It has been almost a month since the release of the latest EverQuest expansion, called "House of Thule" (short: HoT) so I guess the time has come to inform the news-thirsty visitors of the Raging Fury homepage of our progress so far.

After our usual few days off at the start of HoT to level up, get some AA and the needed flagging tasks we have started right away with raiding. The first raid we ran into was called "Tick Tock" and the end boss was indeed a giant clock:

The biggest issue on this raid was in one part of the pre-events, where some nasty unDead dogs were permanently leashed, so they reset aggro constantly - our DPS just LOVED this event! As this part has now been changed, the event has lost pretty much every challenge and even before that it was far easier than the second event on tier 1, called "The Ritual of Terror". In this event lots of lizardmen try to open a portal for the denizens of the Plane of Fear to Norrath, for example this giant toad:

Needless to say we stopped the invasion and by doing so, acquired access to the second tier raids.

After having struggled for a bit with the mechanisms of "Ritual of Fear" (it was bugged for a time too), we expected an increase in difficulty in the next tier. The first 2 raids though were shocking everyone - with their total and utter gimpness. Rarely have I seen the members of RF going "WTH?", "Loool", "This is a joke right?" after a victory, but it happened like that, not only on "Terror in the Dark" but also on "Roots of Evil". Both raids are easier than at least 1 of the tier 1 raids, probably than both.

Anyway, we collected our (almost) free loot and moved on to the next target - "The Torches of Truth". This raid provided a bit more of a challenge, but in the end Terris Thule herself had to admit she couldn't stand against our forces:

The fourth and definitely hardest raid on the second tier is called "The Librarian's Nightmare" and a nightmare it was - for our raid leaders mainly though, because the raid is extremely chaotic and involves lots of things to learn, always combined with a complete restart of the script. Now it paid off that most of us had assembled a safety margin into the level, because otherwise we might have had some low levels in the raid. After a few days of constantly testing and refining our strategy we finally got successful and managed to beat the event and unravel the sad story about the love between the butler and the chief librarian.

OK, so after the first month of HoT, what is my own totally subjective verdict on it?

Raidwise I have to say that the total disparity between raids on one tier is shocking. How in Marr's name could anyone actually approve the raids in the Well or the Grounds when you have got a raid like the one in library on the same tier? I don't mind certain raids being harder (there have always been gate keeping events, which were harder than others on the same tier), but this difference is grotesque.
Also it seems that the focus on beating an event in HoT is more on the discovery of the mechanism behind it, not on the execution itself, giving guilds who beta-tested quite an advantage, because most of the time there are no real clues, what is actually happening. We will see how this turns out in the next tiers.

Groupwise I am a bit disappointed, because the content seems a bit meager for a one year expansion without an addition in April (as we had last year with Convorteum). People can solo named in the endzone Sanctus Somnium, that is blatantly wrong! Imho this early in expansion the endzone should either not even be accessed or if so, only a balanced group with skilled players decked in either group gear from the highest tier before endzone or in raid gear should be able to kill a named. Where has the challenge in the grouping game gone?

Last but not least HoT brought us a few novelties, which newer games have long since had: housing, bags with more than 10 slots and an improvement in the light engine. While the latter isn't that big an impact, it still has one thing in common with the others: it shows that EverQuest still evolves and improves, something not many would expect from a game which is more than 10 years old. The change regarding bags has long since been asked for and always declined because "the code doesn't allow this". Well, as we can see, somehow they made it work anyway and for that I have to say "Good job". Another pat on the back goes to whoever designed the rewards for this year's halloween tasks: an unDead rabbit bunny and a vampire bat for the house are well in the mood for the spooky celebration and the quests weren't very hard or time consuming. Just a nice little quest for a fun reward - thumbs up!

So much for my own first impressions of "House of Thule", I will delay my final judgment until we have beaten the expansion (let's hope not too soon, no one wants another 10 month farming snorefest like SoD).

As usual, no news would be complete without mentioning the (very) few open spots we have. We have full raids every evening, but certain classes still have an opening. At the moment we are mainly looking for shamans and rogues, but we have some spots for other classes too, so speak to our recruiters Illandra, or Nalelini or talk to an officer.

Expect more news after the first events in tier 3 have been beaten, in the next days we have to grab a few more flags to have a sufficient raid force inside, but I promise it won't take us too long, so stay tuned!

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