most people to kill one mob. This makes them a very powerful soloer, but it is so dangerous.
There is also the randomness of attacks missing, so sometimes your charmed pet will win a fight without losing much health, and you have no way of 'finishing off' a mob that is still on 80% health. So you either have to charm it again to fight another mob, but then unload a lot of powerful spells on that mob to make sure your weakened 80% pet can win the fight. Or you have to root that 80% one, charm some other fresh new mob, and have it beat your former pet to death. It is a weird experience because you don't get a chance to ever relax or take a break when you play like this, because you constantly have a mob you have to deal with.
At higher levels they got an ability called Dire Charm which let them permanently charm a pet. This seemed amazing but with no way to heal the pet, it was kinda useless when soloing. But team up with a healer and you could just have this permanently charmed pet do all the tanking and damage while you just helped it out. I used to give it haste which made it deadly, and also give it a Troll illusion which gave it regeneration. Give it some Cleric buffs as well and it was stronger than any player.
Hope this explains how interesting they were to play. Maybe it doesn't sound that special on paper, but to actually play it was very deep and exciting. The only games that have this sort of depth are turn based games, yet EQ played in real time. It was slower paced so you had time to do stuff, but you had to think fast and making a bad decision meant you were dead. So you really had to learn your class, practice it, and then in dangerous situations you relied on a kind of muscle memory to save the day. Any half witted type players would just die constantly in this game and struggle to make any progress. Average players just relied on playing with other people. Talented players could really go above and beyond what everyone else does.
p.s. Another thing I miss from EQ and something that makes it more intense, is that pets needed to be controlled fully. In every single player RPG I've played, pets are just mindless creatures that hit stuff and that's it. But in EQ a pet could attract the attention of nearby enemies so you had to make sure your stayed at your side. Then when you start fighting, the pet will assist you, but if you put a mob to sleep, your pet could wake it up by hitting it, so you had commands like "Back off" which would tell the pet to stop attacking, and you had to be very smart and fast with these commands otherwise you could easily die. You also could tell the pet to focus a specific target, or sit down to rest, and at higher levels you finally got a command to tell the pet to not assist you until you tell it to, which was really useful.
The game provided lots of spells and tools for each class, mostly like AD&D but it worked in its own way so it was unique and players figured out ways to play that the devs never even thought of. This is called "emergent gameplay" and very few games are broad enough to do it.
Part of what made it different to other games is that every enemy in the game (mobs), were designed to be fought by groups of players, or at least 2 or 3 players teaming up. So soloing wasn't even possible for a lot of people. Some classes couldn't do it at all, and some were better than others, but it was only possible by using magic to its full potential. Just a single mob that is same level or even a few levels lower, could kill you in a few seconds if you tried to fight it face to face. Also these tactics and therefore how you play the game, would change drastically as you went through the levels so it didn't get boring by repeating the same thing over and over, which is one of the things I hate the most about modern MMOs and RPGs.
Necromancer:
Being new
At low levels to solo stuff you have to share the damage with your pet and time your spells to cast in between enemy attacks so you don't get interrupted. A single mob can kill you if you don't time things well and balance your damage to share aggro with your pet.
Kiting
By level 20 something, the mobs are starting to hit so hard that neither you nor your pet can spend any time fighting a mob face to face, you just get torn apart. So you have to give up on your damage sharing thing with your pet, those days are gone. You have a lifetap spell that drains health from the mob and gives it to you, but mobs hit so hard now, even the lifetap wont keep you alive long enough to fight toe to toe with an enemy. You have a pet heal, but it isn't strong enough to keep the weak pet alive while it tanks for you either. So there is really only one way you can solo through these levels, and that is kiting. You have a spell that slows the movement speed of the mob. It doesn't slow it very much, but it is enough that if you run for a while, the mob will have fallen behind. You also have to stand still when casting a spell so it is scary, you snare the mob and then run away and you need a good distance so you can stop running, and start casting the spell and hope you gained enough distance to finish casting it before the mob reaches you. Then you start running again and try to get more distance to cast another spell. And the snare spell only lasts about 30 seconds so you have to make a mental note to cast it again after about 20 seconds otherwise the mob will catch up and rip you to shreds in seconds.
