#14 - Shonki - Born 13 April 2003 - 49 days 4 hours

Shonki may have fewer played hours than some of my other characters but he racked up nearly all of those in groups. He's without doubt my most-grouped character, the time I spent with him marking the apogee of my social career in EverQuest, which was, for a time, all-consuming.

Before I played him, I already knew I liked healing for groups. I'd done a fair bit of it with Rachel. Main-healing at max level as a Cleric for a static group in EQ in the early years, though... that was a lot different to playing a Druid, healing for mid-20s pick-up groups at back door behind the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen.

I was a purist back then. It was okay for a Druid, being something of a Jill of All Trades, to be doing other things between heals but a Cleric had one job and one job only: to keep everyone alive. 

I was pretty good at it, too. I ought to have been. I sure took it seriously. I took a dim view of Clerics who didn't. The kind who thought it was okay to get a few licks in with the hammer now and then or cast the odd Smite. I hated it when one of those narcissists turned up in any group I was tanking for, so I made sure never to be That Guy in any group I joined as a Cleric.

Not that everyone appreciated such thoughtfulness. There was a term in use at the time - Sit-and-Heal Cleric. It sounds now as though it might have been an insult and it was, on occasion. If the group was cruising, sometimes resentment could attach itself to the poor old Cleric, just sitting there at the back with his spell-book in his lap and his mind on God, raking in the xp and doing sod all.

My semi-static group didn't feel like that, fortnately. We had maybe fifteen or twenty regulars from whome we permed groups most evenings and all of them were more than happy to have me as main healer, even if I did meditate the day away. They all knew the value of a trustworthy, reliable Cleric one who wasn't going to run out of mana on a bad pull. 

A lot of PUGs were also happy to get a true Sit-and-Heal Cleric. Someone who could be relied on not to have blown all their mana when it came time to bring the heals because they'd used it all up nuking. Someone who wouldn't be caught round the side of a mob, flailing away with a hammer for next to no damage, while not even noticing an add had arrived. 

Someone who could be trusted to do the damn job they'd be invited into the group for in the first place in other words. That was me.

For a while I was damn near religious about it. I used to rate my performance and the performance of the group as a whole on how little I'd had to do. A perfect two-hour session would involve me sitting on my backside at full mana for maybe an hour and fifty minutes. I'd pride myself on having done absolutely nothing apart from standing up occasionally, casting a perfectly-timed Complete Heal, then sitting down again.

That was the dream but there weren't too many sessions that went that way. I imagine if there had been we'd all have gotten pretty bored and if there was one thing I never suffered from as a Cleric in EverQuest in those days it was boredom. Anxiety, stress, blind panic - sure. Every night and twice on a Sunday. Boredom, rarely.

What generally happened was that the session would start with some tense moments just getting to the pull spot, followed by some more adreniline rushes as we got it cleared. Then we'd settle into a ryhthm and start chatting, between and even during pulls, until we'd all relax and slip into a false sense of security.

At which point whoever was pulling would stumble back, close to dead with an add or several on their tail or the group down the corridor would get into trouble and run, leaving us to deal with their train or some careless twonk would break mez or aggro a passing mob that ought to have kept walking and it would be Deal With It Or Die time. Again.

That was when I'd have to jump up and start throwing the heals. It was a bit like being a museum guard. Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens but you daren't fall asleep because when it does you have to be the one to stop it. 

I loved the quiet but I also loved those moments of chaos and although I would certainly have taken a peaceful session over a chaotic one, it was the frenzied, desperate battle to survive our own or someone else's mistakes that created the memories that lasted, some of them until this day a couple of decades later. Blurry, sure, but still recognizeable.

As time went on and the game changed around us, the need for Clerics to do nothing but sit and heal diminished and my personal commitment to the abastract purity of the calling began to fade, too. Eventually even I used to cast that hammer that hit things without needing me to hold it, because why not? I even threw in the occasional nuke here and there. And when the all-instance Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion arrived in September 2003 I added pulling to my clerical duties. 

I'd done some pulling as Druid and I loved the role. Druids and Rangers get a spell called Harmony. It's an AE, it's unresistable and it causes mobs that would usually come to the assistance of their nearby colleagues to just stand there, oblivious, ignoring their best pals as they scream for help. It's ridiculously overpowered outdoors but it doesn't work at all in a dungeon. 

I'd used Harmony with Rachel, acting as puller for groups at the Sarnak Fort and especially outside the Tower of Frozen Shadows, so I knew how to pull, which at the time was a very particular and specialised role in any group. Clerics get a line of spells that does much the same thing, except it's nowhere near as good, being both single target and resistable. 

It does, however, work in dungeons and when LDoN led to Mrs Bhagpuss and I spending almost every evening for six months doing nothing but instanced dungeons with our semi-static group, I became the puller on the nights we didn't have a Bard, Bards being the undisputed kings and queens of dungeon-pulling. Or they were back then, anyway, just as Rangers held that title out of doors.

Clericking suited me. I loved pulling, I loved healing and quite liked buffing, too, which was something else Clerics became increasingly valued for. There was a time when no-one would even leave Plane of Knowledge without Virtue or Temperance, whichever would stick at their level. You could get rich, casting those for a fee or a donation.

