In our last post we talked about the annual cycle of a guild and that we were smack dab in the middle of racing season, well, it all came to a head Saturday March 5th and we were excited! We spent an obscene amount of time tuning our T3 strat, assigning tanks to the right mobs and ensuring every one of our members had all the right focus effects and items to ensure max dps and survivability. We knew our strats were solid and when given the chance to execute that we had a chance to hang with the best guilds in all of EverQuest.
We had moved up from 4th (T1) to 3rd (T2) but we wanted more, our goals were simple, be the best!
The first event out of the gate was Oubliette of Light, our strat was simple, burn down the 8 early mobs, and follow around Robnie to make sure none of the auras killed or imprisoned anyone on the final boss Keltakun. I will be haunted by the calls of “FOLLOW THE FISH” and “COME TO THE FISH” as they are still ringing in my head. We knew this event cold, and our results showed, we had the event down cold and our results showed, we had the event dead in 18 minutes and 52 seconds, a full 2 minutes ahead of everyone else.
The second event of the day was Primal Vampire. This event could get messy, but we had consistent success on it in beta, so were a confident bunch heading into Bloodfalls. The event, for those of you who have not tried it is sort of complex, so you are fighting this boss, then adds pop, you have to kill the adds and they drop bloods, which you hand to out to make auras. A bit later, ticks show up, these ticks lock onto specific raid members and the only way to get them off those raid members is either for that raid member to die, using a specific agro locking disc or, doing a tradeskill combine of two of the aforementioned bloods, targeting the tick and clicking the freshly combined blood. Sounds simple right? Well, its not, because you only have enough bloods to agro lock SOME of the adds, the others are just going to run around murdering people. There is an element of luck to this as well, if the ticks spawn and choose tanks as their targets, well, you got really lucky, but if they chose caster, well, to quote one of our bards favorite saying…RIIIIIIP! While all this is going on, baby vampires spawn and like any baby, they start growing…so you need to DPS them down, because if they grow to full size, they reset the entire event. But wait, there’s more! (RIP Billy Mays) There are also nasty auras on the ground that you need to stay out of and, the boss charms random people and the only way to break the charm is kill one of the many adds and if one of your charm people dies somehow…well, that is basically a raid wipe. Ya, the event is a challenging one. Our run was solid, but not clean, so it took us 34 minutes from Oubliette death, to Primal Death. We teetered on a wipe at one point, having maybe one cleric, two tanks and a couple random DPS alive, but we held it together, but we were now down from 1st, all the way to 4th, being passed by Realm of Insanity, Machin Shin and Silent Redemption.
So, final event, Close the Gate (CtG) is in the same zone as Primal Vampire, but it’s a bit of a run from one end of the zone to the other as you can tell by Google Maps:
RoI next leveled it, by running a single toon over, starting the event and then resetting it, which ported the entire raid force across the zone instantly. It was brilliant and it’s one of the reasons RoI is the best guild in EverQuest (for now). Now, we could be sticklers and say, RoI technically wiped to CtG as a result of employing this tactic but that would be petty and RA is not petty…but I will leave it to you dear readers to draw your own conclusions. So, back to event, basic rundown, it’s a ring event, mobs pop, kill em, more mobs pop, kill em, boss pops along with 8 adds, kill them too, then pass wiping emotes, kill every spawning add and win. Its sound easy, especially when compared to the Primal Vampire, but honestly, it’s not. We spent more time as a guild on CtG than any other event in beta, so to say we were confident, would be an understatement.
The event went smooth as silk, tanks grabbed their assignments, DPS murdered things at an epic rate and the healers said nobody is dying on my watch. We finished T3 with a 10 minutes lead on the #3 guild Silent Redemption and a 23 minute advantage over the #4 ranked Machin Shin.
It was truly a Reckless Ascending as we claimed the #2 gamewide ranking for the Terror of Luclin expansion.
A shout out to SR, MS and of course RoI, much respect to you folks (except Bahdah, for not providing memes) for being great guilds and competing with us on a year in and year out basis, can’t wait till next year!
RoTE please keep streaming cause that was pure entertainment!
P.S. This is where we usually talk about recruiting, we want to be honest, we are pretty full right now, but with summer vacations coming up in a couple months, we would be open to speaking to All-Star raiders who play their classes at an exceptional level, especially bards.