The Spirit Realm

Hello everyone I'm glad to see that the Shaman's Crucible is still around, but over the last few years I've sort of petered off in my devotion to EQ and fell vastly behind in the amount of knowledge I ought to have of everything in the game so please forgive me if my questions are slightly dumb.
I have fairly recently played an SK up to level 74 and still remember all the basic game mechanics that I need to know and since a friend of mine just rejoined the fabulous world of Norrath I rerolled a barbarian shaman to play with him.

Currently we are both level 55 and based on my plans we should be aiming for 59 at which point we will both grab a full set of defiant and the defiant vendor items or dwerium items for jewelry slots and grab our first few AA's now here is where it gets tricky as I understand it for AA's I should go Run 3 and Regen 3 but after that I'm somewhat lost.

Also I have a tank merc and my friend currently has a rogue merc but I'm not sure if we'd be better off if he traded the rogue for a cleric and I went from multitasking healing, dps, buffing, slowing, and debuffing to a more dps centric role in other words could I make up for the dps lost by dropping the rogue and would our group function better that way?

Furthermore since we have been leveling so quickly I strongly feel as though we will be missing some spells along the way at least until we hit the mid 60's and the xp slows down drastically and I would like to know which spells in the 50's and 60's are crucial and which I could live without? I'd also like to mention that I have bought all the vendor available spells for the 50s that were on the abysmal sea spell merchant so the ones I'm missing are the droppable/quested ones.

Additionally I know there are many group based tasks and instances and so forth in the game now and I was wondering in which expansions mercenaries can count as members of your group to get these tasks or if we'll just have to avoid them or pick up space takers from the lobby or some such?

Also are shaman pets affected by pet focus items, and if yes where/when would I find one?

And can anyone tell me how to open the potion belt because I can't find the darn button and population in general has been iffy about helping.

And last question I claimed the worg mount since I don't have the latest xpans to get the lion but it feels sort of slow I understand I can upgrade it by talking to an npc but have no idea of where I could hunt to get enough xp and plat to afford the 100k mounts which would be combined with it?

Sorry for the wall of text and the vast array of questions and thank you for any help you can provide me I'd include a magelo but for the time being it could be essentially said that I am naked in terms of the gear which becomes available in the mid/high levels since I merely have a few slots filled with lowbie defiant drops and classic chainmail. I'd also welcome any redirection to other threads discussing these matters and if I violated a posting rule I hope the mods will delete this thread and let me know what I should do. I simply felt that rather than spamming all the boards with threads one in general might do the trick.

Lots of posts around about the gameplay aspects in your post.

As far as the potion belt... On the options screen there is a tab for keys. It has all of your key definitions. Select "UI" (or something like that - I forget the exact wording) from the dropdown list on that tab. The list of key mappings for toggling various UI windows will be shown. You can sort the list by description by clicking on the title at the top of the list. Toggling the potion belt window is something like Shift/P. If your's is blank, you can create one.

Thank you both. But in reference to your statement that there is a plethora of data on my gameplay questions I have to say I disagree. I've been scrounging about the forums for a few days trying to find the information I wanted with little luck.

For gear I have found the top gear per era thread but that also isn't a good guide for gear a shaman could get soloing or duoing at X level with Y equipment or what I should keep an eye on buying in the bazaar. This could seem trivial to the guys who can just run off to the max level and get help from a few level 90 friends while wearing gimpy gear but that isn't really an option for me. If I find myself too far up in levels and insufficiently geared or aa'd I'm going to have a tough time digging myself out of that hole and it would be an unpleasant waste of time that I don't really want to deal with.

There is data on the spells in the Wiki page but based on my reading of it, I thought it was more of an outline of what spells you could get which are still useful at max level and not what spells will you need to not be a useless git while getting to max level.

I saw zero data relating to the tasks beyond some stuff about how taskadds are ruining the game because of mercs which implies that they can be used for some of them.

And as for the merc the thread I saw appeared to be mostly about whether a tank could function as a beefy dps which isn't what I was looking for which was a comparison of melee dps merc to shaman dps and whether I should trade him out for a dedicated healer.

Might I also suggest the WIKI button at the top? Yes, I think I just might.

It takes you to http://samanna.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Generally speaking, as a Shaman you get more power from leveling than from AAs - although, as the guides say, there are particular AAs which should be acquired as soon as possible.

potion belt default = shift+p (had to look this one up the other day
For spells that made a difference when I was 55-65 were all EP's (etheral parchments) from PoP. They can be found in most of those zones. PoV, BoT, PoS, were prob some of my favorites back then. Level 55 is your 75% slow and 65 is you unresistable malo (a) gets resisted a ton which leads to the need for (b). Once you hit 65 head to WoS for runes...really comes down to rate of levels and what content your wanting to cover. After 65 things get a bit muddled with a heavy expansion release (2 a year?iirc). Usually when I start a toon I'll research via Allah http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spel ... ion=search