Level 40-49: A_Banqueter says, 'CH Raid, LF DPS!'
This is usually how it starts. I'm running along, from A to B, and the occasional capricious mood hits me, partly based on psychological self-harm, partly because it's an anecdote, and I can't just bang on about Second Life the whole time, but mostly because part of me still wants it to work - despite all my bitterness, I still want to be a hero. So pausing only to deconstruct and translate the acronyms (CH - Cauldron Hollow, a raid instance off the Nektulous Forest zone in Everquest 2, LF - Looking For, and DPS - Damage Per Second - mostly wizard types, or rogue types) I signed up. DPS...that's me! CH...that's not far from where I am now, and my level!
Along I went expecting, well, not a lot really. I have no business in there, and no quests to tick off in the zone, but presumably someone out there had, and I know the particular frustration of EverQuest II, which despite all the progress it's made in the last year of so, is still there - the (Heroic) or (Epic) quest. Certainly WoW and others have this too, but much of the really interesting work in EQ2 is still the various group and raid oriented content, and unlike WoW, there are raiding quests and content as low as level 15-20. I've often, and still am, turned aside from a quest by discovering that I'll need a lot of help, or have to come back much later on. It's not so bad nowadays; there's now plenty I can be getting on with instead, but still annoys me a bit. With that in mind, I'm only too happy to lend a hand and help others beat this frustration, and find myself volunteering for groupwork far more than I used to.
Cauldron Hollow isn't really a place I'm that familiar with to be honest, so even more reason to take a look. I poked my head in once, some time ago, and found a gloomy graveyard setting, where even the trashmobs had a /con of 'That's No Moon!', despite them being lower than my own level at the time. A job for an army, clearly, and I was on my way to join the ranks now!
I turned up at the gate to see a rather random selection of adventurers, for this was indeed, a 'Pick Up Raid' in the classical sense, recruited mostly by a small group of two or three close friends spamming the appropriate 'Level' global chat channels, and seeing what fell out of the woodwork. I exchanged nods, feeling a little insecure - the only Gnome there. They sat and lounged by the gate in the dank mist, sharpening weapons, preparing spells, and the whole thing had a sombre feel, in keeping with the area.
One or two were even in the same guild as me, and we chatted a bit while the raid - twelve players - filled up. I'm not the most social of creatures, and although it's a fairly decent sort of family-friendly casual guild, I still tend to spend much of my time soloing, doing my own thing, and so do many of them. Joining a guild and remembering to '/gu hi' and '/gu gratz!' a lot is easy enough...actually making friends with them all is more tricky, so it was nice to actually meet some of them, in person as it were.
Finally we were all assembled, and the line-up was...well, it's hard to tell actually. One thing the visitor from Azeroth will notice almost immediately, is how many different classes there are. WoW has nine, whereas EQ2 as twenty-four. This can make groupwork somewhat confusing. Hell, even I get Fury, Defiler and Dirge mixed up, even now! (A Fury is a sort of Assault Druid, a Defiler is a kind of Necromantic Shaman and a Dirge is a Bard who can't read music properly.)
Luckily, these twenty-four classes divide neatly into four archetypes - Fighter, Healer, Scout and Mage, and while further subdivisions can make a Shadowknight quite different to a Monk, they're both still fighters and function in a broadly similar manner. Neither is likely to do well in a Main Healer role. Of course there is still a 'best' tank and a 'best' healer, (Guardian and Templar respectively, are likely candidates), and this wouldn't be a Ranterbury Tale if we'd had either!
From the little raid window, I could tell that we had only three healers between us all, only two fighters, one scout (me), and six mage types, ranging from the Ever Cool Warlock, through to some of the more obscure practitioners of arcane arts, conjurers, illusionists, wizards, you name it, they were there. Was like Vegas, really...I'm sure I even saw Penn and Teller at the back somewhere, but it all got a bit confusing to be honest. That's DPS covered then, I thought, and not for the first time, wished I was a priest of some sort.
A main tank was allocated, the monk, and in we went. Personally, I'd have gone for a tank who was actually wearing metal of some sort, possibly holding a shield, but I guess impatience on the part of the organisers took it's toll, and really, when your setting up a pick-up raid, you have to take what turns up. The first couple of aforementioned trashmobs, eldritch ghostlike beings with far more health than they are ever have likely to have had in life, went down fairly easy, which was good, giving us all a warm up, and a chance to work out who ought to stand where, use what specials and so on.
The strategy that seemed to work the best for us, with our particular composition, was basically to just pull, taunt it on to the tank, and then hit it with a massive 'Alpha Strike' of thermonuclear arcane force. It's a shame my PC can't run with all the particles on...it must have been quite an awe-inspiring sight.
Pretty much all special attacks in EQ2 carry not only the 'payload', a big direct damage hit, but also a lingering debuff effect too - for example, many of my own stabs, slices, cuts and garrottings tend to also lower an enemy's resistance to Arcane or Divine damage; not much use to me, but in effect, helping any wizards or priests who may happen to be with me at the time. It's this 'interlocking' approach to group and solo abilities that tend to make groupwork seem to 'flow' better than in, say, WoW, in my experience. Priests get a delayed chain heal they can cast on the tank, which will just sit there, until the tank is hit, when it'll then cast a heal, repeating several times...this frees up the Priest for other work, curing debuffs, other heal targets, even a little debuff and damage work if time and power allow. As a Swashbuckler, I get a buff I cast on the tank, which diverts a portion of the hate I generate, to him! SOE being past-masters of 'The MMO Group', for good or ill, it really does seem to have been designed well from the ground up, and with a number of noticeable clever features and mechanics, which the more solo-oriented WoW tends to leave to players, (and UI add-ons) to work around.
