A Note on the EQ Raiding Series

I orginally wrote this series of raid blogs as a member of the Everquest Guild Southern Armada 2004/5. I had been playing EQ on the Karana server for about 3 years when the Guild that I had been a member of for the better part of that three year period, imploded, and I was left without a connection to most of the people I had spent all day, every day with.

At this point I decided I really wanted to see the high end raid game. In essence I was either going to quit or commit. I had spent so long in EQ I felt like I wanted to get into the “end game” and see what the deal was, see for myself what everyone was taliking about. So I looked about on the web to find an aussie/kiwi raid guild that wasnt going to require massive online time.

In my search I stumbled on the Southern Armada web site, had a good look around and after several days of thinking about it I applied to join. I transferred to Prexus about a week later and the following Blogs are my experience as a member of a high end raid guild in Everquest.

I started the blog for me, as a way for me to record my experiences and to have something to look back on. I let a few people from the guild know about it and within a couple of weeks I was getting “why havent you posted?” tells the day after a blog was due. Over the peiord of the 2 years that I wrote this, I recieved quite a lot of emails, ingame /tells and several people actually took the time to post on the SA website saying how much they were enjoying the series and my writing.

The original site where this was hosted recieved traffic from all over the world and quite a lot of it, usually straight into the next blog episode. One backpacker actually sat down in a cyber cafe in Spain and read the whole thing start to finish. I dont think I have ever been as proud of anything in my life as when I found out that that backpacker spent AUS80$ in order to read the entire continuing adventures of Ulaa the Necromancer and Southern Armada.

I think a lot of people were interested in the original blog because SA is a casual guild. It isnt one of those arrogant uber guilds who treat gaming like a job. We raided because we loved it and I was describing encounters that due to the mechanics of the game, many people, even those who had played for years, would just never be able to see or experience. It was a window into a world that was closed to many people.

I also very much enjoyed bringing to life the people and personalities of Southern Armada. SA is full of some amazing and incredibly dedicated people. My experience in EQ went from being Ok to being an absolute blast, I couldnt wait to logon and play the game every day. I would Raid till 2am and be at my desk at work at 7am twice a week for 2 years.

SA triumphed in EQ and moved on to the World of Warcraft. For various reasons I stopped playing that game, some personal, some preferential and some hardware related. I am however forever a member of SA in my head. I am currently involved with a game called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and I am a site admin with the aussie fan site Ausguard.com I am very much hoping that as soon as VG is released SA will move to the new game and I can become an active member again.

I have now migrated these blog entries twice. I am hoping that by putting this up on one of the largest blog sites in the world this will be the last time I ever have to do this. I know they aren’t all that relevant anymore as people have well and truly passed through these areas, but what the hell I still like to look at them and maybe one day they will inspire someone else to log onto a game and go on a raid.

Why I hate Clerics’

I have to post this. This is one of the reasons why I love Southern Armada.
This is a little post from the Oggie Tank AKA Mewkus. I did not write this but I believe it is worth keeping alive as it illustrates beautifully the Love/Hate relationship between a Tank and their Healer.

Why I hate Clerics
A little story about my first encounter with a guilded greydax. I log on late because work sux. keepr sends me an abusive tell to hurry my ass east in BoT because oreen is up. i get there and nerasa is doing his usual finesse pulls and trikkie is copping his usual beatdown from a CoD mob. Group cleric is greydax. i join and say hello. i warn greydax to keep me alive or i will hate him forever. “purple club” was the reply. great. fuck i hate clerics. anyways i grab my buffs and we rez trikkie because i let the CoD mob kill him (i love “forgetting” to taunt sometimes) and get ready for the pull. nerasa gets him solo with 4 pops standing around him (damn that boy is good). oggie charges the bastard and BANG, first hit he gets a stun proc. fuck i love my weapon setup. aggro is locked in, too easy. even trikkie landing tash in the first half second of engagement doesn’t drag him away (why do chanters and shammys always cast their highest aggro spell on the fucking pull???)

watching the damage roll by. damn i kick ass. more stun procs, rage proc, this bitch is mine for aggro now. health gets low, berzerker frenzy! no need to panic, i still have a few k hp up my sleeve. down to 1 bub, ok no CH message yet. 10 bucks the fucking cleric (fuck i hate clerics) is messing with my head and doing a silent CH. they do that sometimes just to piss me off. dirith is the worst. caniella does it too. even phaith does it to me.
did i mention i hate clerics?
ok sliver of life. the bitch forgot to heal. keepr is probably too busy cybering half the server to think about using her oggiehealage5 AA skillz to pull off a last minute save. OMG! OGGIE DOWN! he’s in the purple. the screen changes to view to a top down view of a crumpled oggie. the words YOU HAVE DIED flash on my screen. the formation of a string of extremely foul curses surges to the forefront of my mind and BAM! oggie is on his feet again wailing away as if nothing had happened.

stunned silence.

oggie sits back and stares in disbelief. the ranger begins to crack up. the group begins to chant “purple club, purple club” and greydax is chilling up the back with a smug look on his face as if the smartass little punk planned it all along.

