For what I believe was the seventh time, Raging-Fury was gathered at Boomtown in Copenhagen. These real life events have grown to be a trademark of our guild, and symbolizes the fact that there are much more to the high-end game of Everquest than merely the strive for loot. (even though I am sure Hoyas would disagree!)

Each of these gatherings consist of one raid, often a target we have never bested prior to the gathering, or something which has been way overdue for us to achieve as a guild, followed by a night of enjoying the nightlife Copenhagen has to offer.

Vulaek'Aerr was the primary target, a ring we had attempted a few times prior to the release of Planes of Power, though as most of you are probably aware of, being subject to a few ring resets, combined with servercrashes, this ring was soon abandoned as newer content emerged. However, this being the sole challenge left in Velious, it was decided Vulak's time had come.

Once again we offer our most sincere grattitude to Taxa for organizing the event, like he has done many a time in the past, and knowing the gnome, we all remain certain there will be more to come. Apart from the slaying of Vulak'Aerr we have been attempting numerous elemental plane mobs, completing the necessary keys and so forth.

There used to be a section called fashion victims on this page, though due to the Legacy of Ykesha release, the amount of possible candidates have been overwhelming, thus the following display of a few randomly selected candidates will sadly be the concluding summary for the time being.

Last but not least, and most likely not the final sighting of the following occurrence:

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In lieu of Wednesdays patch, the chamber of transcendence was revisited in hopes of more specific aid in regards to what kind of brawn was needed to slay the individual sentinels of Ikkinz.

Like many a guild, our progress in Kod Taz had until this point been halted thoroughly by this all but broken encounter. Though rumour proclaimed several guilds had actually completed the event prior to the changes brought live this week.

Thus we also blithely attempted a haughty zerg fest of random killshots and intricate division of melee and caster dps, to no avail, merely to illustrate some of the vagaries that took place in the chambers of destruction.

Nevertheless, with the implemented changes, the encounter was completed with ease, and baffled yet jovial magicians felt useful for a change as the sentinel weak to coalesced damage fell to the ground. As the pictures most likely illustrate, I was not present personally, and the screenshot button seems to have eluded my guild once again.

Leading the quote section, Ztroke "accidentallY" clicking the portal within Innoruuk's lair, whilst Spellquestor used the occasion to clear his own name, also worth noticing, the secret of getting a cleric to join your Kod Taz group!

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Having successfully completed the open beta encounter of transcendence a few days ago, it was with an eerie feel of anticipation that we approached the taelosian altar yesterday evening.

Sadly we were all but disappointed upon discovering the tendencies of the trial mentioned initially, apparantly leaving the players completely clueless in regards to what is actually required to kill a mob, has struck home with our beloved developers at Sony.

Eventually stumbling across "the correct energy deemed a necessity to vanquish this foe", the final encounter was a complete reciprocal of the trial in general, in other words, enjoyable.

The keeper of the altar was however not in a photogenic mood, thus seconds after pressing F10, entering my camera mode, I was easily disposed of, limiting the pictorial coverage, but believe it or not, Trille actually managed to snap the occasion, though unfortunately with my corpse displayed amid the remnants.

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The Pixxt summoner circle in Kod'Taz has long been an intriguing event, both in regards to difficulty and to its potential role in the progression pattern.

Having merely attempted the ring once prior to today, the ring was completed sans too much asperity, and various items were distributed amongst those present. Tingle and trille once again reap the acclaim for providing the pictorial coverage.

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A decaying dragon withered to the unrecognizable by the corruption festering beneath the mountains awaited a wary raidforce amid the eerie setting of the nest. Summoning an array of unDead servants to his aid, Vishimtar sought to spread the taint that seemingly had consumed the once lithe dragon, to no avail.

This encounter is possibly the most captivating challenge of DoN to date, not necessarily due to the difficulty involved, the dragon himself is quite easily bested once the correct strategy is applied, though the involvement of every member present definitely makes this fight one to remember.

