Sadly, I'm just waiting til Pantheon comes out. I'm so surprised when I run into people who haven't ever heard about it. However, I'm struggling with the gaming industry right now and am so bored of all these other MMO's.
To break it down I played EQ from 1999-2007ish, I joined the military play time was really limited so I kinda played very casually up until 2011, then I just couldn't take it anymore, EverQuest turned into Hotbar quest, and got really annoying to play. I loved the open world, I loved that nearly everything was group play, and I loved the holy trinity of course, it brings things to an MMO that just changes the way it's played, so instead of one person being able to solo everything DPS relies heavily on the tank, and the tank relies heavily on the healer, and they all rely on each other as a whole unit. It's what I love and enjoy.
So I'm hoping someone here can help me find an MMO that I can enjoy. Just so you know 9/10 times I play a healer, i don't know why, but I'm good at it and love doing it.
Anyways, these are the games I've tried and why I stopped playing them.
EQ2 - Played for a long time and raided the crap out of it, I quit around the velious expansion, of course I raided velious for a while, until they brought out a dungeon that pretty much made all my raid gear useless because you could get the same loot from the new dungeon, or equivalent. So that pretty much led me away from that. I got bored and moved on.
Neverwinter - Recently picked this game up, like maybe had it for a month and a half, I am now max level, 3k ilvl in it and bored out of my mind because all it is is que up for a dungeon and run it 100 times, over and over, rinse and repeat. Got really boring really fast. Although the combat was somewhat fun, it just becomes mind numbing and repetitive.
WoW - I tried it, couldn't get into it, made like level 20 and stopped, it just wasn't for me.
TERA - played for a bit after it came out, had a max level with some good gear, and then just stopped playing, it also got really boring and just the same amount of rinse and repeat as Neverwinter.
RIFT - Raided for a while in rift, it was a fun game, but as soon as you got to raid level there was really no point in doing anything else, although the game was fun had some pretty cool mechanics and all that, it just got boring after a while.
See what I liked about EQ, the grouping requirements, the difficult to get items, and really the whole world was just so big that you didn't have to stay in the same spot, you could move on and find somewhere just as viable as the next place. Granted eventually the combat got really stale, I for some reason still enjoyed it. I loved meeting up in PoK, just to get buffs so i could go adventuring for 2 or 3 hours and then have to head back to do it all over again lol. Then the named farming was fun, it could get annoying at times, but so much fun especially when you finally got that item you were looking for. EQ made a name for itself for having a community, and people that worked together to achieve a common goal. I tried going back and playing on phinigel, their TLP server, and it just wasn't the same, enemies were much weaker than i remembered. Granted it was fun, i did get to raid in velious and kunark again, which i enjoyed a lot. But you could kill Vulak with like 3 groups. It was way too easy. Even with the buffs and debuffs they gave the bosses. Then we were able to 3 split the Avatar of War, which was insane lol. But it was so incredibly dumbed down, and nothing like i remembered it being.
So really, I'm looking for a game, whether it's mainstream or not, I just need something that can hold my attention while waiting on pantheon to be released. Anyone got any ideas? What are you playing right now?
I and a lot of my Guildies have been enjoying Conan Exiles together. Its challenging and fun with a group to travel around killing dragons and stuff. Other than that, I really don't know of anything else worth playing either lol.
If you get interested in trying it out send me a message. I'll talk to Guild Leader and see if we able to get you access to the private server. We about 1/3 Military as well so you know its good times haha.
I wish I could point you in a good direction Dubah, but I honestly have nothing to suggest. I was/am kind of in the same boat. I played a lot of the great old school MMO's starting in the late 90's (UO, EQ, DAOC, Shadowbane, SWG, etc.) and then went to WoW and had some fun there, but its impact on the market and the shift from the social/group-centered/challenging ideals and content that use to be standards of previous MMOs to the instant gratifcation/easy mode/cash shop model to maximize profit kind of killed the genre for me because obviously everyone that came after WoW tried to imitate it to some degree.
Also like you, I tried the latest round of EQ progression servers when Ragefire and Lockjaw were released a couple of years back, but it wasn't a great experience for me either. The content was dumbed down significantly and the server was insanely overpopulated at the beginning, although the instances did help that. You had pretty much all of the high-end guilds acting like children by "poopsocking" the raid mobs and yelling at each other in-game and posting on the forums as well. They couldnt' act like adults and come to a compromise, but had to be petty and bitter and argue/fight over mobs in a game at the time that was 16 year old game (now 18)
What really got me though was SOE letting botters and cheaters run rampant where you had armies of wizard/mage bots plowing through dungeons killing everything in site with no regard to other players and kill stealing rare spawns so they could make plat for RMT. On top of that, you had probably half the population using programs like Macroquest to cheat and SOE didn't do a thing about either of them because banning cheaters would mean losing revenue.
Then SOE sold EQ to DBG and eventually they released the Phinigel TLP which they had coded to pretty much put a stop to the botters, but at that point it was too little too late for me because SOE and/or DBG could have done something about it much sooner. I was over it already and told myself that sadly that would probably be the last time I ever stepped foot in Norrath again because it had left such a bad taste in my mouth.
I am currently backing another game as well, Crowfall, to keep me occupied and to act as my fallback game in the event pre-alpha and or the actual release of Pantheon gets pushed back. Crowfall has some very interesting concepts/ideas, but it's a different breed of MMO and is still in alpha as well, so the only way you can play is by backing it too.
I am looking forward to Pantheon much more than I am Crowfall though. Pantheon is the only game that can even come close to fulfulling what I am looking for in an MMO and have been unable to find in over a decade.
If on the rare chance I do find something possibly worth your time though, I will let you know.
P.S. Kudos for being able to stick with EQ for so long. I didn't last past PoP. I wrote a very lengthy post on another topic/thread about how the Bazaar in Luclin and the fast travel books in PoP kind of killed the game for me. Those two things took out a ton social interaction in my opinion and the game kind of felt like a single player game or guild-only game at that point where you rarely even interacted with other non-guild member players after that point.
EVE Online. If you are bored with the same old same old, then try one of the few games successfully doing something different. Work towards flying Logistics if you like healing, join a corporation, and you will be loved for being a space healer.
They even have a trial you can play forever now with restrictions on skills, but it gives you plenty of time to evaluate by getting into a good corporation and getting a real feel for the game.