Dynasties & Dungeons

The Frostreaver Campaign The story of Frostraiders' raid progression on EverQuest's most unusual Time-Locked Progression server. Eventually every raid guild reaches a point where the question is no longer whether it can progress, but how far it wants to go . For Frostraiders, that point arrived unusually quickly. Frostreaver had already given the guild access to content from multiple eras of EverQuest. Players had been gearing themselves through groups and smaller raids, the official raid force had moved through increasingly valuable targets and enough players had acquired the equipment and access needed to tackle serious Velious content. The guild now had choices. And those choices mattered. The Traditional Progression Path Was Gone On a conventional Time-Locked Progression server, progression is relatively straightforward. The server opens Classic. Guilds raid Classic. Kunark arrives. Guilds move into Kunark. Vel...

The Frostreaver Campaign The story of Frostraiders' raid progression on EverQuest's most unusual Time-Locked Progression server. There is a point in every raid campaign where equipment stops being the only obstacle. You can have the armour. You can have the weapons. You can have a raid force capable of defeating difficult encounters. But if the players who need to enter the zone cannot get through the door, none of that matters. For Frostraiders, Sleeper's Tomb became one of the clearest examples of this problem. The challenge was no longer simply to kill something. The challenge was to make sure enough people could actually get inside. The Importance of the Key On a conventional progression server, keying can sometimes be treated as an administrative nuisance between the exciting parts of raiding. On Frostreaver, that approach would have been a mistake. The guild had already spent considerable effort buildi...

The Frostreaver Campaign The story of Frostraiders' raid progression on EverQuest's most unusual Time-Locked Progression server. Once a raid force has reached a basic level of competence, the question changes. It is no longer simply a matter of asking whether a character has enough equipment to survive. The question becomes: which upgrades will make the raid force more capable? For Frostraiders, this was an important distinction. Frostreaver offered an unusually large amount of equipment, but more loot did not mean that every item had the same value. Some upgrades improved a character's statistics. Others provided abilities that could make an entire raid more effective. The guild therefore had to think about equipment in terms of capability rather than simply item level. Not Every Upgrade Was Equal A conventional equipment list can make progression look straightforward. Replace an old item with a better item and...

The Frostreaver Campaign The story of Frostraiders' raid progression on EverQuest's most unusual Time-Locked Progression server. Winning a few raids is one thing. Building a raid force capable of winning them consistently is something else entirely. By the time Frostraiders had established itself on Frostreaver, the guild had already demonstrated that it could defeat raid encounters. The next challenge was considerably more complicated: how do you equip an entire and constantly growing raid force? This was one of the defining problems created by Frostreaver's unique ruleset. With Classic, Kunark and Velious available from the beginning, there was no shortage of powerful equipment to pursue. At the same time, Frostraiders was not a static group of players. New characters were reaching raid level, new players were joining the guild and established raiders were continuing to improve. The guild therefore needed more than a handful o...

The Adventures of Roghnach Dorje, Ninja Spy   Returning to Dungeons and Dragons Online   ______________________________________________________________________________________     After Nearly Twenty Years It has been a very, very long time since I last played Dungeons & Dragons Online . How long? I originally thought perhaps fifteen years, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was probably closer to twenty. I remember playing it quite extensively, but I also remember reaching the point where there simply didn't seem to be much more to do. Eventually I moved on to other things, and DDO was left behind. Until now. Recently, I started watching Just Drive Plays , and his enthusiasm for DDO, alongside our continuing enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings Online , prompted the obvious question: why aren't we playing Dungeons & Dragons Online again? After all, we like Dungeons & Dragons. ...

Inside Crescent Reach There is something rather exciting about starting a new EverQuest server. I've played EverQuest for a very long time, and I've been through more than a few new servers and progression starts over the years. But Lethar feels different from the traditional progression server experience, and that is what has caught my attention. For a start, we're not going back to 1999. Lethar launches with The Serpent's Spine , which means that a brand-new character is effectively starting in the modern EverQuest experience. This is particularly interesting to me because today's EverQuest has a very different approach to introducing new players than the game I first knew all those years ago. Rather than simply being dropped into Norrath and left to work everything out for ourselves, there is now a much more structured journey available. And that is exactly what I'm going to do. Doing it all again My intention on Lethar is to follow the Hero's Journey . T...