Why does TNF Raid?

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website.  The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.


I wanted to write a short reminder, to myself more than anything else, about why TNF raids. With the recent changes to content in terms of flags, it’s a good time to get back to basics.

  1. We raid to have fun with our friends.
  2. We raid to see stuff you don’t get to see if you don’t raid.
  3. Sometimes we get some nice loot.

TNF was never a ‘progression’ raid force. We were forced into progression to meet the goals above. If we didn’t progress, we would never beat new stuff, if we didn’t do the flagging, we would never have gotten into more fun zones.

There is always an element of progression in raiding. If we just all stayed level 65 in level 65 gear, we’d never beat the latest content, we would never have beaten Sendaii if we hadn’t all worked together, to improve our toons through raiding and grouping. So we’re forced to progress – that’s the EQ model.

But there’s a false element of progression in raiding as well – faction, flags, keys. Those elements are added for several reasons, and we can argue their value until we’re all blue in the face, but it doesn’t matter. For anything up to and including the Prophecy of Ro, they’re gone.

Mostly gone …. some raids require bane weapons, some raids require special items, and those weapons and items are only obtained by raiding previous content (this applies to DoDh and PoR), so there’s still some element of scaling the content.

And of course, no one skips through to the final mob in an expansion and kills it without doing the earlier stuff unless they’re already overpowered.

Where am I going with this?

Well, the recent patch is very exciting for TNF. It opens up more content than we’ve had access to since we started raiding PoP. More targets are available to us now than ever before. More content to challenge us, to entertain us, and to show us a side of EQ we may never have seen.

We don’t know what it means for us yet in terms of week-to-week raids, what we’ll be killing, how we’ll structure things. But I do know, that there’s never been a more exciting time to be a casual raid force in EQ.

No more turning away friends who play rarely because they don’t have the flag. No more scratching around trying to find people to 85 us into zones. No more demands from myself and Sidd before a raid about ‘who’s keyed, who did this, who did that’.

Everything up to TSS is open before us, ripe, ready.

TNF – Raiding for Fun and looking Good while we do it.