You're referring to Laberintica. Great rogue/player. He's been doing that every server since before phinny, and his proof of how prioritizing full resist gear over dps gear in the early expansions will double your DPS is a large part in why Kubat and myself have been big pushers of that motto for many years. Lab goes out of his way to camp the most obscure items from classic/kunark to max out his resists for each specific fight so that he never has to dodge even in VP. It does have it's limitations in classic though considering you cannot fully 100% resist naggy/vox aoe's, you are cap'd at 75%. But more often than not your group healer can keep you healed through the 25% of the time you are getting hit, unless you get several unlucky rolls in a row.
Any server that RI plays on that also has other guilds trying to compete usually doesn't end up as cut and dry as other servers. While generally the guild who is organized enough to dominate all of OW will also most likely win all of the early expansions, this is not historically true for RI. Really just depends on how hard the other guilds push in Kunark/velious. RI historically doesn't push very hard in expansion launches relative to other try hard guilds. Mabbu from my understanding doesn't really care too much about expansion launch wins, but that's just always the impression I got. I could be wrong there. Maybe things have changed in the last couple TLP's. I only went up against them one time on a Kunark launch on a server where they did OW quite successfully, and was able to keep them out of VP for a month.
I'd guess that FTE or TGR still have a really good shot at winning kunark despite the fact that RI is controlling OW. Really just comes down to how much RI is going to care about winning Kunark.
