Fix Your Face
Yo everyone. Twas the night before Christmas and all through the /guild, was “update the site with the shit that we killed”. Yes, Christmas comes early this year. Tell your Moms to return those new rubber bed sheets you had your eye on – the real gift has arrived: a timely and massive website update from your friends at TrialityGuild.com. Personally, I was banking on all the hype that we’d be smashed into happiness oblivion by a Mayan asteroid and I could eternally slack but I guess my Christmas wish isn’t getting granted this year.
You’ve probably noticed that new and previously unthinkable levels of slack were being set here, as far as website front page updates go. The Veil of Alaris update was small, even by my standards. But don’t worry your pretty little faces about it; we’re still rampaging our way through Norrath, strong as ever. We’ve recently defeated King Xorbb and the rest of the Rain of Fear expansion, which is what brings us here today. So wut da deal wit da slack yo? is what you’re probably asking to your computer screens aloud, in the dark. If you promise to stop slobbering on me, I’ll tell you…
I don’t usually drone on too much about myself on this here website of ours. And truth is, I don’t have to now that my best-selling autobiography, Being Great at Being Awesome: The Life & Times of the Internet’s Greatest Hero, Quarken Xired is now required reading in 76% of schools, grades K-12. You pretty much know everything you need to know about me. But what you wouldn’t have read in The Book was: I was away getting married. I know you’re happy for me, and I appreciate that. But anyway…tell you more? Oh come now, I couldn’t. Oh, alright.
There’s not much to tell really, it’s the same age old story we’ve all heard before: Girl finds guy, guy finds EverQuest, girl doesn’t know when to abandon ship, guy crushes girl’s spirit over the span of 12 years and finally asks the question, “We might as well get married”. Not much of a question really but she could’ve run for her life. I’ll put you down for a “congratulations” and we’re registered at Macy’s. Etiquette says you have a year to produce a gift, so make it a good one. But enough about my romance novel of a life, the important thing is that I’m back and so are the website updates and me lying about doing website updates. Speaking of decade long things that destroy your will to live, we have some actual celebrating to do up in hurrr.
This past Fall, Triality celebrated it’s 10th year of putting the nasty in dynasty. All jokes and pseudo-ego maniacal banter aside, I want to say thanks and congratulations to everyone that got us here. Everyone who plays this game knows it is no easy task to keep a guild together and running, and keeping it up and running for 10 years is a straight up miracle. There is a reason for that though and the reason is the people, past and present, that put in the time to keep our little digital family functioning. You’re only as strong as your weakest link and we’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of strong links in this 10 year chain. So thanks to the guildleaders that have donated their time and sanity over the years; Orruar, Mendix, Dalno(th), the army of Officers and the longtime members (Midasa, 10 years in February) and our man Nuntius, giving us a place to fuck around outside of the game. It’s because of all you cats that people like me have a chance to log in everyday and enjoy the game with our friends. Here’s to another 10 years, God forbid willing.
So what have we been doing? If you guessed, “Shit-packing every event in Rain of Fear” then a winner is you. Even though this expansion has been easy, and I mean easy, it was still really fun. I don’t know why, but this expansion has been significantly more enjoyable than Veil of Alaris. Maybe its because it doesn’t have an AIDS sandwich of a flagging system that we’re forced to take a bite of after every event. Actually, that’s exactly what it is. So thanks for that, the ‘flagging’ system in Rain of Fear is proper as fuck and long overdue. Now, let’s just move away from the 54 man raid events and we’ll almost have a modern day MMO on our hands.
Rain of Fear, where do we start – King Xorbb? Tier 2? I suppose we should at least take the time to highlight all the events in the expansion, since we blew through them like shit through a goose and didn’t have a second to stop and update the front page of the website with our progress. So let’s get to it.
Shard’s Landing has one of the funnest raids in the expansion, Calling Phantasm, and it’s the first one out of the gate. You know it’s gonna be a dope event when you pull up and High Priest Syltetzalvek is wearing Solid Crystal Oxygenating Hand-Aquariums. But since it’s just a big kid Pull-Ups© version of the group event, as is par for the course around here, there’s no sense in wasting time talking about it; you’ve all seen it. So I think we can all agree that it was refreshing to see something new in EverQuest for once. I’m not too proud to say, we got lucky with the clues on our first shot at this event and successfully discovered the murderer in record time.
Next was The Madness of King Tormax which might be the best thing in the history of things, worldwide, event better than this. I didn’t bother to read the lore or the storyline about how they managed to retcon or alternate-universe the Velious storyline in order to get Dain-motherfucking-Frostreaver IV, King ‘my pimp hand has a pimp hand’ Tormax and Lord ‘nickname to be named later’ Yelinak in the same room and I don’t give a fuck. I will not question this miracle, I’m just happy it happened. It’s like when Batman and Robin would wind up in a Scooby-Doo cartoon; don’t ask, just enjoy it and masturbate furiously to it.
