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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Tonight The First Creation died for the first time on the server Antonius Bayle, beaten by the combined effort of the members of Raging Fury.

So without any further comment I have the great honor and the privilege to present to you the victorious team standing next to the body of the vanquished enemy:

The end of an expansion calls for some reflection about the expansion itself and the circumstances, under which progression through it happened. Let me just say that the last weeks I have felt a drive and a motivation in the guild which I hadn't sensed for quite some time. After being behind Shadows of Doom on the first events catching up with them during the end of Tier 7 gave a new motivation and focus to everyone in RF. We started to add an additional raid day and raid evenings became longer and longer, just because everyone knew we were close to the end. It felt like a race and that feeling gave invigoration to all our members and made it possible for people to raid till midnight, although many of us had to work the next day. The effort paid off in the end,: we were able to take back the number one spot on Antonius Bayle!

Let me congratulate those guilds who have finished the expansion before us in a legitimate way, I leave it upon everyone for himself to decide what guild to count among those. Let me also thank Shadows of Doom for giving us such a close race, you pushed us to give 100 percent, I am sure you guys will get it down soon too.

Let me also say "thanks" to our raid leaders, who have worked very hard to develop and improve our strategies and tactics and to our recruiters who got us the quality people we needed to fill our ranks. But most of all, I thank all the members of RF for showing the will and strength to overcome one of the hardest expansions in all the history of EverQuest.

Almost 10 months after its release only 4 guilds on all servers have beaten it and I doubt that this number will be more than doubled before the next expansion and level 90 will help more guilds to finally push through.

After the playing field got leveled during the all-to-easy SoD, now was the time to show what a guild is capable of: some new guilds rose to high peaks, some old high end guilds fell deep. Let me take this moment to salute a final time to Tide, it is always sad to see a once strong and proud guild like that collapse - may the former members find new homes in other guilds

.Some of those members have already joined our guild and have helped us to once again claim our place among the top 5 guilds on all the servers in EQ for the tenth time in a row! Yes, Raging Fury has been among those front runners since GoD and I think that is an achievement shared by no other guild in this game. I consider it an honor to be leading a guild which has left its footprints in the history of EverQuest for such a long period of time. I am sure we will be leaving our marks in House of Thuleto.

Until then enjoy the rest as I will enjoy not having to write news until 1:30 in the morning!

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Not long ago I have promised the regular visitors of the Raging Fury news section that there would be more groundbreaking totally awesome news soon. OK, and here at RF we like to stand to our promises so I proudly present the following newsflash: Raging Fury has entered Convorteum, the final zone of Underfoot!

Before we were able to enter there though we had to hit some sense into Brell Serilis. Now, what is more fun than hitting fat dwarves or pesky gnomes? Hitting their creator himself for all the ugliness he has brought into the world! I have to admit though that Brell does have some nasty tricks which can make a raid wipe almost instantly. Anyone else thinks that events like bonus experience weekends are mainly invented to give raiders a chance to win back their loss from deaths over the last week? Just kidding of course, I know everyone loves those weekends, it is just the fact that Underfoot has been rather unforgiving and I haven't had to click "yes" to a rezz request so often in one expansion for quite some time (actually I doubt even GoD killed me that often). I am not complaining, I like hard expansions, it's just an observation from a tank class in Underfoot, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, after a week of banging our heads against the walls in Brell's Temple we managed to turn the table and bang his head against the wall until he finally gave in:

By defeating this event we had also cleared the last obstacle on the way to the end zone of this expansion called Convorteum. As has been the case in all the recent expansions the zone itself is identical to the group version and it even has some trash, but so far nowhere nearly as annoying as in previous zones like Tower Of Discord or MMM - thanks for that!

After we had cleared the first trash, we were staring at the big golem who is called "The Gatekeeper":

This first encounter in Convorteum can only be described as a "reward mob" for entering the final zone of this really challenging expansion. If you don't play like muppets (and noone able to enter here would play like that, right? Right!) you can't lose this fight. So after a bit of whacking the golem fell to the ground and we had our first Convorteum loot.

With the success from sunday everyone could see that RF was gaining momentum towards the final goal to beat the expansion while it is still current, so on Monday we continued our march through Convorteum. Neither the Stonewarden nor the Unstable Creation could withstand our relentless assault for long and I am pretty confident that we will be able to overcome more enemies in the next days. Don't expect a long news post every day though, I might limit this to the final victory message if we continue with this speed!

A last word for this posting: we have entered the end zone and are in the middle of the final rush to complete Underfoot before the next expansion House of Thule is out. If we keep up the focus and dedication shown in the last weeks then I am sure that we will be through Convorteum by then. So if you want to be among the very few able to say they have beaten one of the most challenging expansions ever while it was current now is the last chance to join our ranks before we are done with it. At the moment we are mainly looking for shamans and clerics, but we have some spots for other classes too, so speak to our recruiters Brilhasti, Illandra, or Nalelini or talk to an officer.

Expect more news with further victories soon - you know we make good on our promises!

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OK this will only be a short update, because with the current speed in which Raging Fury is winning events I simply cannot spend hours composing the artful masterpieces you have come to love as a regular reader of our news!

So, I will make this short: after weeks of fine-tuning and learning we have finally been able to beat the second trial in Brell's Temple - The Trial of Creation! Our corpse-to-be had his own description of this raid:

Well, the pain at least brought us also some new toys:

That's it for now, only 1 event left to beat for the access to converteum, stay tuned, it won't be long till next update!

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