i had a bit of time so i thought it would be interesting to catalogue some of the stuff that or members have done in the past while they were in the guild.
When i was working, the division manager said that any engineer should readily be able to give a list of what they've accomplished for the company in the past year -- not just their
duties (like redesigning parts) but actual
accomplishments (like found a new technique to do x saving company $y every year). The point was to be able to "look up" occasionally from the daily drudgery of busywork (those were not his words of course) and see progress in personal development over time in terms of new milestones in doing what was previously not possible.
It is, of course, not necessary for a game like this, since it's just a hobby for most people. However, the game does also provide a certain level of challenges, for those who want to proceed at their own pace in their own time and with their own level of interest. To a certain extent, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. And it is interesting to occasionally look back at what's actually been done, each event usually with their own story and background of preparation and execution -- a scrapbook of sorts of what has been achieved in the past and present.
To that end i looked through the orien and the achievement forums. I sort of just scanned the thread titles though so there's likely a few that i missed. Since people in the guild are generally forward-looking (not to mention busy with rl), this is probably as close to a "guild historian" post as it'll get. I'm sure many guilds can compile their own lists, although the content will vary depending on the focus of the guild; for some, it may be personal achievements, for others, it will be social aspects (such as first marriage of guildies, which i think has happened somewhere along the line).
Note: In terms of stating firsts, i tried to look for others but i may have missed some. So if i said something was a server or world first and it isn't, please pm me (to not clutter up this thread) with the details so i can fix it -- although, i'm likely to ignore it as just misinformed/trolling if there isn't a screenshot or some sort of evidence to back it up ("i'm sure somebody's done it before" doesn't quite cut it in terms of being reliable evidence).
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orien came out sometime in november, 2009. Back then, there was no over raided; however, the players that would eventually form over raided were already part of the "firsts" on the server:
11/13/2009 -
hound of xoriat (server first)
12/4/2009 -
shroud (server first)
12/13/2009 -
titan awakes (server first)
these are not or guild achievements (since the guild had not yet formed), but represent a cross-section of the original end-game players "back in the day" soon after the server had opened. In those screenshots though you can see titanticus and bril (vixa), both of whom would eventually go on to be founding members of or, as well as lead it.
2/2/2010 -
tower of despair (server first)
at this point in time, many of the players that would eventually go on to form or were in epic fail -- one of the longest-living guilds on the server and is still active. Under soul's leadership it was the first home for many of today's end-game guild leaders.
In february, some of the players in ef
formed epic, specifically to handle the most challenging end-game content. During that time, many more of the server firsts were accomplished:
3/13/2010 -
epic plane of night (server first)
3/18/2010 -
tower of despair with suulomades optional (server first)
4/10/2010 -
elite accursed ascension (server first)
4/11/2010 -
elite tower of despair (server first)
sometime after this was when the guild renamed itself to over raided (we *used* to have a record of when it was i think but the original guild website blowed up so i think that info has sort of been lost unless somebody remembers). The guild was formed sometime before the renown system was implemented:
7/1/2010 -
guild level 20 and airship (world first)
7/4/2010 -
guild level 25 and airship (world first)
one of the things that's often missed about these is that they were achieved back when there was no small guild renown bonus -- the guild was able to beat out guilds with hundreds of players (and at those low levels, there's no renown decay) just by sheer activity. In other words, the best way to level a guild is to simply be active and collect a lot of renown from chests and so forth. There was also a lot of preparation that went into it such as looking at which chests would be the best to farm, in terms of renown/minute. For whatever reason, guilds tend to miss this point -- that the best way to level a guild is not to
minimize losses (i.e. Remove less active players), but to
maximize gains (make the guild an environment where people are encouraged to play and be active).
8/4/2010 -
guild level 50 and airship (world first)
8/7/2010 -
1000 raid completions on account (server first)
8/7/2010 -
solo hard vision of destruction (server first)
8/7/2010 -
solo vision of destruction (world first as arcane archer)
for those vod completions, note that back then fvs didn't have dots, so in the hard case it was done using blade barriers (with suulomades having evasion), and in the arcane archer case it was done by pew-pew-pew.
