Age of Unity

Tier One of The Outer Brood.

Once again, it was the time of year for the new expansion, with the Outer Brood launching in December 2024 and new raid early in January 2025.

AOU did extensive beta testing for this expansion, and while I attended a majority of our raids, the screenshots I took matched my enthusiasm for playing and updating the news.

Not taking anything away from Everquest, its still going strong considering its now in its 26th year, I have not been as committed as much as the past, but my annus horribilis is a whole separate story.

Anyway, a reasonably smooth launch with so far few problems (I did win the impromptu “whens the first patch going to be” guess held in our discord.

The two Tier One raids went live as expected, and also as expected AOU beat them both the first night back raiding.

The first one of the pair of raids I cannot say i’m all that keen of, or as Yinla said to me “shit raid”, it seems to be overly complicated with a ton of aura emotes that get pretty much ignored, but I do like the couple of adds that spawn during the event to chase players.

The second raid I didnt see live, as I benched to allow a player chance of raiding, but it was another we had beta tested several times (this one seemed slightly more interesting and for once I wasn’t expected to lead the Hokey Cokey to an emote dance move), ill get to see it next week, so assuming I remember here is a screenshot I took afterwards ..

***** inserted pics here *****

This is the boss of the other raid, as he starts with the simon says colour discs, looks great.But unfortunately, my view of the event for the majority was just his foot,Perhaps a better raid than the previous one, but that is due to there being 3 focus points, although most the raid, you get the foot.

So, special shoutout to the MVP of this whole event – Wonderdog, just doing his thing, at the foot, a mild distraction during the 20 mins of toe sniffing.

***** inserted pics here *****

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Getting back on the subject of Beta Testing and while as I said, I took a bunch of screenshots during beta, a majority were not great, and I was otherwise not that committed to doing a news report everyweek, heres a selection of some pics in no particular order I took showing we attempted (and beat) a whole bunch of them.

BTW, welcome to the Manglers to their first beta with AOU, you know who you are

Thats all for now …

<-  Bonus Anniversary content also  ->

But before we address the Anniversary trashheap, we get to pour over the final 3 events of the current expansion – Laurions Song.

The first event we beat of the three was the one we covered the most in beta testing with Ngreth.

I skipped leg day when it came to reading up on the lore of this event, but its something along the lines of “we went for a walk and met an ogre army, lead by Captain Kar”

A lot goes on, but it seemed an easier one to learn.

 

The next event is the one with the big spider and some nutty elf.

I am sure the lore on this is interesting also, let me know.

I’m part of the team that deals with a weird mechanic in this, which seems very unneeded, but unusual.

I love the spider part, and the other bits before that.

But the final phase of the event is a colossal mass of crap, not very visual and just happens.

 

The final event of the expansion we tackled is, in my opinion anyway the hardest, and by quite a bit.

The spell effect does give a satisfying loony toons bullseye which I captured quite by chance, which is probably the most positive thing I can say about this raid, not my favourite.

But that’s it, Laurions Song completed, overall, quite a fun expansion, nothing spectacular, but far more enjoyable than some other more recent ones.

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But wait, there’s more !

March 15th 2024 saw the 25th Anniversary of Everquest.

In among the celebration is a bonus raid.

And its awful.

We could have had a Dinosaur raid, but instead we got this load of old nothing.