first ever group with greydax. first pull. first heal cast. not just a purple club, but utterly plucked from the gaping jaws of death. i could see the grim reaper getting annoyed as i escape his dreadful embrace.

fuck i hate clerics

Fuck I hate Clerics…

I have to post this. This is why I love Southern Armada. This is a little post from the Oggie Tank AKA Mewkus. I did not write this but I believe it is worth keeping alive as it illustrates beautifully the Love/Hate relationship between a Tank and their Healer.
NOTE: Having now played a tank in 2 games I now fully appreciate this and understand it – SH 26.08.08

a little story about my first encounter with a guilded greydax.

i log on late because work sux. keepr sends me an abusive tell to hurry my ass east in BoT because oreen is up. i get there and nerasa is doing his usual finesse pulls and trikkie is copping his usual beatdown from a CoD mob.
group cleric is greydax. i join and say hello. i warn greydax to keep me alive or i will hate him forever. “purple club” was the reply. great. fuck i hate clerics.

anyways i grab my buffs and we rez trikkie because i let the CoD mob kill him (i love “forgetting” to taunt sometimes) and get ready for the pull. nerasa gets him solo with 4 pops standing around him (damn that boy is good). oggie charges the bastard and BANG, first hit he gets a stun proc. fuck i love my weapon setup. aggro is locked in, too easy. even trikkie landing tash in the first half second of engagement doesn’t drag him away (why do chanters and shammys always cast their highest aggro spell on the fucking pull???)

watching the damage roll by. damn i kick ass. more stun procs, rage proc, this bitch is mine for aggro now. health gets low, berzerker frenzy! no need to panic, i still have a few k hp up my sleeve. down to 1 bub, ok no CH message yet. 10 bucks the fucking cleric (fuck i hate clerics) is messing with my head and doing a silent CH. they do that sometimes just to piss me off. dirith is the worst. caniella does it too. even phaith does it to me.

did i mention i hate clerics?

ok sliver of life. the bitch forgot to heal. keepr is probably too busy cybering half the server to think about using her oggiehealage5 AA skillz to pull off a last minute save. OMG! OGGIE DOWN! he’s in the purple. the screen changes to view to a top down view of a crumpled oggie. the words YOU HAVE DIED flash on my screen. the formation of a string of extremely foul curses surges to the forefront of my mind and BAM! oggie is on his feet again wailing away as if nothing had happened.

stunned silence. oggie sits back and stares in disbelief. the ranger begins to crack up. the group begins to chant “purple club, purple club” and greydax is chilling up the back with a smug look on his face as if the smartass little punk planned it all along.

first ever group with greydax. first pull. first heal cast. not just a purple club, but utterly plucked from the gaping jaws of death. i could see the grim reaper getting annoyed as i escape his dreadful embrace.

fuck i hate clerics

A new beginning

This was intended as the blog of Ulaa the Necromancer, Prexus Server, Everquest. In the last few days there have been massive changes in that arena however which I will report here. After 6 years Southern Armada is moving from Everquest to the World of Warcraft.

Personally I have been getting tired of EQ. Its been getting harder and harder to log in either for raids, for XP or just for stuffing about. It has come out in the last few days it has come out that I haven’t been the only one feeling like that. On Monday the guilds leader, Kezlar the Prophet (the Bear) announced he was leaving for WoW and asked if any of the remaining membership wanted to join him.

I didn’t need to think about it for even a second. When I first started in EQ I joined a guild with little thought of the time zones involved and the problems they would bring. So I started on a server called Karana which turned out to be largely dominated by GMT Guilds and players (-12 hours from my time) I spent three and a half years on Karana, for most of it I was in a guild called The Silent Watch.

TSW was a great guild and was on its way up into the end game when it imploded for the third and last time. At that point I decided I needed to examine why I played this game and did I want to continue?. In the end I decided I did want to continue but I didn’t want to stay where I was doing what I was doing. I wanted to go raiding and see the high end game. To do that I needed to find an Aussie/Kiwi raiding guild in my time zone that was still a bit ‘casual’. I couldnt afford the time to join a 7 day a week 5 hour a night raiding guild.

After a little bit of searching I found The Southern Armada, transferred to Prexus and began my career as a raider into the high end game. I loved SA. I had people in my own time zone to talk with and group with, I had people who understood my cultural references (I got very sick of explaining to Americans that ‘pissed’ doesn’t mean angry) and I got to raid twice a week.

SA traveled up into the end game via the content of Velious and Luclin. On the way up I got to kill all of the old ‘name’ targets of the Game. I was there for the death of Aten Ha Ra, The Emperor Ssraezha, the Avatar of War, Rallos Zek and Coirnav. I was part of the team that triumphed over The Rathe Council and Xegony. We dropped Quarm and progressed through Gates Of Discord to Qvic.

