I remember sitting on the North Wall of Karnor’s Castle back in 2000 or 2001, doing my best to keep my group healed as a…

I remember sitting on the North Wall of Karnor’s Castle back in 2000 or 2001, doing my best to keep my group healed as a mid-40s druid, and chatting with the other people in my group. Yeah, we did a lot of chatting. I don’t know why people keep calling EQ1 a hardcore game… playing EQ1 was like sitting on a beach chair watching the surf crash, and occasionally rousing oneself off that beach chair to fall upon the surf and really mess it up, then relaxing again as the puller went out to find more surf.

Where was I… oh yeah, North Wall. Anyway, we were chatting about the godlike people in uber guilds. This was back before everything became instanced, and uber guilds often raided in the exact same zones people xp’d in – you could even watch! Instead of having one world for raiders and another for non-raiders, everyone existed together, and you would see ubers riding the same boat you did, conversations would strike up, you’d find they were regular people who just happened to see amazing stuff…

Damn, have to stop falling back into Nostalgia. But I guess this whole post is really about that.

Back to that group on the North Wall. We were chatting about how amazing the raid gear was that you could get in the planes… why, there was even rumors of a warrior with over 5,000 hit points!

We were all astonished. I doubt there was a person in that group with over 1,500 hit points. How could we ever see those numbers?

A couple of years passed, and I was a young rogue eager to join this new raiding guild, Crimson Eternity. They were rude upstarts in the raiding community; they’d been the first to kill Doomshade on our server, beating out the older raiding guilds. They were a family guild that had suddenly found itself raiding – and they were rather good at it.

There may have been three or four rogues in the guild at that time, and naturally, we were all excited about our gear. Everyone was level 60 at that point, Planes of Power not yet having boosted the cap to 65. I remember our hit points. I was just barely at 4000 hit points. The guild leader and lead rogue, Westleey, was over 6,000 hit points, but he had a lot of Temple of Veeshan quest armor.

Okay, now take a look at my signature pic at the top of the article. It’s a live signature, I have a program that grabs the stats from EQPlayers every six hours and makes a new signature, so those stats are not more than six hours old.

As of this writing, my ranger is level 47. with 3,443 hit points. How? That new Defiant armor, plus some Secrets of Faydwer crafted jewelry Stargrace made me. People wonder how we can possibly level so fast, playing one day a week. It’s because modern EQ dresses you in raid gear from day 1.

From excellent armor given in the tutorial, to the level 20 Crescent Reach quest armor and now this Defiant stuff… you’re practically twinked just by standing around. There is nothing my ranger wears that came from any zone she cannot fight in. In fact, I think almost all of her gear came from the Crescent Reach quests, Stone Hive, or Dulak’s Harbor.

And at 47, I have nearly as many hit points as my rogue did at level 60 with 18 AAs.

I’m not complaining, really. I guess it’s cool being raid geared without raiding. But it sure gives you darn little reason to START raiding though, doesn’t it?

We’re going to kill Nagafen and Vox soon. We’re going to hold our levels at 52, earn some AAs, get everyone up to date with jewelry and Defiant armor, and then we’re going to shake those complacent dragons nobody ever kills these days to the bone. Can you imagine what two-three groups of noobs in armor that would make hardcore level 60 raiders of days past drool, with veteran rewards giving us max resists, will do?

I feel pretty sorry for those dragons.