What Made EQ Great? Tell your stories to a filthy casual

Picasso_sl said:

Never dealt with an account transaction but selling narandis crown and mithril boots for 1200 was boss at the age of 15.

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This. I sold several Mith Boots and a set of the AoW monk legs. Enough cash to buy my own car at the age of 17. Felt like a pimp, then realized I missed out on so much pussy due to skipping out on parties for dragon raids.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Car > pussy

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Dude people are still fighting over those dragons today. When was the last time you banged that chick from 8th grade?

Dragons > pussy

/d for donation was terrible. Everyone fell for that stupid shit.

When you're also 16, it's life changing.

If you're 35, on the other hand... Well, you're a creep.

I was a part of plenty of blowjobs...Specifically for loot.

Too bad I wasn't on the receiving end...

I did Luclin and PoP as a member of a semi-casual family guild where most folks were in their 30's. We logged in after work and got down to it. We had near zero turnover rate. We were not a feeder for the top end guild on Brell. Raiding for 2+ years with the same folks brought a level of cohesion that I haven't been a part of since then.

We never fielded more than around 40 folks, but with the tight cohesion we overcame the numbers. On top of that, we didn't rush through progression. When we left Vex Thal, we were fully geared out for PoP, and eventually beat Time, our way.

On our third Emporer Sshrazha (sp) kill, a patch broke the bane weapons needed to kill him. The high end guilds on the server thought we were nuts attempting the kill.

We beat him in about an hour (MT stayed up the duration) using nothing but procs and nukes. We had good clerics, and brought along all our cleric bots that were keyed. We would work the shitty geared/aa'd botted clerics into the CH rotation so the main clerics could med up (post mod rod nerf). Pretty sure my wiz parsed 1/4 million damage minimum that time, was usually about 100k for the VT fights back then.

We beat bigger encounters since then but we all agree that was the high point of our cohesive teamwork.

That (shitty/harsh) game environment produced a kind of player I have not met since.

We were fucking around on our 5th or 6th Vulak kill and nearly wiped as a result. However, we got things under control and managed to win the fight. Sure, we fought for a little over an hour, but I used 200 peridots that fight casting Porlos' Fury. So 200,000 damage. It was a crazy long fight and we SWORE we would wipe, but we pulled through. I learned a lot about timing his AE so that I could dodge in and out without costing extra mana for our clerics. I went without a heal for the final 30 minutes of the fight. It was awesome.

All of the other guild members that died kept begging us to just wipe so that we could start over and kill him already, but no such luck. Keep in mind that Vulak had just over 800k HP, and me doing 200k by myself was almost 1/4 of his total health. One of my favorite kills to date. The most favorite being when we got the world first kill on a "retuned" Emperor Ssra. I don't think that bane weapons were broken back then. This was pretty early on, when only FoH, AL and LoS had killed him previously.

Xarpolis_sl said:

Dragonbane, great timing, and a pair of Nikes.

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Glad I posted that story so I could get one back. Nice fuggin job there.

Fucking Myga, took me a week and half of killing her ph's twice a day till I got her to pop.

I am guessing slow wore off Vulak. Every once in awhile our shamans would space out and down went the MT, immediately I would get summoned and splatted. It was a guild joke, but hey always being number 2 on the hate list was a badge of honor of sorts.


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The Ragefire 1.0 incident.

EQ was a social game above all right? If you wanted to get anywhere you'd better make friends... which usually meant you better help others out first.

This was the incident where you had to call in your favors to avoid an EQ tragedy.

So this cleric buddy and her shaman friend were poopsocking the fire giants for like 5 days. I would stop by once a day or so to shoot the shit, see how it was going, etc.
On the fifth night or so, she finally dropped like a rock with her cleric standing there in Naggy's lair.

Of course. ragefire spawns. This was when there still weren't too many cleric epics on brell, so the spies found out within 20 mins or so, and it was off to the races.

A guild started showing up, they had about 1-2 groups there pretty fast, but that wasn't enough at the time to guarantee a victory. We had a slim chance, but the gate was shutting fast. The guild leader wasn't replying to us, even after telling him how long they had been keeping the FG castle down. It was on. Neither of us was in a raid type guild at the time. It was mostly public raids at that time anyhow.

The shaman chick couldn't wake the cleric up with constant phone calls, she was tanked out hard, she calls me (fucking EQ, talking with someone for the first time in the middle of the night due to drama) and we got a plan together ASAFP.

We petitioned with what was going on, and amazingly a GM popped on us within 5 minutes. We pleaded with him to worldkick her, (5 DAYS MAN, come ON PLEASE kick her!!).

The GM said nothing to us, but it was obvious he got the gist of the situation, and had a heart. The cleric popped an LD over her head. The GM poofed.

At the same time we both called in our favors with all the friends we had helped in the past. 3 groups literally ported from their sebilis and charassis camps with strangers in their groups going 'WTF??' (Dude, you GOTTA help me help this one guy, help this other guy)

We had an appropriate force in Naggy's lair within 15 minutes, which is about as instant as anything happened during Kunark. The other guild was still trying to get their force together. It was the middle of the night after all.

Shammy logs in as the Cleric.

We engaged right as the competing guild finally had their three or four groups.

Zordak Ragefire's skin freezes. Fuck. Yes.

