The 2023 Launch Season is in our rearview mirror. For Reckless Ascension (“RA”), there were ups and there were downs. Also, apparently leashing bosses is bad mmmmmm’kay?
First the ups, in the T2 launch, we came 2nd and beat RoI. When you want to list notable achievements, beating RoI in anything (well except getting all the cheeves first which we did last year), is right up there when it comes to modern EQ. They have been the best and proved it once again in T3 this year. Another up was a recent infusion of talent RA pulled in from some server transfers, these new folks integrated very nicely with our existing force and really put us in position to be a force for years to come. Coming 3rd overall in 2023 was one of those bitter sweet sorta things, in previous years, we looked at the RoI time and thought to ourselves, we have no idea how they did that, this year however, we knew EXACTLY how they did what they did and we all know if we had executed the way we did in Beta, we were due to be seconds ahead or behind RoI’s time.
Now to the downs, T1, we came fourth, that was embarrassing, we were better than that as a guild, we leashed a boss on Pit Fight, dropped a DZ by mistake and were generally really sloppy. T2 was clean for the most part, but T3…oh T3, what a mess! A laggy instance on the Gumdrop raid saw all of our banner burning casters banner into a misplaced banner and get immediately murdered by an aura. That destroyed our burn and DPS for the rest of the gumdrop raid. After this, I was convinced we were now playing for 3rd at best with one more mistake putting us 4th.
Our Dusk/Dawn strat was FLAWLESS and went perfect, off tank golems, heal boss, kill boss, run emotes win. Exactly as we drew it up. After such a smooth Dusk/Dawn, I felt like 2nd might once again be a possibility, but knew that 1st was out of reach due to the earlier screw up.
Finally, the bridge raid. The strat was clean, kill mobs at start, no dead tanks, no dead DPS, pull boss to end of bridge, burn him down, while depoping wisps and SKs making sure the centi’s don’t murder people. The boss was down to 30% and I was convinced we had 2nd locked up, boss was dropping fast nobody was going to miss an emote and centis were not getting anywhere close to camp, nothing could go wrong!
And then, disaster struck, the mob positioning combined with a much larger than previously seen aura caused all of our tanks to get tossed out of the event area and then saw the boss follow the tanks and leash and reset…not once, but twice!
You could feel the energy in Discord go from 10/10 to 0/10 in seconds. It was tough to take, but, we soldiered through and found ourselves in 3rd for the NoS rankings. We certainly had our sights set higher, but, big gratz goes out to RoI and SR for their excellent performances and we look forward to our next battle in 2024.
One more thing, the obligatory recruiting mention, ya, we are mostly full, but, if you’re exceptional, please reach out to Meckwell in game, we would love to chat!