The Guild Officers have reviewed and updated the TNT Recruitment Policy and it has been posted here:
Recruitment Policy 2007 Update
As far as the applicant is concerned the recruitment process is practically the same as before (first 2 steps of the process).
The bulk of the change is to change the administrative process which is the responsibility of the Guild Officers (steps 3 to 8 inclusive). As always though, please feel free to direct any questions to any Guild Officer.
“Goodbye Elemental Planes”.
It’s the journey they say, not the destination. It’s the taking part, not the winning or losing. It’s the shared experience, not going home with some loot.
Well, let me say this. Those things are true often enough. But they’re not true when beating encounters means killing a hundred gazillion trash mobs (helloooooo Plane of Air rings, helloooooo Plane of Earth rings). There is no journey there. There is turgid trudging. And I for one will be glad to see the back of them.
I will miss Xegony and her flouncing, I shall miss the frenzied call for “BURN BURN BURN” on Coirnav, and the little giggle inside when someone asks ‘who’s main tank on Coirnav?’. I’ll miss running from one end of Fire to the other, in the guise of clearing some kind of waves of mobs and then forcing everyone to ‘fight at max range’ and ‘ranged attacks only’. There’s not much I’ll miss about the Rathe Council encounter to be frank.
I’ll put those memories into the same basket as Rallos Zek in the Plane of Tactics, rushing to the pit, rushing to rez and get people back in, naked if necessary. The feeling of seeing Rallos rushing the main tank, the God of Warriors against a self proclaimed Warrior God Killer. I won’t miss the hours of mindless killing in the Tower of Solusek Ro, but I’ll miss the brief flurry of excitement as Solusek himself is brought to his knees. I’ll miss watching Agnarr being run in circles by a brave ranger or bard. I’ll miss watching Mithaniel Marr twirl his sword as he smites another contender for his crown. No more shall we watch Terris Thule spin her skirt in an attempt to scare us, and alas, the Queen of Bondage, Saryrn, TNT’s Patron Saint, shall be visited no more. We won’t have to fool the gnome in the Plane of Innovation into giving over his flags, even though we just kicked him in the nuts and ran him around a bit. We shall never again have to smell the stench that rolls from the fat of Grummus, nor walk in the slime that forms around Bertox.
We started a journey, some time ago, to prove to the Gods we were worthy, to show them we knew where they hid, to remind them that mortals don’t roll over and die just because you have a bigger AE than they do.
We made it to Time. We passed all the tests. We flagged the unflagged.
And by god we had fun doing it.
To everyone, all of you, that turn up, week in, week out, who pull, mez, tank, heal, hit, kick, nuke, die, rez, laugh, joke, coth and keep smiling throughout, thank you. You hear me say it over and over, and I can not stress enough how true I believe it to be. TNF is a team effort, from those people who manage the whole thing in the background, to those of us who shout in rsay, and everyone in between. It’s a team effort. We made it to Time by working together and sticking together. And we’ll beat Time the same way.
It’s 1:02am, I’ve just had another cup of tea to calm myself down. The members of the Truly Naughty Friends raid force, in alliance with the Prophet’s of the Myst took on, and beat the Rathe Council on their first attempt. Everyone pulled a blinder. Mezz team were perfect, pull team excelled, heal teams were spot on, DPS were controlled and co-ordinate, and tankage was top notch. It’s a complex raid which requires focus and co-ordination from everyone, and it does feel like all the complexity of previous raids has been a training ground for this one fight.
Yeh, it’s a few years since the EP’s and Time were endgame content, but TNF and PoTM have fought their way through content in the right order, killed the mobs, got the flags and took on the Gods.
I want to assure those raiders who couldn’t make it tonight, or missed the hail due to being LD, that we will be doing Rathe Council and Coirnav again very soon, at the very least.
You did us proud. Hear that ticking in the background? That’s the sound of time running out for the Gods in the Plane of Time.
At 747 Characters our membership roster was starting to get hard to manage. There were over 200 characters in the list that had not been in game during 2006 – some not since 2004.
Today, as planned and previously publicised we removed 227 characters from the roster. We captured a list of them before the removal so if any of them should return to EQ then we will be able to reinstate them as full TNT members quickly should they wish that.
All they need to do is contact an officer.
Thank you for reading this.
Simes
On Friday the 29th of September the Truly Naughty Friends raid leaders announced our intent to form an alliance with Prophets of the Myst, to beat the four Elemental raid events and flag as many raiders from both raid teams as we could, for the Plane of Time (link here).
