History Lesson: Level CapsFollow

This is about what releases gave us what level caps.

For example, in Alla I find out that OoW gave us a level cap increase from 65 to 70.

I hate to admit it, but I have been playing since April 2000, and I dont remember which ones gave us 55, 60, 65 or 75.

Could some of you old timers or historians help me out here?

Thanks ahead of time...

I'll give it a shot. I got a feeling I am going to miss on the L55 one because

L45 Original game
L50 was somewere around Kunark. Maybe with the first of the Planes I.E. Hate/fear/sky etc.
L55 Kunark maybe Velious
L60 Luclin
L65 PoP
L70 OoW
L75 TSS

The L45-55 cap raises are foggy to me, due to not starting the game until just after Luclin came out. I could have sworn L50 was before Kunark, and L55 was Kunark.

Be interesting to see how close I am. Just to foggy.

This is absolutely correct. Original game went to level 50. The Planes were introduced prior to Kunark (fear, hate, sky). Yes, people raided planes between levels 46 and 50. It was tough, but probably the most fun time of the game. The two dragons Vox and Naggy were also present back then as well.

Kunark upped the level to 60, added alternatives to planar armor (rough equivalents with clickies instead of stats/resists), and seriously improved weapons. Also, the first epics came out during Kunark, as well as a new player race: Iksar.

Velious and Luclin both upped the power level a bit in term of gear and difficulty. Velious specifically had a pretty nice progression of raids and gear that players could run through, but with some semi-obnoxious factioning involved. Luclin introduced a new player race: Vah Shir, and I believe also the BeastLord class appeared at that time. Luclin also had the nexus, which was their first attempt at giving players a faster/easier way to travel around the game.

PoP upped the level to 65. It also introduced a new method of raid advancement involving raid events to get keys to new zones. IMO, this "broke" the raid game for many guilds. Previously, you were only limited by your physical ability to defeat content. If you could beat it, you could loot it. Keyed zones typically were accessed via solo or group quests. PoP reversed this, requiring massive raids to gain keys to zones that could then be farmed by groups for gear. This turned the raid game on it's head, and gave huge advantages to those who could mount large forces to get the keys, while leaving smaller guilds in the dust. There were many guilds would could easily have managed the content in the higher planes, but simply could not flag themselves to get there. Really bad idea IMO.


LoY was almost a throwaway expansion. Some extra content for mid-high levels to do. Nothing competitive though. Mostly it introduced some new spells that were worth doing.

LDoN was about single group advancement. The idea was to give those poor folks who'd been screwed out of advancement in PoP some way to "catch up". The problem is that what it really did was destroy those smaller guilds even more since now the advancement had to do with single groups grinding adventures over and over. This created a massive gear gap between casual and hard core players, further fracturing smaller "family" guilds which typically had a mix of both types.

GoD was yet more of the same ickyness IMO. It would have been a decent expansion if they'd provided a realistic progression rate to go into the expansion (or within it). As it was, if you weren't elemental geared (or had massive amounts of LDoN gear) you simply couldn't do anything with this content. It was waaay too obnoxiously difficult for groups or soloists. This was where they countered the "super hard hitting mobs" by making them proc large damage effects instead. Um... Not really an improvement IMO.


OOW upped the level range to 70 and is where SOE finally started to correct the problems they'd made in PoP. For the first time since before PoP (Velious really) there was a progression within the expansion that small numbers of people (single groups and small raid forces) could actually make headway. You could literally walk into OOW with moderate gear, work the content in groups and small raids and go all the way through, gaining gear along the way. IMO this was one of the best expansions SOE released.


DoN was kind of an "iffy" expansion to me. Nice concept. Lots of instanced stuff. There is a progression, and it's worth doing. It was better then LDoN, but still not quite as good as having real content to tackle. Dunno. I liked it. It worked. But there was something that never quite felt "right" about it. Overall a good release though.


DoDH was another kinda throwaway thing. There's a handful of "neat stuff" to play with. They added the whole spell quest stuff here (with some decent spells available). Honestly, I'd have rather they just gave us the spells rather then make us grind through content that maybe we weren't interested for stuff that we'd outgrow down the line anyway (ok, some of the stuff anyway). The content seemed designed just to make specific quests difficult rather then actually make sense. The monster missions and shrouds are things you either love or hate. I'm in the "hate" category. I want things to improve my character, not transform him into something else. I picked the race, sex, class, and appearance of my character for a reason. It's called roleplaying...


PoR was just a revamp to the Freeport/Ro area. Not bad IMO. There's a few decent zones worth visiting. Not sure about much in the way of progression though. I wasn't playing when it came out, so all I see today is a bunch of mostly empty zones that people only go to if they need to complete a specific quest (spells and auras). That's not a ringing endorsement IMO.


TSS upped the level to 75 and was the first "full" release since Luclin. It introduced the Drakkin (and thus has levels all the way from newbie to level 75). I haven't played around with it much, but it looks really good so far. You can find pretty much something to fight at any level in this expansion. Some new quests, new drops, etc with new content for the top end as well.


TBS is not really that interesting to me. It's another one of those "progress through a series of instanced missions" expansions (like DoN), with yet another form of currency involved. It would be much much better if EQ would simply reward one type of currency for missions completed and let people buy from any vendor for any mission. That way one does not feel like he's wasting time grinding one set of instanced missions wondering if all his work is going to be pointless a few expansions later. I suppose you've got pirates in it, but then so did LoY and that expansion flopped... ;)



That's pretty much the rundown of expansions, the changes they introduced to the game, and my personal take on each one.

There's a reason he's called the Encyclopedia...

I would type something out, but Samanna's Reference Desk already did a nice chronology. Click here.

Edited, Sep 28th 2007 9:34am by Pinzarn

That was a excellent writeup G, sweet. I knew I would be off-base on my guess. It was too damn foggy. And the early planes, really had me foggy. I didn't start until 2 months after Luclin came out. Missed all those early times.