The concept of raiding came about fairly naturally for the playerbase, but was probably a bit unexpected for the developers. The very first of what you could consider a true raid was Fires of Heaven versus Lady Vox. The story goes that the first level 50 in the game -- Kalaran, the Wood Elven Rogue leader of Fires of Heaven -- was taking his group through every single high end dungeon in the game and stomping them with extreme prejudice. Some how or another, Aradune -- Brad McQuaid's avatar, the creator of EverQuest -- placed a wager with Kalaran and said that he couldn't kill Lady Vox no way, no how. Up for the challenge, of course, Kalaran accepted, and Aradune accompanied him to the depths of Permafrost to face this fabled beast and a half, you can see him in the green armor with the fiery sword. To Aradune's surprise, Lady Vox died that night. The loot? Nothing. She hadn't been itemized yet, so a special set of items were created for this very first raid, most of which would never drop again for the remainder of the game's life.
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This was about par for the course for the future of EverQuest raiding. Verant would release an untuned, unfinished expansion, and Fires of Heaven would dominate the shit out of it. Later in Vanilla they made what could be considered the first zone tackled from the perspective of a raider, Plane of Sky. Designed around level 60s when the cap was just 50, it required solid group coordination, high gear saturation, and a whole shitload of luck. In the first expansion, Kunark, they would release Veeshan's Peak as the ultimate, end all be all raiding zone. It required a key to get in whose components were from every raid boss in the expansion. It required raids upon raids, 24 hour camps, materials out the wazoo. The whole 9 yards, basically. Veeshan's Peak itself was extremely unforgiving. Once you zoned in, you couldn't zone out unless you died or cleared the zone. The trash was brutal and quick spawning, the raid bosses were deadly. In other words, this zone was designed from the ground up to fuck you, and fuck you hard. This is a tradition that they somewhat continued with Velious.
With the release of Velious, they created raid bosses with more than 32k hitpoints for the first time. In fact, quite a bit more. Mana management, threat management, AE dodging, positioning, this expansion is really where a lot of the concepts used in raiding today were formulated and perfected. Concepts, mind you, that are still at the forefront of raid design. The expansion was designed solely around raiders, there was no level cap increase, no new races, no new classes. There wasn't even a newbie zone in Velious. What there was was a whole lot of raid bosses, dragons, giants, factions, and quests.
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01-04-2022, 08:21 PM
Found this old EJ blog post detailing the <Conquest> Sleeper controversy
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