Dear regular readers of Raging Fury news!

I have to apologize to all of you. Not only is this a rather small update this time (as the last one hasn't been THAT long ago), it is also far too late, as we have beaten the last progression event already on the 11th of August, so nearly two weeks ago. I could come now and blame global warming causing floodwaves to ovErflow my apartment or maybe aliens abducting my PC, but I want to be honest with you and simply say that I had other things on my mind and forgot.

That out of the way let's talk about the two last raids we have beaten.

The first one was called "Burned Out", a phrase some raiders may have used recently when they had to describe their own sentiments about EQ and its raids. Nonetheless I personally found this raid not that bad (maybe a bit too easy) and the graphics are rather nice:

The last progression raid is called "The Journey Home" and it wraps up many of the story lines brought in with this expansion - not bad. The raid itself is OK, but once again (like in Tower of Rot) the raid success is completely depending on the last few percent, meaning that you have to redo all the previous rather tedious stuff only to wipe at 5 percent. I myself don't like such a design and having it two times in only three tier 2 raids to me is a bit annoying... Nonetheless the raid isn't too bad once you learn the setup, the end is just a tad too chaotic for my taste. Oh, and Zebuxoruk still likes to babble too much (long time players will remember him from Planes of Power - now THAT was a proper expansion *remembers fondly*)

So, all of the progression is done, but there is still one raid to beat, the one in Plane of War which came out as "anniversary raid" only to be later officially changed to "permanent", as noone even bothered with it at the start considering its rather high risk vs. reward. Since the event has gone through a retune it has been beaten by more guilds than just the ruling "King of the Hill" Realm of Insanity, so Raging Fury will have a second look at it too now that apart from it only farming is left.

For thoseof you who haven't already heard it, the next expansion for EverQuest has been officially announced for the 28th of October and it will be called The Darkened Sea. I still wonder if they will finally bring in "Ship to Ship Combat" as promised for the expansion The Buried Sea years ago...

Anyway, let me finish with a little fun people have been having with those pesky clickies lately during raids:

It seems, Arionex has indeed taken the point and knows where the balls belong:

That's all for now folks, see you in Norrath maybe!

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It has been a while since I have posted any news (as Jolene was so kind to remind me every other week *sigh*). While I have to admit that part of this lack of inspiring words from the fearless leader of Raging Fury (aka. me) is due to my own sloth (there is a reason why I get called Slackrahil by some), that is not the only cause. More about that in the second part of these news, at first I want to get the important information out: Raging Fury is back on track by downing Tower of Rot (the first and only event in Tier 2a) finally!

OK, so why is this important? I mean, RF has been a high end guild for so many years and now we are happy about beating an event more than a month after two other guilds on AB (grats to them!)?

The answer is: yes, we are happy because we have recently been able to welcome a considerable amount of new friends into our guild which for the first time gave us the possibility to attempt this with a full raid (on most tries before we were 45 people on average). I won't even complain about the insane lag some people experienced in this event, that was the same for every guild, although it might be easier to overcome such obstacles with a full raid. Even after the lag issues were fixed, we never really had a complete evening of trying this event with even 8 groups, so people got a bit frustrated. Even certain attempts to motivate people didn't work:

Anyway, coming there with a full raid was invigorating and apparently lead a certain Shadowknight to premature... death:

After that everyone was awake though and it was easy to see that the difference it makes when trying an event with a balanced full raid force versus missing almost 2 groups and having people bringing in bots for certain classes is tremendous. So we got the event down on the very first attempt yesterday, which I found really impressive considering quite a large number of the new guild members had never even seen this event before - great job everyone!

To prove how totally smooth it all went, a cleric got the killshot:

There is a reason, why Illandra is called the "paladin classleader" in RF!

As we were on a roll we went and had a first short look at the first event in Tier 2b with the proper name "Burn Out". Once again a Shadowknight was the first one down:

Seriously guys, we know your class is nothing compared to the shining knight, the epitome of chivalry and greatness (and mostly curing) known as the paladin, but no need to commit suicide - it's OK, we like you anyway!

I am pretty sure we will be able to beat the two last remaining raid events in reasonable time and I might actually post another update then (no promises!), but for now I would like to explain why RF had to struggle the last months (and why I fear that this might be the same for some other guilds too).

With the change in the release strategy by SOE from releasing an expansion once a year (or twice for those who remember the REALLY old times) to releasing tiny bits of expansion parts all over the year the whole attitude has changed. This is at least as I myself perceive it. In former times a new expansion came out and the high end guilds rushed forward to get the lower tier raids beaten to proceed steadily through the tiers to finally get into the end zone, where (depending on the expansion) they would either find candyland (like during PoP) or the final true challenges (GoD anyone?)

