Took a trip down memory lane looking up my characters on the eqlive site. I assume they made some changes to the 1.0 epics because all of them are missing from my chars inventory according to that site.

Do a decent number of people still play? Would I be able to catch up? My characters range from 60-70. Never had great gear on any of them and am not terribly interested in raiding, but wouldn't mind it if it's become less mind-numbing than it was in the past.

What's the best way to get current on the expansions for the least amount of money? I am sort of tempted by the idea of buying a complete pack and starting a new account.

If I didn't get any of the recent expansions (I seem to have a few that I don't recall buying - Serpents Spine, Burning Sea) would it even be worth logging in?

For the most part I just want to log in and look at my chars and maybe dink around a bit in old zones. Not sure if it's worth $15, though.

If you buy the latest expansion (House of Thule), you automatically get all others - so that's a good investement for your money.

Well I caved, bought HoT and resubbed.

What's with the item display now? Recommended level stuff doesn't show the stats in red anymore? How do I know what the final stats are, or the current stats?

I picked up a couple new items from the bazaar and went to a few zones to see how things go with a healing merc. Eventually I figured out I can buy Bite of the Shissar which speeds things up quite a bit.

Anything else I need to know?

There's a button on the item display called "modified". Click on it to find max stats.

Bite of the shissar is very nice. You're going to want to collect "oleander" drops to make a proccing slow poison called "myrmidon's sloth". You can have one dps and one utility poison going at the same time. When you group you're going to want to collect muscimol for "Quellious's trauma" which is an agro reducer.

Then find a good hotzone and xp.