It is here where the story is going to slow down and in some cases be disjointed. I know what events happened in my career and I also am aware of the dates history has assigned to the releases of MMOs. Somehow they don’t seem to line up. The math is wrong but the answer is still there. Once more I have to stress that the timing will not work exactly right and should sound impossible. I’m not sure how it worked but in some way it did. When we began to make our move from mid-tier raiding to a competitive guild Velious was already released and we were not max level. We were racing towards that finish line but it was quite slow back in those days and we didn’t want to miss out. By then it was only Khallid, Dresden and I. We applied to Blades of Wrath, the server leading guild on Torvonnilous.
Blades did not have an outrageous recruiting policy. They were highly skilled and motivated but the server was new and they were still in a building phase. We applied and started associating ourselves with their organization. It only took a few weeks to really make an impression. Khallid was really feeling the burn though as we tried to get our last levels and when we hit 55 he retired. I believe it was a Monday. On Tuesday Dresden and I were tagged for Blades of Wrath. A truly unfortunate occurrence then. Now I think he probably lucked out. We were new to the whole true raiding scene and the learning curve was steep. We weren’t max level but we were required to raid. This lead to some early frustrations, especially as we did our epics and were passed up by people who were behind us but higher level.
In truth I frequently took issue with the guild leader and one officer in particular. This officer was a cleric and very self serving. To give an example we were just breaking into armor farming in the Temple of Veeshan. Our tanks were not remotely geared out and the first set of plate arms that ever dropped were issued by that officer to himself. By this point Dresden had also dropped out and into retirement. I stuck it our for reasons I don’t quite understand. My frustration grew as I rarely had time to level since we always raided, always died and rarely did anything else. I was told repeatedly that 56 was good enough and could never find help. My group was gone and I was alone in the ocean. Frustrations mounted quickly. I had to have scaled my raiding time back but I don’t remember doing so.
I’m not sure exactly how events went next but I know Dark Age of Camelot was coming out soon and that excited us all. This would be the “third” MMO ever and we all wanted to play it. In an effort to avoid stupidity we decided we would play our set group again and form our own guild, Requiem. From what we’d seen in EverQuest we could do better. When DAoC released we foolishly selected the Midgard faction and I made it clear I was sick of healing. Instead of playing a Thane, my first instinct, I played a warrior since hybrids were so woefully bad in EverQuest. Telbain showed up again as this warrior. Khallid played a skald (bard) and named him Firm. Dresden played a healer (cleric/enchanter) and named him Sloan. Our original monk friend played a berserker and other friends joined in too.
We were quite thrilled with the game for the majority of our experience. When we reached the final 10 levels we started to find out that Midgard was not exactly on par with Albion. We had the one most broken class in the game, the healer, but that was it. On every other pairing we were just slightly below the mark. Dungeon content also started to run dry. Admittedly we had leveled way to fast but as we hit 44 (or 54, we were 6 levels from max) we started to get bored. I quit well before Dresden and Khallid. They enjoyed the RvR because both of their classes were active in it. Warriors, on the other hand, did nothing but chase people they could never catch. We were also constantly in crowd control hell. I got out and called it a day, returning back to EverQuest and a different kind of frustration.
This is where I got into a time machine evidently or the DAoC experience happened later than I imagine in my EverQuest career. It simply doesn’t fit in anywhere but I know we did it and I know we did it at release. When I returned to EverQuest I was once again frustrated by my lack of progress and my malcontent grew. The guild leader and I were not getting along and I pretty much detested that officer. I had two friends on Brell that I knew in real life. They were in Silent Redemption, the leading guild on that server. One day SoE announced they would allow character transfers. To do this you would have to give up EVERYTHING. They would destroy everything you owned and move your character to another server completely nude. I briefly chatted the guys up and decided to make the change…
Check out part one of the story: A history of Ferrel
Check out part two of the story: Ferrel, the formative years
Check out part three of the story: Ferrel, the plan
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