Whatever it was, everyone knew that this process would take a bit of time to get through and that even if the expansion was released on a Wednesday it would not be a huge disadvantage to have your first raid day after that on Sunday. 3 days more or less wouldn't make or break the success in total, it was something between an 800 to a 10000 meter race until you finally beat the expansion and felt something like accomplishment (well, not so much after beating Lord Brekkt, what a poor excuse of an endboss, he must be the laughing stock of his colleagues Tunat, OMM or Triunity, heck even Vishimtar).

After beating this you knew that you would have a break from learning and struggling for a time, simply farming around. As long as it wasn't as long as during SoD (11 months of farming was really a bit TOO much relaxation), some things just take long...

Nonetheless having a farm time was OK, especially during the summer months when people were on vacation, enjoyed an evening with friends or watched the football worldcup (yes, I did my part for the victory of Germany, drinking and cheering with friends! *feels like a world champion himself, almost like Naedion:)

Anyway, fast forward to the current state of the game... expansion release was October 8th 2013, all available raid content was beaten by the very first (RoI and MS) the same day. Pretty much the same picture with the releases of tier 1b, 2a and now 2b. First day out - finished. Feels like 4 50 m dashes instead of the race length described before. Don't get me wrong, I am sure RoI and MS would be the first two to finish also if all content was released at once and if some sort of flagging would be involved, stopping them from finishing all on the very first night.

The way though it is now is simply a bit demotivating for many people used to a different setup. Add to this the general attrition during summer and you get a dangerous mix for many raid guilds who cannot relax during the summer by farming known content with low numbers as they used to. They need to beat newly released content (hey, they consider themselves high end after all), but have issues getting enough people online because people do other things during summertime too, not only EQ (see above). So now they can't beat the new content, thus people who are still online get frustrated and don't log in, others leave for greener grasses (as even some of those finishing earlier now face number issues) and the end result is that a former high end guild is struggling.

This is something which could be totally avoidable by not bringing out new raid content during the summer months and I really hope SOE can rethink their strategy on releases, because the current course is dangerous.

And now, the final quote for those who have actually taken the time to read till the end, I hope you enjoyed some of it:

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To all members of Raging Fury (former and present), to all our friends from other guilds or other games than EverQuest and of course all the people who just like to read about Raging Fury:

Enjoy the season of the year with your families and friends, be Merry, celebrate and overall have a wonderful time!

For myself I can only say that while being grateful for all my friends living close by, I am also indebted to EverQuest forever, as it has brought me some new friends from around the world (many of whom I had the pleasure to meet face to face) without whom my life would be so much poorer.

People who don't share our hobby often look down upon us because "it is only a game" and "you should interact with real people more than being in the virtual world", but all I can say is that I am truly grateful for having met so many great people, some of whom I consider among my closest friends. Does it really matter if you live in the same city or even the same country? Being there when you need someone to talk to, cheering you up when you are down and in the same way letting you yourself participate in their lives - that's what friendship is about in my book!

The internet brings possibiLities to our generation that none before has had and from my point of view what could be better than to try to learn about different cultures by the people themselves? Aren't all those "internet relations are not real"-sayers closing their eyes to the new oppotunities we have?

There is a whole world of people to meet out there and during times like these I would like to express my gratitude for all the precious memories I have gotten by starting EverQuest 13 years ago.

Yes, this is a bit sentimental, but what more appropriate time to reflect upon all the great people we have been priviliged to meet over the years? EverQuest still has people playing not alone because it is such a great game, but mostly because of all the bonds which have been built over the years. Some people may leave, but many still stay in contact even years later and that is what counts.

So from the bottom of my heart I wish you all a great time, may you have a splendid finish of 2013 and a great start into 2014!

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On October the 8th the newest expansion of EverQuest was officially released with the ominous name Call of the Forsaken. With this expansion SOE is continuing down the road they have started to walk upon with the last expansion <8>Rain of Fear (RoF), meaning that they are splitting up the content and releasing it during the following year. A huge difference lies in the even smaller initial part of the expansion compared to RoF. People last year were already complaining about the small number of raids available after the release, but this year it really doesn't feel like an expansion, considering that a total of four (!) new raids is available - the lowest number of available new raids since LoY, which wasn't even officially named an expansion when it was released (it was called a content pack and later changed to expansion).

To be honest, from my point of view such a title would be more appropriate for CotF also in its current state, because quite frankly this is NOT an expansion yet, neither from the number of raids, nor the new zones, new AA or the number of missions and quests. You can see that this isn't even a full tier of an expansion by the fact that only half of the visible gear is actually dropping in the currently available raids, the rest will be on future events which hopefully will come out soon (rumors talk about January).