Since then, the Gods have been quaking in their boots (and high-heels[1], and in the case of one god, tentacles). The first week saw the new alliance plow through the ‘fun’ that describes the rings in the Plane of Earth. Despite two rings being bugged (one not working, one triggered 3 times!) we managed to spawn the Mystical Arbitor, rush to him, and laid him flat on his earth elemental ass. We would have shouted in joy – but our souls had been sapped by the endless trash that this raid revolves around, so we just drank hot drinks and ate cake instead.
A week of recovery, and the alliance swam silently into Coirnav’s home. Giant-cthulhu squids aren’t known for their hearing, and he totally missed the 50-odd people hanging around outside his enclosure. He didn’t notice as we cleared some of his fish-spawn. Eventually we got his attention by turning his so-called guardian into fish-paste and using his scales as decorative jewellery. He summoned his champions, who we turned into sushi, and while he made some half-hearted attempt at confusing us by calling forth a horde of ugly squib-fish, he failed, and we feasted on Roasted Calimari that night.
We quickly reformed, and dried our clothes in the heat of the Plane of Fire. Fresh from our victory against Squid-head just moments before, we swarmed towards Fennin’s castle, his Chancellors put up little resistance and chicken-legs himself came forth to defeat us. Which was pretty dumb of him because we ambushed him and nailed his chicken-feet to the fake wall.
Two gods down, two more shields to everyone in the alliance, and a week to reflect.
The Plane of Air, more endless trash to get keyed to Xegony Queen of Flirting? Perhaps, but a secret weapon, Dheath the Necromancer was three quarters keyed and willing to die for the cause. We just needed to defeat one ring, the Dust Ring, the ring that used to make warriors cry like babies. But no more, we had a plan, we had more enchanters than you can shake a stick at, and we were hungry for fricassee faerie wings. The dust ring fell in about 90 minutes of clearing and killing, the spiders at the end, once feared, were no match for the raid force and we rush the Avatar of Dust, keyed Dheath and marched back to the Rainbow. We spent over an hour moving the raid force onto Xegony’s island, including 85’s and people who needed the flag, longer than we had hoped, but the raid force kept their spirits high and no one camped in disgust. We went over the strat, we setup, we pulled Xegony … she flirted, she sang, she taunted, she twirled, but all in vain. For she died, and her waves of defenders could do naught to get past the forces aligned against them.
We had no butter, so we had sautéed faerie wings instead.
Three gods down, the Rathe Council standing in our way … 12 council men preventing us from our ultimate goal. The Avatar of Earth hiding behind his 12 council men. Already he quakes in fear (see how I did that, Earth? Quake?).
We must bolster our forces, ensure that when we enter Ragrax, Stronghold of the Twelve we are at full strength, and so we may well re-visit the earth rings once more. We may test ourselves against one or more of the other three once defeated gods again, before moving on. But the Avatar need not think he is safe, we are coming, soon, and his council men will provide him no succor from our wrath.
[1] Fennin Ro denies the implication that he wears high-heels, and his legal team is prepared to back that up with money.
The guild roster needs a clean out. We have over 700 toons in the roster – but my guess is that over half of them are defunct for one reason or another. I just feel that the roster looks messy with characters on there from 2004 – to new members it might look as though we can’t be bothered to housekeep it and there is a risk, albeit very small, that we might get an ebayed toon turning up in guild on an old member’s toon.
I am going to post this message in 4 places:
1) Website Blog News Item
2) Guild Members Forum
3) MOTD – in Summary form clearly
4) As an in-game email to every TNT character
The process will be as follows:
a) All guild characters not logged into the game in 2006 will be removed – no sanity checking will be done, so any rarely used alts need to be logged in before removal day ** SUNDAY 26th NOVEMBER 2006 **
b) An email will be sent to all guild characters – stating that if they return to the game and find themselves deguilded they need only contact an officer who will be able to reinvite them.
c) A guild roster dump has been taken and linked on the guild website (as a sticky in the officers forum) for officers to check old members wishing to return.
I reckon that this action alone will remove about 150 defunct characters from the roster.
Then we might be able to see the wood for the trees a little bit and do a more intelligent review of the remainder of the roster.
Thank you for reading this,
Simes
On Thursday, a small TNF Raid force took on, and beat, the Ikkinz Chambers of Glorification. Twenty Four intrepid raiders, against the Hords of Discord. It was never pretty, but it was successful. A brilliant and successful raid which pathed the way for a full attempt on the Ikkinz Chambers of Transcendence.
The full might of TNF rallied on Saturday, 51 raiders entered, 41 were left standing 5 hours later.
