Flush without resounding success, mentioned previously, in 'A Bold Confrontation', the guild was all set to tackle the second Guild Writ in the series - 'A Daring Confrontation'.

Not that I've ever had much experience with WoW Raiding mind you, but so far as I can see, EQ2 does seem to do, if not a better, than certainly a more flexible job of the same kind of gaming experience. For starters, the Raid Instances I've seen so far seem to scale dynamically, based on the average level of the members of the raiding force. The various set-pieces and event-attacks still seem to happen on the bigger bosses, but the whole thing is passed through some kind of percentage-based scaling modifier, in terms of HP, Damage and the like. Combine that, with the extensive Mentoring system on the players side and a little juggling about before zoning in, and the end result is a raid instance in which any twelve players, of pretty much any spread of levels, equipment, gear and quest progression, can all take part in, and be rewarded for. The shineys are shinier if you're all L70, true, but it does seem a more inclusive way to go about the whole business, and prevents the familiar grinding of gears everyone talks about at L60 in WoW (L70 soon enough), i.e. Solo, solo, solo, sudden and complete change of gameplay, raid, raid, raid. The idea being, presumably, that only the most habitual soloer in EQ2 will get to 'T7' Raiding without having had a lot of ongoing experience at raiding, all the way through their lives. Looks good in theory...

We - the EQ2 Guild I'm currently trying on for size - have aspirations of being those effortlessly T7 farmers, snaking it about the Qeynos Harbour Broker in their interesting and different looking armours and waving their fancy titles about the place, and so are working through the City Registrar Epic Raid Quest Line. There's five of these, to be completed in order, and those who want to skip straight to the walkthroughs can find an exhaustive post here:

EQ2 Forums: Guild Raid Walkthroughs

I wish I'd seen that before our last attempt! We Daredevils are currently on number two, having trounced number one (A Bold Confrontation) with reasonable success, a few times now (for those who didn't make it...three shows a night and one matinee!) , and so were ready, we thought, to streamroller number two. Apparently, these raids are a bit like a series of Evening Classes on 'Raiding In General', and are supposed to introduce successively more complex aspects of raiding, as you work through them, readying your guild of n00bs (myself included) for the real raiding at level 60-70. I'm not sure what number one was meant to teach us, aside from a false sense of complacency.

Number two is all about 'mem wipes', so I was told, although even now have only the vaguest idea what that term actually means, despite hearing it a number of times from our leaders, being told to watch out for it, how they were difficult, and so on. The above linked guide is similarly secretive too, so I can only assume it's something so horrific that I would be best off not knowing about at all. "No-one can tell you what a mem wipe is...you must be shown!"

Anyway, in we went... usual drill; a good mix of classes, two groups of six each, main tank, main assist, etc. The thing was inside a version of the instance found at the top of Zarvonn's Tower in The Commonlands, and it was another hit on an evil and/or good, out of control boss figure, and as before, the target is unattackable until we've worked out how to beat the 'puzzle', which usually consists of killing everything else first. Things were going great to begin with - they usually do - mostly consisting of various wandering skeletons, quickly beat down.

Then we came across the first of four 'Sisters' - nightmarish Erudite bosses who do this mem wiping thing. We pulled, and started on the henchmen, while the tank tried to keep her attention. Which is all very well if she'd stay put. I guess by 'mem wipe', they all meant that she basically just ignored any attempts to taunt/detaunt her, in turn making tanking in the classical sense, very difficult or impossible. It's fair I suppose - when attacking a group, I always go for the healers first - why shouldn't they? In any event, it wasn't her random and indiscriminate targeting that was the real problem, from what I saw - it was that she did a truly horrific amount of damage per stab. I know I'm only a DPS Rogue Papertank and all, but really, I'd expect to survive longer than three hits, and while all this is going on, our various healers don't seem to know what is going off, or which way to turn, let alone somehow find the flexibility to keep seemingly random members of the raid alive.

The whole thing effectively made a complete mockery of the Holy Trinity of MMO Class Design; Tank, Healer, Crowd Control, and at some points made the thing degenerate into exactly the kind of panickey DPS-zerg that so irritates me about Guild Wars. I've no doubt all this was intended by design, to 'spice things up a bit', but I have real troubles seeing a strategy to effectively beat it, that doesn't end up with the tank as Last Man Standing, briefly, with no way to heal himself, or make any headway on the Sister's vast HP.

We dared a few more goes at the thing, and indeed, managed to take the first Sister down, mostly by luck than strategy, I suspect - mad over-nuking on most of our parts, and a lucky roll of her 'aggro dice' which made her go after the person we actually wanted her to - the tank. She still butchered him in surprisingly short order anyway, but took long enough to do so that the rest of us managed to wrestle her to the ground, so to speak.

Mem wipe? Raid wipe more like, and after our fourth total wipe, and still on the second out of four Sisters, and not even having met the Big Boss yet, a rather subdued and not-very-chatty raid group left the instance. 'gg', 'good try :)' and the like, but I doubt I was alone in not especially looking forward to another go any time soon.

It does sort of highlight the complete artificiality of Received PvE Design Wisdom though. Imagine if the mobs were ALL smart enough to gank the Priest first? What would be the point in having one at all, aside from existing to buy the most armoured warrior some extra time while you die? Hell, this particular  boss was not even that smart, working to some bizarre logic of it's own. In PvP, where the enemies are all at least that smart, the Priest gets called first, and unless you're actually some kind of offensive-designed Face-Melting spell-caster that's only called a 'Priest' on a technicality, you'd be best off just staying at home.

I suppose in reality, this particular raid is a test for the Healers, more than anything else - teaching them the value of reaction timing and target switching, as opposed to the usual business of setting auto-follow on the MT, and a coffee-cup on the 'Heal' hot-key. I just hope our Healers were getting the gist of the lesson being so comprehensively pounded into the rest of us. The alternative would be just throwing more men at the problem - there may be four raid-group slots for a reason; these were all listed as x2 Epic mobs (Two groups), but I do wonder if just going in there with 24 people is a good substitute for being daring, and trying it with two groups.

At the very least, it's twice as many bodies that the insane ninja Sister has to carve through, and someone is bound to get lucky...