Solo leveling with mercs only, you can easily do 3-5 levels per hour through 60. If I am powerleveling a toon, I can usually push level 30 in about an hour, and another hour to get to 40., double to tripple that if the persone being power leveld is a newb abd doesn't understand what they are supposed to be doing.
Without even working hard, I can push a toon to 85 on less than 10 days played, and my daughter's shaman was oly 15 days played at 85 with 1000 AAs.
So, yeah, leveling is a lot easier than it used to be.
Also there a massive number of factors / game mechanics that have changed to improve your EXP rates. most of been mentioned in other threads many times. Things like fast med/regen out of combat, out run a mob and lose agro, smoothed out leveling rates, revamped mechanics for melee and casters, stronger pets, pets no longer "poof" when you camp, zone, invis, LD etc..., shared bank space, buffs not decaying the lobby or the guild hall, guild hall ports, guild lobby corpse summoning, spells no longer clumped, instead are spread over many levels, your equipment is always on you, even when you die (ie you no longer loot your corpses), 4th year vet reward (summons all your active corpses and 100% rezzes any with rez timers) clerics with 100% daily AA rez, cleric buffs no longer require components (except the DI series), weaker buffs no longer overwrite stronger buffs, shaman and druid no EXP (but no penalty, ie it doesn't effect your rez timer) summon you to your corpse AA rezzes, druid and wizard single target ports, druid and wizard secondday binds, druid and wizard port to bind, daily quests that give lots of EXP, daily quests and continuously repeatable quests giving plat (e.g. level 15 quest giving over 100pp, a fishing quest during the anniversary month, that can be done daily and gives 4500pp, etc...) mercs, upgraded mercs (through group progression tasks), mercs counting towards required numbers to get tasks, mercs not counting against the number of people that can do a task (merc in zone, compelte a task for a friend added to task, even when AFK in lobby, they get credit, though not always EXP for it)....
And that is barely scratching the surface of the changes. EQ is no longer the game it was 6+, 7+ years ago.
Gorse
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