Everquest Mysteries
- Thread starter Big Flex
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Ryoz
<Donor>
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I knew of him but I don’t think Triality wasn’t a real force and hitting world firsts until like TSS or later… could just be a lot of people weren’t following the game anymore. I enjoyed his posts when I saw them and his avatar was always memorable.
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Ravanta
Trakanon Raider
- 65
- 48
What was always really annoying to me is when some other wiseass would kill it, even though they knew what I was doing.
Especially when some other wise-ass said "You don't even have to actually land the spell on something to proc it" but they were being absurd, and were referring to the group proc, not the individual one.
I quit live in early 2020, so my memory might be a little off on the specifics.
I actually befriended a Female Wood Elf Druid (that was an actual girl in RL) back on Solusek Ro in Sept of 1999 and we're still friends today.
Top mysteries for me:
Spawning the dragon on top of the Tae Ew Pyramid past the maze in the 55-60 version of Cazic Thule
The box in Skyfire that you could interact with and had no use at all.
Ah.. Searyx, Master of Mistmoore, he was such a goodie two shoes. A human druid actually. Not a halfling, or an elf, but a human. A pretty much unheard of thing back in the start.
Also, I wonder what happened to Solusek Ro's famous human druid named Mesha Wolfie, who "reinvented" reverse dungeon kiting in Lower Guk, getting bazillion of people killed on a daily basis
Top mysteries for me:
Spawning the dragon on top of the Tae Ew Pyramid past the maze in the 55-60 version of Cazic Thule
The box in Skyfire that you could interact with and had no use at all.
Ah.. Searyx, Master of Mistmoore, he was such a goodie two shoes. A human druid actually. Not a halfling, or an elf, but a human. A pretty much unheard of thing back in the start.
Also, I wonder what happened to Solusek Ro's famous human druid named Mesha Wolfie, who "reinvented" reverse dungeon kiting in Lower Guk, getting bazillion of people killed on a daily basis
- 1
I was a necro raid leader in the Magna Charta for two years. They were a European guild. We did Tacvi and Anguish etc. Couldn't beat Arch Magus Vangl. Long time ago in 2005.
Masakari
Which way, western man?
- 12,920
- 48,624
- 1
Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
- 73,111
- 214,401
ive been hooked on this type of stuff all my life. magic and wizards and dragons and knights. man, who wouldnt love that shit? though, EQ did fulfill almost all those fantasies and even just talking about it was almost as fun as playing it back in the day. i wish kids today would have had the childhoods most of us had with this stuff. more imagination and less "here it is, consume"
- 6
Triality's history as a top guild really started with GoD, even if the first #1 finish wasn't until TSS. I'm bored, so here is some EQ guild history for context based on the excellent raid tracker that started up for GoD @ EGL. Triality's entry is here -
3rd to finish GoD, 2nd in Anguish (10th on OMM), 7th for Mayong in DoDH, 3rd on Ayonae in PoR, 1st in TSS (1st FC, 4th AG), 1st TBS, 1st SoF, 1st SoD, 3rd UF, 2nd HoT. Decent top 10 finishes for several expansions after before disbanding after beating RoF #10.
Triality had a record of dominance in EQ that was only surpassed by RoI if you look at the modern era of EQ raiding (by that I mean real raid scripts). RoI has pretty much dominated the twilight/maintenance era EQ has been in for a decade (they came up from the first TLP when it caught up to live). Despite a ton of players seeming to think EQ ended with GoD/WoW, the overall # of raiding guilds didn't enter serious decline for awhile - until around UF - when the # of guilds doing expansion completes basically cut in half (there is a large contingent of raid guilds who did not complete expansions and make my lists below, but which disappeared over time as well). There are really 3 periods of EQ raid guild history IMO - the silver age of early raiding - Classic->LDoN/God, the golden age of the raid game - God/OoW->SoD, and the twilight/maintenance period - UF->Current. For point of reference, RoI's 1st #1 finish was in Underfoot. You can comfortably call the last era RoI's era. As I said, Underfoot nearly cut the expansion-complete raid guild scene in half - from about 100 to 50, previously it had hung around 100 for 6 years. It probably had a bit to do with the move to yearly expansions (from 2x/yr) - Underfoot was the 2nd annual cycle expansion (SoF was the 1st). Only 53 live guilds have ever finished Underfoot, in contrast, it was 207 for GoD, 137 for OoW, 204 for DoN, 114 for DoDH, 106 for PoR, 104 for AG in TSS, 103 for PoR, 82 for SoF, and 95 for SoD. So 53 in UF, 43 for HoT, 26 for VoA, 47 for RoF, 49 for CoTF, 32 for TDS, 32 for TBM, 30 for EoK, 24 for RoS, 19 for TBM, 37 for ToV, and 26 for CoV should put in perspective what sort of decline EQ has seen in expansion completes (ex-TLP). I think the middle era is defined not only by raid scripting, but also the advent of 2x/yearly raid content coming out - I sort of have GoD straddling eras a bit because of that. Triality as a guild wasn't even a guild until late Luclin/early PoP if I recall - I recall some of their first raids was like Umbral Plains during early PoP (I was a guest on Doomshade or something with them - joined another guild because they had too many monks - who all quit later except 1 =P). Anyway, given their late start such - that GoD finish should be really impressive. They really just had a great leadership team - Orruar is, and was, one of the most brilliant raid leaders I've seen, and we ended up with more than just him over time to boot (Dalnoth, Mendix, etc). The guild had a decline in the post-OMM and DoN->early DoDh era - they got to the point they couldn't kill OMM for example. They did a massive rebuild instead of disbanding - which is when I joined.
