Hi everyone - we have posted a few guides to help you get started in Rain of Fear:

• Rain of Fear: Expansion Overview
  
  • Tier information, where to find spells, where to start, links to other guides/named information.
• Group Progression
  
  • This includes a task list, starting NPCs, and their locations. Links will fill in here over the next few days as quests and bestiary are entered to the site.
  • Unlike Veil of Alaris (which had a very linear progression path), Rain of Fear is a very open-ended expansion. (You can start anywhere.)
• Visible Armor Guide
  
  • Templates have been eliminated. In Rain of Fear, you only need the item drop, the vendorbought essence, and the container (which you only need to buy one time).
  • As of right now, you'll find placeholder item links here. These will fill in over time as items find their way into our database.
• Raiding in Rain of Fear
  
  • There are two tiers of raids in Rain of Fear (broken into three tiers of progression), and raid currencies are back. We also have a bonus raid zone in a new permanent instanced version of North Temple of Veeshan (event equivalents to 12 Tier 1 ROF events + one Tier 2 ROF event).

As for where to start in Rain of Fear: It's an open expansion (no locked zones + non-linear), so you can start in any zone you'd like. For travel purposes, however, you may want to go to Shard's Landing and into the center of the zone (the location of a big crater - you can't miss it!). There, talk to the Portal Tender NPCs (marked with "Portal Tender" under their names) that are near each of the six portals and get their Portal Attuning tasks. They just require some running around on your part, but completing those tasks will make for a much easier and faster time while you're travelling through the expansion (map locations for actual older-world zone connections are found in the Overview linked above).

There are Alarans in this expansion and you will probably want to get your Alaran skill level up to 100. There are two easy tasks (non-combat) in Shard's Landing that will help with that:

• "Welcome to Shard's Landing" (pre-requisite for language task, auto-available to you when you zone in - a very simple explore task)
• "Words of the Unspoken" (auto-boost to 100 Alaran; this task is available from Councilman Nostulia in the southwest part of the crater - findable/CTRL+F)

A reminder: If you have any corpses in game, get them rezzed! All player corpses will be decayed when servers come back up for the launch tomorrow.

Servers will be coming down tonight just after midnight Pacific Time:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be down on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 12:01 a.m. US Pacific* for the EverQuest: Rain of Fear Game Update. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 10 hours.

While you're waiting for servers to come up, you can check out this news story for a sneak peek video of Rain of Fear.

This patch will most likely knock Lucy's Item Collector out of commission for a period of time. We'll get that restored as soon as possible so that we can get items flowing into our database.

In the meantime, happy hunting!!