In the annual life cycle of a raid guild, there are three seasons, 1) Farming 2) Beta and 3) Racing. Well, #3 happened yesterday. RA member studied our strat guide from Beta, spent time coaching up new members and applicants on what to expect, built up optimized groups and replaced our CoV power sources with the shiny new ToL ones.
So, 3pm eastern hit and we started hailing the NPC to get our instance. Instance pops and zone times are slower than usual due to every single guild in EQ trying to access an instance. Almost certainly this was felt by every guild on every server, but it does not change the frustration level as you’re always nervous that it’s your server and you are losing precious seconds. Once we got all our members into the Free the Goranga raid, the event was pretty lag free, just like Beta. Our strat was solid, nobody missed an emote, everything went according to plan. We finished the event, free grabbed the chest and were out the door 31 minutes and 12 seconds after launch. This gave us a solid 6.5 minute lead over RoTE as the first guild to free those clueless Goranga (we really hoped they didnt get captured again this week, but they did).
The second raid in our plan was Shei, now for those of you who have not done Shei, basically, 30 people beat the crap out of this gimp boss mob on a platform and the other 24 in raid do the EQ version of Dance Dance Revolution on the bottom floor. Its entertaining and sort of silly, but, 17 minutes felt about right from completing Free the Goranga to completing Shei.
The final raid and where everything hit the fan was Aten Ha Ra. On race day, everything is intense and fast (that’s what she said). Once we had 25 or so folks inside the AHR event, Robnie (our RL) called for those in zone to start the event, figuring the rest of us would catch up quickly. What Robnie did not know was that while we are zoning out of Shei, a bunch of us crashed, the thing was, since the zoning screen was still showing, many of us had no clue we had crashed so just sat there cursing Rallos Zek for the slow zone times. Once we clued in, we restarted EQ to log back in. Upon logging back in, we found out that our DZ was borked. Robnie could not get into the raid to direct, many of our DPS and tanks were stuck outside the zone unable to zone in and the poor 25 folks in the zone, were fighting for their lives and really not progressing the event that quickly. After some DZ shenanigans, we finally got everyone into zone just before the blobs popped, which is where the event REALLY gets intense. The AHR event is cool, because you are juggling a bunch of things at once, one, emotes to run away or you silence the raid, two, these golems that are running around the room trying to kill you if they get close enough, three adds popping and 4 bosses, some of which split into multiple mini bosses on their death. Its controlled chaos.
Anyway, AHR took 35 minutes, RA members were devastated, we felt like we did not really get a chance to show off all the work we had put in during beta into those events…but, there was a happy ending, even with our AHR adventures, RA placed 3rd overall in the official T2 rankings that can be found at Elite Gamers Lounge.
http://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/progress/expansion.php?exp_id=99
We would like to offer our sincere congratulations to RoI and SR for coming #1 and #2 respectively and look forward to racing with you all in a months time for T3 launch. May the best guild win!
P.S. RA is still recruiting, we could use another bard, a wizard and a berserker. If you’re interested, contact Bristle.Meckwell in game.