Honestly I'm not resubbing after this month.
I'm coming from p99 so im used to SLOW experience. But the thing with everquest is you could find a good little spot to solo, or group up and find a corner in a dungeon to pull 20-30 mobs to (before respawns). Grouping felt rewarding in both loot and experience, group comps were normally whatever you could pick up. So sometimes you would have interesting strategies to make whatever you were doing work. You also were rewarded for CHALLENGING yourself. A solid group could kill yellow/red cons and were rewarded for it with more experience.
In embers more classes are "solo friendly" but for a solo player mobs are spread out so far. Its not fun having to run 10-20 seconds between monsters...In the dark when you cant see very well. To find one more thing to kill. Then spend 10 seconds skinning it (yes I know better tools let you harvest faster).
When I would group killing anything above white cons isnt worth it because mobs get such a huge bonus to defensive stats, you start hitting for half damage. And on top of that the chevrons system makes monsters with 2-3 have way more hp as well, and they don't seem to give xp equal to the amount of extra work you put in. So the best experience I found, and of course this is just MY experience so I could be wrong was being in a group and just killing blue cons. And blue cons in a group, isnt really a challenge. "Harder" mobs arent "Harder" they just take longer, it feels more like a slog then a challenge.
Also I only got to level 15, so perhaps it changes more at higher levels but I have no clue what half the classes DID. I mean I know tanks TANK, and healers HEAL, and some classes got CC abilities where they could sleep or root or lull targets. But that seemed pretty much it? I didn't feel like we ever had to talk strategy, we just basically did the same thing no matter the party composition. Try to pull as few mobs as possible, then beat them down with weapons.
I didn't feel like I was thinking or I was never put into a situation where my fast thinking really changed anything, other then rooting something and stepping back so it didn't hit me. I just found myself annoyed at how punishing it felt to use my abilities because they all cost 10-15% stamina and regen is SLOW. Which again I'm coming from p99 so I'm USED to slow regen but I felt like the game revolves around mostly just auto attacking for all the classes for 50%+ of the time (or more). Just a bunch of dudes in the woods hitting bears with swords and flags.
So soloing was a bust, I think I mostly soloed from 13-14 and in that time I skinned over 150 bears (not including time spent killing other things I couldn't skin as well as picking up random logs off the ground for my tradeskilling). Also not including the time spent running between finding things to kill which often could very well be 10-30 seconds. Possibly longer if even just ONE or TWO people were in that same area
And grouping was a bust too. If we were fighting harder mobs xp was worse then If I soloed. If we were fighting blue mobs, xp was equal/better but damn was it completely mindless.
So I ended up getting burned out pretty quickly. Now if this wasn't a sub based game, this wouldn't be an issue. I could quit for a week or so and come back refreshed, and kill another 200 bears or whatever. But because its a sub based game I WANT to play it, but playing it for several days in a row for a few hours when I get off work just ISNT fun for me.
I feel like for people that have a solid group of static people they can play with everytime they log in THAT would be the ideal experience (and honestly from what I've gathered in my time here I believe THAT is the target audience). But I dont think realistically for most people thats something they are able to put together and or commit to, so unfortunately I think because of that this game isn't for me.
