The May, 2023 Draft has come to a close, and here is Kingdom's results.  While it was a nice restful weekend for most of us, we are most definitely looking forward to the return of competitive raiding.

Congratulations to all of the draft member guilds who accomplished first time kills this time around, it was fun to watch everyone rally and work towards those organizational goals.   I'm sure there are more - but huge congratulations to Nova on King Tormax (and on Triples as well?), El Drift on Eashen & Doubles, Castle on Lord Vyemm and Dozekar the Cursed, Fires of Heaven on Zlandicar and Lord Yelinak. 

Good Guys seemed to enjoy a fun draft full of selections geared more towards their members epics; and Safe Space with their hot dice captured themselves yet another solo kill of Lord Vulak A'err.  

We hope everyone had a great week!   See y'all on the race lines.  

FOR THE KINGDOM!

Good Luck to all of the Drafting Guilds!  Lockout is at 11:59 pm Eastern on Friday, May 5.

The communications team did some data mining and came up with our Q1 Statistics for everyone's enjoyment.  Also we have our 30 day RA 50% club (the month of April) highlighted at the end.  Solid work, solid loot, solid fun.  442 items looted!  A person who turned in 100% RA would have earned 4550 DKP!

For the Kingdom!

Big Props to "Roobii Rods" for winning his first ever Statue race today, running on the legendary Statue Racer Mmow.   

The Kingdom Racing Club is growing by the day!   For the Kingdom!

One of the things I've always appreciated about Kingdom is the enthusiasm we consistently show towards helping our players complete their epic quests.  The following is an incomplete list of epics that were finished in the last month or so.  Whether it's a player's first, or tenth epic on Green - it's always an amazing feeling and a capstone achievement for that character.

Congrats to the following Kingdom members who recently completed their epic quests! 

Aditi   Attreus   Bedarndead   Bottomfeeder   Dabou   Doliok
Drevua      Eands   Fexler   Lucava   Nillaas   Northe
Notoriourbg      Pankayk   Pyrric   Rasso   Viernaa

Here's a list of our top bid loot from the Bristlebane event.   We're still not 100% sure where the commemorative cloth cap from our first competitive warder kill in Sleepers Tomb went, but when we find that I'm looking forward to the Battle Royale between the members who want that as a memento of the day.

Obviously, our top item was that fancy Essence of Nature (Huuuuge congrats to Kudra/Uberhalf for winning that random!).  This isn't the comprehensive list of what we killed, or of what we looted - it's just the top ten high bids (well, top eleven, I had to insert one at the last minute...)

It's fun to see the variety of targets that had top tier loot.  Kingdom had a blast running around as a guild and looking for hidden treasure, and can't wait for the next event (we sure hope there will be one!) 

Kingdom had a fantastic time yesterday thanks to the GM Sponsored event!

The event began with weeks of teaser broadcasts such as "I don't believe my eyes. I just saw King Tormax talking to Bristlebane?! What could those two possibly have in common? I have a feeling something crazy is going to happen", and "Has anyone seen Bristlebane lately? He seems to be up to something. I saw him with a Key of Veeshan of all things." Then random mobs started spawning as Bristlebane (man, that dude has greasy hair...) We killed some HOT Mini Bristlebanes. Snakes started kicking us at random times.

Finally, it became clear (and then later it was announced) that this was all leading up to an April Fools Day event. We got a good nights sleep and waited around patiently/impatiently Saturday morning for the festivities to commence.

Some of our members most notable moments included:

• Kingdom's first competitive Warder kill in Sleepers Tomb
• The crazy 10 minute LTK fight where she kept warping around the room and gating at low health, despite the disappointing moment when we almost had her dead and a GM complete healed her.
  • [Sat Apr 01 17:49:00 2023] Lendiniara the Keeper engages Xakz!
  • [Sat Apr 01 17:59:17 2023] You have been slain by Lendiniara the Keeper!
• Look at those sparkly green scales on Wuoshi!
• Uber winning an EON!
• Guys ... it doesn't work. It says April Fools. (after our first of many Guise drops)
• Biggest wipe in server history?
• Random loot tables and watching the UN community be happy for what other guilds found on corpses
• Server Shutdown in 15 minutes. Please find a safe place to logout, suckers.
• "rabble rabble rabble" moment in coms after seeing Zlandi loot
• 45,740 dkp spent on guises that don't work
• Encyclopedia Necrotheurgia, of course. x2
• Having to adjust tactics and positioning on the fly due to mischievious changes to mechanics or unintentional outcomes of the Bristlebane model having different hitbox sizes.
• "...it's in your hand..."

