The now retired Assassin of Guk was once well known among the EQ2 Assassin community through the worldwide Assassin channel. Although few probably remember (and fewer still who continue to play EQ2 today) Ekard started the worldwide Assassin channel - hosted on Guk - to connect with other up-and-coming Assassins and discuss matters of interest to the Assassin community; primarily DPS results, new equipment discoveries, and raid techniques.
Character Profile
| Name: | Ekard Slackass | |
| Class: | Assassin (previously Predator and Scout) | |
| Titles: | Assassin of the Shard, Hero of Kugup, Knight of Freeport | |
| Bio: | ||
| Ekard is the creator of the first worldwide Assassin channel hosted on Guk server, once the most active place for EQ2 Assassin discussion in the world. As of January 2008 Ekard continues to hold the title for Highest Melee Hit for a strike made on October 3rd, 2005. | ||
World-Wide Assassin Channel
Ekard was well known for my prolific record keeping through chat logs and for happily re-linking newly discovered equipment for the worldwide community - at that time linking could only be performed from the server which hosted a channel but all channel members could view the link regardless of their server. In my final days playing Ekard the advent of cross-server linking let other Assassins take up that responsibility and Ekard concentrated on Beta testing for the then-upcoming Kingdom of Sky expansion.
Progression
I took a meandering route through the game starting out with a college buddy at the launch of EQ2 (much later he went on to work as an EQ2 developer at SOE). We settled on Guk after being unable to hook up with the Goonsquad on another server during the first week of release. It turns out some friends of his from EQ took up residence on Guk and they formed the basis of our first XP groups.
My first guild in EQ2 was Wolfsbane, the membership of which went on to form the core guild members of the uber-guilds throughout Guk server in the early years of EQ2. Most of these players burnt out but I eventually reuinted with some of them in Aei Desis.
Ekard joined a "family guild" named Soulbonded and geared up to raiding strength while learning how to raid through strategy instead of raw force. This experience proved very useful when I joined Aei Desis well after its heyday and during a time of rebuilding AD. Aei Desis eventually would come to compete with some of the larger guilds on Guk and elsewhere but remained overshadowed by Ne Plus Ultra. Ascendance, and the other EQ2 uber-guilds. Ultimately Aei Desis was doomed to fall apart, mainly due to lack of commitment by various players (including myself in the end days), as people got busy with their real lives. In AD there was always more than enough drama from the "old guard" guildmembers who yearned for their golden days of dominance, most of whom became mean and petty before leaving the guild on bad terms.
Highest Melee Hit
During my time EQ2 Assassins had always competed for the Highest Melee Hit record on eq2players.com and Ekard eventually made a name for himself with a hit for 3107 damage using Condemning Blade (Master I) during the time when very few characters had access to that Master and before Assassinate (Master I) was available.
At some point a troublesome mitigation bug was not being publicly acknowledged by the developers and I decided to start a competition on the worldwide Assassin channel to see who could get the highest hit by exploiting this bug - all in the hope that this would garner sufficient developer attention to get the bug fixed. This resulted in Ekard taking the Melee Highest Hit record, which he holds to this day, with a hit for 89,320 damage. As an interesting note while the hit dealth 89K damage (as shown in logs) the graphics engine used 16-bit values for displaying damage numbers and the value wrapped once showing only 23,784 points of damage. EQ2players.com was updated shortly thereafter to show the full damage dealt and a few patches later the bug was indeed fixed. For whatever reason EQ2players.com was not cleared of these erroneous scores although many among the Assassin community, myself included, asked for that to be done - as a result an informal highest hit record was maintained through chat logs on the worldwide Assassin channel.
Forums
During the Kingdom of Sky Beta I was very active on the Beta forums under my forum name "deaks" and posted an in-depth analysis of the Assassin options under the new "Achievements System" (EQ2 version of EQ alternate advancement of AA) - requesting some fixes and usability enhancements which eventually made it in game. This thread carried over to the open forums once the Beta NDA lifted and provided the first glimpse at the Assassin achievement choices for many people playing Assassins. It was my last act in EQ2.
Previous to the KoS Beta Ekard was a strong voice for change on the forums pushing for Assassin DPS dominance based on the "Tier 1 DPS" label give to the Assassin class by the developers. Ekard covered Assassin happenings on the forums from the Combat Update through the Kingdom of Sky release.
No comments:
Post a Comment