Unlike the Mata Muram encounter, one slight neglect will not render the fight all but impossible, but merely prolong an already lengthy fight. As of yet we have not been able to allocate further content in the DoN expansion, and while the newest addition to Everquest has of yet been all but euphoria, one can only hope that further raiding content will be revealed. If not, completing an expansion in less than three weeks will surely be somewhat frowned upon, time will tell. Extremely poor screenshots this time around, one could almost think they were supplied by Finnemann!

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No particular reason for this update really, I for one got fairly fed up with watching the same old Vishimtar picture each time I loaded the page. Speaking of Vishimtar, we are still doing our upmost to kill him in a position that might actually resemble a decent corpseshot, though as of yet, such an oppertunity has all but eluded us.

Content wise, and I believe I am speaking for practically every high end guild out there, the weekly agenda is quickly becoming pretty repetitive, more precisely a Tacvi Clearing, Anguish clearing, selected dragons within the new expansion (read:two), and potentially an occasional MPG trial should the nostalgy arise. Add a day or two of working on the Overlord Mata Muram encounter, and you have the raiding schedule for the next few months laid out pretty plainly. Further content is sorely needed, and should this fail to be addressed within a reasonable amount of time, further server mergers will most definitely be required, i.e announce more raiding content!

Everquest recently celebrated its six year anniversary, and with it, by popular demand, Fabled mobs were introduced anew, this time in the Kunark expansion zones. Familiar faces such as Venril Sathir, Gorenaire, Talendor and Trakanon were all somewhat buffed up and made for an entertaining reunion, and as the search for presentable Vishimtar picture is still undergoing, the fabled celebrants will have to do for eyecandy.

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The Prophecy of Ro expansion is upon us and even though we have no news worthy of replacing Mayong, I guess it's only fair to those browsing various guildsites in search of news on the expansion, to offer a bit of help. First off let me apologize for for this update not being up to its usual standards, but our wordwizard and fearless leader Nineveh has decided to dedicate his energy to RL endevours. Either that or Svartrot ate him. In both cases we wish him the best of luck on his future journey and may it be filled with as much excitement for him as he made EQ and Raging Fury for those of us who had the pleasure of having him as leader.

As far as Prophecy of Ro goes, I wont get into the whole risk vs reward thing here. Lets just say dragons aren't what they used to be. We took down Porthio the Secondborn, but unfortunately I dont have any pictures from that fight at all, so instead I will leave you with one of the Eldarr mobs. Nothing interesting from that fight really, neither in terms of difficulty nor rewards, but it adds some color to the frontpage.

Moving on we find the one mob that put up a fight so far, although he still bit the dust after a few runs to figure him out.

This mob actually gave us some nice loots. If I remember right, it sold better than our demiplane raids who tend to have most loot rotting. Somehow I think we will be seeing Daosheen alot more in the future

Although we lost some people to the natural progress of people moving on to RL stuff, we also got some nice new additions to our current team and we are going as strong as ever, determined to put Mayong to rest once again in his new incarnation. So therefore I wont spend too much time on this update, because I got the feeling that it will be updated very soon as we continue to progress through PoR. Expect some Theater of Blood updates in the very near future.

We have a very limited number of spots open to certain classes and exceptional players, so if you want to be a part of Raging Fury, this is your chance. Check out our current needs and contact Illandra in-game if interested and qualified

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Another brief update just to meet my monthly Deadline for frontpage updates

The Buried Sea expansion has arrived and ofcourse Raging Fury has flagged ourself in a great team effort from everyone. We still tear up Ashengate and Frostcrypt, but I doubt anyone is interesteed in hearing about this again. So instead I will bring you a nice picture of our adventures guild sitting at the Sisters event in Solteris, throne of Ro, admiring our guildbanner. Not that there is much time for slacking in that zone. We are working on the event and we are improving and it is looking good so far. It is definitely not a walkover, but we will get it done. We always do.

