Throne and Liberty launched with a milestone system where content, events, and their rewards were time gated. The idea behind this was to drip feed content to the community and keep the game fresh for a longer period of time. The last milestone was called The Best Guild and it rewarded the top 20 guilds on the server a title: Pantheon of the Strongest. A little over two months after the release of Throne and Liberty my guild, Black Rock, secured this title. This is something I had been looking forward to for weeks and it took some last minute decisions to make it happen.
I should start with why I even wanted the title. There are two reasons that come to mind. The first is I’m an MMO player. I don’t know why but we like to collect things and show them off. It could be a mount, a transmog, a title, there is just something about it that we like. The second is I decided I wanted it early on without realizing how long it would take.
After settling into the game at launch and understanding the milestone system I decided to look ahead at all the rewards which is where I found this title. The game didn’t tell you when the milestone would be completed and after looking for information online I couldn’t find any. I found out when the majority of the milestones would be done not realizing the final few milestones would take weeks to finish on their own. Early on there was a new milestone every day or two, not seven days between. At a certain point it didn’t really matter how long it was going to take, I was sticking around until I got this title.
Since day one of playing Throne and Liberty I’ve been with the same guild. The guild is Black Rock and we play on the Morokai server. We maintained a top 10 guild rank for probably the first month and topped out at rank 5 (someone even said rank 3). After the first month we maintained top 15 and this mostly comes down to how guild points work. We did our guild bosses on Sundays while most other guilds did them earlier in the week. This means most guilds had a 20-30k point lead on us until we killed our bosses. After killing bosses we’d hit or pass rank 10 but as soon as bosses reset mid-week we’d lose a few ranks and the cycle continued.
Black Rock never set out to be the top pvp guild on the server. We have always been a casual guild that likes to play all the content. Each guild can have one guild leader, two guild advisors (e.g. officer), and 5 guild guardians. The leader and advisors have the ability to start guild raids, use guild buffs, decide daily guild contracts (e.g. quests), and other privilege’s that help them run the guild. At one point I found myself promoted to a guild advisor position to help run the guild alongside NierArma and AgentKido after the original guild leader GrossBow stepped down. At the time I was just there to casually assist with things like recruiting and setting the contracts.
I’ll have another post about the history of Black Rock but after the first castle siege on November 16th things quickly spiraled out of control for the guild. Simply put, the siege mechanics were so poorly designed that a lot of people lost interest in the game. On top of that the guild leader left as a new guild, Apex, had formed. I found myself the new guild leader of Black Rock. Unfortunately I was thrown into this bad situation and I was sick for a week and didn’t have the energy to play much. At this point we started bleeding members. Although we were recruiting new people we were losing more. Over a two week period we found ourselves falling in guild rank and at one point we were ranked 25th.
There I was. The guild leader of Black Rock. Over half of the core members had left, at this point two guild leaders had left, the only other officer in the guild had stopped playing, the entire fate of the guild was in my hands. I had a decision to make. I either needed to save the guild or put it out of its misery so everyone could move on. I didn’t want the guild to slowly die. What’s worse is at this point the milestone for Pantheon of the Strongest was starting in a few days. Time for a hail mary.
On Monday night, three days before the milestone started, I came up with an idea. It was newly formed and I was making it up as I went. We still had one allied guild, Shadowsong, from the first castle siege. The guild seemed chill and they also weren’t aiming to be a top pvp guild. I could tell from seeing their guild rank that they must also have lost a lot of people since they were even farther down the ranks than we were, down in the 30’s. So I messaged the guild leader on Discord to figure out how many people they had active and to work out the details of a potential guild merger. Although there were some more details that would be worked out over the next day or two it only took about ten minutes of discussion to agree to merge the guilds.
On Thursday the cooldown between leaving a guild and joining a guild was over, it was time for Shadowsong to join Black Rock. I kicked a lot of inactive guild members to make room and we received almost 25 Shadowsong members into Black Rock. All this time we still had people applying to the guild and accepting them so we ended up with over 60 active guild members. Everything was looking good for the guild and all that was left was to grind out a top 20 guild spot.
I pushed hard and ended up with 30,000 contribution points. Normally a very casual player will reach around 5,000 points a week and someone who plays a good amount will hit 10,000. Between 10k-15k is someone very active and anything over 20k is someone going hard. I went hard, so did everyone else. All guild contracts were done quickly and we had a good time. We were in the 18-20ish range most of the week but I was fine with that knowing the guild bosses were on Sunday.
Sunday came and we had 30 guild members show up to the guild bosses. After we defeated our seven guild bosses we had secured rank 12. The milestone didn’t end until Tuesday morning at 1am but I felt we were safe. I think we had a 30k point difference between our guild and the 20th position. Monday came and I kept on grinding. Although we started the day close to the rank 13th guild we pushed ahead and by the time I logged out Monday night I felt confident we had secured the title.
Black Rock guild, on server Morokai, has achieved Pantheon of the Strongest. We did it. Two great guilds, led by two guild leaders who were able to set aside any egos, came together to not only be a top 20 guild but to rise to the rank of 12 was an amazing thing to be apart of. At this point in the game so many guilds have died and been left by the wayside, only a memory of what they used to be. Although most people won’t understand the feeling but it meant a lot to me to achieve this title with the guild I started the game with. A guild I ended up leading and was able to bring it back from collapse. Although I think my time as the leader of Black Rock and within Throne and Liberty is nearing it’s end I look back fondly on the journey. After all, I was apart of one of the strongest pantheons.