#6 Rachel - 24 January 2000 - 54 days 4 hours

It would be tempting to say that with Rachel we come to my first successful EverQuest character. By the time she arrived I'd been playing for more than two months but as yet I still hadn't even been able to settle on a class. I'd been running through the options, looking for someone who could solo not just effectively but enjoyably and so far I'd found nothing.

I'd been reading up on the subject though and by mid-January I'd found some suggestions that seemed like they might work. At the very least they sounded less delusional than dwarven clerics or troll shamans.

I'd just about boiled the choice down to two: Druid or Necromancer. Of the two, I preferred the Druid, which sounded like it ought to be a more flexible, versatile version of the Ranger I'd been playing. I'd liked the Ranger, as far as it went. It just hadn't gone far enough and certainly not fast enough. 

The Druid got all the good nature spells the Ranger did plus plenty more, including a whole raft of the same kind of teleportation spells that had been so much of the appeal of the Wizard (Not that I'd leveled my Wizard far enough to do any porting - or even scribe any of the spells into her spellbook.). 

Best of all, the Druid could self-heal and pretty decently, too. I read several guides that claimed the Druid could not only solo well but was also welcome in groups, not that I was doing any grouping at the time but I was at least becoming aware of the possibilities by then. 

It sounded too good be true but for the first time it turned out the guides were right; the Druid was a damn good solo class - provided you weren't in too much of a hurry. I made Rachel on another new server, Luclin, one that ended up being my home for long periods over many years. 

I named her after the same character as Rachelsunday, sticking with just the first name this time. I thought I'd add the "Sunday" when she dinged 20 but by the time it happened I'd gotten so used to her just being Rachel I never bothered. In fact, I rarely gave any of my characters surnames in all the time I played.

At first, I found the Druid something of a disappointment. At low level, soloing a Druid didn't seem all that different from soloing a Ranger, except the Druid felt slightly weaker. Rachel would hit things with her scimitar while casting the few spells she had and generally everything carried on much as it had for the previous two months.

It all began to change when Rachel started to get her real DoTs. Druids get a couple of different lines, one of which involves summoning swarms of biting insects, the other setting things on fire. The two stacked with each other and at higher levels a few of the same line could also stack (That was changed but only much later.) meaning after a while you might be able to stack five or more DoTs on the same mob at the same time.

Once I had a couple of those, just about all I did was sit.

Root-dotting or root-rotting, whichever you wanted to call it, was the kind of thing that gave EverQuest a bad name with gamers who like to, y'know, do something while they play. Here's how it went:

• Find a mob near a nice, open space where nothing much else passes by.
• Cast Snare on the mob to make it run incredibly slowly.
• Let it "chase" you, at a crawl, to your chosen safe spot.
• Cast Root on it so it can't move at all.
• Cast Damage over Time spells on the mob one after another so they stack.
• Sit down to meditate and regain mana while the mob stands still as its health pool slowly drains away.
• Stand up only as necessary to recast each of the spells as they wear off.
• Watch the mob expire, collect the tiny blip of XP and the almost non-existent loot.
• Go find another mob and do it all over again.

If I did that for an hour I'd make enough XP  to see the bar had moved, which felt like I'd really achieved something.  I know it sounds incredibly tedious now but back then it felt like I was actually making genuine progress for the first time.

Rachel was my first character to make it into the teens. She was also the first to take gear really seriously. I went so far as to ask another player to make her a full set of Reinforced Leather Armor, the first and quite possibly only time I ever contacted a stranger in EverQuest to ask them to make something for me.

In later MMORPGs I took up crafting in a moderate way, sometimes making all my own armor or spells. For the first few years in EQ, though, I didn't just avoid tradeskills myself, I rather disapproved of their being in the game at all. 

In those days, I disapproved of a lot of things. I took certain aspects of the game far too seriously. I thought the whole point of being there was to have adventures and I didn't see sewing and baking as any part of that. Worse, as a Druid, I believed far too literally in the sanctity of nature, to the point of dropping groups if anyone insisted on killing animals - even if the animal had attacked them first. It would barely have been excusable behavior in an adolescent but I was in my early forties...

As we'll hear next time, by the late teens, I'd grown impatient with the speed at which Rachel was progressing. It seems a little ironic now, given that she must have been leveling at twice the speed of any character I'd played up to then, but after not much more than a month, I benched her for a Necro.

His is a separate story but I will say now his turn didn't last long, through no fault of his own. By the time Rise of Kunark, EQ's first expansion arrived on 14 April 2000, I was already back to playing Rachel, who'd scraped into the early twenties by then. 

I bought the expansion on release and on the first day I took sail from the Oasis shore to Firiona Vie, the confusingly-named Elven city in the equally confusingly-named zone. I can remember nothing about the journey but I remember vividly, two dozen years later, what happened next.

