New to game need helpFollow

Oh boy, that's really broad! It's hard to come from a game that you're intimately familiar with to one you don't know at all, isn't it?

My advice: Dive in. Roll a toon and go for it. The newb experience is pretty darn good, and you shouldn't have any problems. If you do, we're here, just ask anything. And use that hand search box up in the right corner!

My best piece of newb advice: pick a server with a good population during your regular play time. When you roll a toon the servers will be displayed with population loads. If you are starting that character when you'd usually play, pick a server with a medium-to-high load.

Meanwhile... what'd you play in WoW? Before you burnt out on it, what did you like best about the game?

AA stands for Alternate Advancement and it is a way for you to customize your character so it ends up closer to your playstyle then the default set up might be.

As an example, by carefully tailoring AA points, a warden (one of the two EQ2 druids) can be morphed from being a "root & nuke" kind of healer into being a melee DPS kind of healer. The difference is astounding and can be accomplished through the careful allocation of AA points.

Regarding your original question, since the game leans heavily on the traditional "holy trinity" of tank/DPS/healer, you really can't go wrong if you pick any one of those arch types as a base character.

Since you mentioned melee DPS as a favored style I'd suggest an assassin (straight melee based DPS) or maybe a monk or zerker (both are hybrid DPS/tanks) as a good starting point.

Whatever you choose, welcome and enjoy!

Temps may indeed have the highest quality of heals but the trade off is that they do pathetic levels of damage!

A friend of mine (whose main is a temp) is fond of saying that the only way a temp can kill a mob is to engage it in melee and then wait for it to die of boredom! He is pretty much always LFG.

You must, at some point, check out a frog monk.

Frog monks are the cooliest.

Is there a tutorial like there was in EQPC?

Like Dyadem said, there are starter quests that are vital to do and will teach you a lot. There are also npc's standing near the place where you begin which will explain the basics of the game, fighting, death, collections, banks, ...

Just talk to everyone at first, see what they say, definitely everyone with a feather above their heads. Most npc's are untargettable, so hitting the a button out of chatwhen you target them will not attack them and get you killed, something that did happen in EQ I (at least, I had it happen, more than once). Don't be afraid to wonder and experiment, at worst you can die, which isn' as bad as it used to be.

Also, small tip, don't hand in collections before you hit level 10. All collections are lvl 10 and higher, so they count for your AA's, you don't get any AA xp before you hit 10. The rewards from the collections at a low lvl are not better than the quest rewards so you do not miss out on much. AA's change a lot, they're a very important part of the game, but don't worry all too much at first about it, apart from those collections before lvl 10.