I will admit I'm a bitter asshole, however I just don't understand the appeal. If you truly desire to relive classic Everquest then there seems to be other servers that are free and will deliver a closer experience.
Retail has instanced raiding and advanced looting. Not all progression servers have instanced raiding, but Angarr will. IDK if I could ever play EQ again without these two features. I don't think any of the free EMU's offer these features. There is also zone load balancing. If an exp zone gets too many players, another instance (pick) will spawn to accommodate more players. These features make for, IMO, a much better gaming experience.
Don't think of the servers as classic, because they are not. If you want "classic", you play p99. If you want to have fun and not have to poopsock, you play on the progression servers.
Yeah they nerfed pets in general and added some kind of augs, im not sure which augs got put in but from i heard they did that to balance melee toons. Shaman dots got nerfed as well.
Raids mobs are also buffed, iv heard it went from the standard 32k hp to 2mil for classic raid mobs.
Melee have been changed. Monk fist damage, general damage calcuclations, and they did add some augs. Some stun, some dot, some do DD proc. They seem to benefit warriors the most.
Shamans are due to be un-nerfed on the next patch. They changed DoTs for the live servers and got some unintended results on the progression servers.
Mitigation of the Mighty is the buff on raid mobs. MotM reduces the amount of damage the mob takes.
I play on Phinigel and it's a blast. I am guilded with several old SoD players.
I will probably roll a toon or two on Agnarr to see the initial rush, but I dont want to raid the same content again. I'm looking forward to GoD, OOW, DoN, and other content that I've never seen.