[Dalrek]

PoR - Prophecy of Ro

With the Prophecy of Ro expansion we saw something new. For some reason SoE had decided to make a large part of the progression non-instanced, giving me flashbacks of racing back in Velious. On a server like AB with 3 endgame guilds, this is bound to create some bottlenecks. Add to this that one of the major hurdles was a non-trackable spawn with as of yet no known trigger that on top off all this would depop within 30 mins or so, it was very hard to get the flagging done.

RF was first to get Daosheen and Suchun done, but I believe RF, Tide and DW all got the Sverag bottleneck flag mob done around the same time, granting access to Razorthorn with it's bugged instance lockouts.

At this point Tide pulled ahead of the rest by completing Razorthorn and entering Deathknell 3 weeks before the others, which allowed Tide to be the only guild on the server to defeat event 1 in DK in its original state, RF's best being around 10% when the event underwent changes in difficulty.

With the new changes to event 1 in place, RF blew through the following events, actually overtaking Tide in the process and finishing the zone 2 days ahead of Tide. Darkwind's struggles getting past event 1 resulted in several members leaving the guild and they had to go through a recruiting phase to finish the zone almost 2 months after RF and Tide


TSS - The Serpents Spine

Having finished PoR in good time before the next expansion was due, we decided to fill some of our schedule with some TSS beta raiding. This turned out to backfire once TSS went live. Not only did very little of our feedback make it into improving the events we had tested, but when it became clear how much work was ahead in TSS, several people reached the point of burnout and retired

The Serpents Spine expansion introduced what in the eyes of most raiders, the worst flagging path we have seen. Each guildmember had to complete 30+ individual missions as well as raise faction to be able to join raids. These followed the PoR pattern of taking place in non-instance zones, where people were also camping the same rare spawns needed for flagging, purely for their loot. So we saw 100+ people online in Ashengate all trying to camp the same 4-5 spots that was needed to meet the requirements that had been set to join raids. Only later in the expansion would flags be aquired by actual raiding. As mentioned above, this caused several members to retire due to the sheer amount of work required outside raidhours to not fall behind, while at the same time levelling up to the new level 75 cap

We got it done in a big team effort and started off by choosing the Ashengate path like most other guilds. Same did Darkwind and Tide. All 3 guilds killed Vergalid within the same week. After this, Darkwind started falling behind while Raging Fury and Tide ran a parallel progression with both guilds killing up to and including Dynleth within few days of each other. At this point Darkwind still had not entered Ashengate North

Lethar 2 turned out to be the real roadblock and while RF continued to throw ourselves at the encounter, after a while Tide seemed to turn their attention towards Frostcrypt and save Lethar 2 for later instead. This resulted in Raging Fury being the only guild on the server beating Lethar 2 in 2006, doing so in the begining of December, so we could all go on xmas break a few weeks later without thinking about this encounter waiting for us.

The race for AG was won. The race for FC and expansion completion was on

Turning our full attention on Frostcrypt, we quickly caught up to Tide, defeating Grenwald and gaining access to FC2 just 1 day after they did. close race followed in FC2 instance, ending with Tide killing Shadeking Beltron 2 days ahead of RF, thus freeing them to work on the only mob they were missing in the expansion, Lethar 2, while we were working on the last mob missing for us, Beltron. The oucome was Raging Fury killing Beltron and finishing the expansion 1 day before Tide killed Lethar 2 and finished it

Darkwind had still not entered FC 2 and had actually gained competition from behind in the form of upcommers Shadows of Doom who had set in a nice finish and was now also working on Lethar 2 along Darkwind, but ended up holding on to their 3rd spot on the server, finishing the expansion a couple months later

TBS - The Buried Sea

From one extreme to the other. Where TSS had tons of flagging mission that took a long time and several raids were not overly challenging, The Buried Sea expansion went the totally opposite way, with very short and fast flagging, giving everyone access to the endzone through 8 group missions without any flag raids at all. Basically anyone who could do the group missions, could enter Solteris, Throne of Ro...but the raids here proved to be some of the hardest we had seen for a long time and even after working on event 1 for a while, it seemed not doable without further farming in TSS first

So we kept doing our weekly AG/FC run, while working on Solteris progression. Eventually something paid off and Raging fury took the lead in Solteris and has stayed there throughout the entire expansion, taking first kills on all mobs and comleting the expansion almost 3 months ahead of 2nd place

As for the other guilds on the server, it was up and down. First we had Tide as a close competition, taking 2nd place on Sisters, Aprosis and Balreth, then suddenly coming to a complete halt for more than month. After a month DW caught up to Tide and passed them on event 4, 5 and 6 and Shadows of Doom still coming from behind and passing Tide and reaching same stage as Darkwind. DW seemed to loose their momentum though and the position for 2nd place ended up going to Shadows of Doom with both Darkwind and Tide finishing off on the same day one week after SoD