But it wasn’t over. Vrex Xalkak`s Sentinel’s were giving us some issues. We finally managed to get one single and nailed. Then another. And after what felt like an age, we killed the last two. Vrex Xalkak`s Marauder spawned and we gave it our best shot, FOUR times, but eventually we just ran out of people standing on their feet, we leashed him, and set to go again.
But we couldn’t contain him. And again we had to recover.
It was late, people were tired, the end was so close. Trash that had been giving us concern when we zoned in was being dispatched in seconds, lest it get in the way of our true goal. Vrex Xalkak`s Marauder had a date with the floor. We explained the strat again, we engaged …
… and he died and stayed dead on the first kill – Hybrids.
We charged Vrex Xalkak Nixki while he wasn’t looking, burned the last 5% of his life from his rotten corpse, and vowed never, ever to set foot inside the Ikkinz Chambers of Transcendence ever again.
TNT officers have been having a number of discussions lately where quite frankly we’ve seen some behaviour in guild that falls a bit below the standards that we would expect of TNT members. Only a couple of issues have been serious which we dealt with individually. Most have been very minor and it would therefore be very wrong to start berating individuals. However, we do think that the time is right for a bit of a refresher on EQ etiquette – so we’ve prepared a document covering the following areas:
All of the officers have made a significant contribution to this document and I am sure that any of them would be happy to answer questions if anything needs further clarification.
TNT members are naughty people that play nice. This means you:
1. Setting up groups
2. In groups
3. Loot
4. Special events
5. Buffs and rezzes
Above all, treat other players as you would have them treat you.
It was a grudge match. Only one other mob has eluded our grasp as many times as Battlemaster Rhorious. It was time for him, and his hangers on to meet the blunt end of a TNF shaped Wedgie. We were light on clerics when we started the move, but a few more bolstered our numbers by the time we arrived. We had more necromancers than a goth party in a morgue, enough DPS to handle just about anything, the time was right.
But hell was it ugly. BMR tanking was fine, he died as he should, carefully, well managed, until his golem buddies rushed the raid. And all hell broke loose. The golems started their fun little knockback. Casters got thrown into the path of Snakes-on-a-Dress, and the goat just kept chasing down our ranger and kicking their ass. It was messy. We nailed BMR, killed the golems next, struggled with the snake but finally got her flattened and then just did the goat from afar. Awesome work from everyone, I’d like to think we can tidy it up in future, but hey the loot rocked and we had FUN!
After beating Ikkinz 1 in the week, and beating BMR, we felt it was time to step into the Muramite Proving Grounds and take on a trial. The MPG Trial of Hatred to be precise. Holy chaos in a bucket batman. The short summary is that we ‘learned some lessons’ and ‘made some valuable tactical progression’ which means we got our asses handed to us *but* not because we don’t have the power, skill and tactics to beat the trial, just because it was new and we had to deal with some new situations. We can beat that trial, we will beat that trial.
To round off the evening we took out Ritesmaster Verok in the Ruins of Illsalin and boy does he drop some nice loot 
Overall a great evening, grats to the 4 people who got level 70 spells, grats to the winners of the loot from BMR and from RV and grats to everyone for a sterling effort in MPG.
It started as a scouting mission. To see how long clearing into the temple in Kod`Taz would take. To see what the trash inside Ikkinz hit like. To see how few hitpoints the priests had and how bad they hit. To get a feel for how many people we’d need to beat the pit. Just to put our toes into the water.
We discovered we don’t need to paddle, we can swim. TNF beat Ikkinz 1 with 25 people. It was a challenge, it was fun, it was a learning experience, and most importantly, it was a huge success. Thank you to everyone who turned up and put in the effort. Thanks to the folk who grouped with myself and Siddhaya over the previous months to allow us to farm the pieces needed to trigger the raids. Thanks to everyone who’s run Tipt runs to get people flagged. For some people this was a return to Ikkinz raiding, for many this was their first experience, and for some it’s just another raid in a long series of raids. For me, it’s just amazing that we’re back in Ikkinz and beating it with friends.
And of course, no trip to Ikkinz would be complete without loot. The bosses in the Ikkinz raids tend to share similar loot tables, and the loot in Ikkinz 1 is very nice.
Grats Simes and Rabbe on their new legs – Runed Flesh-Banded Leggings (sorry for the picture)
Grats Lessi on her new aug (Blackstone of Radical Thought)
Grats Rowenna on her new sword (Darkglint Blade)
And last but not least, grats Runenblastem on his new mantle (Mantle of Mending)