In a nutshell...
-Old/Kunark: Splitpaw is now extremely tough and shitty and worthless. Nurga/Droga are now revamped to 50-60ish zones.
-Velious: Plane of Mischief now has a zone in in Great Divide. (follow the stream through shardwurm cave and keep running). It's no longer a quest zone, it now has mobs that hit for 300's and progressively higher. NTOV is 1-2 groupable with decent groups - but they've added something called a 'ring event' to it that basically makes the last guy (vulak?) not worth killing due to it's ass-painery.
-Luclin is worthless, asides from the Paludal Caverns zone - which is hands down the best zone for leveling toons from 1-20. It does offer horses (bought in bazaar at stables) - which allow casters to med without having sit agro and med while they move/cast. The 100kpp horses can move about as fast as max bard speed.
-Planes of Power zones give good XP modifiers, but the mobs are a bit tougher. Progression is generally a waste of time as no one does it anymore and no one raids there asides from PoTime - however if you want access to the higher zones (Sol Ro Tower/Plane of Tactics), there are some relatively simple alternate access quests. If you want access to PoTime you will have to raid there and loot a key (they regularly rot). There is a vendor in Plane of Tranquility near the bank that sells invisibility and insta-gate potions.
Access to Sol Ro Quest:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/ques ... quest=3018
Plane of Tactics Access Quest:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/ques ... quest=2292
-Ykesha is useless asides from it's map features and extra bank slots, and armor dye (bazaar 'prismatic' for vial of prismatic dye). Download maps at
http://www.mapfiend.net/
-LDON is now obsolete with Dragons of Norrath out. Just be sure to go to your home city and talk to the NPC (yellow emote will say there name on zoning in) and do that little quest, so you can have access to the Magus's in the LDON camps - who can port you to any of the other camps. LDON introduced augmentations, which you can attach to equips for additional stats. To add augments, click on the golden pools in LDON camps that look like a birdbath. There is a gnome merchant in butcherblock, bazaar, and guildhall that sells distillers that remove augments (use birdbath to do this).
-GoD is generally useless to non raiders, everything there hits very hard and generally does not give worthwhile XP compared to things from later expansions. Noteworthy is the 'Tribute' system (check your home town for a tribute master) - which is essence is: you trade in droppable items for 'points', and you can use these points to buy 10 minute increments of all sorts of abilities - like max haste/mana regen/focus effects. ALT+U opens the tribute ability window. Just be sure to de-activate it once you're done, or it will use up all your points.
-OOW gives decent exp zones and new spells - these spells drop from nameds (in the form of minor/lesser/greater/glowing Muramite Runes) - you turn in these runes to 'Karsor the Mad' in Dranik's scar. There are better grouping options and loot rewards in Dragons of Norrath imo, but OOW is still decent. Riftseekers Sanctum is awesome XP, but the stuff is very tough there (1200ish hits) so unless you have well equipped friends you probably won't get many groups there. Noteworthy are 'MPG Trials', which are 15 minute (quite intense) missions that offer 200+hp items as a reward.
-Dragons of Norrath gives some interesting things. You do missions, and as a reward you get 'crystals' that you can use to buy armor/augments - DoN stuff is better, cheaper, and more time/EXP efficient than LDON Hands down. The crystals are droppable so you can sell them in bazaar if you want - can get 4000-5000pp per mission like this. You also get a token that you hand back to the vendor for faction: which you need to be able to start missions (I suggest simply joining DoN groups to get faction - dont bother doing the solely faction tasks). There is DoN progression - the first two tiers are arguably worth it (get +10 all stats and +10 all stat caps, then an innate extra 250mana/hp ), but not critically important:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/ques ... quest=3061.
Also noteworthy is the guild lobby/guild hall (zone from PoK). The lobby offers corpse summons (practically removes risk factor of dangerous zones), and the guild hall offers double-regen pools - tradeskill areas, and a port system to take you to out-of-the-way zones.
-DoD brings some interesting stuff. There are monster missions, where you play as a lower level monster and do stuff asides from the typical kill-grind. They give about 1AA (and some of them can be done very quickly - making them an interesting XP option), and offer item drops around the 100hp level (one gives a 150hp ring:o). The good monster missions are in Nektulous (fairy mission), Lavastorm (clockwork gnome mission), and Undershore (Sporali Mission).
There are also 'spirit shrouds' - you talk to a shroud master in PoK (use find button), and can turn yourself into a monster of all sorts of different classes. The practical use of this is the goblin rogue shroud - you can hide/sneak and pick locks, which is very useful for quests and such. Shrouds also are not on the same faction as you, so you can slaughter stuff with them and not have any effect on your actual toon's faction.
Probably the best thing are the spell missions --- they reward each party member with upper PoTime quality loot. If you have well equipped friends (cuz these missions are HARD), they can remove themself from the mission and add you to the task at the end, and you will get the item.
Misc: ALT+V brings up LDON mission window. SHIFT+T brings up custom title window. ALT+Z brings up GOD Mission Window. ALT+Q brings up DoN (and DoD) Task Windows. Backspace brings up the Map window. /loadskin default_old gets rid of the shitty new user interface. ALT+Enter puts EQ into windowed mode. Options now has the option to auto-consent group/raid/guild. EQ is much more graphics intensive now - you may want to go to options (at login screen) and turn off a lot of stuff. Check bazaar for gate potions, they are relatively cheap these days. PoK (and bazaar) now has KEI/Haste/Heal potions - very useful.