all these "nostalgia" posts remind me of what a goddamned terrible game EQ was
I can't imagine a multi-day corpse run (and god forbid your corpse despawns, wave the gear you spent months acquiring goodbye) is fun for anyone but the people laughing at the sap.
One of my best stories from MMOs occurred during a corpse run. I was farming efreeti lord djarn in Solusek B in Everquest. For those that don't know, this was a lava based zone and the efreeti was deep in the back of it, past kobolds, bats, beatles, spiders and finally demons. The efreeti room itself, once broken, was relatively safe however getting back to it was rough. I was doing this by 2boxing a druid and an enchanter. Unfortunately, I made a mistake and killed my chars. It was late at night, I was frustrated that I died so close to bed and so deep inside the dungeon, so instead of quitting for the night and getting my corpses in the morning, I decided to corpse run with a 3rd char, a cleric.
The problem at this point wasn't that my characters were naked (although a massive setback on its own). It was that I had been with more characters to get to and break the room. So getting back to it via normal methods was no longer viable for me. So I brought the cleric and my 2 naked characters to the zone line. I buffed my cleric, created a hotkey to drag each corpse and setup a spell set including DA and DB (Divine Aura and Divine Barrier, both short duration invulnerability spells).
I double invised my cleric and then began a solo mad dash for the corpses. When invis broke to see invis monsters, the first barrier went up and my real timer began. As I ran through the zone I was training everything, every single monster was at my heels, a single round of attacks would have killed me. I reached the corpses, however I just burned my second invulnerability and there was no way I was going to make it back through the same route with invulnerability still up. So I had to take an alternate, secret route by running through the lava rivers beneath the efreeti's own area. Even though I was invulnerable, swimming in the lava would have been too slow, invulnerability would have run out and I would have been killed, but because I was levitating I was able to run above the lava. The whole time I'm running back to the zone, I'm also mashing my hotkeys to make sure I continue to drag the corpses, if I stop pressing any key for too long, that corpse goes out of range and gets left behind.
I made it back to the entrance of the zone, with 90% of it in tow and managed to resurrect my 2 characters. The real thrill of it was that I really had no idea if my plan would work, I had no guide to work off of or set of tools, this wasn't some scripted sequence someone had wrote about on a forum or a well-worn strategy. This was just me, making shit completely up on the spot with a ton of risk riding on failure.
When I got back I started laughing. The kind of laugh you laugh when a baseball just misses your head. An overwhelming feeling that that plan shouldn't have worked. It was a great rush and even though I wouldn't want to repeat it, I ended up looking back on it fondly.
EQ was a hard game, but the reality is that by the end of it, I and the people I played with all had a whole handful of stories just like this one. Each one truly unique to the player and the circumstances. It made the game live on past the boring grind and the item camping.
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