November 2002 saw the beginning of a sea-change in the way I'd spend my time in Norrath. Until then, the overwhelming majority of my gameplay took place alone. Not for much longer.
I'd duoed a little with people I'd met along the way and Mrs Bhagpuss and I had made a few not very successful attempts to find characters we could play together, hampered by the fact that we rarely played on the same servers. I'd done as many pick-up groups as I could get with Rachel but those had mostly dried up with the coming of Velious.
Things were rolling along comfortably enough but I suspect now that, had Dark Age of Camelot not intervened, I would have drifted away from the game sooner rather than later, to return only occasionally over the years to come as a curious, if somewhat detached, tourist.
DAOC changed everything in that it introduced me to the dark, invasive, insidious and compelling power of playing with people you know instead of alone or with strangers. For a decade, from late 2001 to the first year or so of Guild Wars 2 in 2012, I spent at least as much time playing with friends and guildmates as I did alone. Quite probably more.
It was a mixed experience. The highs were intense but so was the drama. My god, the drama... I didn't mind it so much in the game itself but when it leached into offline life, as it regularly did, I found it draining. By the time the shift to the kind of alone-together play we take for granted today began, which for me was something I first experienced in Rift, I was more than ready for it.
That was still more than a decade away, when I made my first and so far only Ogre Shadowknight. I made him as a joke, in response to a character Mrs Bhagpuss was playing. At the time, I never imagined he'd become anything more than that.
That's the thing about these games. You make characters you never intend to play and then end up playing them for years. Four of my five most significant EverQuest characters fit that bill, the exception being Rachel and of the five, she made the least progress.
When we came back we began by picking up our existing characters on the various servers where we'd left them but for reasons I no longer remember (Maybe someone we knew had moved there? Maybe we were having connection issues with the US servers?) we chose to relocate to Ant Bayle, as everyone called it.
I'd love to be more definitive but my memories of those times, while sometimes clear, are frequently fractured. I can remember many of the people we played with and a great deal about what we did together but as for the way we met them or why we made some of the choices we did, I can only guess.
I do know that not long after we moved to Ant Bayle, Mrs Bhagpuss made a character called Wimbletoot. She named him after a village in Ireland and he was a gnome. I can't remember his class.
One afternoon, when I clearly had nothing better to do, it amused me to spoonerize Wimbletoot's name and blow him up to the largest size possible. I imagine I thought it would be funny to run around as an ogre/gnome duo with matching names.
If that would ever have been funny, something I very much doubt, it certainly wouldn't have been funny for long. Luckily we never had to put it to the test because very soon after, Mrs Bhagpuss deleted Wimbletoot to make room for some other character she wanted to make.
I remember being a bit outraged by that. I almost never delete characters in any game. At the least level of affection I think of my characters as something akin to cuddly toys or household pets, not to be disposed of lightly, but if they gain any traction at all I think of them as people with rights. Virtual rights.
Wimble's demise left me with a joke with no punchline. I'd never intended to play another SK but since the record shows I didn't acquire any further characters (The significance of that verb will become clear in the next post.) until almost six months later, it would appear I must have been happy enough to take the challenge on. I'd like to say I remember my thinking there but I very much don't.
Rather than any organized plan, what I mostly remember are a number of significant incidents from Timblewoot's long and eventful career. He was a character I came to hold in considerable esteem and take quite seriously as I leveled him to the cap in something not far off real time.
In those days, the level cap went up only infrequently. Reaching it involved some hard graft and felt like a big deal. The EverQuest Show has a handy timeline indicating the level cap only went up twice in the first five years, during which time there'd been no fewer than eight expansions, the link between expansions and level rises being far from established at that point.
Timble hit both 60 and 65 when each was as far as you could go. He did most of the work in groups, which was how he came to be the character with whom I learned to tank. I was never a very good tank but I became good enough for most casual purposes.
I was very lucky to be able to learn by example from some of the very best tanks on the server. Almost from the moment she started playing, Mrs Bhagpuss had become adept at both making friends and joining guilds, something that took me a lot longer to pick up, but by the time we came back from DAOC I was fair to middling at it too.
Between the guild and the channel I suddenly had all the group offers I could handle. Thanks to the high-end company in the chat channel, I also got to spend a good deal of time with players who really knew how to play and I learned a lot. Eventually I even knew enough to be able to pass some of that on. It was an intense but often very fulfilling time to be playing EverQuest. I kind of miss it, sometimes, but I wouldn't have it back for the stress that sometimes came with it.
Most of that stress came from the aforementioned drama, which was never-ending, but I also found tanking pretty stressful in itself. Definitely a lot more stressful than healing, which turned out to be my metier. Nevertheless, I mustn't have been that bad at it - good enough to get asked to do it pretty often, anyway.
