Bazerka,
I'd guess I spent between 200 and 300 hours in EQ2, prolly a third evil side and two thirds good side. The things that ruined it for me really were the things I listed - only two start/home places, one main area for everyone level 10-20 and the class system particularly. I also really thought a couple of the big long zones in Freeport were very badly designed. If you've not been bothered by those things then I genuinely wish you well in the game
Muri
The real strength of WoW is the true diversity in the class structure. At each level after lvl 9 you get one point per level to spend on talents. The game was firstly created without talents, so the class system is complete without them - talents just offer huge diversity within the classes. Talents exist on top of all the generic skills, spells and abilities all classes get a bunch of.
There are three trees of talents per class, very similar to Diablo's skill trees.
For instance, Hunter. This class is roughly equivalent to EQ's Ranger classes. They get tracking which displays mobs (and players) real time in your mini map on the right top of your screen, for example. Then they also can charm beasts in the game and keep them permanently as pets, levelling them up with themselves and using them as tanks or offensive units (they get to have 3 pets permanently, only 1 active and they can lose them at any time if they chose to if they want a different mob as a pet - they can also charm most rare spawns and keep them etc etc).
So we have Rangers with a tank unit as a pet. The Ranger talent tree is split into three, which basically enhances their pet, their ranged abilities or their melee abilities, namely Beast Mastery, Marksmanship or Survival . There is a massive number of different builds which make for very different experiences both solo and in groups. Each of the 3 trees has a single top skill, which requires you to have spent 30 points in that tree. Hence the top skills in the trees can be attained not before level 40. In most cases people will put 31 points into one tree, in a variet of ways, and 20 points in one of the other trees. Obviously there is a lot of variance in this. For example, if you chose to go Beast mastery your top of the tree skill is Spirit Bond, which heals you every time your pet hits a mob.
Hunter talent tree here for reference
I cant emphasise enough how much :
i) each class is a very different gaming experience, enhanced even more so by the talent system; and,
ii)
what a huge difference there is in the gaming experience in all the different starter areas. A couple of them I actually hate, if I am honest, and find extremely boring, but others are just totally captivating. By starter areas I mean series of areas covering level 1-30. There are pretty much 6 sets of these ( one series of zones for each of the six starter areas) and they are big.
As for each class coming into its own, the talent system producing such huge diversity within the classes reflects one aspect of this - you couldnt just have a simple MT, healer etc setup in every situation.
To give an idea, a typical group night would be to clear an instance. Instances in WoW are similar to LDoN dungeons in EQ1, BUT they are much bigger (most of them), with a lot more interesting design, a series of quests in each of them and each having a series of well told stories to them. There are also a number of boss mobs in them each time you do them so you are guaranteed some decent loot for your efforts and no one else apart from your group can get to them
Its kind of like being able to zone into Plane of Time (except the instances are superior in gaming experience to Plane of Time) and knowing ahead that its going to be there for you and no one else can zone in apart from your group. There are over 30 instances in at the moment for single groups. They can take anything up to ten hours to do everything in one of them.
As you travel through each member of the goup is going to have to pull their weight, sometimes to the max, to deal with what is happening. You cannot split pull or lull often, so there may be places you know you are going to get 6 or 8 mobs. There are some instances where these mobs can be AE'ed and an AE class (Mage or Warlock) is going to save you hours literally. There are other places where you are just going to have to deal with those 6 or 8 mobs one on one or one on two etc. Warriors used to be able to keep all taunted but they removed that so now everyone has to do their bit.
edit : one little touch I do like is that every single trash mob has a small chance of dropping top items and a very, very small chances of dropping epic items. There are tiers of rarity reflected in the colour of the name and text of the item - grey, white is sell to vendor junk, green is uncommon and has stats, blue is rare (very) and is what drops off decent bosses. Purple is above blue and can drop off trash (as can blue items)
Probably the biggest strength of WoW is that they have managed to make it just as fun for solo, duo, group or raid play.