8/13/2010 -
guild level 55 and airship (world first)
8/23/2010 -
guild level 60 (world first)
10/1/2010 -
guild level 70 (world first)
11/17/2010 -
guild level 80 and airship (world first)
12/6/2010 -
100 shroud completions on single character (server first)
1/2/2011 -
guild level 85 and airship (world first)
1/21/2011 -
completionist (server first)
2/13/2011 -
solo elite stealer of souls (melee, no sp/sf pots, no hirelings) (server first)
3/6/2011 -
guild level 90 (world first)
3/24/2011 -
3-man epic plane of night (server first)
3/30/2011 -
guild level 93 (world first)
4/25/2011 -
solo epic against the demon queen (server first)
5/9/2011 -
solo epic tharashk arena non-invis, no hireling
6/17/2011 -
solo epic fathom the depths with cube optional
6/23/2011 -
guild level 100 (world first)
6/24/2011 -
solo epic zawabi's revenge (server first)
7/6/2011 -
shroud 11-minute speedrun (server record)
this was pretty fun for me because i was in charge of developing the strategy for this, so i investigated a lot of the raid mechanics and we tried out various approaches. It was the world record (without using bugs) until revenants did their superb
9-minute speedrun, which
in theory we could have tied if everything went off without a hitch and every part was the quickest we had done them, but
in practice on each run some part would be slower than average (after all, "average" means half are faster and half are slower). Although our group compositions were very different; since or was melee-centric at the time, we had to account for either having to rest at shrines to recharge action boosts (taking up time), or rationing those boosts out throughout the raid (decreasing dps).
7/11/2011 -
elite accursed ascension 6-minute speedrun (tied with world record)
7/11/2011 -
epic plane of night 3-minute speedrun (server record)
7/22/2011 -
elite hound of xoriat 10-minute speedrun (server record)
7/29/2011 -
solo epic chronoscope (world first)
8/1/2011 -
tower of despair 8-minute speedrun (world record)
this one was interesting because it was a record that still stands but it was done with 11 people. Although i believe it could in theory have been done in 7 minutes, we were never able to do it that quickly.
9/18/2011 -
completionist artificer (world first)
i *believe* this was the first one in the game, but if there were any on other servers, please give me a link.
9/19/2011 -
hard lord of blades (server first)
9/19/2011 -
hard master artificer (server first)
9/24/2011 -
solo epic into the deep with demon optional (server first)
10/3/2011 -
solo epic against the demon queen (server first as fvs)
10/18/2011 -
solo epic devil assault (server first)
12/16/2011 -
tr in 27 hours of quest time
1/13/2012 -
epic master artificer (server first)
1/20/2012 -
solo epic all soloable epic quests (world first)
1/27/2012 -
solo plane of night (server first)
i should note regarding this, that i found plenty of posts from 2009 claiming that people can solo von6, but i was unable to find any posts that actually had evidence (such as a screenshot of an actual solo von6 completion). I'm not sure if there were different game mechanics or setups back then or something, since all the posts making reference to it were from 2009 and not more recent. Nevertheless i'll assume that *someone* did actually go solo it back then even though i wasn't able to find any evidence of that, based on the number of posts saying it's doable.
1/27/2012 -
2-man accursed ascension (world first on 1-round puzzles)
this one probably took the most amount of preparation for me -- my earliest notes on investigating how this would be done go all the way back to july 2011. Previous 2-man runs relied on doing 1 puzzle per round, and just re-beating down the abbot each time until all the puzzles were completed. They were, obviously, done back when the abbot had 50k hp regardless of difficulty, instead of the current 135k/209k/303k hp. They also used deaths as part of the strategy, namely in scouting the puzzles and determining which was which. For us, the goal then was to do all 3 puzzles in a single round, which means completing 2 puzzles and getting into the 3rd before the dimension doors went down (after 90 seconds). Since you are locked into asteroids for over 3 minutes, this meant both tiles and ice had to be completed within 90 seconds. In practice there was less time than that since you also had to account for running to each dimension door and the loading screen times. Tiles took quite a bit of practice until we could get our times down from the original several minutes down to around 40-50 seconds for both sides relatively consistently. Asteroids also took some tinkering since there were only 2 people in there instead of the usual 4, but by the end i could solo it if need be (although not with 100% chance of success).
