EQ Live - When You or Your Guild Became "Uber"

[Lagaidh]

I've been looking back on my real life lately. I'm 35. I've come an incredibly long way. I grew up with one parent in poverty and now I own my home. It occurred to me that there are small moments of reflection in life clue that you in that who you were is gone and you're who you are... And your former self would look at folks in certain positions of life and wonder how the hell to get there; "is that even possible for me?"

When this notion occurred to me, I realized it had happened in my virtual life too. In live I had certain goals that were in the "wouldn't that be awesome" category that I never realistically expected to achieve. I always wanted an Amulet of Necropotence. A skeleton pally? C'mon! I always wanted to raid the elemental planes, but I couldn't even get to max level efficiently.

Somewhere along the way, I nabbed that amulet. It's still on my live toon rotting on a server in San Diego (I believe). I was a member of a guild with very humble ambitions. It started out as a chat channel for friends. Then it became a grouping vehicle for a few friends. Other invites happened. Before long, we were all working on VT keys. Then later, I remember flagging in PoP. Before I could really think about what we were all doing, we had whittled our initial PoTime clear time of 11 hours down to 2. We were uber. We were one of the top five guilds on our server, and in the top three most of the time.

I felt uber spending my DKP on hard won PoFire and PoTime drops. But what I truly felt uber about was the fact that I'd been with these guys from just about their beginning. I happened into the guild following friends just prior to VT keying and the first organized raids. We worked through the insane PoP flagging in its initial version together. We leveled up to max together. We shared the spoils of that common experience. That felt uber. We'd been through the ringer, had our share of drama, and on the other side it was just pure uber =)

I suppose the first time I felt personally uber was when I acquired an AoN for a second time, having sold the first, simply because I wanted to use the original DWF male model while being able to use the Holy Steed AA. My riches fueled from being able to solo Veksar like a champion and selling the crap out of the goodies.

I sure as hell never saw that coming when I used Lay on Hands on a goblin while playing with my very first group ever in Butcherblock. I was even going around with the limited UI where you just had that center window to see the world. "Use Lay Hands Lag!" "What the hell is that?" "Look for the button!" "AH! Done!" "Aaah! Target one of us next ti- uhrg!" I for sure couldn't see it the first time I traveled from BB to Kelethin. I asked if I could follow another player with a lantern. I couldn't see well at night (I didn't know about gamma).

Did you ever feel uber? When's the first time you thought you might be pixel-hot-shit? I always knew there were others that could roflstomp me- hundreds on my server in fact, but I felt like I was doing fine by my standards for most of my EQ tenure.

Actually I remember the first time I felt like hot shit. Kunark was new... and my friend introduced me in a new group as "He's the one with the mith 2h". I was introduced by a piece of gear I owned. That was kinda neat =) I understand how it might be insulting, but I saved a long time for that mith 2h, so it felt like a nod.

/Odd.
//I just heard a skeleton's casting audio. I am not in game. I am at work.
///Oh shit. I'm getting obsessed again.