One nice thing about Everquest is that it's cut down on my gaming expense.
I used to buy one or two games a month at $40 or $50 a pop. With EQ, I've
prepaid for two years (back when they were offering that option) so I'm all
set, except for when an expansion comes out.
However, lately I found myself yearning to play something more. Last month
I bought Nightfire because it looked interesting and I thought it would be
fun pretending to be James Bond. It wasn't, and the game was just another
first-person shooter quickly disposed of. No wonder it was only $20 so soon
after being released.
So Friday I went to the computer store and browsed through the available
games. Starfleeet Command III - but I bought the original Starfleet Command
and didn't like it; micro-managing to the utmost extreme. A new expansion
to Morrowind - but I have never liked any of the Elder Scrolls game. I
bought Morrowind just to try it out and found it to be more of the same - a
*lot* of mostly-uninteresting quests until you fall over dead from boredom.
Bounty Hunter - maybe, but I'd recently been burned by an FPS based on a
well-known franchise. The Sims Online? Not a chance - I'm going to stick
to one online game, thanks very much though. I'm not even going to buy EQ2
or SWG until such time that EQ itself dies. Besides, I tried the original
Sims at a friend's house. You have to tell your Sim when to use the
bathroom? Puh-lease.
After wandering around the gaming section for an hour - important decision
here, dontcha know - I decide to buy Kingdom Hearts. I like Squaresoft
games, and I like Disney characters, so chances are pretty good I'll like
the melding of the two.
I buy the game, then get home and log on EQ. We're at a loss as to what to
do, since not a lot of folks are on. I don't normally play on Fridays - I'm
usually playing in my live-action D&D group - so I don't know if this is
normal or not. We decide to do Vex Thal. Unfortunately, the day before
Drinal's alliance of Japanese guilds - which we lovingly call Voltron - had
kill Aten Ha Ra. Still, they left a few mobs up, so we decide to give them
a try. We begin to pull, somehow we get a train, we wipe. We rez in, begin
to pull, somehow pull another train, wipe. Raid leaders call it, since many
people are logging out of frustration anyway.
So I turn off EQ and start playing Kingdom Hearts.
Now, I do bad things when I start playing Squaresoft games. I'm the kind of
person that enjoys building up my characters and getting every possible
powerup, etc. (This perhaps explains why I enjoy EQ, too.) I'll spend hour
after hour after hour wandering around, killing stuff, doing mini-games,
completing every quest so I can get the Ultimate Weapon. I tend to lose a
bit of perspective during such times, often playing way too late and not
getting much sleep.
I devote much of the weekend to playing Kingdom Hearts. I don't really keep
track of time, just falling into bed when I can no longer keep my eyelids
open, then sleeping for eight hours. After one such cycle, I wake up at 4pm
Sunday night. Hmm; may as well play Kingdom Hearts all night, then go to
work. So I do, and work goes pretty well - I thought I'd be dead tired but
I'm not, I keep alert and focused all day. It helps that it's a
quasi-holiday; I don't get many calls and can work on some other issues.
I get home, having been awake now for 26 hours. I really ought to get to
sleep but dutifully I log on. Our guild has been having a bad couple of
weeks. We can't seem to kill anything. We've failed three times on
Bertoxx - on our last attempt, Bertoxx despawned after we engaged him. And
although we killed Agnarr once, we haven't succeeded since. Things have
been too easy for us for too long; now that we're pushing to progress, we're
not meeting with our customary success. We've had a lot of major
discussions about what's going wrong, and have come up with a lot of
possible reasons - too many people going AFK, too many people with split
attention, not enough communication, not coming up with good healing
strategies. The last is, of course, something that relates directly to me;
we've been having a nice discussion on our alliance board discussing what we
can do.
