Photoshop stitched together four screenshots to make this, automatically. Pretty neat!
No, it’s true. We went to the Plane of Time tonight.
Once upon a ‘time’ (sorry), that meant you had completed all the raids in Planes of Power — lessee if I can remember them — Terris Thule & Saryrn, Grummus & Carprin & Bertoxxulous, the Manaetic Behemoth, any trial in the Plane of Justice (didn’t have to kill Seventh Hammer, though), Aerin’Dar & three Halls of Honor trials & Mithaniel Marr & Agnarr, Vallon Zek & Tallon Zek & Rallos Zek the Warlord, Solusek Ro, that alligator in Plane of Earth, and then the Elemental gods — Fennin Ro, Coirnav (entire raid — 14 minutes or you fail for three days), The Rathe Council (12 raid mobs — six mezzable, six not — need to die within 8 minutes of each other, IIRC), and Xegony (google ‘xegony boobie taunt’). After doing all that — and how many times for each raid before all of 72+ people were flagged? — you could zone in to the Plane of Time.
Now it’s about as hard as walking into a wall. Just hail this bozo and say “Got the time?” and *poof*, there you are. He’ll also send you if you say, “please make a year of determined effort instantly pointless”. Nah, kidding about that one. Maybe.
Honest truth is, I would so love to raid Plane of Time, one last time. In fact. I would run every one of the raids leading up to the Plane of Time again. Because they were SO. MUCH. FUN. If you were in a raiding guild, it was never better before and never got better after than it was in the Planes of Power. After PoP, *NO* MMO dared to ship their game without a full set of raids because how else could they EVER hope to compete with EVERQUEST?
That’s died down some lately. But how many games tried to copy the master? WoW for sure, but they flinched, made their max raid size 40, and then 25, and now 10. Devs give a nervous little laugh at the thought of MEGA RAIDS that required 72 people to accomplish — that needed raid leaders and sub leaders and team leaders and so on.
Anyway. So, Plane of Time. Big whoop 🙂 Not like we could ever raid it.
The latest patch notes told of a mysterious wanderer last seen in the Dreadlands who seemed awfully concerned that the veil between the present and the past was being rent asunder by some dreadful force.
He sends people to check on reported disturbances in the Field of Bone, Warslick Woods, Commonlands, Qeynos Hills and the Rathe Mountains. So I’m thinking, Kaesora, Dalnir’s, Befallen, Blackburrow and … but that doesn’t work, there is no dungeon in the Rathe Mountains, unless they added one I don’t know about. Best check this out. I thought maybe I’d get an update just for zoning in, but no such luck.
Field of Bone was infested by dragons. These dragons were in a state of high dudgeon. They’d just be in a horrible fight over the Field of Bone against the Iksar emperor Ganak, and things were not going well. Next thing they know, they’re here, Jared’Dar’s bones are picked clean in the center of a mysteriously appeared crater, the entire area seems to have not seen war for centuries… it’s very confusing. One poor dragon was not only pulled through time, but universes as well — ripped right from World of Warcraft.
 Mmm, yummy troll dinner snack! |
 Whaaa? Where’d that troll go? And why are my colors kinda dull? Mother? |
With Warslick Woods being so near, I zoned over, had a quick look-see for Grachnist the Destroyer (nope, Mr. Shrunken Goblin Earring once again being a no-show), and then tracked a couple of bright red dragons in the area. I wondered how they were doing. Really. My only concern was for their health. As in, their percentage of health. As in, steadily declining toward zero.
This guy was doing fine, if somewhat bewildered. Cousin to Vishimitar, if I know my dragons. The color, anyway.
Now this guy grew tired, and more tired as I watched. In fact, I took out my bow, hit my Trueshot Discipline, and helped him become tired even more quickly as the bard kiting him did his thing. Bard had a gnome mask — those are RARE. Anyway, when he saw the adds that were following him die, and me plinking away, we grouped up, finished making the dragon very tired, and I got a quest update when it finally lay down for a good nap.
The bard grabbed the loot and logged. I felt happy to have helped out.
By that time we had a fairly full group of people online, so we headed off to Lavaspinner’s Lair once again to try out luck there. Three people needed drakes and two needed spiders; just because I wasn’t paying attention, we went to the drakes first. Seja and I finished our drake collection quests, Mantis made some progress, Coldheat hit 60, everyone else made between 2-3 AAs, it was all good.
There was a raid mob on track, and we kinda were heading toward it when sanity prevailed. We turned back and pulled another, easier named, killed that no trouble, then were ambushed by Crimsonwing once again. Crimsonwing took her death well, except near the end where she gated away and summoned people, one-by-one, to die far from the group and surrounded by adds.