It was enough. After 6 years, the last 2 years of which have involved getting to sleep at 2am (when raids finish) twice a week, it was enough. The Gates of Discord expansion is essentially what broke EQ for me. I feel like the Developers and management of EQ at that point broke faith with the players and put out a product purely for the money with no regard for the players.

Now the argument can be made that they are a company and they are there to make money and that is perfectly legitimate. However, we the players are the driving force behind the game. Without us there is no game and no money. SOE essentially ignored us and produced a steaming pile of unfinished, cheaply produced, poorly put together crap and asked us to pay 69.95 for it.

So after 6 years of unfinished, buggy content, lack of communication with the players, indeed outright abuse of the player base, broken promises and appalling customer service I decided to hang up my Scythe with the rest of the Guild and go to WoW.

So the internet Blog of the Adventures of Ulaa the Necromancer will stay where it is as a testimonial. This newly created Blog will continue as the adventures of Ushnak the Ork and The Southern Armada in the World of Warcraft. This blog will be updated weekly, or as close to weekly as I can manage in between play, work and maintaining real world relationships. I know I had a decent readership for the EQ blog. Hopefully I can manage to entertain a few people in this blog as well.

Well first entry. The World of Warcraft is released 23/11/04. I cant wait.

The reason I went to this format is that you the reader can post comments. Its always nice to get some feedback, in fact its hugely encouraging.

Everquest Southern Armada Week Thirty Two

30/10/03 Week ThirtyTwo

Every now and again you have a raid that just reaffirms your faith in raiding and EQ in general, Monday night was such a raid. First up is the becoming traditional beat down of Solusek Ro. We formed up in SolRo’s tower and cleared the trash up to the tower itself and began the long and tedious process of zoning in. After about 40 minutes and at least 2 raid reforms we finally managed to get everyone into the Chamber.

He knows us now, he knows what’s coming

Trying to pretend he isn’t scared as he is tanked by an SA Cleric! The Warriors had all gotten bored and gone AFK

He turned to run, it didn’t help he died. *sad*

Once again we were a “light” raid and dropped him with about 55. I couldn’t believe it, he dropped The Orb of the Sun and no-one wanted it!. Kez had to force a Wizzie to take it!. Damn they Wizzies is just too uber!. Hell I’m still chasing a Wizzies HP total as he is the highest HP dress wearer in the guild! *Grumble* Gnomes are against nature *Grumble*

So once Mr Ro had snuffed it there was a veritable array of killing goodness up and the officers sent out the scouts to see what we wanted to do. After about 5 minutes, enough time to dump a bunch of trade skill stuff I had collected in LDoN groups to Xardan, the raid was called to the Elemental Plane of Fire (damn I love saying that, SA raids in POF woot! *happy dance* )

We zoned in and ran to the west wall spot, beyond the first castle. We even managed to make it with absolutely minimal deaths. Usually there are at least 10-15 people who die in that run when I have done it with Unity, but we made it there pretty clean. We formed up, Kez called the strat, which was ultimately “Kill him before he kills us!”, and with no further ado the Pull Team had Magmaton Incoming! Now this guy is unslowable and triples for 2800 a hit, he is a damage monster, makes Rydda ‘Dar look like a kitten being playful.

Now at first we had Nymeria as page tank with healers assigned to keep her up.

Nymeria biting Magmaton’s Kneecaps!
Grrr Argh!

Eventually she gave up and went for the groin instead!

I’ve faced this guy with Unity, I know what he is capable of, and I really didn’t know if a raid of 60ish people could take him down. From now on, someone just slap me once a raid and remind me that we can kill ANYTHING, because 60 pissed (that’s drunk for our American friends) ANZAC’s took out Magmaton!.

We got damn high praise from Vanman of the mighty Nameless Order, who had tagged along on the kill, when he said that was as good a kill as he had ever seen, and that meant a lot. But the true praise came from Kezlar and Pooby:

Southern Armada Clerics are just the ShitzNatz! Of course we had to feed every single tank we had into the maw of Magmaton’s rampage engine, but Pooby lived!
/mourn the SA Tankage, but we beat the fucker!. Second hardest Mob in the Plane of Fire and we took him out with 2/3rds of a raid.

Of course Kez neglected to tell us that he was the second hardest Mob till much later. A fast move on to the “Picnic tables”, again with very few deaths and we formed up for General Reparm. First off we had trash to clear.

First time we tried it we attempted to do it the conventional way “everyone else” does it. That didn’t work, and it became clear fast it wasn’t going to work, so we camped a cleric and as much of the raid as we could.

Once we had reformed we attempted the now newly patented “SA Method for the Killing of General Reparm”. Basically it works like this, and feel free to use this strat anywhere you want. Remember the General triples for 3K a hit AND proc’s a 3K dd as well.

Keep Pooby alive till 60% of the Generals health then let him die. Now here comes the tricky part, one by one you have to feed the /def tanks into the mincing machine of the Generals aggro range, then the Knights and finally when he is down at 5% or so, start to chain Rangers with WS at him!.

Brilliant strat and we implemented it perfectly! At the end of the fight we had NO tanks up and one Ranger still standing, not a single Cleric or Dress wearer got touched!. See Kez we controlled our aggro perfectly!

