[Imrahil]

VoA - Veil of Alaris

During the last expansions a certain wave pattern had established, with a rather easy expansion followed by a hard one. According to that pattern many expected quite a few challenging events during VoA and while it was overall not as brutal and unforgiving as UF there were certainly some raids which in their original form would have proven unbeatable for more than a dozen guilds (if that many).

The flagging mechanism in VoA had been changed away from pure keys which were handed out to a raid book, in which the victories were written down. A certain number of victories in one tier flagged the player for the next tier, with higher events backflagging for lower ones. While this was rather nice for many guilds as it made the process of flagging new members seemless, it was a logistical nightmare for progression guilds pushing towards the next tier, because the target had to be to get as many fully flagged as fast as possible. This was leading to some frustrations among players, who missed one victory early on and had to sit out regularly in the next weeks.
Another new invention was the idea to make group missions based on raids (or vice versa), apparently the attempt to bring raiders and groupers closer together. Obviously the complexity of a raid script must be higher than for only 6 players, but many of the general mechanisms stayed the same. This frustrated many groupers as they had problems with the rather unforgiving tasks in the higher tiers, but it also annoyed raiders who felt they lost part of the fun by simply repeating what they learned in a group mission on a larger scale instead of a completely new event.

The tuning in the lower tiers of VoA at least seemed more appropriate than in the previous expansion: while HoT had an issue with one of the harder raids being in the first tier (RoT), in VoA all raids in the lower 2 tiers were fitting for their intended audience, so it was no wonder that SoD and RF were able to overcome them rather easily with RF being 1 day behind. That 1 day lead held true for the first 2 events in T3 also, but SoD was able to beat the last T3 event 6 days earlier than RF.
The first 3 events in tier 4 were needed to enter the final zone called Sepulcher and during those events RF managed to reduce the gap to 3 days behind SoD, still hoping that by a strong finish a similar coup like during UF would be possible. SoD though were even able to extend that lead back to 6 days during the third event in Sepulcher which in its original form was an extremely hard event with adds tripling for 40 K and a boss who could shred through a tank under defensive in an instant. Both guilds needed the same time to beat the relatively easy event 4, so RF was still six days behind SoD when coming to the final event – The Triune God..

The Triune God in its original form can only be described as a testimony of what EverQuest players are willing to do in order to beat an expansion. Being an event which lasted more than 2 hours with a plethora of emotes in 3 stages, without any form of saving point or even a short resting period (eg. for a bio break) and complexity which reduced every previous raid choreography to Halfling size, it forced every guild except the current “King of the Hill” Realm of Insanity to a halt. Having to learn step by step with sometimes only 2 tries possible per evening as the final phase merely started after 2 hours it was no wonder that all following guilds needed more than a week (most of them considerably more) to figure it out. Around that time RF lost its two main raid leaders in the time frame of 3 weeks together with a few other members, so the race on AB was over, before it even really started and SoD finished the expansion as third guild serverwide with RF following a month behind as fifth of only 6 guilds able to beat the Triune God in its original version on all servers.

After a retune which shortened the duration and added a saving point after phase 2 a few more guilds were able to overcome the Triune God, among them D’Pikeys who were able to finish the expansion another 2 months later, confirming their place among the top twelve guilds serverwide and number 3 on Antonius Bayle.