The 7th on Mayong in DoDH is more impressive than you'd think - first, we were 27th on Sendaii after rebuilding - so that was some serious catch-up. Then none of the 1-6 guilds had Mayong on farm, they'd all killed him once, maybe twice (TR & Assent I think?) - they didn't know about the bane mechanic until I slipped up and mentioned it in l33t monk chat (Triality could not recruit clerics to save our life - we only had like 4, maybe 5 max, and sometimes 3 on raids - we also were short warriors - only like 2 or 3 on raids for a long time - other guilds in that era had like 8 wars and 8 clrs - we were at a serious disadvantage on a ton of endurance focused content, so we had to great creative). It's hard to emphasize the little details there - there was nearly a 3 month gap between us and the #6 guild - they were the only guilds to beat him before PoR - he was difficult and not farmed. Also, we were the only guild to kill Redfang in 2 rounds before SoF - hell, maybe the achievement was 1-rounding him before SoF (sorry it's been awhile - our dps was just lit). The 3rd on Ayonae in PoR was similar (note that PoR was out when we beat mayong) - 27th on Dao to 9th on SZ - and 1st/2nd/3rd on Ayonae was seperated by like hours for 1st(just before midnight) and minutes for 2nd (I think we beat her 4min after Assent around 2am maybe).
After that, the level of dominance is hard to emphasize - for TSS, Frostcrypt - the #2 guild was nearly 3 weeks behind, 24 days on Harfange - multiple events had to be nerfed for them (Harfang, Grenwald, Beltron, and another were all nerfed for them - heck I think Grenwald got 2 nerfs maybe). Ashengate - we started the Ashengate side like 28 days after the other guilds, but still finished 4th there. We were the only guild to do Frostcrypt 1st of the top guilds - all the others did Ashengate, which was far easier. We didn't know that though - they did.
TBS - Solteris was billed as the most difficult raid content ever made at the time - it was pretty tough. We beat event 2 a month before the 2nd guild, and the 3rd guild took nearly 3 months. Event 3 was flat out broken (oh Zajeer!) - we had to wait on a patch (we nearly beat even 4 before 3 despite the mechanics to wipe you if you tried that), which let our competition nearly catch up. By event 4 - we were back to the #2 guild being 27 days behind and #3 being 74 days. We even had to wait on a patch for event #5 to be fixed (& maybe 6 - I forget). That pattern held - they had to nerf event #6 twice for the #2 guild to beat it. The last raid also had to be nerfed for the #2 guild if I recall - they were 20 days behind, #3 was 72 days. SoF - We entered Crystallos a month ahead of other guilds and despite other guilds using an exploit on Kerafyrm, we beat it over two weeks ahead of #2 and almost 2 months ahead of #3. Here's a fun tidbit - Nodyin asked to compare guild parses during SoF, wanted to know if other guilds were sandbagging. He sent me parses of a few other top guilds - I sent him our parses for the same fight. If they were running 20k dps burning, we were running like 80k - we were just lit in terms of maximizing our output - we literally had no other choice for years, we even had some saber-metric sort of stuff we'd look at - judging people not just by dps or total dmg, but by their on-target time (how fast we swapped targets) - for like the Performer originally, because it was THAT close because of our lack of healing/tanks.
What is also worth mentioning is that Triality also ended up with something like 8 or 9 of the Class Leaders/Community Leaders being in the guild in this era - it wasn't just raid performance, it was that some of the more prominent players in the game's community were concentrated in the guild. I forget the exact %, but at one point we had like 40-50% of us/them in just one guild.
After SoD the guild started faltering - most of the core of the guild was around or in our 30's. We started retiring over several expansions (myself in SoF) - family/IRL/careers was hitting, most of us had played EQ for a decade - many since 1999/launch - it was just starting to be that time. The game was changing too, and the amount of raid content was dwindling - the game was catering to a different audience. A chunk of our members ended up joining RoI eventually after we disbanded - such as Q. His fame has largely to do with this bit of Triality guild history - he did our frontpage updates, videos, snarky posts, and he won a SoE video competition with an artifact reward. As a note, the design of that artifact is something I was the go-between on between him and the item dev (Merloc), I think it was my idea to do the evolving bit and we even got it upgraded once with a new expansion. It looked cool AF. He was basically the Tigole news poster of that raiding era. You can view some of his old videos from our frontpage at the bottom of the list here - https://www.youtube.com/user/TheQxx/videos . Unfortunately I think our frontpage news updates got lost to time (& Nuntius).