All in all, Kingdom got some fantastic items including EoN, AoW bow, Vulak Dagger, Vulak sword, Ruby Tear, Necro Book (2x), Cowl of Mortality, Gnarled Staff, Sap Encrusted Branch, Halo of Enlightenment, lots of guises*, and tons of other loot.

Thanks to the server staff for hosting this event. We appreciate the change of pace in gameplay, and the time and effort this took you to set up and host.

One of the great parts about being in Kingdom as a guild, is that we have done the content so much that we can very often relax and have fun during draft week. It's a nice balance between running with a large force of overwhelming numbers, yet also not constantly being in a situation where we are struggling for resources.

This tale of three drafts is a nice demonstration of our approach to the more relaxed and scheduled week.

During our first draft week, we demonstrated Kingdom quality /randoming and got terrible picks for the Draft. Historically, we ended up with Sky as our final pick - and turned lemons into lemonade as we managed to coordinate 2x a day Sky runs to maximize our Queen Bee kills, DA rings, Sky necks, and chances at Cleric necks. This push shows in our stats with a ton of DKP awarded, but not nearly as much spent. We (for a short time) held a record for the most Sisters killed in one run after this quake, but GG went after that record and destroyed it claiming a 32 sister kill (wow!). We'll see who can overtake them on the next draft, if it's even possible...

In the 2nd Draft we gambled our dice on a player who historically was one of our best guild /randomers. That didn't turn out so great, either, although we did get some nice selections in Statue/AOW and Tunare. We spent a ton more DKP overall than on the first draft, due to getting really nice drops off of our best picks. This draft week was noteworthy as being related to the big changes in how Tunare's call works.

Our most recent draft featured our worst randoming yet. We didn't think it possible, but it was. 7 out of 1000 for the first round? YIKES! We had a ton of fun with our draft targets however, with a balance of practicing some techniques we have recently been flubbing up a bit as well as trying some new adventures. I believe the highlight was probably pulling Jorlleag to the zoneline (sorry to our friend in FOH who ended up spilling their bourbon chicken in surprise...). Unless the highlight was clearing King Tormax's throneroom while not injuring the King himself (KT was a draft target of the Drift) while trying to figure out a cryptic GM server announcement ...

At any rate, enjoy the stats below - and let's hope we find someone who is more capable of big rolls to represent us for the May Draft!

Today, our favorite elf sim turns 24 years old! A bit of interesting history about the original launch of Everquest from PC Gamer Magazine: 

Maybe the real Bristlebane was the friends we made along the way?

The only riddle we figured out was "what Bristlebane and King Tormax possibly could have in common".  Although Morgroth (who was standing in the throne room for a while) did say something about what could Bristlebane be "up to".  

We do acknowledge that Bristlebane is the king of trolling, and thus this event being nothing could just be masterful roleplay..... At any rate, here's how it went down for those who didn't attend.

Highlights:  Godsend pulling KDT, who gated and wiped the server the first time; Castle pulling the faction mobs while Sentinels were respawning and nearly wiping the server the 2nd time; and then KT chasing everyone to the WL zoneline when we finally released him from the back room.

Just for grins, we analyzed the dkp purchases from 2022-current (6007 items) to see how bidding pans out from a class perspective. Older data was eliminated from the analysis for this project as DKP earnings as well as spend has changed drastically over the years.

If you want to get relatively cheap gear in Kingdom, unsurprisingly, you should play one of the hybrid classes - Rangers spent on average 261 dkp per item, Shadow Knights 319 per item, and Paladin's 343 DKP per item. In contrast, our melee spent the most on their gear - monks with an average of 623 dkp per item, rogues at 533, and warriors at 511.

Monks, however, shouldn't fear because they have the 3rd most items won overall (so lots of opportunity to upgrade) after our warriors and rogues. The warriors won items at a much higher rate than the next closest class, with 744 items won compared to the next closest class as rogues at 647 items won.

With as many items as we have to bid out, our melee classes really benefit from a vast selection of weapons and gear. If we average out dkp spent per character from class to class, again, the rangers come out way ahead of the curve with 1828 dkp spent per character over the 15 months. Wizards rise up in this category with an average of 2,908 dkp per character and druids as well at 2,959. Warriors, with their gear dependency, really rack it up with 6,916 dkp spent per character.

At any rate, enjoy the data in the following graphic - and keep dominating the raid scene, Kingdom!