Sunday night, I stay up reading until 5am for some ungodly reason. I do
manage an hour's sleep before work. (Hint: if it's a choice between
staying up all night and grabbing one hour of sleep, get the sleep - even
one hour can significantly increase your odds of surviving the following
day). I go to work and actually manage to get through the day without
feeling irritable or exhausted. A minor miracle.
I come how, fix dinner, log on to EQ. Guild message of the day: Creator
soon. So I ask, "Too late for Creator?" "Nope," is the response. So I run
to Ssra and say into the raid channel, "Is there a CoH link set up yet?"
This is met with gentle laughter. I do /who GUILD and find that there are
only three people in Ssra - turns out "soon" meant in the next twenty
minutes. I exchange a couple of good-humored jibes. I was just made a full
member of the guild a couple of days ago after a month of being a recruit.
It feels good to be accepted and forming virtual relationships with my
guildmates.
I run outside and do a couple of rezzes. One guy had complimented me for my
posts on eqdrinal.com as I ran through Ssra, and alas stopping to type had
ended up getting him killed. I rez and run back to Ssra. I actually manage
to get to the temple without aggroing anything. I then use Pacify on the
golems and manage to zone into Ssra without creating a train - a first for
me without invisibility.
Inside more people from my guild have begun trickling in. I sit down and
watch Monday Night Football until we get enough to begin clearing our way
up. This goes fairly easy and, early on, I'm in the XP group. I had just
hit 61 the night before, and my XP bar barely twitches - I imagine that this
level is gonna be fun to get through.
We get to the jail cell and begin the process of buffing, CotH-ing people
in, the usual. People are eager - we've more-or-less taken the last week
off to do PoP, and this is our first raid in a few days. I'm eager in my
own way - the Creator can drop a hammer that adds 15 percent to smithing.
I've been working on becoming a Grandmaster Smith (188 right now) and would
dearly love this hammer. Alas, reports are that the Creator is wielding a
sword. I get conflicting information from my groupmates as to whether or
not this means he can still drop the hammer. I decide to wait and hope.
A friend of mine from my old guild and a recruit to my new guild says hello.
He is the first (and, as far as I know, still only) epic troll beastlord on
Drinal. On the first raid he participated in as a recruit, he summoned his
warder which caused a lot of bemused comments all around - "Lockjaw has
joined the raid!" He's quite starry-eyed by the loot that's been dropping
at these raids, just like I was - heck, still *am*. =) He casts SP all
around - gotta love the 6 points of mana regen that stacks with
*everything*.
We rush in to the Creator room. One shaman goes linkdead just as we rush
in, gets hit by the Creator's AE, and runs up to the Creator and begins
whacking away at it. He lasts all of fifteen seconds, and when he gets back
on, we salute his character's bravery and comment that he'll probably need
to be 65 before he can solo the Creator.
I have join our cleric channel, as always. One of our tanks drops in and
says, "Hello girls." It is a fact that, of the twelve clerics in the raid,
ten are female characters, but still. I say "Girls?" and get gently teased
by the other clerics in the channel - "We know you just like displaying your
feminine side, Mon." We begin.
Ever since the mod rod nerf he haven't been setting up cleric groups for a
lot of mobs. For Creator we just announce heals in the channel and try not
to all cast our heals at the same time. This includes ducking out when it
seems like your CH won't be effective - need to preserve mana. While this
sounds like a formula for disaster, in practice it's worked well. Everyone
is a CH chain veteran, and knows when to cast CH. We haven't lost any tanks
yet - or, at least, we haven't lost any more tanks than normal. =) This
time the Main Tank stays up the entire fight, and the Creator goes down.
Anxiously I wait for loot - sword, range haste item, spells. No hammer o'
smithing. I sigh and sit back, thinking about gating out and getting to
bed. My beastlord friend mourns the fact that warriors will get the range
haste item before beastlords do, which is a shame because he'd like to
replace his off-hand epic with a better damage weapon. I tell him to be
patient - drops will come if he raids enough with us. During my first month
as a recruit, they even let me have a neck item that was a minor upgrade to
Tserrina's Symbol that I'd gotten from the Tower of Frozen Shadow.
Several people have noticed that we have twelve clerics in the raid. Let's
do High Priest! The word goes out, and we head back to the jail. Alas,
golems have spawned along the way. The word goes out - don't go to jail,
get back to Creator. Alas that I heard the first thing and not the second.
I sit in the jail and notice that no one else is there. I run back - right
smack dab into the trap. Buh-bye Monual.
I find myself back at the Nexus. I decide to run into the Bazaar and make a
warning. A scammer has been working the Bazaar lately, telling random
people that he is an alt of a guildmate of theirs and asking if he can
borrow their equipment to "play a joke". (Several months ago he pulled that
scam on me - successfully, alas.) He tried that scam on one of my
guildmates - alas, he said he was the alt of a guildmate who was actually
with us on the raid, and he was able to quickly say that it wasn't him.