I have to admit I’m not feeling the love for Crimsonwing that I probably should.
Since we aren’t getting enough people on to raid, we’re likely going to be leveling up again soon. If we’re just going to be doing group things, might as well get to level 65 so we can go to the Bastion of Thunder and just have a good time with the grouping. BoT is all sorts of fun. Good challenge, good xp, good loot, a LOT of different places to go. Looking forward to it.
Wow…time…boy does that bring some memories back. I loved the PoP raids. They were so much fun! And I didn’t even like raiding. But I liked doing PoP. The later progressions were…meh…but I loved PoP. I think Bertie was my favorite. I was always on rezz duty with my cleric.
I must admit that on Test they ended up giving the raiding groups Time access because we had so much trouble doing the progression because of server outages (Test used to go down at least once a day…it was insane how many times it went down within 15 minutes of a raid). But still, most of us finished the PoP progression anyway just because we enjoyed the content.
Oh, Bert! That was a madhouse. My first time through, as a rogue on Erollisi Marr with Crimson Eternity, it was always so stately and paced and disciplined. We split the raid into two halves, coming together for the kings. Then I went through PoP again as a cleric on Stromm. Stromm had largely been settled by uprooted uber guilds, and so most Stromm raids were done in the uber guild way — as a chaotic mess where you were expected to know what to do at all times without being explicitly told. Bert THERE was pullers constantly pulling trash into a pile in the middle where everyone would be AEing and the chanters would be stunning and mezzing and …. I think we got the entire raid, from death of the trigger mob to dead Bert, to forty minutes at our best — with an hour twenty left on the clock.
I’ve never felt anything like that in any other raid in any other game.. Okay, actually, Coirnav was like that. Having to kill three mini bosses, all their adds, and Coirnav with all HIS adds in fourteen minutes? EVERYONE did dps. Clerics, everyone. First time we finished it was with just seconds to spare. By the time we finished running that raid, we had two or three minutes. It was insane.
Or that RZtW fight. CE on EMarr — stately and orderly. Viking Alliance on Stromm — mass killing and druid and enchanter charmed pets going at it. That was wild, both ways — but even cooler that there were always many ways to defeat a raid and everyone did it different according to the guild personality.
You could tell a lot about a guild by how it raided. Crimson Eternity — controlled and disciplined. Lost Sock Patrol and Viking Alliance — balls to the wall, 100%, 24/7, no rest.
I have almost 3 GB of screen shots from CE days. Love hearing other people tell stories about it.
My memories of RZtW raids were of standing behind RZtW, doing DPS with sweaty palms waiting for one of the MAs to die and hoping I stepped in their place in time. It all felt very chaotic to me, but things always are as I tend to use first person view.
I remember on Coirnav that all the enchanters used Minor Illusion to become seaweed or a school of fish to avoid a knockback stun that was becoming a problem on that raid. Good times 😉
I know there’s a gazillion expansions after PoP but for me this expansion was the end of the game. Getting to the Plane of Time and then beating Quarm was THE goal of EverQuest, bar none. Once I’d managed that I literally camped out and quit the game (right at the end of that raid). Even though “Dragons of Norrath” had been released at the time, beating PoP gave a completion to my 6 years in the game. PoP was an incredible expansion and required a level of team-work that I’ve yet to see in any other game. How many other games require the level of teamwork required to take down the Rathe Council (took us 6 attempts) or deal with the mechanical spider factory in the Plane of Innovation. None I suspect.
But PoP is the end of Classic EQ for me. Afterall, once you’ve beaten the gods, what’s left?
Bah, the Plane of Time gets me all misty eyed for EQ. If Sony released another progression server that moved slow enough for everyone to take part then I’d return in an instant. It would be great to do this content again from scratch.
It’s true, PoP had it all. Guild competition, engendered a very strong pickup raid community — encouraged, subsidized and often led by people from top raid guilds because they had people needing flags as well. Many of the raids could be watched by interested observers to see how it was done — and you could actually SEE how much better other guilds were than you, and what being a raider meant.
Now that my son is off to school for two years, I actually have time to raid once again, if I wanted to. But there’s no game out there — not even EQ2 — that deserves that kind of devotion. Well, there’s EQ itself, but my last experiences raiding in EQ, in DoDh and PoR, were just too scripted, too much like WoW, not enough like the EQ I loved. Not that I am averse to total scripting — the Overlord Mata Muram fight was a good time and Vishimitar was one of my all-time faves — but I like best the kinds of raids where you can be creative and win in your own way.