It is not actually that far from EQ he needs to remake.
Everyone and their dog knows what things were broken in EQ, and many people understand the principles of what made EQ so addictive in it's gameplay and caught people's attention and lives for years.
To do list from EQ
1) Re-create the sense of "gamble" to the game. Rare named mobs with rare highly sought after drops that either create A) higher utility (fishbone earring, levi cloak, dark elf mask, circlet of shadow, Holgresh beads, ect...) B) higher then normal power such as the top end weapons and straight stats armor provide and C) Power increasing items that affect downtime/regen/haste (FBSS, Regen BP's, Mana regen increasers, ect...). These types of items that people have to try and try again to get can be put into community dungeons but they can also easily be added to rare mobs in instanced dungeons such as the flute and mount drops in Undead Strat.
2) A death penalty. You need a sense of danger and the chance of loss to create the above gamble and stop people from just mindlessly blundering into dungeons and ramming their heads against the content with no chance of loss but with the chance of gain.
3) Higher end loot in social (group and raid) content. The better items should be in the dungeons and off of the raid mobs. There should not be getting near/at raid level loot from using badges or some other such crap.
4) Maintain travel requirements. No insta-travel all across the world. Have special classes and occasional warp points such as EQ provided but work to maintain challenge in travel and create a sense of scale to the world.
5) Isolated racial starting areas. Maintain racial starting areas and do not allow warping your Gnome to the Dark Elf city to group with your friend with ease. If that friend wants to travel the world to get to the Dark Elf city it should be a challenging journey as it was in EQ and seeing a gnome at the Dark Elf city early in the game should create a sense of wonder knowing what that person went through to get there.
6) Significant level curve/exp requirements. These are needed to prolong the life of a game and ensure that the bulk of the playerbase does not eat through content inside of 2 weeks of play and thus quit the game.
7) Community dungeon and raid content. Not exclusively community, there should be instanced content as well, but much like original WOW there should be things like the world dragons that guilds can compete for and some very large community dungeons where you can run into other adventurers not in your own party.
Things EQ did that should be avoided.
1) Significant out of combat downtime. There is no way a person should be meditating for 5 minutes to get to full mana or waiting 10 minutes for their 600 hitpoints to go up 2 points per a tick every 6 seconds until they are back to full health. There should be mana drinks that recharge mana quickly and bandages that heal quickly when out of combat.
2) Hidden quests. While the "talking to a NPC" way of stumbling into quests worked in EQ it is outdated and should never be repeated. There should be some visual sign that a NPC has a quest. Perhaps not a big goofy question mark above their head and instead a slight pulsing glow that lets you know they are a NPC of interest and not just scenery.
3) Quest rewards being loot only. Experience should be rewarded for a complete quest. Furthermore things like AA point type advances can also be added to quests.
4) Zoned outdoor world. The world in a new EQ-like game should most definitely not be zoned or instanced and should instead be un-zoned and un-instanced.
5) Merchant bought spells and skill advances. After the very early levels the power increases should be obtained from the adventuring and questing in the world, spells should be found in dungeons in libraries, skills should be learned via fighting a certain mob-type or finding some hermit at the top of a mountain and doing a quest for him.
6) Soloability for all classes. While grouping should be encouraged through better loot, higher exp rates, and other such boosts all classes should be able to solo much of the content in the game to gain experience with minimal downtime to make the game more accessible to newer players and allow shorter play periods to be productive without the need to find a group and get to a dungeon.
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By in large keeping the things that were good about EQ and made it so addicting while getting rid of the few obviously broken things such as the regen rates/downtime, lack of ability to solo as many of the classes, ect... and maintaining many of the things that made EQ such a draw that now lack in newer MMORPG's (WOW initially actually had far more of the things that made EQ great such as un-instanced raid mobs, rare loot in some dungeons, a relatively reasonable length exp curve, ect... and those things helped it in it's initial success).
. I'm sorry, but every game, I think literally all of them, has improved on EQ's balance. The only reason they feel more out of balance is because they highlight their imbalances by putting things like low population based raid caps in. (Even when EQ did have raid caps, they were fairly generous--except for some absolute top end guilds, you were usually concerned with filling the raid over getting what you wanted in terms of classes.)