I don't hate on EQ as much as other people here do. It was far from perfect, but it's also the reason most of us are still on this site, 20 some years later. I do think it's odd (and I've stated this before) that in 1999, we had like 14 starting classes, 12 starting races, and 13 starting cities, and I don't think any modern game has come close to having that many options. EQ also got loot correct, in that a lot of the items that really improved your ability to play were really highly sought after and difficult to obtain (fungi tunic, mana stone, FBSS, Cloak of Flames, etc...) and made them that much more memorable. Pretty cool that even all of these years later, I can still rattle off like 100 items that dropped in that game, even ones that didn't help my specific class. The dungeons were also very well designed, albeit they definitely could've used more to spread out the population. Seb, LGuk, KC, Solb, there just needed to be a few more dungeons per level group.
Anyway, as someone who played a Wizard as my main, I can definitely attest that the game was not very well optimized whatsoever. Most casters who weren't Clerics or Enchanters sucked ass in a group, as we'd have to sit and med again after 6 or 7 casts, and it was even more fun when half of those spells were resisted. Yay! I did 400 total damage!
All that being said, if another MMO came out that was more EQ than WoW, I'd definitely play it. I don't have 18 hours a day anymore to sink into a game like that, but man would it be fun to get that engrossed in a MMO again. And it's not just rose colored glasses, I liked a lot of what EQ did right, even if you had to wade through some of the shit to get to the flowers.