The Frostreaver Campaign – Part 6: Keys Before Kills
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 building a deep raid force. Players were improving their equipment, new raiders were reaching the required standard and the guild was becoming capable of fielding increasingly powerful forces.
But Sleeper's Tomb imposed another requirement.
Players needed to be keyed.
That meant that the guild had to think about access in much the same way that it thought about equipment. A player who had excellent gear but could not enter the zone was still unable to contribute to a Sleeper's Tomb raid.
The key therefore became another form of progression.
Keys for the Raid Force
The important point was that Frostraiders did not simply need one or two players with access.
The guild needed enough people keyed to make Sleeper's Tomb a practical raid destination.
This changed the way the task had to be approached. It was no longer an individual achievement that could be completed whenever a player happened to have the time. It became a collective logistical objective.
Every additional player who completed the key increased the guild's flexibility.
A larger pool of keyed players meant that absences were easier to accommodate. It meant that different raid groups could be assembled without being held back by a lack of access. And it meant that the guild could begin treating Sleeper's Tomb as a genuine part of its progression rather than as a zone that only a small number of players could enter.
Progression Has More Than One Currency
By this stage of the campaign, Frostraiders had learned that progression could be measured in several different ways.
There was equipment.
There was experience.
There was raid organisation.
And now there was access.
A guild could be rich in one of these resources while being poor in another. Having excellent equipment did not automatically mean having the experience or organisation necessary to tackle the next encounter. Similarly, having a strong raid force did not guarantee that everyone could access the content they needed to tackle.
Sleeper's Tomb therefore became a test of the guild's ability to manage progression on several fronts simultaneously.
The Value of Group Work
Once again, this reinforced the importance of activities outside the official raid schedule.
Just as Skyshrine armour could largely be pursued through group play, the work required to build the guild's access to Sleeper's Tomb did not necessarily require the entire raid force to assemble every time.
Players could work on their own progression and help other members through the necessary stages. This allowed the guild to continue preparing for the next major raid objective without sacrificing every official raid night to preparation.
It was another example of the same philosophy that had already shaped Frostraiders' gearing strategy:
Use the right size of group for the job.
Five or six players did not need a full raid force to work on something that could be accomplished in a group. Conversely, a full raid was required when the objective demanded it.
The distinction allowed Frostraiders to make much more efficient use of its available player time.
Why Enough Keys Matter
There is an important difference between having access and having raid capability.
If only a handful of players are keyed, a guild may technically be able to enter a zone but still be unable to operate there effectively. The absence of one or two key players can suddenly become a major problem.
That is why Frostraiders' objective was not simply to get a few people into Sleeper's Tomb.
The goal was to build a sufficiently large pool of keyed players that the zone could become a dependable part of the guild's raid programme.
This was particularly important as the guild's raid force became deeper. The ability to field different combinations of players was one of Frostraiders' growing strengths, but that flexibility was only useful when those players could actually access the content.
Keys Before Kills
This is where the title of this chapter comes from.
Frostraiders had reached a stage where it was tempting to think about the next dragon, the next piece of armour or the next major raid victory.
But before any of those things could happen, there was groundwork to complete.
The guild needed its players to be ready.
It needed them to be equipped.
And it needed them to be able to get into the zones where the next stage of progression would take place.
That might not sound as exciting as defeating a major raid boss, but it was precisely this kind of preparation that allowed the later victories to happen.
The Frostreaver Difference
On a conventional TLP, a guild might approach progression in a fairly linear fashion. One expansion opens, the guild gears up, the next major zone becomes available and the process repeats.
Frostreaver was different.
Classic, Kunark and Velious were already part of the same progression environment. The guild therefore had to decide which objectives mattered, which activities could be done in groups and which required the full raid force.
The existence of powerful equipment did not remove the need for preparation. If anything, it made preparation more important because there were more possible directions in which the guild could move.
Sleeper's Tomb was therefore not simply another zone on a list.
It represented another stage in the process of turning a collection of well-equipped characters into a coordinated end-game raid force.
Preparing for the Next Stage
As more players obtained their keys, Frostraiders gained another piece of the infrastructure it needed for serious Velious progression.
The guild had already established its equipment base. It had learned how to use group content, unofficial smaller raids and official guild raids together. It had begun using increased loot availability to build depth rather than merely producing a handful of exceptionally geared characters.
Now it was solving the access problem.
And that would lead to an important change in the campaign.
Once the guild had enough players properly equipped and enough players able to access the most valuable Velious content, Frostraiders could begin making decisions about which content was actually worth pursuing.
Not every raid zone would receive the same attention.
Not every difficult encounter would be worth the cost of attempting it.
And some content would eventually be deliberately left alone, even though the guild had the ability to pursue it.
The next stage of the campaign would therefore be about something more difficult than simply obtaining access.
It would be about deciding where not to go.
The Frostreaver Campaign
- Part 1 – Why Frostreaver Was Different
- Part 2 – Building Frostraiders
- Part 3 – First Steps into Raiding
- Part 4 – Building a Foundation
- Part 5 – Gearing for Capability
- Part 6 – Keys Before Kills
- Part 7 – The Point of No Return
- Part 8 – Choosing the Right Battles
- Part 9 – The Economics of Loot
- Part 10 – Lessons from Frostraiders
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