[Imrahil]

SoD - Seeds of Destruction

Shortly before the release of the next expansion Seeds of Destruction (SoD) there had been an announcement from SOE that they were planning to reduce the maximum raid size to 36. This announcement was met with a huge protest from guilds across all levels, mainly because it would hurt the healthy guilds to bench more than a dozen additional players and as such would mean another exodus of players. Also the point was brought forward that with so many distinctive classes EverQuest needed a certain raid size to allow every class to be able to get a raid spot. After the heated debate went on for a few weeks, SOE finally decided to draw back and return to the old maximum size of 54 players.

Throughout the whole expansion though the difficulty level indicated that the tuning was indeed done with a raid size much smaller than those 54 in mind, which is why the top guilds were all very close to each other during the race, with Raging Fury and Shadows of Doom beating the third tier “Field of Scale” on the same day and Tide close behind.
The “Plane of Earth” theme had an awful number of bugs especially in the “Rallos Returns” raid (which also lead to chances to be exploited by single players). While the event itself wasn’t really hard the random resets slowed RF down, while Shadows of Doom took the lead finishing off that tier 4 days ahead of RF, followed by Tide.
SoD seemed very motivated to win this expansion (after all, with that acronym it was fitting), so they continued to push hard and finished the endzone “Tower of Discord” as first guild on AB, with RF following less than a week later as fifth guild serverwide.

The assumption, that the raids in SoD had been tuned for the initially planned raid size received further backing up evidence when SOE added the exactly same raids on a different lockout-timer with new loot and a maximum raid size of precisely 36 as a band aid for the complaints about “lack of content”. This was quite easy to see when all top end guilds managed to beat the events with 36 players on the first attempt (with RF being the first guild to finish the Tower of Discord “hard raids” serverwide due to lock outs and the time zone advantage).

Shortly after the start of SoD our Guildleader Obsqura the Friendless stepped down from office, whom many players from across all servers may still remember for his work on maps for the previous expansions. As Dalrek also stopped playing EverQuest, Imrahil has inherited the duty of writing the history for now.


UF - Underfoot

After the “all-too-easy” expansion SoD the developers promised a more challenging experience with the next expansion Underfoot (UF) – and they kept their promise!

At the launch of UF many guilds considered themselves high end, because they managed to beat the expansion before the release of the new one and the gear level was pretty much the same across the top 25 guilds at least. Underfoot showed very clearly which guilds were really among the bleeding edge with less than 10 guilds even able to beat the expansion before the level increase coming with the next expansion, with a few long-time strong guilds collapsing, among them Tide on AB.

This left the race for the top spot on AB between SoD and RF, with SoD leaping ahead rather early on while RF still had its 2 weeks of leveling up and flagging. SoD continued to expand their lead to more than a month during the following events in T6 out of which “The Beast Below” stood out as an extremely challenging event (which was later nerfed multiple times to make it more accessible). RF closed the gap to 3 weeks during T7, until SoD came to a full stop though when they hit a road block called Trial of Creation. Raging Fury caught up to SoD with both guilds trying to beat the trial without success until it got nerfed down to a more reasonable (but still very demanding) difficulty, after which both guilds defeated the event on the same day and downed the next raid relatively fast, entering the end zone Convorteum on the same day.

The first 5 events in this zone proved to be less of a challenge than many of the lower tier raids, so RF and SoD raced towards the endboss simultaneously. Event 6 proved to be the first challenge in Convorteum and it also was at this time that RF finally went ahead of SoD by more than a day, beating the event 3 days earlier. Motivated by the chance to win the expansion Raging Fury used the momentum and finished the endboss of Underfoot 5 days before SoD as fourth guild serverwide.

With Tide gone the third guild to beat UF became D’Pikeys finishing the expansion more than 2 months later after the level increase provided by the next expansion, but still among the top 15 guilds serverwide.