So basically, the three eras of EQ raiding have had these famous guilds -
Silver/Early Raiding - FoH, AL, LoS for example
Golden/Mid Raiding - Triality, TR, CT, CD, Assent
Twilight/Maintenance Raiding - RoI mostly, maybe MS (not really a strong consistent #2 guild over the last 11 year period - MS comes closet atm)
The era of real raid scripting started during the middle era, and the reason Triality was famous then had alot to do with our upswings in the first half, and then total dominance in the second half of that era when raiding 4-5 nights a week was still common with guilds chewing on content (for point of reference, alot of guilds raid like 1 night a week now I think for quite awhile). RoI is famous due to it's utter dominance of the 3rd/last era of EQ raiding to date AND it's feat on the first TLP of catching up to live. RoI hit live, and then steadily improved it's rankings (#3 in SoD) until taking #1 in UF. They're a great guild - the TLP->Live accomplishment was incredible, and they had solid finishes at the tail end of the middle era. They also beat some of the toughest in-era content EQ saw - ie like PoWar - and despite how EQ's raiding time investment requirement has declined - along with the amount of competition in this last twilight era - they're undoubtedly a top 5 all-time EQ guild, even likely the top (definitely by sheer # of wins). This is a situation where I don't think you can really compare guilds across eras super well though - just some great guild history for each of them to be proud of.
TL
R - you want to talk EQ raiding for it's full history and you only want to mention the 5 most influential/famous/top guilds in the game's history, I think you probably have to include FoH, AL, LoS, Triality, and RoI. That's a bit of a disservice to TR/CT/CD/Assent in the middle era (and maybe some 1st era guilds), but IMO they solidly round out #6-#9 when discussing era's. If you take a look at other notable guilds, that don't necessarily make the "by-era" list, you almost certainly have to include Triton, and probably Club Fu/SR due to longevity over several eras and being good long-term guilds.
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Synj
Dystopian Dreamer
- 8,205
- 36,282
Incorrect.Triality's history as a top guild really started with GoD, even if the first #1 finish wasn't until TSS. I'm bored, so here is some EQ guild history for context based on the excellent raid tracker that started up for GoD @ EGL. Triality's entry is here -
3rd to finish GoD, 2nd in Anguish (10th on OMM), 7th for Mayong in DoDH, 3rd on Ayonae in PoR, 1st in TSS (1st FC, 4th AG), 1st TBS, 1st SoF, 1st SoD, 3rd UF, 2nd HoT. Decent top 10 finishes for several expansions after before disbanding after beating RoF #10.
Triality had a record of dominance in EQ that was only surpassed by RoI if you look at the modern era of EQ raiding (by that I mean real raid scripts). RoI has pretty much dominated the twilight/maintenance era EQ has been in for a decade (they came up from the first TLP when it caught up to live). Despite a ton of players seeming to think EQ ended with GoD/WoW, the overall # of raiding guilds didn't enter serious decline for awhile - until around UF - when the # of guilds doing expansion completes basically cut in half (there is a large contingent of raid guilds who did not complete expansions and make my lists below, but which disappeared over time as well). There are really 3 periods of EQ raid guild history IMO - the silver age of early raiding - Classic->LDoN/God, the golden age of the raid game - God/OoW->SoD, and the twilight/maintenance period - UF->Current. For point of reference, RoI's 1st #1 finish was in Underfoot. You can comfortably call the last era RoI's era. As I said, Underfoot nearly cut the expansion-complete raid guild scene in half - from about 100 to 50, previously it had hung around 100 for 6 years. It probably had a bit to do with the move to yearly expansions (from 2x/yr) - Underfoot was the 2nd annual cycle expansion (SoF was the 1st). Only 53 live guilds have ever finished Underfoot, in contrast, it was 207 for GoD, 137 for OoW, 204 for DoN, 114 for DoDH, 106 for PoR, 104 for AG in TSS, 103 for PoR, 82 for SoF, and 95 for SoD. So 53 in UF, 43 for HoT, 26 for VoA, 47 for RoF, 49 for CoTF, 32 for TDS, 32 for TBM, 30 for EoK, 24 for RoS, 19 for TBM, 37 for ToV, and 26 for CoV should put in perspective what sort of decline EQ has seen in expansion completes (ex-TLP). I think the middle era is defined not only by raid scripting, but also the advent of 2x/yearly raid content coming out - I sort of have GoD straddling eras a bit because of that. Triality as a guild wasn't even a guild until late Luclin/early PoP if I recall - I recall some of their first raids was like Umbral Plains during early PoP (I was a guest on Doomshade or something with them - joined another guild because they had too many monks - who all quit later except 1 =P). Anyway, given their late start such - that GoD finish should be really impressive. They really just had a great leadership team - Orruar is, and was, one of the most brilliant raid leaders I've seen, and we ended up with more than just him over time to boot (Dalnoth, Mendix, etc). The guild had a decline in the post-OMM and DoN->early DoDh era - they got to the point they couldn't kill OMM for example. They did a massive rebuild instead of disbanding - which is when I joined.
