Holiday Celebrations

For some strange reason, minor holidays have been very good to us in 2010.  On the day before Martin Luther King Day, we defeated Fippy Darkpaw for the first time.  On St. Patrick’s Day, we defeated the Steel Behemoths for the first time.  On Tax Day for the US, we defeated The Beast for the first time.  And just 2 days after my 40th birthday (ok maybe this one’s a bit of a reach), we defeated The Unburrowing for the first time.  All were server firsts and all events have been on farm ever since.

However, since we had only just gotten enough coins to move on to tier 6.5 Underfoot raids and hadn’t been able to try any of the new raids yet, we didn’t have very high expectations coming into yet another minor holiday, Cinco de Mayo.  We weren’t really sure how to properly celebrate Cinco de Mayo and youtube really wasn’t much help.  Since we didn’t really want to sit around eating tacos and watching Klavyn and Orbus “whacking their pinatas”, we decide to celebrate the holiday “hillbilly style”.  No we didn’t put on our overalls, climb in our pickup trucks, pickup a first cousin, and head out for a night of moonshine and cow-tipping.  Instead, we put on our overalls, picked up our shotguns, and headed into the woods for a night of vermin slaughtering.  In EQ terms, we put on our gear, met up with our raiding partners, and headed to The Foundation to slaughter lots and lots and lots and lots of burynai as part of the Masked Invaders raid.

Not So Great Expectations

Since we barely had 60 coined and we knew almost nothing about this event, we expected this to be a learning experience with lots and lots of dying.  When we could barely field a raid of 40 people due to gimp issues, we lowered our expectations even more.  After a couple resets and a partial wipe, we decided on a strategy to attempt, and a strange thing happened.  Even though we didn’t have much of a raid force and even though we didn’t have much of a clue what we should be doing, we kept progressing the event, and our first real try kept going on and on and on and on.  Here is an amazingly accurate summary of the event.  (This video is so similar to the raid that I must conclude it is the inspiration for the raid.)  Actually, since this “learning attempt” ended up running over 2 hours, the experience was actually more like the extended version of the video (provided you watch it for the whole 6.5 minutes without turning off the sound or looking away).  Right around the 2 hour mark, at a time when we were usually long done raiding, we realized that we might be able to actually get to the boss on our first real try at this event and maybe even win, but we also realized it would probably take us another half an hour to get there.  Nonetheless, almost everyone stayed and we pushed on to the end, taskadding every bot we could load in case of a win.

Amazingly, after about 3.5 hours in the instance and about 2.5 hours spent on this single attempt, we survived many close calls to finally see the spam none of us expected that night…

The survivors huddled around the winter harvest…

and the loot we found inside was better than anything we’d ever gotten from a pinata.

So a raid that is locked behind 3 other raids and drops loot like this can be beaten basically on the first attempt by 40 ish people who had no real idea what they were doing and were getting sleepy to boot?  Seems rather shocking really, but I guess thats the current state of raiding and raid tuning in Everquest today.  We’ll add this event to the farm anyways and will attempt to learn it better so it doesn’t take us 2.5 hours in the future.  Its a shame for the rest of this server that this raid is locked behind The Unburrowing.

Epilogue

The late hour that this raid ended spawned some very amusing chatter including the worried rantings of a certain ranger telling us that his wife has never been this angry with him.  (I still haven’t seen him online since Wednesday!)  It also spawned this exchange from the lone Euro with the stamina (mania?) to stay for the entire raid.

Kysumu, I hope you enjoy the new title, new key, super-shiny new loot, destruction of your sleep-wake cycle (and 10 Achievement points!) that you earned by staying up with us and seeing this thing through!  All kidding aside though, Kysumu is emblematic of the type of people that populate our raiding alliance.  Most of us are just people that love this game and want to see new stuff and attack new challenges even when it likely means scores of deaths and lost sleep and lost spousal faction with no loot or other in game reward to show for it.  This is the attitude that keeps us strong and moving forward and it was certainly on display tonight.

What’s Next?

Well, we now have the 3 Tier 6 Underfoot raids on a one day farm.

I expect we’ll be able to complete Masked Invaders on the same day soon as well, and we’ll be spending much of our time working on The Wrath of Brath which is the next Tier 6.5 raid.  With the jump in difficulty we expect from Underfoot raids going forward, we’re expecting many weeks to months of farming the first 4 raids to gear up for the challenges ahead.  Unfortunately, that will still leave a couple nights free, which means we’ll be continuing to farm SoD events for at least a little while longer.

PS – Thanks to Draedon for supplying some screenshots for this update.