Yeah, it seems really hard to imagine, but we have not yet ventured into any of the alternate planes of reality as a guild. We fixed that last night as we had our way with the Plane of Hate.
This isn’t your dad’s Plane of Hate. Once a viciously deadly raid zone, PoH has been gentled, and is now a fairly average place to experience. We had the guild hall portal set to PoH so people could come and go as they pleased, a huge difference from the old days where just finding a wizard to port you up was difficult, as the zone in was often a death trap. Early zoning strategy was to hope the monsters would be more interested in killing the other groups so that yours could get to the safe point, and then you could start the long, mandatory corpse recovery before you ever pulled a single mob. It could easily be an hour between zoning up and being ready to pull. Sisca, our monk, used to have the job in those elder days of zoning to Hate, feigning death immediately, then dragging the corpses once everyone was done dying.
Sejal had busted butt to get to 46 so that he could join the Friday group in Hate, and it was a good thing. A LOT of enchanter loot dropped — a defiant dagger and various bits of Insidious armor made him last night’s big loot winner.
Once we had a group together, we cleared our way through to the Maestro area, and guess who we found there:
“Bad touch” Rogbog? No, that’s the Hand of the Maestro playing one-fingered piano. The Hand is needed for the warrior epic. Ceipheid couldn’t make it last night, but we decided to go ahead and kill it anyway. When we had enough for a second group, we made a quick raid and entered the Cathedral to take the mob down. The Hand joined as we were killing the mob in front of it, so I offtanked that while everyone else killed the Hand and Qutey and Callendra, druids both, tried to keep people alive as the cleric, Coldheat, kept getting disconnected every couple of minutes. The Hand and the add died at about the same time.
We split back into two groups. Group 1 stayed on the steps, while the group I was in returned to the bridge and pulled for a couple of hours. It was fun, but after awhile it got a little boring. I can’t wait until we get to level 60 so we can get back to doing some raids. In EQ, Raids = TOTAL FUN, and there’s bunches two groups can do.
Ended the night with four more AAs, for a total of 30 now, with 20 spent and 10 saved. Nine of those are reserved for Endless Quiver when I reach 59. 44% through level 55. I’ll probably try to get into a Nadox group sometime next week to start heading for 60. This weekend, though — Fan Faire, but my son is sick so I dunno how that will work out.
Next week: Riwwi, the level 60 hot zone. Level grinding, but in someplace new. I used to see groups camped at the zone in all the time. Next week, that will be us.
If you can handle it, the arena ‘circle’ in Riwwi is more fun than the zone in IMO. Invis down into the arena, and then move around in a circle.
We’ll see how it goes. I’ve been to the Coliseum before, and it is fun, but we have only one cleric, so usually the second group is stuck with me as the tank, with a druid healing me. There’s places that would be too tough 😛
Have fun at Fan Faire sweety, sorry to hear about your son being sick. I still had a blast last night, it was great to listen to everyone else’ stories about how things used to be. I wish I had of been a part of it all!
Yup can me tough – the thing I liked about those zones in GoD was the chance to learn about Rampage when fighting the Noc.