We are fortunate to have several people on the way from other servers to join our ranks and might close recruting soon, but for now we are still open for an enchanter, a wizard, couple of paladins and shadowknights, a necro and a bard. Gnomes extra wanted!

You will find all info needed to apply on our forum as well as in links on this frontpage. Expect us to have some exciting news for you soon.

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On Monday the 26th of March Raging Fury managed to defeat The Triune God, making us the fifth guild serverwide to finish Veil of Alaris, the 18th expansion of EverQuest. So our streak of staying among the top 5 in every expansion since Gates of Discord has continued once again, which I find quite an achievement. This success is even more remarkable considering the fact that Raging Fury has lost its main raid leader 2 times during the process of learning the final event, but with the help of our raid team we managed to overcome all obstacles while generally still keeping to our 5 raid days per week. I heard there was a guild on Drinal who raided 60 days out of 61 in a row without having beaten VoA yet - I give them an A for effort though.

While I am speaking about other guilds I would like to congratulate Realm of Insanity, Machin Shin, Shadows of Doom and Crimson Tempest for beating VoA before us. Also congrats to Triton who have finished the expansion only a few hours after us, very close race indeed.

Anyway, let's return to our own victory. The event is undoubtedly the most complex in all of EverQuest's history. I don't want to belittle events like Tunat Muram, OMM or Mayong Mistmoore, but the number of phases and mechanisms you have to learn to control is simply incredible. Imho every guild having to learn this event will at one point or another say "OMG, wasn't this already complex enough??"

On the other hand it most definitely was a challenge and beating it felt awesome (followed by a feeling of relieve not having to go here again for another week).

Let's come to some screenshots!

Here you can see a picture of our formidable adversary in his power:

And here he/she/it isn't as powerful anymore:

Of course we also have a picture of the victorious force inside the raid:

As always upon such victories there are people who haven't been online/inside the raid when it finally happened, but who have played an important part during the learning phase of the event. This is especially true on an event like The Triune God which has taken us more than a month from the first attempts till finally beating it, so I would like to congratulate ALL members of Raging Fury upon this success, you guys have done a great job!

Of course it wouldn't have been possible without skilled players like our warrior class leader Xack, the ancient lizard (he has been in RF longer than anyone else who still plays) and his wisdom:

Anyway, as customary whenever I write news about the finish of an expansion I will add a few comments about the expansion itself. First of all the total number of raids is too low, there is no denying that 14 raids is pitiful considering the fact that when EQ moved to annually releasing expansions we were promised more developer time for content. With the current paradigm of "nothing matters, but the current expansion" every previous raid is more or less obsolete, especially since the decision to let spell foci decay, even from the endzone of the previous expansion. I still think this was a VERY bad move as it leaves the mid-tier guilds with only 4 raids (Argath, Sarith, Lunanyn, Beast's Domain) until they run into a brick wall (Rubak and Resplendent Temple).

On the other hand we have 8 tier 4 raids, so at least something to do for those few guilds who actually manage to beat the expansion. Is it arrogant and premature from my side to assume that there won't be more than a dozen guilds able to beat VoA in its current state, if that? Maybe, but I doubt it. There are simply not enough hardcore guilds left who will overcome the obstacles laid in their way. The complexity and unforgiving mechanisms of events like Pillars, Sepulcher #3 or Sepulcher #5 are simply too much for more than just a handful of guilds. I doubt there are many guilds left in this old game who just take it that they can have a maximum of 2 tries per evening on one event, because the really interesting part begins after 90 minutes. Nonetheless you can't just go on "automode" during the first 2 phases, because playing just a bit sloppy can mean a wipe or a huge disadvantage later on, so the pressure is kept up for almost 2 hours constantly. This is different to former long events and I don't think it is good design at all. Considering that the loot on this event is the same number of drops as on the other (much shorter) raids it is no wonder that many think that time investment vs. reward is not balanced at all.