What a fight that was!. The Necro’s are chaining what they can onto him, with little reports as to what is sticking and what isn’t coming into the Necro channel, meanwhile SA is slowly feeding the General our tanks. I was throwing out DOT’s as fast as I was able to get them to stick, every one was laying the smack down as hard and as fast as they possibly could and his HP were slooooooowly dropping. We got to 20% and he GAINED a percentage. I’m thinking “Oh shit that’s not good”.

It must have been a fluke tho or a bug in the updating of my UI as he slowly started to drop again. 5, 4, 3, 2.. the last Ranger puts up WS, 1, 0…… DEAD!

Woot what a fight! As we were Rezzing and loot calls were being made Kez chose this moment to tell the raid that Magmaton and General Reparm are considered the two hardest Mobs in the zone!. Not even Fenin Ro the Tyrant of Fire is supposed to be as hard as the General!.

The final run of the night for me was a fast run to the Ssraeshza Temple and an Emperor kill. The clearance up to his chamber is now trivial for us. The raid leaders don’t really have to even tell us what they want done, we just do it and clear up to the Emps room. We got to the 3rd floor, dropped one named in order to flag someone and zoned into the Emperors Chamber.

We got sorted and Kez called “Bring me Snakes!” and Snakes were brought, contained and a CC rhythm established, The Blood of Ssraeshza died fast and POP there is the Emperor!. One question I do have to ask, how the hell can the same heal team that managed to keep Pooby alive against Magmaton allow him to die against the Emperor?. LOL I was just about pissing myself when that happened!, half the Clerics must have fallen asleep all at the same moment!.

The Emp died and the most Phat of Phat Lewtz dropped. Grats to Wolfestar on the Uber dress!. You maybe a dress wearer but at least you are wearing the Emperors Clothes now!. Eventually if enough of those drop they may one day start to filter down towards the Necro’s.

I had hung around for the Emp kill, but at this point it was 230AM and time for beddie byes, so I called my goodbyes and toodled off to my little snug happy smacked-some-really-good-shit-down-while-raiding bed.

Logged in late Thursday and managed to catch a decent pic of Wolfestar and his new dress while waiting for the Raid to be called.

Once again there wasn’t a lot up as the US guilds had been hard at work and we, unfortunately, had to be content with their leavings. So it was off to the Plane of Air for some Avatar slaughtering. Now with the plane of Air you have the ability to spawn mini named’s in order to get the Avatars to pop, which means that there is almost always the ability to kill something.

There is still an ass load of trash clearing tho, I love the Air Phoenixes they just look so cool!.

An Air Phoenix Noble

Stormrider Priest of Destruction

Then we finally got to some mini named’s These things are actually quite tough. The constable caught us by surprise when he came in and we lost Pooby relatively fast. The raid recovered well tho and Nym stepped in to tank the Constable smoothly.

Constable Alranderisan

He’s ugly, he’s smelly, he’s Baltaldor the Cursed. We are going to have the Sparkling Shortsword rotting soon.

Calebgrothiel

Proof that Monks cant count!.

and finally the Avatar of Wind

The Avatar wiped us on our first attempt at him last week, this time we had no issues at all and he went down smooth like a good sippin’ whisky!.

SA went on but once again at 2.00am I needed to sleep. I figure by 2.00am my “day” is approaching a full 19-20 hours so its a good time to go and fall over. So it wasn’t the world’s most thrilling raid but it was 1/4 of a Xegony key!

Everquest Southern Armada Week Thirty One

24/10/03 Week ThirtyOne

“Gimmee the beat boys and free my soul I want to get lost in the rock and roll and drift away..”

This Update brought to you by Uncle Kracker, Staind and WAY to much Caffeine.

A couple of weeks ago I said that I thought the progression through the Tier 3 planes was there in order to teach you stuff that a guild was going to need in the Elementals, stuff like Off Tanking, Effective Mezzing, AEing etc etc. Well one of the lessons I didn’t realize we were being taught was patience. Tuesday nights raid kicked off in the Elemental Plane of Earth or the “Elemental plane of Endless Fucking Trash Clearing” as I am starting to call it.

First up we headed on down the left wall to a little visit with the biggest Crocodile in Norrath, Lockjaw’s bigger brother Tantisala Jaggedtooth.

He’s big, he’s ugly, he’s green and he’s stupid, kind of the Incredible Hulk of Crocs. He also has a nasty ass disease based DOT. For once I actually remembered to bring the resist gear and I managed to come through the fight relatively unscathed and delivered about 45K worth of DOTs (according to that fine program EQwatcher.)

We TL’d back to zone in and began to pull the Rock Ring. Here is where the endless pulling of trash comes in. First you have to clear all the trash in the path to the Ring.

A Rock Creation

Then once the trash is clear you actually start to pull the elements of the ring itself and the mini bosses.

Thousands of these guys

Finally after a million hours of clearing the junk we get to pull and kill Peregrin Rockskull.