I died and lost my corpse. That's what. Yes, again.

I went exploring in the jungle, trusting to my swift speed and ability to camouflage myself until I was effectively invisible to keep me safe, which they paramountly did not. It turned out the jungle beyond the city was infested with repulsive dark elf/spider hybrids called Drachnids, who not only see through invisibility but cast all manner of spells that can snare and root and dot...

Yes, I get the irony - now.

Several people tried to help me find my corpse. The zone was busy as you'd expect and with everything new, people were understanding and eager to help. Only no-one could find it. I carried on looking, died at least once more, then finally gave up. I never did find that corpse.

Surprisingly, I wasn't all that upset about it. I mean, I wasn't happy... But I didn't feel like rage-quitting or even giving up on Kunark. I felt more like I'd had an actual adventure for once. Okay, it didn't end well but not every adventure does.

What did end well was my Kunark experience with Rachel later on. After a break I came back and this time I stuck with it. With a bit of research, once others had blazed the trail and written up their notes, I managed to find the safe route into Lake of Ill Omen, which became my hunting grounds for several happy months. 

It was in LOIO that I made my first EQ friend, a relationship that did not end well. I met a Paladin, played by a French Canadian, and somehow we got talking, I can't remember - or imagine - how or why. I imagine he asked me to group. I certainly wouldn't have initiated it.

We got on very well. We ended up hunting together regularly for a few weeks, until one day I happened to say something that made it clear I wasn't a girl in real life. Pretty much never heard from him again after that.

In fact, as I think back now, that Paladin wasn't the very first friend I made in the game, although he was my first hunting partner. For a while before that, I'd been having the occasional conversation with a teenager playing a character I don't think I ever saw. 

I forget exactly how we came to speak to each other in the first place - I think he sent me a tell asking me some question about the class I was playing - but for a time he'd send me tells out of the blue just to  chat about things he was doing, in game and out. 

It was a strange time, when the sheer novelty of being able to talk to strangers on the other side of the planet sometimes seemed like reason enough to do it. Didn't last. Probably just as well.

The coming of Kunark saw my first, genuine introduction to grouping in EQ. I had grouped, sporadically, before but to no real purpose. In Lake of Ill Omen I discovered for myself exactly why so many people thought grouping was a lot more fun than soloing and to my surprise I found I agreed with them.

The first few months after the launch of the expansion was an extremely busy time and Lake of Ill Omen was one of the most popular leveling spots for characters in the twenties There were always people starting groups or looking to fill them. It took me a while but soon I was answering LFM calls for second healer spots or the general support work for which a Druid is so well-suited. 

I think it was as simple as trying it once and it not being a disaster that got me started. Once I'd gained some confidence I wouldn't even wait to be asked. I used to log in on weekend mornings and start LFGing in /shout or /ooc immediately. Mostly it only took a few calls before I got a group. 

My favorite camp, by far, was the Sarnak Fort, preferably at Back Wall, where we could set up camp outside and have someone go in and pull the Sarnaks out to us. I remember a few times when more adventurous groups worked their way inside and tried to hold a room. It never worked out well but it was certainly a thrill while it lasted.

It was something of a bittersweet moment when I realized I'd all but out-leveled the Fort but fortunately by then the second expansion, Scars of Velious, was almost there. It dropped in December 2000 (Yes, two of the games largest and most ambitious expansions appeared in the same year, the first within months of launch.) 

Content in Velious was tuned, at the lowest end, for characters in the mid-30s and up. Rachel was, I believe, 32 or 33 at the time and I thought she'd be fine. And she was, except unlike in Kunark, no-one wanted to give a group slot to a slightly under-leveled Druid. Rachel did very well in groups outside the Tower of Frozen Shadows, when she could get one, but she couldn't get them often enough to make all the hanging around seem worthwhile.

I can't remember for certain where I took her after that but it wasn't anywhere in either Kunark or Velious. The new continents were too dangerous alone and after a few less than successful attempts to find new hunting spots there I moved her back to Antonica, specifically to North Karana, where I mostly hunted Griffins.

During the rest of that year I slowly worked her all the way up to the old level cap of fifty. Of course, the new cap had been sixty for a while by then. As you can see from the portrait at the top of the post, she did make sixty eventually, mainly soloing in Scarlet Desert and other lunar zones, but by then her time as my main character was at an end. I played a few more Druids after that but mostly for the ports.

Rachel remains one of my favorite characters in any game. Not only was she fun to play but playing her taught me a lot, some of it about playing nicely with others, some about playing happily alone. When I think of EverQuest, it's often those times I remember most fondly and most clearly and Ihave Rachel to thank for showing me the way.