The 7th on Mayong in DoDH is more impressive than you'd think - first, we were 27th on Sendaii after rebuilding - so that was some serious catch-up. Then none of the 1-6 guilds had Mayong on farm, they'd all killed him once, maybe twice (TR & Assent I think?) - they didn't know about the bane mechanic until I slipped up and mentioned it in l33t monk chat (Triality could not recruit clerics to save our life - we only had like 4, maybe 5 max, and sometimes 3 on raids - we also were short warriors - only like 2 or 3 on raids for a long time - other guilds in that era had like 8 wars and 8 clrs - we were at a serious disadvantage on a ton of endurance focused content, so we had to great creative). It's hard to emphasize the little details there - there was nearly a 3 month gap between us and the #6 guild - they were the only guilds to beat him before PoR - he was difficult and not farmed. Also, we were the only guild to kill Redfang in 2 rounds before SoF - hell, maybe the achievement was 1-rounding him before SoF (sorry it's been awhile - our dps was just lit). The 3rd on Ayonae in PoR was similar (note that PoR was out when we beat mayong) - 27th on Dao to 9th on SZ - and 1st/2nd/3rd on Ayonae was seperated by like hours for 1st(just before midnight) and minutes for 2nd (I think we beat her 4min after Assent around 2am maybe).
After that, the level of dominance is hard to emphasize - for TSS, Frostcrypt - the #2 guild was nearly 3 weeks behind, 24 days on Harfange - multiple events had to be nerfed for them (Harfang, Grenwald, Beltron, and another were all nerfed for them - heck I think Grenwald got 2 nerfs maybe). Ashengate - we started the Ashengate side like 28 days after the other guilds, but still finished 4th there. We were the only guild to do Frostcrypt 1st of the top guilds - all the others did Ashengate, which was far easier. We didn't know that though - they did.
TBS - Solteris was billed as the most difficult raid content ever made at the time - it was pretty tough. We beat event 2 a month before the 2nd guild, and the 3rd guild took nearly 3 months. Event 3 was flat out broken (oh Zajeer!) - we had to wait on a patch (we nearly beat even 4 before 3 despite the mechanics to wipe you if you tried that), which let our competition nearly catch up. By event 4 - we were back to the #2 guild being 27 days behind and #3 being 74 days. We even had to wait on a patch for event #5 to be fixed (& maybe 6 - I forget). That pattern held - they had to nerf event #6 twice for the #2 guild to beat it. The last raid also had to be nerfed for the #2 guild if I recall - they were 20 days behind, #3 was 72 days. SoF - We entered Crystallos a month ahead of other guilds and despite other guilds using an exploit on Kerafyrm, we beat it over two weeks ahead of #2 and almost 2 months ahead of #3. Here's a fun tidbit - Nodyin asked to compare guild parses during SoF, wanted to know if other guilds were sandbagging. He sent me parses of a few other top guilds - I sent him our parses for the same fight. If they were running 20k dps burning, we were running like 80k - we were just lit in terms of maximizing our output - we literally had no other choice for years, we even had some saber-metric sort of stuff we'd look at - judging people not just by dps or total dmg, but by their on-target time (how fast we swapped targets) - for like the Performer originally, because it was THAT close because of our lack of healing/tanks.
What is also worth mentioning is that Triality also ended up with something like 8 or 9 of the Class Leaders/Community Leaders being in the guild in this era - it wasn't just raid performance, it was that some of the more prominent players in the game's community were concentrated in the guild. I forget the exact %, but at one point we had like 40-50% of us/them in just one guild.
After SoD the guild started faltering - most of the core of the guild was around or in our 30's. We started retiring over several expansions (myself in SoF) - family/IRL/careers was hitting, most of us had played EQ for a decade - many since 1999/launch - it was just starting to be that time. The game was changing too, and the amount of raid content was dwindling - the game was catering to a different audience. A chunk of our members ended up joining RoI eventually after we disbanded - such as Q. His fame has largely to do with this bit of Triality guild history - he did our frontpage updates, videos, snarky posts, and he won a SoE video competition with an artifact reward. As a note, the design of that artifact is something I was the go-between on between him and the item dev (Merloc), I think it was my idea to do the evolving bit and we even got it upgraded once with a new expansion. It looked cool AF. He was basically the Tigole news poster of that raiding era. You can view some of his old videos from our frontpage at the bottom of the list here - https://www.youtube.com/user/TheQxx/videos . Unfortunately I think our frontpage news updates got lost to time (& Nuntius).