Peregrin Rockskull

After all the waiting he was actually a relatively easy kill. Then we began the pulls for the Ring of Mud. The Monks must have been going out of their tiny little minds run pull FD, repeat endlessly. At least some of the MoBs in this ring are a little more interesting that just straight up Melee kills. The 5 triggers you have to kill all spawn little baby Muddites at various points during their demise.

Most guilds Mezz the adds and kill them after the main MOB is dead, not us. Kez decides we are just going to AOE them, the suicide chanters get into place, the Wizzies load up, the Mudlets pop and, well what do you know it works! So the remaining triggers and their Muddites all get dealt with in the same way. Once the last of the triggers dies you get an auto-aggro of 4 Red Con to 65, Filth Gorgers. Can’t be mezzed, these bastards just steam rolled over us. We managed to finally take out all three and had to keep one Tank Mezzed until we could rez and rebuff.

A BAD Filth Gorger

Finally the main named is incoming, this guy is nasty, nasty, nasty. Hits like a small locomotive and hits fast.

A Monsterous Mudwalker

He wasn’t tougher than Pooby and the tank/heal team tho and we smacked him down. For some reason Caniella was on the Mobs hit list last night, named would be called, Cani calls the start of the rotation, Named engages Pooby for a few seconds, reaches across, casually smacks down Cani and goes back to beating on Pooby. Happened a couple of times, odd.

At this point we were starting to lose people left and right as it was getting late in Aussie. The Officers had someone check the Plane of Fire for Targets and decided to stay in POE. So next up was the Vine Ring.

The travel across to the Vine Ring Platform was NOT clean, when the officers say “stay high on the wall” people thought they were obviously only kidding as we somehow managed to aggro MOBs on the plain up onto the wall.

The screenie above isn’t good but its about all I got to see of the final Ring. I hung out till about 2.00AM NZ time and finally had to go to bed. I think SA were well on track to finishing the ring. They were about 3/4’s of the way through from what I could see.

I’m kind of glad I went to bed when I did as I walked into a shit fight as soon as I got to work, so 4 hours sleep isn’t a lot but its better than nothing.

I have to say one thing. Back on Karana during one of The Silent Watch’s periodic split ups I got sick of posting goodbyes as half the guild left. So I made a post on that board which essentially said I will never post another goodbye to anyone, and I haven’t since then.

Many people leave the game and for many different reasons, some burn out, some get sick of people they have to deal with, some just stop enjoying it. Some people eventually come back and take up where they left off. I have met people who have taken 1-2 years off and come right back to the game as if they never left. I know people who drop in and out of the game for a couple of months at a time.

Just recently SA has suffered a couple of losses of players for one reason or another and I feel compelled to break my rule. I am not going to post it on a message board, but Axixs, Jeks, Lyrique you will be missed by this Necro and many others and I hope one day to meet you in game again. /respect

Well Friday rolls around, I settle in with my bottle of Whiskey, coke, ice, everyone is out, EQ is happily fired up and glaring out of my ancient (but 21 inch) IBM Monitor. First up, Sol Ro. This fat bastard is becoming a regular fixture as an opener for Southern Armada’s raids. So we all race into the Tower of Solusek Ro and form up. In our typically fast fashion we are good to go in minutes and start the trash clearing.

A Protector of Ro

Once again it becomes a nightmare trying to get people into the Tower. The raid leaders again display insane patience with everyone and we finally get everyone into the chamber and we are good to go. Now I have to say here, that I really didn’t think we were going to be able to do this. You see we had a very “light” raid, only 54 in at the kill. Normally when guilds are first setting out to do Sol Ro they take him on with at least a full raid. Here we are trying to do it 20 people short of a full raid, and that’s a respectable amount of fire-power missing.

Solusek Ro thinking he is about to gain a level from SA

Sol Ro feeling very embarrassed

I should know by know, never doubt the Southern Armada when we want a Mob dead. We are the very definition of “the little guild that could”. I don’t know of any other Elemental level guilds on any other server in the game who only raid 2 days a week.

So after ganking Solusek Ro, the Burning Prince we headed off to the Elemental Plane of Water to have a go at some new and interesting ( and possibly more difficult! ) Mobs.

So a quick AOE TL out of the chamber and on to POW. We formed up and headed out towards our first target, Grioihin the Wise. I have killed this guy before with Unity and he is a nasty bastard. He has a pretty unresistable AOE stun that makes it tough for Clerics to heal and for tanks to hold aggro. We set up on the opposite side of the Chamber from him and pulled.

Oops that didn’t go to well. Pooby downed, clerics stunned, Mr Wise poofy boy rampaging and one rounding tanks, off tanks, non tanks, me. It was ugly. So we all ran back from our respective bind points and we rezzed back into the fight spot. The crappy thing about the whole zone is its underwater. So when you get rezzed in and all your buffs are down you need to find your EB item FAST or risk drowning.

