West Karana

Yup, last night we entered Vex Thal for the first time as a guild. Aten Ha Ra, your days are numbered, etc. (I don’t have to mention that we were trying to zone off a train, right? Good!)

I’ve always had a deep and abiding affection for Vex Thal. What’s not to love? A city devoted to the worship of a four-armed goddess who dresses like a Rocky Horror refugee and uses her moon as a footrest for her spike-heeled, black leather boots?

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Since I barely did anything to help with the guild hall, compared with Stargrace, Kasul and Ecor, I feel kinda embarrassed to be the first to blog about it, but there ya go.

If you’d been following Twitter yesterday, you’d have seen the drama as Nostalgia worked crafting writs so the guild could reach level 30 and be allowed to buy the smallest, cheapest guild hall. Even the smallest, cheapest guild hall is pretty expensive and perhaps 5-6x larger than the largest house you can buy. There is nothing small about any guild hall. They really are, large, stupid large, and omg wtf I need a map large.

Due to the heroic efforts of the Nostalgia crafters, the guild dinged 30 JUST before I got home. This was my first time home this week before 6:30; I’ve been trying to catch up with work and coming home later. The guild was parked in front of the guild hall, waiting for me :)

Since Dina doesn’t have good enough faction to purchase her loom, I had to switch to Dora, who has max faction with Freeport’s crafter society, to buy it.

We all donated status and some of us, coin, to pay for and maintain the hall. A couple of folks with too much status came by and donated some, and we now have enough status to keep the hall going for a very long time. Stargrace bought five amenities — NPCs and other features you can add to the guild hall. Five is all we’re allowed, for now. We got the druid who opens portals for you to any druid ring, an attuner that grants you a spell to port back to the guild hall, a fuel merchant, a rush order crafting writ giver, and a banker.

Because we are, after all, largely a guild of crafters, we went for the crafting things first.

I decorated my tailoring area a little; why not? After resizing the loom down to halfling size, I added a wardrobe for storing work in progress, a chair for when I get tired of standing, and a skull with a sword stuck in it resting on a small table because… well, because why not?

This is Buddy, the giant dog who roams our hall, keeping it prowler free. I wasn’t sure if he was really there or just my imagination, so I sat him right behind Stargrace as she was arranging books in the guild library. Her scream woke up people three guild halls away :) She said, “I was arranging the books when I heard some barking, and I thought someone had let their dog in here. Then I turned around and AGH!”.

Good times :)

Earlier, I’d been packing up Dora’s room when that STUPID FRIGGIN ZOMBIE jumped out at me from nowhere, so I’d already gotten my scream in. I need some Zombie Spray to keep those zombies away. Thank God my son wasn’t home to hear.

My guild room looks like front row center at a Spinal Tap concert. It needs a lot of work. I want to get a dungeon-y feel to it. Giant flaming pig heads are an interesting choice for any modern bedroom…

The hall is still pretty barren, but if I know Stargrace, it’s going to be something special in a little bit. You’re all invited to the open house, when we have one :)

Tomb of Thuuga. The boss fight is hard to take screenshots of because of positioning.

Yes, yes, I know I don’t have time for raiding, nor the desire to have some group of strangers have control over how I spend my evenings. Hardcore raid guilds have always seemed at odds with modern life. You mean, you actually raid seven days a week? You seriously expect that every single night of their lives, people will want nothing better than to sit in front of the computer and

I love raiding, but there is no way that hardcore raiding is good for you in any sense at all. I quit that self-destructive lifestyle last Spring and will never go back. And, I consider any game that encourages or requires such dedication (see: EverQuest, World of Warcraft) as encouraging a really psychotic playstyle. WoW is even giving out a unique title for the first person to hit level 80 in the expansion. They even used to have a PvP ladder system that required you to do nothing but battlegrounds 24/7 — with little or no sleep — to reach the top. They did finally change that.

When I quit raiding, I quit EQ2. It was when we were starting the Nostalgia guild in EQ1 (a game I had quit under similar circumstances a year before), and getting that going required a lot of time anyway. I didn’t log back into EQ2 for about a month. My guild there kicked me out. But I felt great. I was getting plenty of sleep. I stopped worrying about how I was ever going to finish my mythical epic. I absolutely stopped caring about EQ2 at all. Not because the game isn’t fun, but because it was taking up too much of my life.

Stargrace eventually got me to pick up EQ2 again with her EQ2 Nostalgia branch, but even with that, I haven’t been playing EQ2 much. I have way more fun playing a variety of games casually than one game to the exclusion of all others.

So, given ALL THAT…

Yesterday was my EQ2 crafting day (or was going to be). I did some writs to hit level 60 tailoring, logged on to my jeweler and made a couple of rings for a guildy and a set of tier 4 jewelry for a random stranger, and was trying to decide between starting up tier 7 tailoring or to betray my necro to a conjurer when I was invited to a Tomb of Thuuga raid. This is the tier 1 Kunark raid where you kill a spider who spawns cocoons and more spiders, similar to the EQ1 Volkara raid in Dragons of Norrath.

There are some very nice scout boots that drop from there, so what the heck… it is an easy raid, and it had been awhile…

After two tries with different strategies, we took her down. That didn’t finish the night… we rolled to the Shard of Hate, where we easily killed the two easy bosses, Dreadlord D’Somni and Demetrius Crane (getting me a master spell, Countersong, along the way, YAY!), and then, amazingly and astonishingly, Master P’Tasa, the first time I have ever been part of a raid that killed him. (And it was a pickup raid! Imagine!)

He dropped the ring Signet of Betrayal, and I won the roll. Winning loot is the Scooby snack of raiding. It’s easy to be all blasé about raiding. Then you win something and it’s all like, “oh, what’s this on my finger? Just a bauble really. I’m sure nobody is interested in this old ***—> SIGNET. OF. BETRAYAAAAAAAAAAAL <—***”. And now you need more. You start looking up strategies for raids you haven’t seen yet, and whittle a carving of Trakanon into your desk with a pen-knife, leaving the blade stuck quivering in his little wooden heart. Yesssssss fear me, Trak. Your death is coming……

Huh? Oh, wait. That’s right. I gave up raiding.

Tonight, Nocturnal Wrath, the guild that hosted the pickup raid, plans to finish off the Shard of Hate, and they invited those of us who hitched a ride on last night’s raid to stick out a thumb for this one.

I’ve at least tried Master P’Tasa before, but the rest of the Shard of Hate I have never even seen. I wonder where I’ll be tonight. 7 PM Eastern time. Najena server.

Hmm.