Buffing your own group cost money, though, which is why a lot of Clerics got grumpy about being asked to do it for free. I was lucky. Playing mainly with people I knew, I'd get handed Peridots to replace the expensive gems I was using as reagents, sometimes so many I'd come away with a small profit.

As must be obvious, I really loved being the main healer in groups. Indeed, it was many years before I stopped thinking of myself as that in every MMORPG I played, despite there being precious little evidence to support the claim. 

I drew the line at healing raids, though. I did try it a couple of times, in open raids, which were a thing for a while. Someone with more patience than a rock would spend an hour or two recruiting players in chat to come join a raid on some fairly accessible boss. Then they'd try to manage the ensuing chaos so that not everyone died.

At the time raiding generally required multiple clerics just to keep the Main Tank alive, a task they achieved only by means of something called a Complete Heal Chain, which was like playing Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at sombody else's head. A bunch of Clerics would all be given a number. They'd have the tank targeted and when the fight started they'd count off until it was their turn to cast Complete Heal. Then they carry on counting until their turn came around again and that was the raid as far as they were concerned.

At one point Complete Heal literally healed the target to full health, no matter how many hit points that took, but later it was given a fixed, very large total. Either way, it was the biggest heal available. And the slowest. 

Complete Heal takes ten full seconds to cast.  I got to be very good at timing its use in a group, where I was in full control of when to start. In a Complete Heal Chain, all autonomy is stripped away. You count the seconds between the first cast and your turn and god forbid you be the one who fucks up. No pressure, then...

It's one of those gaming experiences I'm happy to be able to say I did but which I did not enjoy at the time and never wanted to do again. Although I did do it a couple of times so it can't have been that traumatic.

I did know my limits, though, and raid healing was outside of them. So, as it turned out, was main-healing bleeding-edge, at-cap content in the infamous Gates of Discord expansion. One of the last things Shonki did before Mrs Bhagpuss and I decamped for EQII was to join a PUG going into one of the early GoD zones. 

This was a good while after the expansion had landed, by which time pretty much everyone I knew was already refusing to set foot in it again. I was still curious to see more, though, so I answered a LFM call for Clerics from someone wanting to do something or other in one of the instanced zones, one I'd never seen.

The group turned out to be just two people, a couple of high-end raiders who wanted a healbot. They told me what to cast and when to cast it and I did exactly as I was told. A bit of a change from my regular groups, where it was me calling all the shots as often as not and always me grunting "FFS!" angrily, whenever anything didn't go exactly the way I thought it should.

I still marvel at the fact we all didn't die on the first pull. In fact, the three of us managed to do whatever it was they went there to do and got out in one piece. It was one of the most stressful groups I ever had in any game and it pretty much decided me I was done healing in GoD for good.

Maybe Omens of War, the next expansion, woulfd have set things right. It ddid for some people. By then, though, I was ready for something new. Off to EQII I went, along with half the people I knew.

And that was more or less the last I saw of Shonki. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I returned to EQ, it was to play different characters on a different server. I did briefly try soloing Shonki with a mercenary when they were added to the game but that really was boring. I retired him after that and in retirement is where he remains.

I realise now I haven't explained why I called him Shonki in the first place. There's a reason for that. I didn't. Mrs Bhagpus did. He was her character, at least to begin with.

Shonki had a very odd start in life. Mrs Bhagpuss created him and named him that because she liked the sound of the word, which means something like "dodgy" or "shifty" in Yiddish. She then proceeded to play him in a way that entirely lived up to that name, especially when spelled with an "i", the way a stripper would spell it.

Okay, let's be honest. Shonki was once, as Mark Knopfler put it in the song he wrote and later gave to Tina Turner,  a privated dancer, a dancer for money. He did what you wanted him to do. And got well paid for it.

At that time in EQ, guard-killing was an established if controversial method of soloing. Later, the devs made many guards virtually unkillable but in 2003 most of them were still (un)fair game and there would usually be a couple of Dark Elves or an Ogre or two outside the gates of East Freeport, pulling the gate guards and slaughtering them as fast as they spawned.

As I mentioned when I was giving Timblewoot's backstory, there were some corrupt guards whose helmets you could hand in for a decent cash reward and some very good faction and xp. The bad guys killing guards at the gate didn't care about any of that. They just wanted the xp for killing them.

For a few weeks, Shonki, with Mrs Bhagpuss's help and encouragement, ran a small business servicing these reprobates. They couldn't go into Freeport for food and drink or whatever else they needed so she Shonki would go and get it for them. 

That wouldn't have been so bad but she'd also dressed him all in leather armor, which for some reason displayed on a Gnome like a shiny, wet-look gimp suit, which may be why she also had him dance for them, a sight some of the evil crew found highly amusing.

In return for Shonki's self-inflicted humiliation, they tipped him well and also let him loot the helmets, which he handed in to level himself up. That's how he got as far as Level 9. He certainly never healed anyone.

Eventually the appeal of this wore off for both sides and Mrs Bhagpuss was about to reward Shonki with the gift of eternal oblivion, when I stepped in to offer him both a home and moral redemption. I returned the little pervert to the one, true path, following his god...

...actually, I can't remember who his god was. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Church in Norrath back then. 

Probably just as well he retired.