So we pulled him in for a second time. I would hate to be a tank or monk for these POW fights, As a caster I can just sit at the back and unload, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, it just changes the spells I cast, but for a tank its a whole new world of positioning, mob push, movement etc.

No mob for a long time has stumped us twice however and the second time around he died, stomped by the Oggie Tank!

So Grioihin the Not So Wise Anymore behind us we moved on through the zone towards Krziik the Mighty. I think they got the names mixed up as the Wise was definitely tougher than the Mighty who fell before us at the first pull. It may not have been a pretty kill, but hey we were still doing this with 55 people. These are Mobs that smack down full raids of 65’s, we were doing it with 55, and not everyone was 65!.

That was about it for me for Friday’s raid. A surfeit of Whiskey and a very long week and I realized during the last fight with the Mighty that I was in fact asleep. I was still casting, but fully asleep. I came too just as I was about to fall out of my chair and the Mob died. So a quick gate out and that was the end of Friday nights raid for me.

Everquest Southern Armada Week Thirty

19/10/03 Week Thirty

I haven’t been slack this week, I know the update is really late but there are good reasons.

1. I didn’t get to do nada on last Mondays raid, which sucked because it was our first run into the Plane of Earth. I was having to deal with backup issues on the servers at work so I kept having to log out to check the running jobs. In addition to that I was having an LD night. After my 5th LD in an hour I was damn close to logging out and just giving up, but it eventually seemed to stabilize, just in time for the raid end.

Unfortunately due to the reasons outlined above I didn’t manage to get any screen shots of Mondays raid. I was promised some by someone who was managing to stay connected so here they are:

Tantisala Jaggedtooth

So you will just have to accept that Monday was our first Elemental raid, it was the Plane of Earth and we completed 2 of the Rings, Soil and Mud I think they were.

2. There was a pickup raid against the Emperor on Wednesday night but I had already logged out so I didn’t know anything about it. Damn GF Faction. It was also SA’s first failed raid against the Emperor. The people who were online tried it with only 32 people, 2 Clerics and 2 Druids as Main Healers. All they needed was another Necro and they would have won damn it!. I believe they got the Emp to 26% or so before it all derailed.

I managed however to join a couple of LDoN groups this week, I have to say apart from putting the one and only spell that’s of any use to me in a dungeon that no-one goes to, making it conjuration, unaffected by my Foci and AA’s, insanely mana intensive and incredibly expensive, I am in fact really enjoying LDoN so far. It is paradise for a well played Necro. In the undead dungeons I get to play Gimp Chanter/Shammy. I am slowing, Mezzing, Root-parking, Doting, Nuking, Petting, Group healing, Direct healing and Mind Wracking.

Live-side Dungeons are just as much fun and a good Necro is just as useful without the slowage and mezzing.

Guk

Northern Desert of Ro

Early in the week I also managed to briefly join up with a Plane of Storms flagging for some of SA’s members.

Paruek the Strong

These Plane of Storms named’s were tough once!

Finally we get to the first real raid of the week I was able to be at and this week was a goodie! I logged in about an hour before hand, checked some of my quest mobs (spawn you bastards spawn!) and then went AFK to wait for the raid. I got back to a message from Kez, “SolRo is up!, get your asses to the tower!”. So off we popped to SolRo Tower. This is not a tough kill, but managing to get everyone, flagged and un flagged into the tower is a real pain in the ass and a real test of a raid leaders patience.

Finally we managed to get everyone in and there was Solusek Ro, the Burning Prince waiting for us.

We didn’t keep him waiting long, as soon as we had everyone in place we charged!.

He put up a valiant fight!, he even managed to kill a Necro! (Me) but no matter how much he struggled and wiggled there was no way he was escaping the blades of the Southern Armada.

And that was that. In two weeks we have opened the path to all of the Elemental planes, Earth, Water, Air and now finally Fire are now fully open to us!.

Just to prove it we headed up to the Plane of Air for some exploration. We have had individual members run through here with other guilds, but as a guild we have never fought in POA before so it was a real learning experience all around. It felt a little lumpy to be honest. I don’t know whether people just figured that after the grind to get through all the flags and finally reach the elementals, that suddenly it was all going to get easy. But some of the really simple rules of engagement seemed to be being neglected.

A Stormrider Priest of Destruction

We essentially decided to try an Avatar for the first time and did a lot of clearing through trash and a couple of named’s to get to the Avatars room.

Prismatic Recluse

Baltaldor the Cursed

Pherlondien Clawpike

Avatar of Wind

We got the Avatar down to about 26% before the 4-6 adds managed to completely wipe us out. Having now seen a lot of the mini’s from Earth, Air, Fire and Water, I still maintain that there is nothing I have seen that can stop Southern Armada short of the Elemental Gods themselves.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Thirty Four

15/10/03 Week ThirtyFour
Well last Friday’s raid just didn’t happen. We should have known really. Typical SOE patch process seems to run something like this;

1. Throw some Code together from all the bits and pieces you have tried out at various times and in various combination’s that you may or may not have tested on the Test server. If you did test it, completely ignore anything sent in by the people on the test server as to any problems that they may have had with the patches.