With that little new raid content under the current paradigm to make raids accessible for almost every guild it can't really be surprising that all events were beaten on the release day by the usual trailblazer guilds who did put in the extra work to learn everything about the raids in Beta and how to optimize in getting the needed quests done to request the raids - kudos to them.

Talking about Beta - it seems that with this sort of content releases there is no real "race" anymore, because it is already over, before it even started, but IF you really have the ambition to finish among the very first, then getting knowledge in Beta might be the only option. This is something we in RF have not done for quite some time and personally I have always thought that learning everything on the life servers without previous knowledge is more fulfilling - we will have to decide how RF will handle this in the future. Despite our lack of Beta infos we were able to beat the first event "Against the Doomscale Horde" as first guild serverwide, which was definitely nice.

Sadly the servers had come up pretty much at the start of our raid time, so we didn't have the needed quests finished for another raid, so we had to come back the next day for more - as our own group trailblazers had done a great work on getting us raidable we were able to start working on the second event "Xulous Prime" until we finally downed it as first guild on AB just 30 minutes before midnight - was a nice feeling!

On Thursday the servers were brought down during the afternoon only to come back up 2 hours after our normal raid start. Now normally we would have said "whatever, we just take a day off", but with the new raids enough people were motivated to make raiding possible to a certain degree and we managed to work on the bixie raid (officially called "Saving Jacyll") a bit, although the overall number of raiders was not remotely close to normal due to people doing other stuff on an evening with such a late raid start.

So far, RF had done pretty well, but now the dreaded weekend arose - the bane of raid participation in Raging Fury for a long time (which is actually the reason why RF never raids on Saturdays EVER). Nonetheless our raid leader Insaneox was brave and tried to get the show going, but there is only so much you can do with more than 2 full groups missing - all those pesky folks who have to do other stuff on a Friday evening than playing EQ - how dare you!

The Bixie raid was actually a bit more challenging than the others as it brought one or two surprises, altogether I think it is actually a well-balanced raid with a new idea - not bad!

Anyway, we finally finished the last raid called "The Houses of Thex" 1 week after the release including a second flag run on "Xulous Prime" and now the farming starts yet again...

Normally I conclude the first news update after all current raids of a newly released expansion have been beaten with a personal verdict on the raid game. This time though I can't do that, because obviously the miniscule addition of new raids is simply too small to judge the whole expansion yet. All I can say currently is that SOE will have to fulfill their promises regarding more content or this might very well be the last expansion I myself have paid 40$ for - what we have gotten so far would only be worth a quarter of this amount in my book and I think quite a few people share this point of view. People have in a way "prepaid" for a complete expansion and we all hope, that we will get what we paid for in the end...

I am deeply sorry if these news aren't as elaborate or witty as previous news might have been (at least I hope, some people enjoyed them), I simply adapt to the current trend in EverQuest itself - smaller bits with less interesting content garnered with the hope for more soon (tm).

Finishing off with 2 little quotes:

First of all, the invention of collections you can assemble in EQ brought some new items with funny names which make up for a few laughs:

Second, RF has the most manly warriors EVAH! I mean, generally our "Rainbow Warrior" (OMG, will the French Secret Service now try to sink us?) is normally Daze, but this time it appears that Swordweaver wants to be one too:

Now imagine that hat on a rather big and ugly troll warrior and you have a fearsome picture indeed!

PS: Even the quotes seem to be less, I blame SOE for that lack too!

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Just a small little update before I go to bed: tonight Raging Fury has beaten the newest addition to the 19th expansion, which has been given the ominous name Shadow of Fear.

While this is not a new expansion, but only the next tier to the previously released Rain of Fear, I still would like to congratulate every member of RF for finishing it as first guild on Antonius Bayle and sixth serverwide.

Considering the fact that it consists of only two raids which aren't particularly challenging the bragging rights are rather tiny, but nonetheless it feels always good to be the first again after a break.

Let me congratulate all who finished before us (sometimes the timetable isn't in favor of the Euro guilds) as well as Shadows of Doom, who finished about half an hour after us.

As usual a "Thank You" is in order to those who got the necessary tasks and missions done to get us the raids as well as our raid leaders and members of the strategy team to get the events pinned down fast.

Let me finish with a picture of the victorious force and Luclin herself:

Let the farming continue until tier 4 comes out!

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Just a small update: today Raging Fury has beaten the ruler of the Corrupted Temple of Veeshan, the mighty Vulak'Aerr himself as first guild on AB and fourth serverwide

After our victory over King Xorbb we finally had our hands free to turn towards the revamped version of the old Northern Temple of Veeshan, which brought back many memories to the old raid players. Although one could clearly see, that raiding back then was far simpler (tank and spank), nonetheless it felt relaxing just beating stuff up and not having to worry too much.