Fear Kiting
By level 30 ish, you are tired of kiting because it is hard work, and it requires big open spaces, but you now have some new spells that change things. Your snare spell is stronger so the mobs only walk now when you use that. But you also have the Fear spell that makes mobs flee in random directions. So first you cast the snare spell, and then you cast the Fear spell, and the mob will slowly start walking away in random directions and not fighting back. So now you get to chase the mob and stack your most powerful spells on it, and have your pet attacking it, and you can kill mobs pretty easily like this. Fear can break randomly but also any can be resisted, so you can get unlucky and get a bunch of resists in a row and you will often die because of this, but the rest of the time you are succeeding so overall it is worthwhile. You also have interesting spells to cast, various damage over time spells (disease, magic, poison, fire, cold), and you have a lifetap to recover any lost health, a big instant one, and a more mana efficient lifetap over time spell. You also have a spell called Lich which drains your health constantly and converts it to mana. It can be dangerous and you can die from it, but if you regularly lifetap you can recover your health and end up with a bit more mana than when you began. And if all else fails, you can Feign Death which means you pretend to be dead and the mobs give up on you and walk away. You basically reset the whole thing and get to start again, very powerful trick. But this can fail for a few reasons. You can also use a spell called Gate that lets you teleport back home, but takes a while to cast so it is hard to pull off in combat, and also it means you have to run all the way back.
Aggro Kiting
At higher levels some mobs are immune to fear, so the only way to kill them is to do something similar to the basic Kiting method above, but it is a bit more controlled. Your powerful snare spell still works to slow them down, but fear wont work, so you start with snare, then you instruct your pet to not use his taunt ability, and send him at the mob to do some damage. And then you cast your biggest most damaging spells on the mob to piss it off enough that it will chase you and ignore the pet. But it is walking slowly, so you run and keep ahead of it, and keep blasting it with your best spells while remembering to keep the snare spell refreshed. It isn't as easy as Fear Kiting but it works, just have to be careful with your timing of the mob catches up to you and you can die in 3 seconds. You also have to kite in circles so you don't get the attention of any other nearby enemies.
Root Rot
In tight spaces and especially indoors like a dungeon, you can't use any of these kiting methods. So instead you have to use this other method. You have another spell called Root which stops the mob from moving and you can now stand a bit away from it, both staring angrily at each other, while you load it up with spells. But its not as easy as it sounds, because the Root spell can break randomly, and has a very high chance of breaking if you use Direct Damage spells. So you have to get some distance, and then use only your damage over time spells (hence the Rot). So you stand at some distance and start stacking all these spells on it and watch its health slowly drain away. But if you are casting a spell and the Root breaks mid cast, the mob can just sprint at you and tear you to shreds in 3 seconds. So you have to react very fast, as soon as it starts moving, you have to crouch to cancel casting whatever spell you were doing, and instantly cast your root spell. If you are lucky you can land the root before it reaches you. If you are unlucky, the mob will be hitting you while you try to get that root spell off again. Now you get some distance and frantically cast your lifetap to recover some health for the next time the root breaks. It takes time to kill a mob like this so it is a tense fight. This method also can't be used against spell casting mobs because stopping them from moving isn't a problem for them, they will just stand there and blast you to death in no time. Also originally, the snare spell would not stack with the root spell, so it made it very dangerous. When root broke, the mob would run at you at full speed and in a few seconds would catch you and start ripping into you, and a few seconds later you were dead. So reacting fast was essential, as was making sure you kept the maximum distance you could manage.
Make it up as you go:
You could sometimes mix one or more of the above strategies with your own tricks to win a fight.
I figured out a few great places to hunt that nobody else used to go to, and once I met an uber guy and we shared a few secret hunting areas. His place was really tough but rewarding. There was a dungeon called Charasis that was designed purely for groups, and nobody would even think of going there solo. When you enter the dungeon you fall from above and land on a tall pedestal that doesn't give you much room to work. But the plus side is that if you keep the Levitation buff active on yourself, if you ever get in trouble you can just step off the side of this pedestal and you will slowly float down to certain death below, but if you cast the Gate spell while you are floating, you can teleport out of there while you float. It is a pretty sure escape. But actually succeeding in there was hard. When you first land there are 2 enemies that can kill you in 2 seconds. One of them was a Barbed Bone Skeleton which can Harm Touch you for 90% of your health instantly, and the other is a slime monster. So usually you will get blasted almost to death before you even hit the floor. So you have to instantly feign death and lie there for a while waiting to regenerate some health, and waiting for them to move to the far side of the pedestal. Then you have to stand up and cower in the corner while you regen, and keep on feigning every time they wander close. When you are ready you have to charm the skeleton to fight the slime, and keep both snared so they don't run anywhere. Then release the pet and kill it. And now you can kill all the nearby mobs which are great experience. And you have to set a stopwatch to remind you in 30 minutes when these first 2 enemies will respawn and you need to be ready to eat the Harm Touch again.