Timble's class and race had something to do with that. At the time, Shadowknights were becoming a popular choice for Main Tank, having been very much also-rans to Warriors and Paladins for a while, and Ogre SKs were the most welcome of all since they enjoyed the considerable advantage of being immune to stuns while facing front. Even so, you still had to know how to play one and with some practice I became reasonably confident that I did.
The highlight of my tanking career came when a friend asked Timble to tank for him when he went to face the triggered version of the dragon Trakanon in Sebilis for his epic. I'd already tanked the Drolvarg Warlord earlier in the same extremely lengthy questline. I seem to remember that not going particularly well but it can't have been that bad or he wouldn't have asked me back for the much harder Trak fight.
I also remember being there when he took on Phinagel Atropos in Kedge Keep for the same never-ending quest. It was an absolute nightmare of a zone and a horrible fight but at least I wasn't tanking for that one, thank Tunare.
Granted, triggered Trakanon isn't as tough as the full-fat version but at the time he was still a bona fide raid mob and we made a raid to kill him. I was flattered to be asked and excited to be there but I can't say I enjoyed it. Main tanking for a raid to get one of the final drops needed for someone's epic felt like a lot of responsibility at the time and if there's one thing I've never enjoyed it's responsibility.
In the event, everything went off about as well as could be expected. I still have flashes of the fight burned into my memory even now, like a series of still photographs glimpsed in a lightning storm. I never did anything like it again, nor wanted to. It was one of those things you're glad you've done for the experience but not until it's all safely behind you.
Everything was a learning experience back then, though. It was one of the best things about the game. Now, it takes a never-ending sequence of new games to provide that level of intellectual challenge but in the early years of the millennium just learning to play the one game adequately was more than enough challenge for me.
With Timble, when I wasn't tanking or off-tanking, a role I much preferred because of the diminished levels of responsibility, I was either leveling alone or working on his faction. Leveling speed was faster in groups but those were the days of hell levels and sometimes even grouping didn't make as much of a dent in the xp wall as you'd have liked so I spent much of my downtime from grouping fear-kiting solo to eke out a few more per cent.
As for faction, I'm still stupidly proud to remember how Timble was eventually able to stroll across North Freeport to do his banking. Not a lot of Ogres were welcome there but he was. He had to kill a lot of corrupt guards in the back alleys to gain the respect of the rest of the guards but it was a task both he and I were happy to take on. Getting to a safe spot in the city then locating, pulling and killing guards was one of the highlights of my time as an Ogre.
I carried on playing Timble all the way through until the next split in the timeline. That came a couple of years later, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I jumped ship once more, this time for EverQuest II. That proved to be a much more fundemental schism. A number of our friends made the transition but the only one who stayed for more than a few weeks after launch was the Bard I'd tanked Trak for. We played with him, on and off, for many years, all the way into GW2 until we finally lost track of him sometime in the twenty-teens.
All the rest either went back to EQ or moved on to other games or stopped playing altogether. We never saw any of them again.
Looking back, I can see it had as much to do with with the infamous Gates of Discord expansion as it did with competition from new games like EQII or World of Warcraft. The infamously overtuned, unfinished and unforgiving GoD arrived in February 2004 and the damage it did, especially to morale, didn't begin to mend until the appearance of the following expansion, Omens of War, six months later, by which time it was too late for many who'd either already left or wished they could.
For some of the latter, including Mrs Bhagpuss and myself, plus a few members of the guild we were in, the launch of OOW co-incided almost exactly with invitations to join the later stages of the EQII closed beta. The beta still had several months to run but once we got in and saw what was on offer I don't believe any of us came back to EQ, not even to say goodbye to those who remained.
Mrs Bhagpuss and I did return eventually but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that, when we did, we made yet another new start, leaving Timblewoot and all our old characters on both accounts beached on the sandrifts of the past.
It seems fair. Timble had a great run. He's earned his peaceful retirement. He's probably just happy he doesn't have to tank any more. I know I am.
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Agree on both tanking being very fun but also stressful, and on guild drama sometimes being more grief than it's actually worth.
ReplyDeleteIn theory, healing ought to be just as stressful, given the equivalent level of responsibility, but I never found it so. Then again, I was a much better healer than I ever was a tank...
DeleteTimblewoot is a great name! I love the origins behind your character names... they are always interesting, even when they are silly.
ReplyDeleteIn those days I used to spend quite some time coming up with unique names for every character. Nowadays I mostly just run with variations on the same two or three. I ought to go back to putting some thought into it.
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