Vulak himself though proved to be quite a bit more challenging and so the fight was indeed complex enough to get a feeling of accomplishment after downing him and being able to call ourselves "Vanquisher of Rain of Fear":

I guess we will add NToV to our farming plan now and then, was OK to do :)

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What a start into the new year: today Raging Fury defeated the The Return of King Xorbb, the final event in Rain of Fear, the latest expansion of EverQuest.

Before I come to anything else, here is the traditional picture of the victorious Raging Fury force:

This is another shot, including the Evil Eye King Xorbb himself - not so evil anymore:

And here is the loot we got from Xorbb (sadly no Bag of Sewn Evil-Eye, that would have rocked!):

So this was the final event, beaten one month after the release of the expansion, including a time of reduced raiding for the holidays? Well, at least this is the status of that event for now, but there are strong hints towards some additional content before the next expansion comes out (you may have noticed the additional three portals getting raised in Shard's Landing if you play the game) and most certainly we in Raging Fury are looking forward to additional content, more specifically raid content, because otherwise this will have been the shortest expansion raidwise since LoY...

Seriously, the first guild (Realm of Insanity) finished the last event one week after the release of RoF with the second (Machin Shin) only a week behind, followed by 4 other guilds before christmas - kudos to all of them.

And what about Raging Fury? As usual RF started a bit slower than other high end guilds, but got into gear pretty well in the end. Sadly, given the fact that this expansion was more a sprint than anything else, we couldn't make up for that slow start and thus finished it only after our small christmas break as the seventh guild serverwide, still quite a respectable result I would say. Nonetheless I hope for additional raid tiers so that maybe in the end we can still maintain our spot among the top #5 once RoF is really finished...

As the expansion was so short, I didn't post any news before, so I will give a few pictures of other raid events for you to enjoy:

This is from The Madness of King Tormax (and yes, that's Yelinak, I know)

Danella's Stand:

Zeixshi-Kar's Shard:

The Queen's Decree:

A Feast for Zalikor:

Guardian of the Gate:

That last event (also known as Xorbb #1) was actually the hardest in the expansion, not so much because of the complexity itself, but due to the fact that it is extremely poorly tuned and as such can only be beaten other than the obviously intended way.

Or to put it in other words:

Aren't we all a bit like Rambo sometimes?

Well, I guess you can't be afraid of dieing when you do events like that, even when you try to avoid certain dangers:

The event brought evil ideas into people's minds (totally un-RF-like!)

Normally the members of Raging Fury are well known and respected across the server!

But also some of the other events had surprises, especially for our RLs. I remember Insaneox asking Queen Grelleth happily to be sacrificed for her dinner table (sorry, I laughed so hard I forgot to take a screenshot), and also Odysias had an accident:

Nonetheless I am very proud of my guild, because during the last few events I have once again seen the drive and passion which seemed a bit lost after such a long farming time (the fact that the first events were beaten that fast didn't help either, I guess).

I want to thank especially our raid leaders who have done a really great job together with our whole strategy team.

I also want to express my gratitude towards our recruiters for the excellent work they have done during the long months of farming to keep the guild in a healthy state, well done, Ladies!

Thanks also to the rest of the officer team as well as to all those trailblazers who got through the quests fast so we could request the raids - especially in such a short expansion people like you are a tremendous asset to any guild!

Last but not least I want to thank every member of Raging Fury for making this guild the way it is: a hardcore raiding guild with a generally relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

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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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Yesterday evening Raging Fury was finally able to beat the third event in Sepulcher called Fumerak the Quintessence.

It took us quite some time and many deaths to down this raid, with some people losing more than a level worth of experience in the process. Adds quadding for up to 40 K damage versus tanks with over 9000 AC, a named who in certain states hits for over 55 K and some funny AE effects with pushback, blind etc. – pure joy!

Still the raid wouldn’t be so bad (I mean, we have all asked for challenging content here in RF, so there we go), if it took a bit shorter until you finally get to the stage where it really matters. It is really frustrating when you focus for ninety minutes, just to wipe in the last percents. I doubt that in its current incarnation this raid will be beaten by more than a dozen guilds serverwide and this has nothing to do with arrogance from my part. I simply don’t think that there are many guilds left in EQ who can field the constant force willing to die endlessly for days (or even weeks).

Anyway, I am glad we managed to overcome this challenge and hope we can get the next two events beaten soon as well to finish the expansion - stay tuned!

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Just a short flash update: Today Raging Fury has downed its first Tier 4 raid in the current expansion, making us the fifth guild serverwide to beat this indeed very challenging event.

As it's late I will just put in one picture of the "big bad boss":

And here are the usual cheers and some lore:

Once again a really great performance by everyone!

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