Anyway, since we haven't been doing so hot, I feel obigated to log in and
check to see what we're going to raid and if my help is needed. No sooner
do I log in than my guild leader says, "Mon, get to HoH." Two of the Halls
of Honor trials are up. This isn't really something we've been failing on;
just something we've been putting off. I run to HoH and get CotH'd into the
midst of a few folks huddled in the center of a huge room. My guild leader
tells me to run to Room 1. I ask him how to get there; he tells me just to
run through the door. I look around the room; I see two hallways leading
out. I ask again how to get there, he tells me to just run through the
door. I ask him which door; he says the one straight ahead. Well, since I
can't see him, I don't know which one is straight ahead of him. After a bit
of back-and-forth that's funny in retrospect but frustrating while you're
dealing with it, I get a tell from one of our monks telling me to follow
him. I look around and see him back away from the people huddled in the
center of the room towards one of the hallways. I follow him through the
hallway into another huge room. There's another group of people in the
center of that one. I run up to them and ask if this is room 1. No, the
say, it's room 2. I turn ninety degrees and run down another hallway. Here
I find a third group of people, and this indeed seems to be room 1. I find
a group and we buff.
I ask in the raid channel what the strategy is. I'm told all I have to do
is heal my tank. Great, another unresponsive answer. I let it go since
it's not worth pursuing and I figure I'll find out what's going on. The
trial starts, and a bunch of mobs spawn in the room. The tanks each grab
one and I'm dutifully healing mine when a message comes across my screen
that a woman is screaming. "We lose" is said into the raid channel. By
following the recriminations that fly through the raid channel, I deduce
that the purpose was to keep these mobs from killing some NPC's. Somebody
somewhere let a mob go untanked and it killed the NPC.
After we're finished bickering, we move on to the dragon trial. This is
where we decide to try one of the healing strategies we discussed. Two
clerics - myself and another guy - will keep casting Complete Heals on the
Main Tank. The rest will spam fast heals; one cleric will be the designated
rezzer. We get it all set and we begin the trial. A huge Sonty-looking
dragon spawns. Initially I lose control of myself and can't cast CH, but
then I regain control and get my CH off. We keep the first Main Tank up
until about 60 percent, then he falls. We get the second MT in place and he
stays up until 20 percent. My CH's keep going off, and I never again lose
control of myself, but they can't seem to corner the dragon and I have to
run around trying to keep the MT in range. At 20 percent we just zerg the
dragon, and down he goes.
People are hailing some guy whom I assume is the flag guy. For the life of
me, I can't find him. I run around for a good two minutes trying to find
him. See, this is why I need to level up another class sometime; if I'd
been familiar with targeting mobs rather than players, I would have known
all I needed to do was hit the F8 key to target the NPC. Eventually I find
the guy and hail him and I have one-third of the trails completed.
The third trial isn't up so I get to the Nexus and run to the bazaar, just
to check to see if anyone has any 65 spells for sale before I log. As I'm
doing so, the word goes out - get to Tactics, we're going to do Vallon Zek
and Tallon Zek. These are two more mobs we simply haven't been able to
kill. Wearily I get to my feet and make my way towards Tactics. Gosh, I'm
tired.
I zone in and get re-raided. As people gather, I sit back in my chair and
close my eyes for a second. When I open them again, people are beginning to
move. So help me, I pick up my PS2 controller and push the left analog
stick forward. When I realize it's not working, I hit the circle key to
cancel my own action. I toss the controller aside and revert to the
keyboard.
We fight our way to Tallon Zek, who has a huge freakin' bow. The strategy
is explained: tanks engage, and the clerics are to run behind TZ so that we
don't get hit by his huge knockback. Once again, I and another cleric will
be casting Complete Heals while the rest cast fast heals.