2. Put the patch code live and completely fuck up everything, emergency patch to fix the really significant fuckups within 12 hours. Deny any problems at all.

3. Second emergency patch to fix the fuckups we either didn’t fix with the first emergency patch or that we actually caused with the first emergency patch. Continue to deny any problems at all.

4. Refuse to admit that anything changed, refuse to admit that we broke anything at all and to all the people now reporting errors with EQ that they have never had before, cut and paste a “Its your fault not ours” standard reply on the tech support boards.

The gist of this is that I gave up trying to log on at 1:30AM my time and went to bed. SA managed to get a few people on after the patch and had a go at a couple of the POE rings. Monday nights attempt was a lot better. I am studying at the moment so I logged on quite late to see what the targets were, rather than my usual logon and try and get a group or two before the Raid.

First call was to the Elemental Plane of Fire for Blazzax the Omni Fiend. We have never done this MOB so I was really looking forward to this kill. We all headed out to POF and zoned in, I hung about for the first 20 minutes or so to DMF any people zoning in, and then Usurp volunteered as the COH mule and I headed into the castle.
We set up and began clearing the trash.

A Magma Rocklord

As we were prepping for Blazzax, a stroke of luck!, POP hello Criare Sunmane. As we were already set up for the OmniTwit we pulled our first Phoenix!

He died pretty fast, but not before my first death of the night and after eating a few tanks. For some reason our DPS last night just sucked. We had about 60 on the raid but we just didn’t seem to be pumping the DPS the way I know we can. So after rebuff, we got reset and inc was Blazzax the Omnifiend!!. Unfortunately we slightly underestimated the range of his AOE.That was death number two for me. Its all good, as they say death is a learning experience, so after a bit of adjustment of tactics we pulled him again. This time he was going to die! I do love this model!, this is SUCH a cool looking mob to fight.

Now many people ask me, where do we get our ‘Leet strats?, do we have spies in other guilds?, is there a secret message board that Uber Guild leaders post on?. I cant answer for any other guild, but I can tell you where SA gets their strats. Now this is a secret and you cant tell ANYONE got it!?.

The secret is in fact a person!. There is one person in the guild who is able to extract secrets from Mobs, he can charm them, talk to them, get them to tell him about their friends and how to kill their nearest neighbors!. After every kill he moves to the corpse and communes with the dead spirit of the Mob.

He is Attann the Ass Whisperer!

And that’s how we get our Strats! After the PhatLewts was handed out we headed out to visit “The Wise” in the Elemental Plane of Water. I hate POW. Its even laggier than normal. However, the one and only good thing about the zone is that nothing in here resists anything I can throw at it. So at the end of the Wise fight, shortly before I got summoned and mashed into paste I had FP, BOT, DP, SK, EBolt all running on Grioihin the Wise.

With around 1k a tick running on Mr Wise, BOT wore off, I stood up from FD to recast and *Summon*

Eeeek! he is WAY to close!

Splat.
Now this was a damn messy, but a really fun fight. Any fight I can REALLY lay the hurt on a Mob is fun to me. The AOE stun he has makes life a little difficult tho and we ended up feeding him tanks again, but hey that’s what tanks are for 🙂 The raid reformed and headed to POAir for some beatings of name’s over there. It was still relatively early, only 1.15AM but of the team of 5 that I work with, we are down 2 long term and another short term. So there is a need for me to be relatively awake and paying attention in the mornings.

So with much regret I logged and left SA to the next set of targets. Hopefully this Friday will be huge!

Yes I know I am damn late. I am about 10 days behind on raids at this point. People are saying ” are you not maintaining the web site anymore?”. Well actually I am, but at the moment the team of 5 that I work with on a regular basis is down to 3 and one of those we are missing is the boss. Add to that a rather nasty outbreak of the W32/Nachi worm in a regional office this week and its been a hell of a ten days or so.

A wee piece of advice to any corporate types who may ever read this. There is no such thing as 100% protection against Virii. You WILL get Viruses, its only a matter of time. The question you must always ask is “What happens then?”. How will you contain the attack, how will you clean it up?, how will you even know it is happening?. Do you have a dedicated (or even semi dedicated) Anti Virus/Security officer? or do you rely on the typical “she’ll be right, it will never happen to us” attitude?.

Anyway enough of the real world, on to Everquest!(tm)

We logged in Friday and the MOTD was listing a bunch of targets from PoFire to Kael Drakkal. Kez made the call that we were going to have another go at Rallos Zek, so off the the Fortress of Zek we all traipsed. As I zoned in I brought up the Raid tool and checked numbers. Ooooo boy we were really light. Now for those who have never engaged him most guilds usually take on Rallos with 80+.

Those who are inside the raid do all the DPS, positioning of Rallos Zek the Warlord, healing etc etc. Those who are outside the raid do all the controlling of the Adds, kiting etc etc. Guilds who have been farming in the Plane of Time for a while have been known to do him with less than 50. Once again those guilds are 7 day a week raiders, VERY well equipped. We were about to engage Rallos Zek the Warlord with 56 in the Raid!