So basically, the three eras of EQ raiding have had these famous guilds -
Silver/Early Raiding - FoH, AL, LoS for example
Golden/Mid Raiding - Triality, TR, CT, CD, Assent
Twilight/Maintenance Raiding - RoI mostly, maybe MS (not really a strong consistent #2 guild over the last 11 year period - MS comes closet atm)
The era of real raid scripting started during the middle era, and the reason Triality was famous then had alot to do with our upswings in the first half, and then total dominance in the second half of that era when raiding 4-5 nights a week was still common with guilds chewing on content (for point of reference, alot of guilds raid like 1 night a week now I think for quite awhile). RoI is famous due to it's utter dominance of the 3rd/last era of EQ raiding to date AND it's feat on the first TLP of catching up to live. RoI hit live, and then steadily improved it's rankings (#3 in SoD) until taking #1 in UF. They're a great guild - the TLP->Live accomplishment was incredible, and they had solid finishes at the tail end of the middle era. They also beat some of the toughest in-era content EQ saw - ie like PoWar - and despite how EQ's raiding time investment requirement has declined - along with the amount of competition in this last twilight era - they're undoubtedly a top 5 all-time EQ guild, even likely the top (definitely by sheer # of wins). This is a situation where I don't think you can really compare guilds across eras super well though - just some great guild history for each of them to be proud of.
TL
Only true measuring stick is top burst DPs all time.
Ikkan
Molten Core Raider
- 278
- 412
If agreeing with this means I don't have to read that dissertation on guild rankings posted above then fuck it I'm in.
Ryoz
<Donor>
- 846
- 194
That was so long. Wasn’t trying to shit on Triality of course, I just knew there were a good number of guilds at that level during that era. I think I even tried to apply to them after I got booted from CD but no one ran with more than 2 - 3 SKs back then so pickins were slim.Triality's history as a top guild really started with GoD, even if the first #1 finish wasn't until TSS. I'm bored, so here is some EQ guild history for context based on the excellent raid tracker that started up for GoD @ EGL. Triality's entry is here -
3rd to finish GoD, 2nd in Anguish (10th on OMM), 7th for Mayong in DoDH, 3rd on Ayonae in PoR, 1st in TSS (1st FC, 4th AG), 1st TBS, 1st SoF, 1st SoD, 3rd UF, 2nd HoT. Decent top 10 finishes for several expansions after before disbanding after beating RoF #10.
Triality had a record of dominance in EQ that was only surpassed by RoI if you look at the modern era of EQ raiding (by that I mean real raid scripts). RoI has pretty much dominated the twilight/maintenance era EQ has been in for a decade (they came up from the first TLP when it caught up to live). Despite a ton of players seeming to think EQ ended with GoD/WoW, the overall # of raiding guilds didn't enter serious decline for awhile - until around UF - when the # of guilds doing expansion completes basically cut in half (there is a large contingent of raid guilds who did not complete expansions and make my lists below, but which disappeared over time as well). There are really 3 periods of EQ raid guild history IMO - the silver age of early raiding - Classic->LDoN/God, the golden age of the raid game - God/OoW->SoD, and the twilight/maintenance period - UF->Current. For point of reference, RoI's 1st #1 finish was in Underfoot. You can comfortably call the last era RoI's era. As I said, Underfoot nearly cut the expansion-complete raid guild scene in half - from about 100 to 50, previously it had hung around 100 for 6 years. It probably had a bit to do with the move to yearly expansions (from 2x/yr) - Underfoot was the 2nd annual cycle expansion (SoF was the 1st). Only 53 live guilds have ever finished Underfoot, in contrast, it was 207 for GoD, 137 for OoW, 204 for DoN, 114 for DoDH, 106 for PoR, 104 for AG in TSS, 103 for PoR, 82 for SoF, and 95 for SoD. So 53 in UF, 43 for HoT, 26 for VoA, 47 for RoF, 49 for CoTF, 32 for TDS, 32 for TBM, 30 for EoK, 24 for RoS, 19 for TBM, 37 for ToV, and 26 for CoV should put in perspective what sort of decline EQ has seen in expansion completes (ex-TLP). I think the middle era is defined not only by raid scripting, but also the advent of 2x/yearly raid content coming out - I sort of have GoD straddling eras a bit because of that. Triality as a guild wasn't even a guild until late Luclin/early PoP if I recall - I recall some of their first raids was like Umbral Plains during early PoP (I was a guest on Doomshade or something with them - joined another guild because they had too many monks - who all quit later except 1 =P). Anyway, given their late start such - that GoD finish should be really impressive. They really just had a great leadership team - Orruar is, and was, one of the most brilliant raid leaders I've seen, and we ended up with more than just him over time to boot (Dalnoth, Mendix, etc). The guild had a decline in the post-OMM and DoN->early DoDh era - they got to the point they couldn't kill OMM for example. They did a massive rebuild instead of disbanding - which is when I joined.
The 7th on Mayong in DoDH is more impressive than you'd think - first, we were 27th on Sendaii after rebuilding - so that was some serious catch-up. Then none of the 1-6 guilds had Mayong on farm, they'd all killed him once, maybe twice (TR & Assent I think?) - they didn't know about the bane mechanic until I slipped up and mentioned it in l33t monk chat (Triality could not recruit clerics to save our life - we only had like 4, maybe 5 max, and sometimes 3 on raids - we also were short warriors - only like 2 or 3 on raids for a long time - other guilds in that era had like 8 wars and 8 clrs - we were at a serious disadvantage on a ton of endurance focused content, so we had to great creative). It's hard to emphasize the little details there - there was nearly a 3 month gap between us and the #6 guild - they were the only guilds to beat him before PoR - he was difficult and not farmed. Also, we were the only guild to kill Redfang in 2 rounds before SoF - hell, maybe the achievement was 1-rounding him before SoF (sorry it's been awhile - our dps was just lit). The 3rd on Ayonae in PoR was similar (note that PoR was out when we beat mayong) - 27th on Dao to 9th on SZ - and 1st/2nd/3rd on Ayonae was seperated by like hours for 1st(just before midnight) and minutes for 2nd (I think we beat her 4min after Assent around 2am maybe).
