Hmph. Seems as if I was completely wrong in my vulture-like glee-filled pessimism about The Burning Crusade launch, with pretty much everyone else actually being able to buy, install, patch, connect and play the blasted thing with no problems at all. See, well, any of my sidebar links, for a glowing tale of praise, joy and post-Lv60 exuberance. I'd post specific links, but Blizzard have basically made me look a like fool in front of the entire Internet, so I'm far too cross to fiddle about with <a> tags now. Grrr!
Seriously though, it is nice to see a company get it right, proving if nothing else, that with a bit of planning, foresight and of course, oodles of cash to spend on the project, it can be done well, and hopefully the addition of ten more levels of what made World of Warcraft the success it is today, namely the solo and small-group world questing, will breathe new life into it for the silent majority of players who aren't really that enthused with the idea of following 39 other ruthlessly efficient Epic-Harvesting machines about the same Raid Instance night in, night out, or just standing about in the Alterac Valley tunnel, waiting for their stipend of Stormpike/Frostwolf Faction Points to be paid. I do wonder if merely adding ten levels to the top end won't just postpone the...no! Stop it Van Hemlock! TBC is a success...let it go!
Anyway, I'm sure the remaining eight of you that didn't Expansion up either, are dying to hear how my EQ2 Properly Organised Guild Raid went, after hearing about my Ranterbury Pickup Raid hijinks previously. The very fact that this post isn't entitled 'The Ranterbury Tales: The Bloody Stupid Idiots' Tale...' is a bit of a spoiler, and indeed, the trip went very well.
The trip had been planned some weeks in advance, using the guild's message board, effectively meaning that I, 'Captain Casual', now follow a Raid Calendar. How easily our principles crumble, but the utility of such a tool does make a lot of difference - you can't just show up at the entrance and start spamming in Level Chat, as we saw before. A big undertaking, involving 12 or more players, of carefully selected levels, composition, and indeed, competence, does take a bit of advanced warning, and even with all that, we still had three no-shows, leaving nine of us to tackle the twelve man quest. If the EQ devs were looking to add anything else to the already bursting Guild Window, I'd suggest an in-game calendar tool of some sort, perhaps integrated into the Alarm system already in place.
The composition of the two groups involved had also been carefully thought out, and pre-assigned. I was in group two, the 'Hammer', with all the other DPS folks - Warlocks, Wizards, Brigands, etc. We had a tank of our own, and a healer, but mostly we seemed to be a kind of flanking cavalry of sorts, the entire group of us acting in much the same way a single rogue or wizard would do in normal group work - "avoid notice, do damage."
The primary group, the 'Anvil', was made up mostly of tanks and healers, and was acting as sort of 'Paladin', doing the brunt of the tanking work - "taunt, soak up damage, stay alive" - through it's own tank (the raid's Main Tank), and large array of dedicated healers, three of them all concentrating on just him. (Not all Furies this time! Ha!) If things worked to plan, our group of damage-dealers ought not to get much aggro, so should be easily maintained by just the one healer, who could also help out with group one if needed. Our tank had been designated 'Main Assist', and thanks to EQ2's helpful targeting system, if we all just 'attack' him, the game is clever enough to know that offensive actions should be redirected to his target, while beneficial ones should apply to him.
Already the strategy involved far outclassed that of the pick-up raid, by dividing the traditional tanking role into two - one tank merely concentrates on keeping everything's attention - the other can then selectively choose specific targets to pick off, safe in the knowledge that he can go full-on DPS with little interference. The healers have one known point of focus for their spells, and the rest of us can do our thing, safe from interrupts, or being mashed into the ground by a stray monster. I'm hardly telling any experienced raiders anything they don't already know, but for me, it was ingenious. (The most Raiding I ever did in WoW was one spectacularly anarchic and free-form piece of ten-man improvised dance-theatre, in Blackrock Depths - read the horror here!)
First stop was the City Registrar, an NPC in each city responsible for giving out the really big jobs - Guild Writs. Some confusion here, as some of our guild were Evil, and had to talk to the one in Freeport instead. A bit of juggling about, and a leap through the handy teleport door, and we reassembled in The Shattered Vale, a kind of general-purpose Event Instance off Antonica. I've been in there about four times now, on different quests each time, and the contents of the place seem to vary wildly. The zone itself is the same though - a small enclosed grassy canyon, with a large circle of druidic stones in the middle. Clearly a site of Great Evil/Good* (delete according to personal alignment), and the other few times I'd been in there, there was always some group of assort ne'erdowells trying open rifts to Beyond, summon Pig-Demons and generally conduct bad/good* Ju-ju. Usually I stop them, give them a stern talking to, a fixed penalty notice and caution, and leave them to think long and hard about what they just did.