Another location had a famous boss mob in a dungeon that was very hard to kill but I worked out that if you snared him and put all your damage over time spells on him, you could lead him down a corridor that split two ways. I would lead him down one of the splits, and then jump across a gap (he couldn't jump), so he would then slowly start backtracking to take the other path to reach me. As long as I kept him snared, the time it took for him to backtrack to get to my path, gave me valuable seconds to sit and recover some mana, and then when he got close to me, I would jump across the gap again and he would head back the other way. He had so many hit points, I had to do this for a good 10+ minutes and ended up using all my mana, but eventually he would go down.
Charm Kiting
The Necro could charm undead mobs, so there were times he could do this other method. But I'll describe it in the next bit:
Enchanter:
The Enchanter was probably the hardest class to play. It had not much in the way of damage unlike the Necro, and it couldn't drain life back either, but it had more ways to control the mobs. This made it extremely tense though because one mistake and you took a lot of damage, and then you had no way to recover it...
Up to level 30 ish had to be done the same as the Necro above, tanking the mob yourself and then later on you let your pet do some tanking and then you jump in to share some of the damage.
With no snare, kiting beyond this point isn't possible, and your spells aren't good enough to blast stuff to death, and you have no pet heal either... Your only option to solo as an Enchanter at this point, is to charm a mob to be your pet. This is very powerful because mobs are very strong so you now have a very strong pet, but it is also very dangerous because the charm can break at any time, randomly. It could last a minute or it could last 1 second. The idea is you charm a mob to become your pet, and then send it at another mob to attack it, but if the charm breaks at this point, you now have 2 very angry mobs that will come at you. Bear in mind that 1 mob could kill you in 3 seconds, so 2 mobs means almost instant death. So ideally you charm a mob, and send it at another mob, then you root that mob in place. So now if the charm breaks, at least you only have to deal with your former pet.
So anyway, you charm Mob A, and send him to attack Mob B. You then root mob B to hold him in place, and also maybe use a spell that slows its attack speed, weakens it, or does some damage. You just want it to be at a disadvantage to your pet so your pet will win (even though they are the same creature). When your pet kills Mob B, you get experience, and now your pet is injured, so you cast invisibility on yourself to break the charm, and now you kill the injured Mob A. It is stressful but you kill 2 mobs in the time it takes most people to kill one mob. This makes them a very powerful soloer, but it is so dangerous.
There is also the randomness of attacks missing, so sometimes your charmed pet will win a fight without losing much health, and you have no way of 'finishing off' a mob that is still on 80% health. So you either have to charm it again to fight another mob, but then unload a lot of powerful spells on that mob to make sure your weakened 80% pet can win the fight. Or you have to root that 80% one, charm some other fresh new mob, and have it beat your former pet to death. It is a weird experience because you don't get a chance to ever relax or take a break when you play like this, because you constantly have a mob you have to deal with.
At higher levels they got an ability called Dire Charm which let them permanently charm a pet. This seemed amazing but with no way to heal the pet, it was kinda useless when soloing. But team up with a healer and you could just have this permanently charmed pet do all the tanking and damage while you just helped it out. I used to give it haste which made it deadly, and also give it a Troll illusion which gave it regeneration. Give it some Cleric buffs as well and it was stronger than any player.
Hope this explains how interesting they were to play. Maybe it doesn't sound that special on paper, but to actually play it was very deep and exciting. The only games that have this sort of depth are turn based games, yet EQ played in real time. It was slower paced so you had time to do stuff, but you had to think fast and making a bad decision meant you were dead. So you really had to learn your class, practice it, and then in dangerous situations you relied on a kind of muscle memory to save the day. Any half witted type players would just die constantly in this game and struggle to make any progress. Average players just relied on playing with other people. Talented players could really go above and beyond what everyone else does.
p.s. Another thing I miss from EQ and something that makes it more intense, is that pets needed to be controlled fully. In every single player RPG I've played, pets are just mindless creatures that hit stuff and that's it. But in EQ a pet could attract the attention of nearby enemies so you had to make sure your stayed at your side. Then when you start fighting, the pet will assist you, but if you put a mob to sleep, your pet could wake it up by hitting it, so you had commands like "Back off" which would tell the pet to stop attacking, and you had to be very smart and fast with these commands otherwise you could easily die. You also could tell the pet to focus a specific target, or sit down to rest, and at higher levels you finally got a command to tell the pet to not assist you until you tell it to, which was really useful.
:ehue:
I am sure there are occasional tough dungeons in some games when people do super-heroic-whatevers. But last time I did a dungeon in Rift, I just pressed 12345 and watched fireballs and lightning bolts smash groups of mobs to death in 5 seconds.