However, these tools can only get you so far, and in general, raid work, I'm learning, is a little more complex than 'Everyone nuke that one!' The first few fights went okay with this blitzkrieg approach, mostly I think, because they were unlinked, single mob pulls - one target, swiftly turned into a scorched smear on the damp cobblestones. I even managed to get a few stabs in on some of the more resilient ones, further hampering their ability to withstand the flock of fireballs incoming on the second wave. (What is the collective noun for 'fireball' anyway? Herd? School? Gander? Answers on a postcard please!)
The monk was managing to keep the target's attention, just about, although mostly I think just because there were so many incoming fireballs, the ghost just couldn't decide which wizard to pound into the dirt first. My own hyperactive gnomish flailing, behind the thing, barely even registered, but for a Swashbuckler, that's success, not failure, and I'd like to think I was doing my fair share of the actual damage.
The first double-pull caused a bit of concern, and the monk lost one of them, which promptly went charging into the flotilla (?) of wizards, started hoofing them about, yanking on skirts...not pretty. The healers tried their best, and me and the other tank-type chased after it and eventually brought it down, but not before it'd, perhaps deservedly, given at least two of the wizards a terrific trampling. Never bring a skirt to a sword-fight, I've always thought. While we waited for the Healers to yank the poor souls back from a peaceful retirement to go through it all again, the rest of us had a bit of a tete-a-tete about Tactics.
It turned out that one of the barrage (?) of wizards was in fact some kind of Enchanter-type person...Coercer, Illusionist, something like that, and not, as we'd all assumed, just another bloke in a dress with an arcane-bazooka. If I had a 'gp' for the number of times I'd heard the 'Don't hit the ones with the glowing sparkly halo around their heads' speech, I'd have...26gp, but I'd have to admit guilt this time too; the vast number of Wizard Flavours in EQ2 having confused me somewhat. 'Nevermind that', I thought, 'the tank can't hold his aggro!' and That Ranterbury Feeling started to sink in.
Rebuffed, rearmed and re-gretting it already, we stepped up to the next challenge. This was some kind of trollish looter, just as Epic as everything else in that godforsaken graveyard, only his Name Was In Capitals...meaning, a boss. He was stood on the steps of a ruined chapel of some sort, surrounded by treasure chests, eyeing us up with the look of a man...troll...whatever...who Knows Something We Don't. The treasure chests, the promise of phat Advancement XP for a named kill (EQ2's 'Talents'), and the general gung-ho pyromania of our pesdigitatory back line, it all got a bit much and before I could type 'Careful, those chests might come to life and attack us', the tank charged, the chests came to life and attacked us, and things went downhill quite quickly at that point.
Dinner...is served!
It's all a learning experience, I guess. I survived down to the last three, which I was quite proud of, although once the tank 'appetiser' had gone down (in a shockingly quick time), taking his artificial hate-list manipulation with him, it took the Troll, and his pet treasure-chest-monsters, a surprising amount of time to chew through the collective meat-shield 'main course' of six suddenly very apologetic wizard-types (with mixed pet-summon 'side-dishes') and light 'dessert' of two doggedly resigned healers, before they got to the 'cheese, coffee and gnome biscuits' course, me. One of the healers outlasted me by just massively chain-healing themselves. As a long term strategy, this lacks somewhat, and as soon as her power burnt out, she swiftly became the 'after dinner mint'.
The remaining fighter did survive the encounter actually, mostly by running like hell as soon as it looked like it wasn't going to work. This wasn't entirely selfish - the healers had given us all summoned temporary items whose sole purpose is for raising healers from the dead, another neat idea, meaning that as long as *someone* survives, the thing isn't a total wipe. Unfortunately, during the Trollish Banquet, he'd lost his bearings somewhat, and eleven of us lay there, on the cold damp stones, collectively slapping our hands over our eyes as he ran screaming further into the zone... The Troll and his chests picked their teeth and put their feet up, to the sounds of screams from the deeper darkness of the Hollow...
And that was that - as a raid zone, Cauldron Hollow has a reuse timer of about eight hours, meaning no second go, and no chance to show what, if anything we'd learnt form the experience. We appeared outside, and I was all set for the Blame Game, a sort of raid-based mini-game, involving a ribald vocabulary and some serious method acting, but was shocked to hear all sorts of 'Oh well...good try :)', and 'Nice meeting you' and the like. Once again, the players of EQ2 have massively let me down by refusing to blow up over trivial gaming happenstance! Grr!
I was still reeling at the speed the tank went down, and the other two guildies and I worked it out, CSI: Nektulous style. Apparently, one of them, a quiet expert type, knew exactly the problem. Although we had three 'healers', which ought to be enough to keep a tank alive in that situation, all three were the same subtype, 'Fury'. At best a kind of druid, with more regeneration than straight healing, all three had hit the tank with their best heals simultaneously, only to find that heal-over-time spells from the same subtype won't stack, meaning that in effect, only one of them was healing the guy. Poor monk never stood a chance. If we'd had say, a Fury, a Templar and a Mystic, things would have gone much more smoothly, as presumably their heals, all of different types, wouldn't block each other. So the thing I learnt was that although there are only four archetypes, the six subtypes of each, are still important! It's not enough to have 'just a healer' or 'just a tank'.
The general feeling of good-natured 'oh well!' was quite infectious however, and despite having had my arse kicked in a quite comprehensive manner, instead of just blaming it on idiots, soloing up and disappearing into the wilderness, the three of us guildfolk went off to have a crack at some other Heritage Quests, requiring merely a group of 3-6, rather than 12 or more, and did very well out of it all. There's another guild raid planned soon, so it'll be interesting to see how that kind of organisation compares with the more anarchic pick-up raiding above, but so far it's all quite fascinating, and quite funny to boot!
Mmmm...adventurers...