Reverse Engineering EQ Protocol: Thoughts and Tips ?

[unficyp]

Hi all,

i'm following this project for a long time now and i tried to run my own server to look around and visit zones i wasn't able to visit in EQ Live.

But there is one thing i wanted to know since i first tried eqemu:

How do you approach to reverse engineer the network protocol ?
I'm an programmer myself,i have clue about C/C++/networking but i never got in touch with reverse engineering so i always wanted to know how this is done ...
What tools do you use (except for a packet sniffer) or did you write your own ?
What difficulties did you expect ? Where do you start ?

thanks for your thoughts (and for reading) !