2/2/2012 -
2-man accursed ascension (world first on flawless)
this is the first 2-man abbot completion i know of that had no deaths. As mentioned above, this is because our 1-round puzzles strategy did not rely on deaths, although on the above completion i died near the end of the main fight. This is also likely the fastest 2-man abbot completion, coming in at 13 minutes, even though it had to deal with a 135k hp abbot instead of the 50k hp abbot of the other 2-man completions. Originally, after this completion, the plan was for me to switch to using my barbarian instead, which would've taken somewhat more damage (due to not having improved evasion) but would have allowed for 11-12 minute completions plus more crowd dps during the main fight (rather than relying on vevay to handle all the trash) because of the higher dps, significantly higher than any other melee class. However, because of rl things (i had a paper due) we ended up not really getting around to it.
2/5/2012 -
solo elite plane of night (server first)
again the same as above -- i had found references to people saying it's doable, but no actual screenshots of solo completions. So i also don't know in what difficulty it may have been done, whether or not any of the people who may have soloed it had done it on elite. In cases where i'm unsure if it's a server first or a world first (i.e. If people on other servers had done it before), i defaulted to server first.
2/12/2012 -
highest dc wizard (world first)
what i found most notable about this one was that flamicia apparently got a higher dc than what people had been saying was possible. Tod was much easier once he got the dc.
2/27/2012 -
epic web of chaos chain (server first)
3/11/2012 -
solo epic lords of dust (server first as melee)
3/14/2012 -
4000 favor (server first)
3/17/2012 -
solo epic lords of dust (server first as arcane archer)
5/1/2012 -
epic master artificer 27-minute speedrun (world record)
5/8/2012 -
2-man master artificer (server first)
5/18/2012 -
2-man lord of blades (server first)
6/5/2012 -
solo tower of despair (server first)
6/17/2012 -
solo epic servants of the overlord (server first)
6/19/2012 -
2-man hard accursed ascension (world first)
i *believe* the previous 2-man abbot completions were on normal, though i may be wrong on that. At any rate though, this was the first 2-man completion with hard abbot beefed up to 209k hp. Rather than take the chug-sp-pots approach some people use to complete raids, we set up an additional goal of not using any sp pots, in addition to the previous goals (such as 1-rounding the puzzles). After looking at several options, we decided on doing it with melee characters using self healing (vampirism). We ended up with 2 dark monks as the safest option (i.e. Least incoming damage), although throwing a light monk in there would have been faster (since then we could use dps weapons instead of vampirism weapons due to curse of healing), and dual barbarians the fastest but riskiest. The puzzles were completed flawlessly but there was one death near the end of the raid (with the abbot at 22%). After this was completed, we started some work on doing 2-man elite abbot (since our characters were actually specced for that such as having high enough saves and to-hit) but didn't have enough time to spend on it due to rl issues and asteroids, prior to the release of the expansion.
6/21/2012 -
solo epic chains of flame (server first as arcane archer)
6/22/2012 -
solo epic web of chaos pack (world first)
6/24/2012 -
solo epic jungle of khyber (server first as arcane archer)
7/9/2012 -
solo epic elite all motu quests (world first as flawless, at-level)
7/24/2012 -
solo epic elite partycrashers all optionals (server first)
7/30/2012 -
solo epic hard plane of night (world first)
8/1/2012 -
solo epic elite zawabi's revenge (world first)
8/4/2012 -
solo shroud
8/5/2012 -
solo tower of despair (world first as arcane archer)
8/26/2012 -
solo epic elite devil assault (world first)
8/29/2012 -
solo epic elite offering of blood (world first)
8/31/2012 -
546% healing amp
9/6/2012 -
solo epic normal caught in the web (world first)
9/7/2012 -
solo epic elite druid's deep (server first)
10/9/2012 -
epic elite caught in the web (server first)
this was actually a run started by the myths but eventually completed by shat and nix (i piked the completion since i was busy with something else at the time, so i just came for the loot in or tradition). That the first ee completion on the server came this late shows the lack of interest in this raid, similar to lob and ma -- in the new raids, turbine introduced elements that are simply time-wasters that many players don't feel like bothering with, such as a long wilderness run for lob and ma, and the various running around and killing random junk parts in this raid and in lob and ma -- not to mention the bugs.
10/15/2012 -
1,000 elite streak completionist
10/19/2012 -
all 25 monster manual hp rewards unlocked (world first)
1/5/2013 -
solo accursed ascension (world first)
this was notable for being a solo completion where all the puzzles were completed in one round. That's right, ice, tiles, and asteroids were all completed quickly enough that when the abbot came down the second time, he never retreated back again.