Did the Original Planes come out before Kunark or after?Follow

Just to add on this a bit:

There was no key or flagging required to get into Fear. Just a level restriction. However, the portal you arrived at was in a spot where a number of roamers wandered. Combine that with a "large" social agro, and "unusual" pathing, and you were going to get agro. Lots and lots of agro...

There was no way to avoid this. There were some adjustments made over time to the zone to make it a bit less nasty, but the basic problem was unavoidable. Even if all you did was step into the zone and not move at all, you could reasonably expect to agro and have to fight upwards of a dozen mobs. If you moved, you'd just increase the number of mobs you came into agro range of and due to pathing often *massively* increased the number that would ultimately agro on you.

And just to make matters worse, there were these mobs that would proc a shadowstep on their target, randomly teleporting raid members some distance away from the raid.


So basically, if you just zoned into the plane and tried to stand and fight, your entire raid force would likely die to massive trains resulting from the combination of all of these things. However, the plane has a respawn time of like 7 or 8 hours, so once you clear out the mobs that are in the area, you have "broken" the plane. You can now safely travel around the areas you've cleared, and (most importantly) anyone else can simply hit the portal and safely join the raid in progress.


There were lots of different tactics involved in breaking into PoF. Some involved carefully and meticulously clearing the portal area (a more successful tactic later on), most involved basically a mad lemming run to one of the "safe" edges of the zone (west wall or north wall typically), and camping out to clear agro. Those usually involved a "sweep team" that would zone in first and run off in a different direction hoping to grab as much of the agro from the portal area as possible, while the rest of the raid zoned in and ran to the designated camp spot. Everyone then attempts to camp. Some will die. Some will make it. If you get at least one cleric and one FD class, you can then begin dragging bodies to the safe area and rezzing anyone who died.


That was what was usually involved in "breaking Fear". It was arguably one of the most terrifying things anyone has ever had to do in EQ. Because if things went wrong, there was no way out. If you failed to camp the right people, your raid was stuffed. This is where people would eat multiple (often unrezzed) deaths. Because you had to keep trying. So you'd have to get the same people (now ungeared since their stuff in on their corpses) to keep trying to clear the portal area and get a cleric camped in a safe spot inside the zone. If you didn't, then you couldn't recover the corpses and everyone lost everything. I remember a particular bard who literally died over a dozen times doing this (bards were good choices since they could do the "sweep" job without being worried about being dispelled. They always died though...).

While we managed to always succeed at this (sometimes with a lot of deaths involved), I have heard of some guilds failing so badly and so often (hours of attempts and failures) that they'd have to beg another guild to form another raid just so they could get their bodies back. It happened.

Can you imagine anything like that happening today? A guild sending a tell to a rival guild's officers asking them to form up an raid something just so they can clear it and save your guild's members from losing their corpses? That was not unheard of back in the day with Fear though.


Fear was really an aptly named zone IMO...

I've done little raiding but I have raided Fear several times - and it was the biggest adrenalin rush. It seemed to be totally unpredictable and, as a family guild on Venril Sathir (later merged with AB) we had to get ourselves help after a wipe.

We had raided successfully several times and then, inexplicably we wiped. (We were later told that a mob was out of position.)

A good friend of our guild was a member of one of the biggest raiding guilds on the server and they duly turned up, chuckling at us little guys and volunteering to wipe the place and get our corpses. Rather amusingly - although also rather scarily - they wiped too. They went ballistic!

At that point a number of us genuinely panicked and thought we would be rerolling our mains.

In the end, three or four members of the very top raiding guild on VS, including IIRC a necro to summon corpses, came (very surprisingly as they were - are?! - notorious) to our aid. Some six hours after we first wiped, we were reunited with our corpses and our gear (and our bank-stored back-up gear).

Fear felt how it was meant to be: unscripted, unpredictable and extremely dangerous. I loved it.

Now I am back in the game properly after a break, I want to raid again in different zones. I will always respect Fear, however.

Ker

You're not only contradicting yourself from your earlier post, but you're comparing raids that you've done with raids you've admittedly not done and concluding that the ones you did were harder?

Old School Planar raids were alot harder, here's why.

1) The internet was dial up, Omgzzz hurry up and wait. Someone call the Raid Leader on Bell and ask if hes even gonna come back.

2) The organizing raids didn't have the Teamspeak advantage, you were lucky if the Raid Leaders were using voice of any kind, cell phones did exist.

3) Die and your spawn point is where you start running back from, don't count on getting rezzed back. You usually had to form up a skeleton raid just to get your bodies. You don't get your body, literally walk right up to it, your gear will rot and you'll never see it again. You lost alot of experience this way and sometimes lost a couple levels. This was considered (normal). Raid wipes entailed several hours of moaning and complaining while your gimp squad tries to get your gear. Oh, and alot of people would go LD for no apparent reason, but with Dial-up who knew what happened.

4) SOE hated joo all and wanted raiders to suffer because after all this was end-game content and they made everything nearly impossible to beat. They would "tweak" it harder if it seemed too many actually were beating it. The reasoning is, there is nothing left after this. Everquest was filled with tons of time-sinks to prevent players from finishing anything. This kept you playing the game and from zoning around too much. The nerf bat was wielded heavily.

5) Travelling in the game took several hours. You were forced to travel the day before to the raid meet spot or be left out. The raid day was THE DAY and if you win great, lose and you lost. They didn't have any partial wipe but recovered nicely or summon and rez in Guild Lobby. They didn't have instance timers either. You had to start and finish the raid that day, there is no tomorrow. You needed to wear diapers and keep all your food and beverage items nearby the computer or face being kicked out of raid for being AFK. You would lose all your gear after that since they pretty much arent gonna help you get back in to the raid zone and loot your gear.

6) Buffs were not freely given out like candy in a potion shop. The "Bazaar" did not exist and you had to wheel and deal your gear in general chat of random X zone. There were alot of shady deals going down in those days and alot of players were ripped off. This is what you had to face to get decent gear so you didn't want to miss any raid gear "EVER".

Or was it 989 Studios. I don't know when Verant took over, but it could have been 989 Studios back then.

Lower numbers on the servers make for smaller raids? had numbers in the servers when Kunark came out regularly above 3000 on a time. different thread is listing only one server with more than 1000 playing.

Uh! First off I was there and Sony owned EQ from the Start! Want proof?

The city of Qeynos -- is sonyeq backwards!!!

Verant and 989 studios was just the front for EQ but Sony was always the owner.

Oh, how truly thou doust speaketh! AMEN!