I really hope that we will get a retuning of many raids in the very near future otherwise I foresee an exodus of players, which would be sad, because on the other hand we have seen quite a few new faces since EQ became "free to play" (F2P). Some of those faces are actually rather familiar, for example one of my predecessors as guild leader of RF is back (with a small namechange) and Dalrek already feels the strong lure of EverQuest again:

Qujam feels that lure too, but of course there are opposing interests to decide upon - Insaneox made his choice as you can see:

A final quote so you all know how much respect officers in RF get from their members:

That's it for now, Veil of Alaris is beaten, the farming starts, and I can only salute my guild for a tremendous job they have done.

Members of Raging Fury you made me proud once again!

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Dear valued reader of the Raging Fury news: I am proud!

No, not of myself because I managed another update only 5 weeks after the last (I am accepting pats on the back though for such an accomplishment), but of my guild who managed to down the fourth event in Arx Mentis called Principal Indagatrix Lucia yesterday evening.

This event was no "walk in the park" although it takes place in the garden area of that zone, so we did actually have quite a bit of cheering after all those achievements upon the victory:

To be honest, I think Pippi exaggerated a bit there, fights like Triunity, Fumerak (both VoA), many of the Underfoot raids in their original form or even Solteris back its day were much harder than this event. Nonetheless it felt certainly as an accomplishment, to which to a huge part the suicidal tendencies of Firiona Vie contributed. Seriously, that lady should get an honorary PhD in Lemminging, she is a real pro in that discipline...

Anyway, beating this took us a bit longer than expected, but not all of that delay is to blame on our admittedly more casual approach (compared to the times when we were constantly among the top 5 serverwide).

As those who are still following information around EverQuest most likely will already know, Sony has sold its daughter company Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) to an investment company called "Columbus Nova", so SOE is now called Daybreak Game Company.

Aside from the usual lay-offs which happen after such changes (hopefully followed by new hirings) there was also a change on the patch times for EverQuest which hurt the Euro players pretty badly. That change alone cost us two raid days, otherwise I think we may have beaten Arx 4 last week already (not that it really matters anyway). Still we hope that future patches can be moved out of our main time again.

Apart from that we are all anxious to see how Daybreak will handle the current problems in EverQuest and if they will rectify some of the mistakes recently made by SOE (namely the so-called "XP-nerf" when players below 100 were grouped with players level 101 and higher and the huge reduction of exp for all zones below CotF). There is no denying that EQ was not given the resources needed to maintain a healthy game which then lead to more people quitting, leaving it with less resources... a vicious circle.

We can only hope that Daybreak (or Columbus Nova) is seeing things from a different angle than Sony and maybe supports the game in a way which actually brings back some of those retired folks and maybe even gains some new enthusiasts. Having more content than 5 progression raids and two so-called "one-off"-raids and a miniscule number of zones could actually help with that. What is a "one-off"-raid you may ask if you aren't in the game anymore? Well, that is a raid you can only attempt one time, the lockout gets activated when you trigger it, not when it is beaten (a bit like Corniav during PoP-era). No offense, but putting this mechanism in on two from only seven raids in total is a blatant and open attempt to make the content appear bigger than it actually is. You can only attempt it once every five days (meaning for guilds like RF once a week) and there is a good chance that some of the stuff you learned you forget again until next week without training inbetween (or there is a change in the raid force with some new members). Now, I wouldn't mind something like that if we had 20 raids of which two were of this type, but when you only get 7, then this is simply an extremely bad and annoying idea which in no way is making raid more fun!

The brand EverQuest should still stand for something, so we can hope that Daybreak may listen a bit more to the players and the devs may also have to be a bit more understandable that people who are not enjoying the game will actually leave. Putting fingers into ears singing "lalala, I can't hear your whines about not enough content, timesinks via spelldrop rarity and exp-nerfs" has cost EQ too many good players already.

On a more positive sidenote, mages got their summoning spells nerfed, about time!:

That's all for now, folks, the last update should come when we have finished the last progression raid and then I will also give my personal verdict on the expansion called The Darkened Sea (as if you couldn't read it between the lines already).

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