Gameplay

Several "recent" (lol, since 2007) gameplay changes were not immediately understood by me as a returning player, so I'll document them below.

Mercenaries

Introduced with Seeds of Destruction in 2008, these are sort of like pets, but they level up as you do and you cannot directly command them - you just give them "stances" to adjust their aggression. You start in the tutorial with Apprentice Mercanaries, either a tank or a healer. Aapparently there used to be many levels of Apprentice and Journeyman mercs, but now it seems like the system has been revamped, and there are only Apprentices and Journeymen - but different races of mercs unlock somehow. At present, in the low 50s, I don't see how to fix this, but I'll address it and investigate further when I feel the need.

AAs

I was already 50 before I realized that even with a free account, I was entitled to Lesson of the Devoted (extra XP for ~30 minutes a day) and some other AAs. I had to scroll through them all to see which ones I could buy. The great news is that AAs come really fast. I read that there is a multiplier that scales from something like 500x to 1x as you get your first 500 AAs, to help characters not be so squishy and ineffective. There's also an autogrant feature, but that's only for paid accounts.

Heroic Characters

For a fee, you can magically make any character become either level 85 (~$35?) or 100 (~$40?). This is supposed to give you about 1000 AAs and bring all your skills up to what is normal for characters of that level.

Extended Targets

I guess this is pretty useful on raids, but it seems to just take up space for now.

Purity, Power Sources, etc.

Even though these were entering the game as I was leaving, I have no clue what, why, or how, other than they make armor better modularly, much like some crafted armore used to take Symbols which gave the gear a good chunk of its final stats.

Currencies

I see a whole tab of alternate currencies - There seems to be a comprehensive table at https://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Alternate_currency that I need to study.