Iirc...
...Iksar also get an underwater swimming bonus - hold breath longer and maybe start w/ a high skill in it. ((edit, Iksar also are vulnerable to fire but get a resist bonus to cold - or soemthing like that))
Halflings start with a somewhat high Hide skill - and maybe get a racial Sneak ability, too. Bah, the memory gears are so rusty. I believe if you needed a low lvl alt or "mule" to run errands for you in dangerous places, you made a Halfling Rogue - cuz w/ racials he could sneak fairly effectively at lvl 1. Iirc my old raiding guild planted lvl one Halfling rogues deep in certain dungeons - they could sneak past the living and undead - to occasionally see if certain mobs (mostly bosses) were up.
Also, lvl one Halfling rogues could sneak around in any zone looking for "ground spawns," which used to sell for crazy money. Hah, I now remember making a lvl one rogue to do just this. You just had to be very careful before destealthing to pick something up. I'm talking lvl 50+ zones.
Wood Elves and Dark Elves, iirc, get a racial Hide but not sneak. Wood Elves get a racial forage skill, I think.
High Elves and Erudites start w/ high Int, Wis - and for HE cha. They make good casters for this reason. Don't think they get anything else.
Ogres have stun immunity - or did. The attack had to come from their front to be immune, iirc.
There was a buncha info saying that Humans had an experience bonus. It turns out they probably never did. Humans and Barbs can't see in the dark, and early on we didn't know how to adjust gamma (a lot of us didn't) to fix that. W/out a spell or glowing item, we were blind. Corpse runs from HaulAss, er, Halas, down that dark tunnel to Blackburrow were challenging.
Negatives for trolls and ogres, and sometimes barbs, is getting stuck in dungeons. Literally. I remember an ogre in our party died and lost his "shrink" in Solusek (the lower lvl one). There was a shaman in another grp there, but he wouldn't come over and shrink him. We offered to come to him, nope - he was being a jerk. He wouldn't shrink our ogre.
So, we overpulled - and it was RUN! Run to zone! Our Ogre tried but got stuck in the window room - literally got stuck in a doorway. We were on the other side, healing him, while four gobs hacked at him. Then, the party w/ the uncooperative shaman overpulled - and tried to run for zone - and came upon our Ogre!
There were like 12 angry goblins - then more, cuz they started spawning - and the other group was SCREAMING at our ogre to get out of the way. We told them back they should have shrunk him- and we ran for zone, sans ogre - and the rest of them died. We zoned back in and rezzed our ogre - they had a loooong walk back (they didn't have the nerve to ask us to rez their cleric). And then we decided to fight down to the zone line to Naggy's lair, where the tunnels were wider and our ogre wouldn't get stuck.
This was back when potions either didn't exist yet or were quite rare.
Troll SKs were notorious for having a bad exp penalty, the worst - Troll penalty plus sk hybrid penalty. Also, before PoK, there was a considerable penalty for being evil. Evil humans and gnomes weren't KoS everywhere, but a lot of DE, ogres and trolls were (evil race + evil god was BIG kos). You had to do a lot of rep fixing to be able to enter FP, and even then you couldn't bank there til you worked even HARDER to up rep w/ N FP - (muffins for Pando or soemthing - there were some quests you could do a zillion times - or you could just hunt orcs).
As the game progressed, other factors became important - like religion and certain items you could go for. Evil Clerics and Trolls who worship inoruuk could quest for (and probably still can) a clickable item that casts a necro "darkness" spell. What's so cool about that? It's just a level one DoT. But wait! There's more! It's a level one DoT that SNARES. This means a cleric can fear kite!
You pull a mob to a safe spot in zone, click the snare-dot on him, then fear. As the mob slowly trundles away in panic, you smite and nuke away! This way you don't have to worry about root breaking when you root bomb. For shamans, dot-kiting or root rotting becomes much safer if the target is also snared. So if you wanna be a soloing cleric or shaman, consider this option - it makes things much easier (it's a something symbol of Inorruuk, sorry, can't remember exact name - maybe devotion symbol or symbol of devotion).
There is a really good clicky that Tunare worshipers can get, too - which is iirc a free root. Very handy for certain soloing situations, like when you're out of mana and your target is almost dead - root it mana free, sit, get mana for that last spell, kill it.
Edit, it's cleric/druid only, and race restricted:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=5684 Warden symbol of Tunare.
Regent Symbol of Innoruuk.
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=1254 Edited, Dec 21st 2007 4:20pm by IponemaGirl Edited, Dec 21st 2007 4:25pm by IponemaGirl Edited, Dec 21st 2007 4:27pm by IponemaGirl