...............with EQ2 is when they changed damage from an overall number, such as "you get hit for 391 damage", to a percentage. See my wife and I usually just duo because we are parents of five children and full time college students. Its very difficult for us to commit the time, any consistent time at all to grouping without having a very patient group. Its not that we can't group, or we are anti-social, but how would you like to be in a group where the tank had to afk every 10 minutes to take care of something? Yea, I'm that person and I know, and it wouldn't be a lot of fun. So we end up just doing our own thing at our own pace so we are not annoying anyone else with our constant AFK's.
So when they switched to a % based damage model, the wife and I were screwed. We couldn't go back and do the older content that at the time was to difficult, because no matter how many HP you had, the mobs hit at the same overall damage they originally did 2-3 years ago. Whos brilliant idea was that? You get crap experience for it, the gear is way to old to be of any use, we just did it to say we did it and for FUN!

Anyway, rant over haha

I wasn't aware they switched to % based damage, has been years since I actually played for real though. That does kind of suck as I use to duo with a rl friend. This is content related and won't be an issue here though, thank god.

I think it was around DOV they started it. We used to always tackle 2-3 expansions ago content because with each expansion, we would get better and better gear and be able to duo the older stuff with just my wife and I, and if it was tougher, we'd add a merc. Actually we always use mercs now. If you remember with DOV gear they doubled and sometimes tripled the gear stats. So prior to DOV say we had 13k hp, with average DOV gear it jumped to 35K+ depending on your class. My wife being a tank is near 40K HP now, but when the expansion was released, she maxed out around 13K. So the wife and I were all excited to go back and get through some of the older content that we could never do without a full group. So we trout in to...ohh forgot the name of the zone, doesn't matter but its all of them now, and the same mobs that hit for say 550 before, and casted for 3k max, yea.....my wife gets aggro and I send my pet in and WhAM, "You have been hit with lightening of vengeance for 77K". We thought it was some weird outlier so we gathered our corpses and trotted back in, and WHAM, "You have been struck with deadly disease for 92k".

So yea, the more zones we tried the more things stayed the same. Its % based so there is no going to do older content without a full group, and who would want to go older content for crappy gear and littlel experience? Thats when we pretty much quit playing EQ2. Right after DOV.