Cleric(Shaman) looted up, gated and camped her out. Would have been nice to see the look on her face when she logged in. Fuck... oh... FUCK YES!!

So yah, I had rezzes locked in for a loooong time after that one!

Funny how I will be elderly some day and never forget some of this shit.

Shit like that has really never happened in any game before or since. That is the essence of EQ right there, stories like Herv's.

Cyni Barhopper of the nameless!?!?

Herv_sl said:

...STUFF...

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You said Brell, right? Just curious what guilds / characters these were.

This server was my old stomping ground before AB (Euro server) opened up.

At that time I had Repic/wiz Mafx/druid for lvl 60's. Can't remember the other names, just been too long.

e: Oh Mafx was probably still in <Skyre Draneth> and Repic was probably still in <Mystical Avengers>

I forget the name of the guild that showed up to contend for Ragefire.

Tbh EQ was a the time a shitgame, dont get me wrong, it was not bad but the mechanics in it was shit, with hell level 59, where your blue bar moved like 4 steps after having spent an entire fucking night at disco, doing endless pulls, then at it was time to leave some assclown further in trained out and with a snap of your fingers even after you had been rezzed, about 3 hours of gametime was wiped from your exp bar.

Running from Qyenos? to Freeport? without sow took like 3 hours or so and if you where unlucky and got aggro along the way and stomped into chutney, you had to start over again naked.

I remember one episode when I had a Barbarian Warrior and took a boat ride from Greater Fey to Kunark along the way there where island with cyclops in it and some dude came on board with a lvl 35 ish cyclop that bashed his brains out and then aggroed all who was onboard, this was prior the instaclick portals to Nexus, so the boat was quite full and all started running circles on the boat in order to survive until the zoneline, was quite funny to see until that cyclop one hit me to oblivion and then I ended up naked at my bind point in Halas, now to find the corpse turned out to be quite a challenge, this was a the very beginning of my eq career, I had just spent around 5 hours running to Freeport from Halas (first and foremost I didnt even know that equipping a torch made you see in the dark, imagine running naked in gnolls cave leading out to Qyenos hills...) once I finally reached Freeport again, I had delevelled from 17 to 14 only to find out that friggin corpse once the ship zoned, stayed in the zone I died in.

Took me 6 hours of crying to get help to find the corpse, with all my stuff on it, I didnt even know that rez existed so I looted all my corpses /facepalm.

After that episode I created a pally, so I could heal myself and rez myself, later I created a necromancer so I could find my corpse and rez myself and survive aggro, by casting feign death. God I loved my necro...

These shitty mechanics are not found in games today, this is what made EQ special, for me a part of the game died when SoL came out, with instaclick portals and the bazaar, back in the days, one of the most lively zones was EC tunnels where goods from all over the game was sold.

Wait what, you thought all that stuff was shitty? Or that is what made it special? I don't get it. Personally I hated all that crap. It was stuff like that which chipped away at the enjoyment I was getting from other things and ultimately what made me quit the game forever.

The 3 day camp in 'disco' for example, I enjoyed that but when I wanted to move on, I couldn't because I had only made 1 yellow bubble of exp and I was expected to stick around for 5 times longer to get the level completed. Or travelling somewhere and dying before you got a bind, you then either had to face a 3 hour naked autorun boring journey, or you had to beg someone to go out of their way to rez you even though their only priority in life was spending 5 more weeks in disco to grind out that remaining 70% of their level too.

I always felt like some of the hardships were what made everything feel more meaningful when you finally achieved things, but they just took it way too far. And then ever since we have had games that hand you everything on a plate with zero effort. There is nothing in between.

The hardships grouped us together. See, that person rezzing you didn't mind doing it because they understood your pain. Basically, it built community. Should it be as hard as it was in EverQuest going forward? No. But it shouldn't be all WoW/Rift where there is 0 hardship.

In 1999, bixies were the lowest level jokes of EQ mobs. Now, in the latest expansion, we have the Bixie Warfront, where bixies hit for 20k and are level 100 to 104. It's fine, it's cool, but it does make me wonder...

What if... once EQ finally hits it's finale and we have an end to expansions and new content, how cool would it be to have a server were mob levels are completely re-imagined. If you take the idea of expansions out of the game completely, and you work with a level 1 to 100 scale, you could start slotting in overall power rankings and levels for your entire world, rather than arbitrarily making level rat's and bat's level 85 because they were in your 17th expansion.

Who is the most powerful mob in EQ and why? Is it one of the gods, maybe Rallos Zek? Maybe the Sleeper? Who gets the ultimate level 105 boss ranking? What if you had progression that felt real and truly epic. You would have extremely powerful mobs in a zone of lesser beings. You would have high level zones adjacent to the low levels ones. That would feel like a true fantasy world and not this arbitrary one we have in the current state of the game.

Herv_sl said:

Funny how I will be elderly some day and never forget some of this shit.

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Great story! That really took me back.

I remember as a ranger, I helped a handful of mages get their peg cloak. People I didn't even know, I'd just randomly help em. Not all of them would /friend me, but enough did. It really helped getting groups or other little favors, and once even kept my corpse from rotting out.

We also had a few clerics who if they saw your corpse would stop what they were doing and take the time to rez you. Saryrn had some really great folks on it.

@ Fight - Highest level has to be Sirran the Lunatic.