After that, the level of dominance is hard to emphasize - for TSS, Frostcrypt - the #2 guild was nearly 3 weeks behind, 24 days on Harfange - multiple events had to be nerfed for them (Harfang, Grenwald, Beltron, and another were all nerfed for them - heck I think Grenwald got 2 nerfs maybe). Ashengate - we started the Ashengate side like 28 days after the other guilds, but still finished 4th there. We were the only guild to do Frostcrypt 1st of the top guilds - all the others did Ashengate, which was far easier. We didn't know that though - they did.
TBS - Solteris was billed as the most difficult raid content ever made at the time - it was pretty tough. We beat event 2 a month before the 2nd guild, and the 3rd guild took nearly 3 months. Event 3 was flat out broken (oh Zajeer!) - we had to wait on a patch (we nearly beat even 4 before 3 despite the mechanics to wipe you if you tried that), which let our competition nearly catch up. By event 4 - we were back to the #2 guild being 27 days behind and #3 being 74 days. We even had to wait on a patch for event #5 to be fixed (& maybe 6 - I forget). That pattern held - they had to nerf event #6 twice for the #2 guild to beat it. The last raid also had to be nerfed for the #2 guild if I recall - they were 20 days behind, #3 was 72 days. SoF - We entered Crystallos a month ahead of other guilds and despite other guilds using an exploit on Kerafyrm, we beat it over two weeks ahead of #2 and almost 2 months ahead of #3. Here's a fun tidbit - Nodyin asked to compare guild parses during SoF, wanted to know if other guilds were sandbagging. He sent me parses of a few other top guilds - I sent him our parses for the same fight. If they were running 20k dps burning, we were running like 80k - we were just lit in terms of maximizing our output - we literally had no other choice for years, we even had some saber-metric sort of stuff we'd look at - judging people not just by dps or total dmg, but by their on-target time (how fast we swapped targets) - for like the Performer originally, because it was THAT close because of our lack of healing/tanks.
What is also worth mentioning is that Triality also ended up with something like 8 or 9 of the Class Leaders/Community Leaders being in the guild in this era - it wasn't just raid performance, it was that some of the more prominent players in the game's community were concentrated in the guild. I forget the exact %, but at one point we had like 40-50% of us/them in just one guild.
After SoD the guild started faltering - most of the core of the guild was around or in our 30's. We started retiring over several expansions (myself in SoF) - family/IRL/careers was hitting, most of us had played EQ for a decade - many since 1999/launch - it was just starting to be that time. The game was changing too, and the amount of raid content was dwindling - the game was catering to a different audience. A chunk of our members ended up joining RoI eventually after we disbanded - such as Q. His fame has largely to do with this bit of Triality guild history - he did our frontpage updates, videos, snarky posts, and he won a SoE video competition with an artifact reward. As a note, the design of that artifact is something I was the go-between on between him and the item dev (Merloc), I think it was my idea to do the evolving bit and we even got it upgraded once with a new expansion. It looked cool AF. He was basically the Tigole news poster of that raiding era. You can view some of his old videos from our frontpage at the bottom of the list here - https://www.youtube.com/user/TheQxx/videos . Unfortunately I think our frontpage news updates got lost to time (& Nuntius).
So basically, the three eras of EQ raiding have had these famous guilds -
Silver/Early Raiding - FoH, AL, LoS for example
Golden/Mid Raiding - Triality, TR, CT, CD, Assent
Twilight/Maintenance Raiding - RoI mostly, maybe MS (not really a strong consistent #2 guild over the last 11 year period - MS comes closet atm)
The era of real raid scripting started during the middle era, and the reason Triality was famous then had alot to do with our upswings in the first half, and then total dominance in the second half of that era when raiding 4-5 nights a week was still common with guilds chewing on content (for point of reference, alot of guilds raid like 1 night a week now I think for quite awhile). RoI is famous due to it's utter dominance of the 3rd/last era of EQ raiding to date AND it's feat on the first TLP of catching up to live. RoI hit live, and then steadily improved it's rankings (#3 in SoD) until taking #1 in UF. They're a great guild - the TLP->Live accomplishment was incredible, and they had solid finishes at the tail end of the middle era. They also beat some of the toughest in-era content EQ saw - ie like PoWar - and despite how EQ's raiding time investment requirement has declined - along with the amount of competition in this last twilight era - they're undoubtedly a top 5 all-time EQ guild, even likely the top (definitely by sheer # of wins). This is a situation where I don't think you can really compare guilds across eras super well though - just some great guild history for each of them to be proud of.