This scammer has been changing identities quickly, so I can't just shout out
a warning about him specifically. Instead, I say in /ooc "If someone says
they are an alt of someone you know and asks to borrow your equipment to
'play a joke', don't do it. It's a scam." This gets a few sarcastic
comments from the general populace - "Note to self: don't be stupid. Got
it. Thanks Monual" - but I'm not upset. I just want to get it in a few
people's heads to be wary of these kind of scams. If I can prevent just one
person from losing their hard-earned equipment, I'll be happy.
Eventually I get rezzed and we move to the jail for real. I actually nod
off a couple of times while we buff and disarm traps. When they pull all
the non-banishable mobs to the jail cell I wake up fully. We only lose a
couple of people, and when the crowd control folks say they have everything
under control, we move in.
One of the clerics forms a group of six cleric to concentrate on healing the
Main Tank. The rest of us will just heal whoever gets Rampage and do backup
heals on the Main Tank. Sounds good to me. We begin, and I heal the
rampage folks - it seems to be split between three people. The MT stays up
the entire fight, despite dropping down to 100hp at one point, and the High
Priest goes down.
Loot is announced. The first thing that leaps to my eye is the Shield of
Ssraeshza - 45 AC, 15 WIS, 100 HP and MANA, +30 SvD and SvP, and... Flowing
Thought VI. This is the second time this shield has dropped since I joined
the guild. The first time, my jaw dropped to my knees. That's about the
best cleric shield out there, excluding whatever can be gotten from PoP.
This time, I just merely comment "Shield $$" into the raid channel.
My beastlord friend sends me a tell "Good luck on shield". I respond,
"There's not a chance in heck I'll get this, but thanks." I put in my name
for the shield. The crowd control folks want to know if it's all right to
begin killing their mobs, and we give them the green light. In fact, the CC
chanter wins the halo that dropped, and is CotH'd in so she can loot it.
We begin clearing golems and the like so we can get back to the jail and the
CC folks. Meanwhile, the rest of the loot is awarded - but no word on the
shield. As folks begin to leave the HP room, you can see who's staying
behind - just about all the clerics. It's been twenty minutes, and no word
yet on the shield.
I mentally debate my qualifications - I was on the loot council of my old
guild, so I kinda know what factors play into awarding loot. Every time I'm
online, I'm available for a raid. And I'm online quite often - 4 or 5 days
a week. Whenever I'm not raiding, I'm grouping with guildies and trying to
help folks with stuff. Also, my equipment, while not bad for a level 60
cleric who's done some HoT and some CT, could stand some upgrading. I only
have FT3 boots and a FT1 earring, and mana regen is important in these
post-mod rod nerf days. The downsides are that I've only been with the
guild a month, and recently I've been vocal about wanting some time to
explore PoP, which has caused some moderate conflict (nothing terrible, we
all still like each other even if we have different views on how to deal
with PoP).
I also fantasize about what I'll say if I win - "Woot, my ebay value just
went up!" or "Awesome, now I can apply to Cats!" (That last is kind of an
in-joke in our guild; Cats in Hats is our resident uber-guild, and I would
never want to join them.)
An officer asks if we want to do Burrower Parasite now. It's approaching
midnight and I am dead tired, and say so. But then I remember the last time
we did BP - by the end all the clerics and druids were out of mana. And I
mean we were *all* out of mana - if the fight had lasted sixty seconds
longer I'm certain we would have wiped. So getting as much available
healing mana as possible will be important. Wearily I state that I'll force
myself to stay awake and be present.
Time is running down on the HP's corpse. There must be quite the debate
going on in the loot council. People have begun to make jokes - "/em has
looted a Shield of Ssraeshza" or "SYSTEMWIDE MESSAGE: Servers going down,
log out now!" Finally, with nine minutes left on the corpse, the
announcement is made: "Grats Monual Shield"
To say the least I'm thunderstruck. Mind you, not so thunderstruck that I
don't immediately run up and loot the shield. I tell ya, it felt weird to
click "Yes" on the no-drop message. I am inundated with congratulations,
and all my clever, pithy responses fly out of my head. I simply say
variations of "Thank you" over and over. I spend so much time responding to
tells I forget to actually equip the shield for a while.
Finally we rescue the CC folks. I heal some people, then sit down to med -
and get summoned three rooms away. I have no idea how that happened. My
guildmates get my corpse and rez me, and I get to loot my new shield for the
second time.
BP is called off because too many people have to log. I run to PoK to buy
my new 61 healing spell, then gratefully sit and camp - at the same time
hitting F9 so I can actually look at my new shield. I grab a quick shower
before bed, and find myself smiling. Funny, isn't it, how a virtual piece
of loot in a game I play on my computer can make me so happy.
I now have one of the uberest shields available for a cleric, and in one
fell swoop my FT has gone from 4 to 10. And I'm still on cloud nine. =) I
know this means I won't qualify for additional drops for a long time, but
that doesn't bother me at all - this one shield will make me feel quite good
about my equipment for some time to come. ^_^
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
High Priest of Rodcet Nife
Winter's Light
Drinal server
This page is Copyright by Skaarak; Everquest (TM) is property of Sony Online Entertainment
All stories and art work are Copyright@ by the origial owner/writer.
Most, if not all stories, were taken from newsgroup alt.games.everquest (AGE), I recommend that anyone who gets a chance to read it should!