Jesus Christ it is late. What’s next? Oh god, Danela’s Stand. What the fuck were they thinking with this one. Again, as you all already know but just in case you don’t: the object here is to drop rocks from the ceiling which is like 100 feet high, down onto Danela. Sounds like normal right? The only problem is EverQuest is so fucking old that is has a collision system that’s worse than a Tiger Handheld. In any modern game, this would be all peaches and cream but put lipstick on a pig and it’s still EverQuest. Let’s understand our shortcomings and work around them. I know we’re trying to “set a new standard of gameplay” here but don’t build entire events highlighting and trying to forcefuck those short comings into everyone’s raid experience. What I’m telling you is, EQ just doesn’t have the skills, agility, the skagility to make this sort of thing work naturally. It feels clunky as shit. Anyway, this event is a lot like sex: there’s a woman, positioning is important and we’re not very good at it.
Zeixshi-Kar’s Shard was the next event we killed. Pretty decent DPS event. Just a shitload of drakes, giants, dwarfs and a dragon. It’s like old school EverQuest condensed into a nice purple dome.
I think we killed The Queen’s Decree next. Ya, Grelleth, Her Majesty the Queen. Just to set the stage here: This event is a purple BBW pig queen that calls upon like six(?) of her exclusively male kids to help her kill the intruders, e.g. our raid force. Like, okay whatever, seemingly normal enough on the surface. Right? Then the dialogue hits and it is sus af. SUS AYY EFF:
The dialogue reads like something out Oedipus’s tortured subconscious and that’s just one snippet. There’s a whole event just full of this shit. I mean, we kind of take it at face value when we see it play out ‘in character’ within the context and confines of the game. H O W E V E R someone was sitting there at a keyboard typing up what they considered to be normal raid banter and scripting but in reality they likely have more mommy issues than Good Housekeeping magazine. Honest question here: Who writes this crazy shi-
After shitting my last 4 meals onto Frankie’s basement floor, he was hauled away by the proper authorities and we moved on to Heart of the Oak. This event is one of those events that makes you wonder, “What actually happens on beta anyway?”. Who beta tested this event, for real? There is no way that the first half of this event should have been given a clean bill of health. There are more bugs than Lohan’s vagina, the event resets seemingly at random, you have to perform mundane and forever-long tasks to progress the event and as if that wasn’t enough, you have to stand inside what appears to be The Asshole of Norrath. Fitting I suppose. Once you blast past the ass and get to the final boss fight, it’s actually pretty good. The event has some cool shit going on and I dig the boss; looks pretty dope if you’re into that vagina dentata thing (and I am nomnomnomnom).
I mean, it’s like 4am on Christmas morning. What the hell has gone wrong in my life that put me here at this moment in time. I’m not sure, but what I do know is we prepared A Feast For Zalikor next! Sorry Zalikor, the only thing on the menu for your feast, is our massive balls. EAT UP. Hiyoooooo! I’m officially exhausted at this point. This event is pretty dope. The Breeding Grounds is a kick ass looking zone too. More importantly, Zalikor got Nipsy’d.
The last mofaka in tier 2 that we had the pleasure of smashing was my nigga Marnek J. Best part about this event was that even the necro NPCs are still using the Epic 2.0 – now that shit is hilarious. This is another pretty cool event. I like this one, I think we all enjoyed it. To be honest, pretty much every event (except the first half of Evantill) is fun enough. Of course, with this proper flagging system and beating the expansion before Christmas, it’s hard to put me in a bad mood. I’d be all fire and brimstone if we didn’t beat the expansion before the holidays. That’d suck. Big time. I think I’ve filled this paragraph enough, on to the picture!
Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, well the moment I’ve been waiting for because that means I can almost go to bed – the Valley of King Xorbb and the end of this lengthy, but educational, website update!
So we entered this fool sucka’s Valley a little late; almost 2 weeks behind our competition. But we ended up smashing through it and taking back our rightful spot on the throne, finishing 1st on Drinal server. That’s good shit right there and I want to congratulate all my brethren in Triality for their hard work, raiding until the wee hours, and still having a fucking blast to make that shit happen. I’ve said it a lot over the course of 10 years and goddammit I’ll say it again: You guys kick ass and never cease to amaze.
I feel like we all went on an adventure together tonight; an adventure of writing, and pictures, and dick jokes and more pictures, and gallons of Diet Coke and enough Sour Patch Kids to clog a wood chipper. All in all, the expansion is fun. The events are all pretty fresh and everyone seemed to have a good time romping through it. But the highlight of the entire thing…the real reason why Rain of Fear is the second best expansion in the history of the game: North. Temple. Of. Veeshan.
Whoever’s idea it was to put a beefed up version of NToV in the game should get free blowjobs for life. NToV is, without question, the best raiding experience money can buy. I was all excited that I might get to update the front page of the website with old school screenshots of those dragon bodies, reliving the raids of yesteryear but with so much other shit to talk about, and my desire to get more than 3 hours of sleep tonight, I’ll just leave you with these:
So that’s it, my friends; Rain of Fear abridged. I know we’ve kind of covered everything here, not leaving much for another update until we get some new Rain of Fear content in a few months but we have some shit planned. It’s our 10 Year Anniversary, we gotta throw up something good. So we’ll have another update soonish and it’ll have the goods. For example, we’ll be mixing up a Rain of Fear video like so much funzie and something else special that I think people might have fun reading. Ooooh, that’s what we in the business call a teaser.
Merry Christmas, my Nigerian princes!
There’s not a pair of dry pants in the bunch.