Well, first off, you'll use a weapon and shield at frist, because you cannot dual wield until level 13. However, once you get dual wield, you'll want to use a 2nd weapon, because quite a bit of your aggro will come from DPS. A weapon creates considerably more dps than bashing with a shield. In the high end of the game, hate procs start to come into play, but at the low end, there are no real useful procs, especially in original expansion weapons.

If this were truly an oldschool server, you'd start off your armor by smithing some banded, or looting some ringmail. However, to my understanding, the newbie armor quests will still be there on Combine, so do those. That armor is much better than anything that was available back in the day.

You'll probably want to try to get people interested in Runnyeye, once they get up to level 25ish or so, because the blackened alloy weapons in there, are MUCH better than anything that was available when EQ first came out. BA longsword is great for aggro, when the rest of the group has Antonica quality weapons as well.

Also, remember while you are levelling, keep any tradeskill items, and fill your empty slots with anything, even if it's patchwork leather made from ruined bear pelts.

Large bronze armor drops in Najena, and from there, look into the crafted armor quests.

Edited, Thu Jun 1 22:08:21 2006 by xaanru

I can't coment on the new newbee quests, but it is was truly like EQ in the old days here are some hints

1. kill goblins and skellies for money until you can kill the bear cubs in EF. Once you can kill the cubs use some skill up points in tailoring, and use the runined petls to make a full set of PW armor. This should be doabel at lvl 3 or 4.

The best early weapons to get will be the cracked staff, and a short swrod. dropped by the skellies. Sharpen the sword sword to a tarnished short sword.

If you can sell PW armor to others.
Once you get a bit high lvl kill the giant spiders for silk. You might be able to sell silk armor to casters and monks etc.
If not you should be able to sell them to those working on smithing and or tailoring.

Making banded will be expensive, and a waste of time if it itsn't better than newbee quest armor


With a full set of PW you should be able to tank in Blackburrow, which is one of the better sorces of money near Halas, and will likly be part of a number of quests.

also find which version of split paw they put in, in the early days it was the next place to go after Blackburrow

Look into the lansex quest a 6/23 weapon as i recall, was very hot in the early days. Also drops a nice 2hs
Another popular weapon was the Minator axe, Drops in the Gome newbe zone, or Beholder Maze
Runnyeye had some good drops too.