YMMV / EverQuest II

• Accidental Innuendo: The Zone name "Maiden's Gulch" sounds kinda dirty if you think about it.
• Best Boss Ever: Roehn Theer
• Creator's Pet: The Gnome race as a whole. They seem to have a major role in almost every expansion and they get more attention than most of the other races put together. If you play a Wood Elf or Halfling or Sarnak or some other unfavored race and want more content? Tough! Have some more wacky gnome hijinx!
• Demonic Spiders: The "key mobs" are these for people who like to solo zones. They have one ability called Mandate, which stops you from targeting the mob, stops you from healing (including curing the ability off yourself), and if you do try and cast an spells that don't need a target, such as an AoE, it will send you flying around the room. It doesn't help that some of these keymobs are near named mobs, and, if they aggro, they can spell your doom.
• Difficulty Spike: It's actually quite easy to solo your way all the way up to max level. In fact, the developers changed the game to intend for this. You will then be lacking knowledge on how to work as part of a group. You will also probably be undergeared, as all the better weapons and armor are obtained from "heroic" quests and boss mobs, both of which require groups to conquer.
  • Will happen to you again if you decide to go from being a casual player to a raid player. Raid quality gear mostly only drops in raid zones.
  • Also noticeable within dungeons themselves. For example, in the raid dungeon Perah'Celsis' Abominable Laboratory, there's a large jump in difficulty between Vernox the Insatiable, who is a "tank'n'spank" mob with a few tricks to watch out for, and Sara Greenheart, who spawns adds, bounces you all over the room with area-of-effect attacks, and power drains.
• Nintendo Hard: In general, SOE does a fairly good job at providing both easy content for the casual players and really difficult stuff for the hardcore ones. Sentinel's Fate originally had two raid zones. It took the game's best guild 6 months to defeat the 4 Rune Roehn Theer boss, and almost as long to defeat Arkathanthis the Destroyer. Then, so the top level guilds didn't get complacent, they released the Underfoot Depths raid zone in LU57...
  • Starting with Destiny of Velious, SOE has been making "normal mode" and "challenge mode" for most raid content and occasionally for a group-scaled or solo-scaled dungeon or boss as well. Challenge mode monsters hit much harder and the bosses require a more complicated strategy to beat.
• Once Original, Now Common: The game was the first MMORPG to have actual voice acting for most NPCs. While it was a big deal when it first game out, such a feature is pretty much standard issue for most modern-day MMORPGs.
• Player Punch: EQ2. Discovering Erollisi Marr's death. Though the punch is severely diminished now that we know she's back. Working to open a portal to the Shard of Love, then fighting your way through the distraught residents, and finally finding Mithaniel Marr himself mourning over Erollisi's coffin.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The way The Scavanator would despawn after he wiped a raid made it impossible to really practice working on him.
• That One Boss: Dozens of them, seriously. In an effort to make the game more challenging for the ever-increasing-in-power player base, boss mobs come equipped with debuffs of ever-increasing-nastiness.
  • A good example, although not the only one by any means, is Pawbuster in EQ2. An level 84 "Epic x4" Drolvarg. Basically, there's a grate in his room. Pawbuster occasionally does an attack where he smashes the ground. He has to be placed exactly so he hits certain bolts when he does this. While all this is going on, he has a regular area-of-effect 50 second stifle (mutes/disables spells/combat abilities), and a nasty DoT (damage over time).
    • The Pawbuster ends in one of the most satisfying ways ever conceived in an MMORPG though. Once you wear him down just enough, a player pulls a switch and drops him into the whirling blood-soaked fans right underneath him.
  • Bosses get steadily more ludicrous. The boss of the Destiny of Velious expansion, the Statue of Rallos Zek. First you have to pull him about an in-game mile down a long slope. You have to stay out of his reach and ranged damage him, because otherwise he'll wipe the raid. Periodically he anchors himself and releases an AOE, you have to be out of range or you get flattened. As soon as he's done he "memwipes" and the tank has to grab him before he attacks the raid. You have to gradually drag him backwards, across a ridge running across the floor that messes up line of sight and exists only to be annoying. While doing all this you also have to be constantly burning down the warboars he summons, which "target lock" players, forcing them to target the warboars and making it hard to heal and attack the statue. You have to drain him to 30% health and run him to a fountain, at which point a red tornado spawns, that you have to kill (but you can't kill it until the Statue has been dragged away from it, otherwise he wipes the raid). Once tornado #1 is down you have to drag him waaay across the room to the other fountain and make another red tornado spawn, then kill it. Oh, once the statue goes below 50% of its health, each raid death heals it by 5%. By the way did I mention that this is just the "easy mode" version of the right? Because it is.
• That One Sidequest: In EQ2, the Roekillik quest line. It was released to hype the Kingdom of Sky expansion pack. It is still outlandishly difficult even for a lvl 90 character, and the rewards, well, completely suck.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Everquest 2 was first shown in 2002 and released the same years with charming, but technically dated looking World of Warcraft. It was one of the best looking games ever and the absolute best looking MMORPG on the market. More than that, it has managed to stay on the pedestal for years, since back then and even today almost all online games never tried to push graphics quality anywhere. Back in 2004 (and especially during E3 presentations in 2002 and 2003) people were simply overwhelmed by it's graphics. To put it in perspective: at the time, literally not a single game could handle detailed character and enemy models, bump mapping, dynamic real-time shadows and water with actual reflections on top of great draw distance in an open world environment. On the max settings, this game looked like it came from future. Thanks to that, graphically, Everquest 2 aged very, very well for a 2 decades old rpg. Not surprisingly, system requirements were so ridiculous that only a few people could see it in it's full glory.

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