Everquest

Rating:
Summary: Not Really What I Needed
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer. This guide was a help to this newbie but essentially boils down to "Where's the Beef?" The spell listing was nice and the guide cleared up a few questions I had about how to get some things done but as a "strategy" guide it left me cold.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Value
Review: This boxed collection of miniature Everquest strategy guides is a sketchy purchase, even at Amazon's discounted prices.

Consisting of four small paperback volumes, Prima's set is not much better than the included manual in the latest "Everquest Evolutions" retail software box. For example, even though there are two separate books dedicated to the expansions "Shadows of Luclin" and "Ruins of Kunark", much of the information is exactly the same, making you wonder why they bothered killing the trees to make them distict tomes in the first place. Worse, the information in the two expansion-specific books provide little or no insight into the various hunting zones, history, lore, quests, items, spells, and quirks of each. You will be able to obtain far more detailed and useful information from free Internet sites like EQAtlas.com, crgaming.com, and Allakhazam.com than you will reading the entire Prima series of "strategy guides". In fact, the guides even admit this glaring deficiency in the prefaces. Providing a disclaimer that the guides do not provide spoilers is admirable in terms of disclosure, but it also begs the question: why bother at all?

Here is my final assessment of this product.

Pros:
Newbies who lost their original game manuals may find something of value here
The spellbook is a nice reference, though there are always new spells and stat changes being done to the game

Cons:
The price
No quest spoilers
Few maps of "hunting" (adventuring) zones, dungeons, or anywhere dangerous--maps that are provided show no NPC detail
Little insight into gameplay strategies for each of the various classes, no new tips on how to adventure as a group or how to solo--basically, there's little reason to call these "strategy guides".
The Kunark guide is especially worthless with more emphasis on fan fiction-style anecdotes than on the game itself

Summary:
While it's nice to have a hard copy of spell lists and a few zone maps, the Prima books are a bad investment overall. At best, they are merely very high level guides to the game as a whole, and not very good ones at that. There is really no reason to purchase this product unless you lost your original manuals and don't feel like printing reams of data off of the Internet. However, the Internet is clearly the best avenue for players who want to improve their game.

No recommendation

Rating:
Summary: Great Collection for any EQer from newbie-> expert
Review: this is a very good collection of 4 books which help explain and understand EQ a little better. Covers from the orig.EQ-> SoL...sorry no coverage of LoY or LDoN. but the main thing in this collection is the Spell Book guide. It has most of the spells for all of the classes, no second guessing if you have all the spells you will need to become a powerful char. I highly recommend this collection of EQ guide books.