TL
Wingz
Being Poor Sucks.
- 13,246
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Back when I played I would visit top guild websites to see their front page posts. Used to like reading Qs updates back when I played. Funny stuff. Too bad it's gone.Triality's history as a top guild really started with GoD, even if the first #1 finish wasn't until TSS. I'm bored, so here is some EQ guild history for context based on the excellent raid tracker that started up for GoD @ EGL. Triality's entry is here -
3rd to finish GoD, 2nd in Anguish (10th on OMM), 7th for Mayong in DoDH, 3rd on Ayonae in PoR, 1st in TSS (1st FC, 4th AG), 1st TBS, 1st SoF, 1st SoD, 3rd UF, 2nd HoT. Decent top 10 finishes for several expansions after before disbanding after beating RoF #10.
Triality had a record of dominance in EQ that was only surpassed by RoI if you look at the modern era of EQ raiding (by that I mean real raid scripts). RoI has pretty much dominated the twilight/maintenance era EQ has been in for a decade (they came up from the first TLP when it caught up to live). Despite a ton of players seeming to think EQ ended with GoD/WoW, the overall # of raiding guilds didn't enter serious decline for awhile - until around UF - when the # of guilds doing expansion completes basically cut in half (there is a large contingent of raid guilds who did not complete expansions and make my lists below, but which disappeared over time as well). There are really 3 periods of EQ raid guild history IMO - the silver age of early raiding - Classic->LDoN/God, the golden age of the raid game - God/OoW->SoD, and the twilight/maintenance period - UF->Current. For point of reference, RoI's 1st #1 finish was in Underfoot. You can comfortably call the last era RoI's era. As I said, Underfoot nearly cut the expansion-complete raid guild scene in half - from about 100 to 50, previously it had hung around 100 for 6 years. It probably had a bit to do with the move to yearly expansions (from 2x/yr) - Underfoot was the 2nd annual cycle expansion (SoF was the 1st). Only 53 live guilds have ever finished Underfoot, in contrast, it was 207 for GoD, 137 for OoW, 204 for DoN, 114 for DoDH, 106 for PoR, 104 for AG in TSS, 103 for PoR, 82 for SoF, and 95 for SoD. So 53 in UF, 43 for HoT, 26 for VoA, 47 for RoF, 49 for CoTF, 32 for TDS, 32 for TBM, 30 for EoK, 24 for RoS, 19 for TBM, 37 for ToV, and 26 for CoV should put in perspective what sort of decline EQ has seen in expansion completes (ex-TLP). I think the middle era is defined not only by raid scripting, but also the advent of 2x/yearly raid content coming out - I sort of have GoD straddling eras a bit because of that. Triality as a guild wasn't even a guild until late Luclin/early PoP if I recall - I recall some of their first raids was like Umbral Plains during early PoP (I was a guest on Doomshade or something with them - joined another guild because they had too many monks - who all quit later except 1 =P). Anyway, given their late start such - that GoD finish should be really impressive. They really just had a great leadership team - Orruar is, and was, one of the most brilliant raid leaders I've seen, and we ended up with more than just him over time to boot (Dalnoth, Mendix, etc). The guild had a decline in the post-OMM and DoN->early DoDh era - they got to the point they couldn't kill OMM for example. They did a massive rebuild instead of disbanding - which is when I joined.
The 7th on Mayong in DoDH is more impressive than you'd think - first, we were 27th on Sendaii after rebuilding - so that was some serious catch-up. Then none of the 1-6 guilds had Mayong on farm, they'd all killed him once, maybe twice (TR & Assent I think?) - they didn't know about the bane mechanic until I slipped up and mentioned it in l33t monk chat (Triality could not recruit clerics to save our life - we only had like 4, maybe 5 max, and sometimes 3 on raids - we also were short warriors - only like 2 or 3 on raids for a long time - other guilds in that era had like 8 wars and 8 clrs - we were at a serious disadvantage on a ton of endurance focused content, so we had to great creative). It's hard to emphasize the little details there - there was nearly a 3 month gap between us and the #6 guild - they were the only guilds to beat him before PoR - he was difficult and not farmed. Also, we were the only guild to kill Redfang in 2 rounds before SoF - hell, maybe the achievement was 1-rounding him before SoF (sorry it's been awhile - our dps was just lit). The 3rd on Ayonae in PoR was similar (note that PoR was out when we beat mayong) - 27th on Dao to 9th on SZ - and 1st/2nd/3rd on Ayonae was seperated by like hours for 1st(just before midnight) and minutes for 2nd (I think we beat her 4min after Assent around 2am maybe).
After that, the level of dominance is hard to emphasize - for TSS, Frostcrypt - the #2 guild was nearly 3 weeks behind, 24 days on Harfange - multiple events had to be nerfed for them (Harfang, Grenwald, Beltron, and another were all nerfed for them - heck I think Grenwald got 2 nerfs maybe). Ashengate - we started the Ashengate side like 28 days after the other guilds, but still finished 4th there. We were the only guild to do Frostcrypt 1st of the top guilds - all the others did Ashengate, which was far easier. We didn't know that though - they did.