We engage. I run in and get hit by the knockback an incredible distance. I
run back up and get behind Tallon Zek. In Kingdom Hearts, there's a kind of
Heartless (the generic bad guys) that's invulnerable to attack from the
front. You have to run around behind it to attack. One of its attacks is
that it will spend a few seconds drawing a huge breath. So you think, aha,
now's my change to get behind it and attack. Well, when it's done inhaling,
it will immediately whip around to face in whatever direction you happen to
be and let loose its breath attack and do a lot of damage to you unless you
get out of the way. I swear that Tallon Zek is the exact same kind of
monster. To my tired eyes, he even seems to be wearing the same kind of
silly hat. It seemed that no matter where I stood, Tallon Zek would whirl
around until he faced me, then hit me with his knockback. And not just me;
he kept whirling around and knocking everybody silly. Our first tank falls
and our second tank can't get aggro because of the constant knockback. I
resort to rezzing a few folks, occasionally targeting the MT to see if he
has aggro yet. When he does, I heal him. Somewhere along the line I draw
aggro, and down I go. Despite the chaos, we seem to be doing all right, and
as I watch from the Nexus we finish him off.
I get rezzed back in and immediately run over to the Planar Projection. I
get my flag, then loot my corpse. Now it's time for Vallon Zek. We fight
our way to him, then discuss our strategy. There are five tanks; all of the
healers are designated a tank to heal. The tanks will then say into the
raid channel whether their Vallon Zek is the real one or the fake one.
Everyone is to leave the real one alone and help the other tanks kill the
fakes. Seems reasonable enough to me. It's just like fighting the huge
Heartless octopii in Atlantis that, when killed, would split into several
smaller octopii.
Vallon Zek is pulled. He drops to 60 percent, then splits into five. The
tanks do a pretty good job each grabbing a VZ. Everyone's asking which one
is the real one - all of the tanks are reporting that theirs is a fake. Two
of the fakes die, then one of the tanks says, "I guess mine was the real
one" as five more VZ's spawn. We bear down, one of the raid leaders spams
the current assist into the raid channel while the clerics continue to heal.
The real Vallon Zek is correctly identified, and the rest are dispatched.
We let the tank on VZ continue to get beat upon for a while as we rez and
rebuff the dead. Finally, we fight VZ down until he spawns five more.
Again, the real VZ is identified. The raid leaders tell everyone to assist
one of the other tanks. Unfortunatley, this other tank had also targeted
the real VZ, and after the real VZ was identified didn't bother determining
whether or not his was a fake. So when the raid beats on that Vallon Zek,
it disappears and five more Vallon Zeks spawn admidst much cursing. I keep
thinking that now would be a good time to hit reset and load my last saved
game.
The real Vallon Zek is identified, and this time the tank that has aggro
pulls him into a corner, away from the rest. Everyone else starts in
killing the rest. While eight fake VZ's are a lot, the healing strategy
seems to be working all right. Well, one tank dies, but is replaced by a
pally - our guild leader, who has every defensive AA known to dwarvenkind.
Since he has no cleric assigned to him, I target and heal him, switching
back and forth between him and my assigned tank. With the tanks keeping
aggro and staying up, we manage to beat down all the fakes. We quickly rez
up everyone and get in position, waiting for the next set of five. Then we
beat down on the real Vallon Zek. To everyone's surprise, he actually dies
and a Planar Projection spawns instead.
There is much rejoicing. I hail the PP and get flagged. Loot is
announced - a cleric-only hammer and a Mana Preservation IV neck. Alas, the
other guild in our alliance gets the neck and our guild leader asks who will
be going in on the hammer. While the hammer is a nice toy, I still have a
lot of heraldic armor that needs replacing so I pass.
After I finish rezzing, I look around at the architecture. I see that above
us is a series of ledges that circle this room. The complete and absolute
truth is that my first reaction, on seeing the ledges, is that I should be
able to reach them using my improved jumping ability. I actually begin to
line myself up for a jump before I come to my sense. I am just too too
tired.
I gate out and log, really being too tired to continue. I look at the clock
and I have now been awake for over thirty hours. Enough is enough. Bed
beckons.
So, despite my sleep deprivation, I was able to materially contribute to a
series of successful kills our alliance really needed. We are now done with
the Zek twins and are another step closer to Rallos Zek. Hopefully by the
time we get there I'll have maxed out my AP and gotten my Ultima Weapon
keychain.
--
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
Archon 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!