Erenshor “Rising Shadows” launched!

Yesterday, both Dune: Awakening and Erenshor had major updates. Since Dune is an MMO, and I’m in a guild, and other people wanted me to get up to speed on the new content, I of course went there first. Fiddled around in my base, went to Arakkeen to start the new content… No, I didn’t do that, because I could not get to the new overworld map. I finished some base construction I’d put off and headed to Erenshor.

The game adds a lot of “quality of life” options — sim players auto join your group when invited, you can hide helmets now, healers can heal an enemy to “heal through” and heal whatever they’re hitting. This is a game changer for healers. If I played one, which I do not.

But — guilds! We can have guilds now, and in fact have to have one in order to participate in the guild challenge events and to cement your rivalry with “Friend’s Club”, the local uberguild. You’ll get pretty spammed with guild invites, but once you start one, you’ll get folks asking to be in yours. Not only your friends; randos will beg to join. And of course you’ll want them to, because more guildies = more levels = more guild rank = better loot.

I thought long and hard about my guild name. I was in a few EverQuest and EverQuest 2 guilds that I could honor; of them all, I only was a cofounder of “Nostalgia the Guild”. That didn’t seem super appropriate for Erenshor, so I settled upon “Exiles of Norrath”. It’s generic, but I’m fine with that. We’re the Exiles.

I invited everyone in my “A” team to the guild, and they all promptly left their guilds and joined mine. Next step is to find other top level players, group with them until they like me, then bring them into the guild, and keep doing this until “Friends Club” has no more top level players to recruit. Starve the beast, I say.

I also started a Reaver, Erenshor’s version of a Shadow Knight. I don’t get a skeleton pet yet, but most of the other stuff is there — life tap, ensnare (necessary now because things run), etc. You can set your stance to be tanky or slashy. I’ve got mine set up right now so that my attacks do 100% damage — but I lose 4% health each time I hit. This is where the life tap comes in, but maybe I don’t want that, as I also have a buff that increases my DPS as I lose health.

I will definitely be encouraging high level Reavers to join the Exiles.

So: Next step for Moon Unit is to get more Ascension points. I have one, at the moment, and I got that as we tore through Fallen Braxonia last night looking for something Eron wanted. I need to work on the portal runes so I can get places faster. Getting back to town to bank and sell has become a lot easier with the guild halls; everyone can grab a guild hall portal stone to use. Works just like Town Scrolls in Diablo; you pop into your guild hall (where I have placed a bank and a vendor), do what you need to do, then return through the portal to where you were. This, again, is game changing.

Burgee suggests, to be ready for raiding, to get everyone in your core group better gear, especially blessed gear, and to be able to defeat a particular summoned dragon. I think there’s a couple of zones I still need access to, too, so that all needs to be sorted out. Not sure how many characters are necessary for raiding, but I plan to have two top teams because I can’t imaging needing more (and suspect raids will just be one group, anyway). EverQuest, Erenshor’s heavy inspiration, could have 48+ people in them. I very much doubt Erenshor will deal with that; back in EQ raiding, we had levels of leadership within raids to keep everything organized.