TBS - Solteris was billed as the most difficult raid content ever made at the time - it was pretty tough. We beat event 2 a month before the 2nd guild, and the 3rd guild took nearly 3 months. Event 3 was flat out broken (oh Zajeer!) - we had to wait on a patch (we nearly beat even 4 before 3 despite the mechanics to wipe you if you tried that), which let our competition nearly catch up. By event 4 - we were back to the #2 guild being 27 days behind and #3 being 74 days. We even had to wait on a patch for event #5 to be fixed (& maybe 6 - I forget). That pattern held - they had to nerf event #6 twice for the #2 guild to beat it. The last raid also had to be nerfed for the #2 guild if I recall - they were 20 days behind, #3 was 72 days. SoF - We entered Crystallos a month ahead of other guilds and despite other guilds using an exploit on Kerafyrm, we beat it over two weeks ahead of #2 and almost 2 months ahead of #3. Here's a fun tidbit - Nodyin asked to compare guild parses during SoF, wanted to know if other guilds were sandbagging. He sent me parses of a few other top guilds - I sent him our parses for the same fight. If they were running 20k dps burning, we were running like 80k - we were just lit in terms of maximizing our output - we literally had no other choice for years, we even had some saber-metric sort of stuff we'd look at - judging people not just by dps or total dmg, but by their on-target time (how fast we swapped targets) - for like the Performer originally, because it was THAT close because of our lack of healing/tanks.
What is also worth mentioning is that Triality also ended up with something like 8 or 9 of the Class Leaders/Community Leaders being in the guild in this era - it wasn't just raid performance, it was that some of the more prominent players in the game's community were concentrated in the guild. I forget the exact %, but at one point we had like 40-50% of us/them in just one guild.
After SoD the guild started faltering - most of the core of the guild was around or in our 30's. We started retiring over several expansions (myself in SoF) - family/IRL/careers was hitting, most of us had played EQ for a decade - many since 1999/launch - it was just starting to be that time. The game was changing too, and the amount of raid content was dwindling - the game was catering to a different audience. A chunk of our members ended up joining RoI eventually after we disbanded - such as Q. His fame has largely to do with this bit of Triality guild history - he did our frontpage updates, videos, snarky posts, and he won a SoE video competition with an artifact reward. As a note, the design of that artifact is something I was the go-between on between him and the item dev (Merloc), I think it was my idea to do the evolving bit and we even got it upgraded once with a new expansion. It looked cool AF. He was basically the Tigole news poster of that raiding era. You can view some of his old videos from our frontpage at the bottom of the list here - https://www.youtube.com/user/TheQxx/videos . Unfortunately I think our frontpage news updates got lost to time (& Nuntius).
So basically, the three eras of EQ raiding have had these famous guilds -
Silver/Early Raiding - FoH, AL, LoS for example
Golden/Mid Raiding - Triality, TR, CT, CD, Assent
Twilight/Maintenance Raiding - RoI mostly, maybe MS (not really a strong consistent #2 guild over the last 11 year period - MS comes closet atm)
The era of real raid scripting started during the middle era, and the reason Triality was famous then had alot to do with our upswings in the first half, and then total dominance in the second half of that era when raiding 4-5 nights a week was still common with guilds chewing on content (for point of reference, alot of guilds raid like 1 night a week now I think for quite awhile). RoI is famous due to it's utter dominance of the 3rd/last era of EQ raiding to date AND it's feat on the first TLP of catching up to live. RoI hit live, and then steadily improved it's rankings (#3 in SoD) until taking #1 in UF. They're a great guild - the TLP->Live accomplishment was incredible, and they had solid finishes at the tail end of the middle era. They also beat some of the toughest in-era content EQ saw - ie like PoWar - and despite how EQ's raiding time investment requirement has declined - along with the amount of competition in this last twilight era - they're undoubtedly a top 5 all-time EQ guild, even likely the top (definitely by sheer # of wins). This is a situation where I don't think you can really compare guilds across eras super well though - just some great guild history for each of them to be proud of.
TL
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Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
- 73,111
- 214,401
a lot of them tried to be like Furor with funny edgy updates. it helped fill the ranks. helped my guild too. it made it look like we were having a ball.
Wingz
Being Poor Sucks.
- 13,246
- 41,016
Thats why I got here. Someone mentioned a Furor rant during POP was funny and I did an internet search.
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- 1
Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
- 73,111
- 214,401
easy for me, i heard epic weapons were leaked by FOH and it brought me to Noows. been here ever since. 21 years. i should have left by now.
- 1
Uqua was broke with trash hitting for 3k right after the plane of time. Then they spawned a few adds when someone died. Figured it wasn't too much to ask for. But I once ran in there with my friend before it got nerfed. That was fun while it was on crack. Would've been impossible for any guild at level 65 throughout the zone though. Tallon and Vallon in time hit for 3k. Shows you the comparison.
