I usually just lurk these forums as I haven't had time to play much at all lately... but just to weigh in here...

the thing you're all talking about is mudflation.

every game with a persistent world encounters this... and there's really very few ways to counter it if you even decide to at all.

yeah things were probably harder, and laggier, back when the server was new.. but that 'endgame' (by Xiggie's post, 2.5s and ldon gear?) was much closer to new characters than the current 'endgame' (6.0s and T6?)

'maxing' your character to the point that there was nothing left to do but farm charms was a much shorter road.. so typically games end up putting in short cuts just to make it appealing to new players

this is why mainstream games put huge jumps in item power periodically.. WoW as an example, each expansion pretty much eliminates months of progression for your character, if you picked up the game now, you wouldn't have to farm through T1-T2-T3 etc, you'd skip the first 10 tiers of raid gear entirely, get random/quested drops as you level and probably jump straight into T13 stuff

not that I think skipping all the raid tiers and all the epic work would be a good idea here, that's part of the appeal to EQ in general for a lot of people, but making it quicker to get through is really just trying to artificially shorten the road to endgame that's gotten longer over the years.. not entirely a bad thing.

So I've been playing on EZ for 3 weeks now, and I have to admit thus far the encounters seem pretty tightly tuned.

I aimed to do all the content myself with no outside help, and started by boxing sk pal pal zerker, time seemed easy right until i tried DS without any hirelings alive, so I left and tried terrorantula - and got smashed... after spending a little longer in time and fully gearing my MT, quillmane/terror/DS all died to my little 4 man.

Running through ldon then seemed easy, right up until level 6 bosses - I could barely outdps their regen, and again smashed by the epic boss MoW.  So, I collected armor cards for my SK and again fully geared him for the current tier, and was able to take out MoW without help.

Qvic.. the keeper and the sandmonster gave me a little trouble until fully gearing my tank yet again, the keeper mid-fight, the sandmonster when he spawns the 4 little guys.. twinkletoes was also doable by my qvic geared tank.

So I'm currently sitting in a tacvi instance waiting on repops and I thought I'd give some props, while at a glance stats seemed very inflated on this server, the tuning throughout progression content is apparently very well done - assuming single grouping was intended :p