Today it was the Gnolls. Grr, you pesky Gnolls! *shakes fist* Actually I quite like the Gnolls - the average Gnoll is to the Furry what the Soccer Hooligan is to the New Age Hippie, and unlike most Furfolk, their hind leg knees hinge the way you'd expect a dog's would. Anyway, it was all Epic rated, and much of it still 'wandering trash' with patrols, the occasional small-group and the like, so the first job was to clear some room. Excellent pulling by the main tank while we all warmed up on this stuff, and surprisingly good reactions by everyone else when the odd stray patrol joined in from behind. One thing I'm noticing almost immediately, and this applies to more conventional group work too, is that when it's Going Well, it can also be dangerous, as complacency sets in, and rhythmic and repeated monster destruction can even dull the senses after the first hour or so. No such slackness here though, and we were soon onto the main event - the Gnoll leader, a shaman of some sort who was trying to use the stones to tear Reality a new one...again! I swear, next time I'm sent in there, I'm taking blasting charges, as these menhir are just a temptation too far for most monsters.
The boss was actually quite a complex chained event thing. The guildleader took some time to explain what was about to happen. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but can understand why sometimes The Joy of Experimentation can be a bit much - nine players, many of whom had got up early especially to be here, were devoting a good hour or two to this one quest. Very few of us were experienced Raiders in general, and I'm not sure a smirking raid leader going 'You'll never guess what's going to happen next...go on...try and guess!' would help morale, or indeed, future attendance.
The boss was un-attackable at first - presenting as an NPC, rather than monster, until the last of his henchmen was attacked. At this point, he spawned an insanely robust giant rock monster. It's lucky we knew about this beforehand, because it had a truly immense number of hit points, and suddenly we were embroiled in a fight almost entirely unlike any I've ever had in an MMO before. Simply because it had so much life to remove, the very texture of the fight changed significantly - instead of the quick, dirty, frantic exercises in extreme over-DPS that most soloing ends up as, or even (Heroic) group work to some extent, this quickly became about staying power, stamina and attrition. The boss was healing it as well which didn't help, and the real fight became against our own power bars. Direct damage specials take a back seat to debuffs and although I lost track of time somewhat, I’d guess it must have taken around ten minutes of intense and protracted combat to bring the thing down. Shame we didn’t try and get the four-person Heroic Opportunities going really… I’ve always liked the concept, but I guess it can be obtrusive if people have specific jobs to be doing.
Despite being told beforehand to try to conserve power for the next bit, we were all close to empty when the big rock golem finally blew up. Then the boss decides to wade in, offering no respite, himself a powerful healer/caster type, and to make matters worse, he’s calling in extra gnoll reinforcements at regular intervals. It all got a bit hectic at that point as we all tried to switch gears from ‘economy drive’ to ‘fast takedown’, and the rubble of the rock beast, still scattered all about the place, didn’t help with targeting. We lost the main tank, and main assist at one point, leaving Swashbuckler DPS Paper-Tank me, to carry on the assault for an alarming thirty seconds or so. We managed to keep them off the healers however, who were quite on the ball themselves, and soon the meatshields were back from the dead, and fighting hard again. By this point, I was down to using default attack, and item-based debuffs, long since being out of power to pull anything more fancy out of the bag.
But we won in the end – the Gnoll Shaman’s evil plot was foiled, and we were all heroes. Loot was nothing you couldn’t have found soloing, but the real prize, apart form a greater understanding of raid techniques, was the huge boost of status and XP for the guild itself, leaving me with a feeling of a couple of hours (including assembly, sorting out groups, etc) well spent. Despite the deaths, I think it did go well, most of our ‘OOP’ problems caused simply by the fact that there should have been another three people in our strike force.
I’ve always been very negative about Raiding in general, and the culture that goes with it, but I think I begin to see my generalisation a bit. It’s not the raiding per se that’s the problem – more the drama that goes with it, and those all too frequent occasions when some online tin-pot dictator starts to take things too far, forgetting the overall purpose of the exercise – to have a bit of fun with some friends.
And I now own a DKP! I’m thinking of selling it on eBay…