Now I have seen Southern Armada doing some amazing stuff with very small numbers, so instead of doubting Kez, I simply put my mind to it and said “we can do this”. First up was the run through the Halls of Zek, clearing through trash, killing triggers and massacring our way past the Zek Brothers.

Tallon

Vallon getting rooted

Rallos Zek

The Tallon fight was a little lumpy, I can only assume people were still getting warmed up, maybe the beer was warm in Aussie and they were having trouble getting the first one down?, I really don’t know. But there was some damn fast rezzing going on before Vallon was inc. We got up to Vallon and obviously the beer had started to flow as that fight went extremely smoothly. Rallos Zek went down clean as a whistle (did we lose anybody?) and it was Rallos Zek the Warlord time!.

Unfortunately as the Pet getters were getting their pets they got a little over enthusiastic and started to wipe themselves out with an over pull. We were already damn close to time so it was Rallos INC ready or not!. I popped my pet from suspend and sent him in and just started laying on the Dots. I had even unloaded my survival spells (except FD) and was just laying the full load on him.

Slowly, slowly his HP dropped. Now I am facing the wall at this point so I had no idea what was going on behind me, but I gather it was a hell of a mess with massive numbers of adds everywhere and the kiters exerting Heroic effort to keep them away from the raid. We almost had the fat bastard!. I was finally dropped by Rallos himself, with him at 6%. SO CLOSE!.

So we reformed, Rezzed up and headed in again.

Second Tallon kill, Flawless
Second Vallon Kill, Flawless

Second Rallos kill, Flawless

And minutes later we were back at Rallos Zek the Warlord again. This time the Pet guys spent a little more time and didn’t try and wipe themselves. Once everyone was ready we pulled.This would have been a flawless kill as well. We did absolutely everything right. Positioning, Aggro control, healing everything was perfect. We managed to get him to 6% again before the adds overwhelmed us. We just didn’t have the DPS with the number of people we had exactly 56 on engage again. A little longer farming the planes, a few more high DPS weapons, a few more AA here and there and this guy will definitely be in the “farmable by 50” range.

I think Kez was a little disappointed that we didn’t manage to drop him, but I was happy as hell. I doubt anyone else at our level could have gotten him to 6% with the numbers we had. We will do him again many times I am sure, we need at least 3-4 more BoW’s for a start!.

Be proud Kez, be damn Proud!

Everquest Southern Armada Week Twenty Nine

11/10/03 Week TwentyNine

Due to the release of LDoN Kez has only announced a single Raid this week with a warning to watch out for the pop of Rallos Zek the Warlord. So Monday night was quite a short one. First up we headed to the Plane of Disease for a quick Grummus kill. I decided (with permission) to take Garakk on this run rather than Ulaa. Mainly because its a fairly simple kill for us now so I didn’t think Ulaa’s firepower would be missed and secondly cause Garakk still needs this flag, hell Garakk needs all the flags. I figure I will ninja them for him slowly.

So we formed up, and headed into the POD castle, pulled and killed Gryme for his key.

Wiped Aramin the Spider Guardian out of our way and then nailed Grummus.

Now there is a reason that this kill has so little information attached to it and that is I had no fucking idea what was going on half the time. The view of Pooby between the legs of Grummus is about all that I managed to see of him. That is the view that most tanks will see during the course of any given raid. As I am a Troll and I am double shrunk 90% of the time I cant see nada. If I am beating on a MOB and a caster pulls aggro, to me the mob just vanishes away and identifying the MOB again amidst a sea of legs is damn hard.

I really don’t know how the regular full time tanks can do it, I certainly gained a new appreciation of how difficult their job is. I really like being a tank in groups, its fun to go toe to toe with a nasty, but I really don’t know if I would want to do it as a full time occupation as a raider. So as soon as the Grummus raid was over I logged back into Ulaa with a sigh of relief.

After Grummus we headed to The Halls of Honor to smack over Mithaniel Marr. Now Mr Marr is not my favorite kill, in fact I really hate it. It has less trash to clear than a lot of other kills…

A big Pussy Cat

There are a few named’s on the way to MM and they are relatively easy to drop…

Halon of Marr

There is the usual hypocrisy of the ostensibly “Good” people, they tell you one way to live your life and behind the scenes they are practicing all kinds of filth and degradation.

Leave that Cat alone you perverted Frog!

The reason I really hate this kill is this; we have one of the best pull teams in the game. Atann, Ainyarx, Geno and the boys can pull anything solo. They have the art of extracting a nasty mob from its friends down perfectly. However with MM they always have problems. Splitting him out from his guards is damn near impossible and often in the end comes down to sheer luck and the SOE “Random” number generator.

That is just wrong, it denies the skill and time the boys put into a pull and reduces it to luck. This time they had some of that luck and that, along with their skill and style bought us MM alone.

The Lord Mithaniel Marr INCOMING!

So with little or no fuss we quietly disposed of MM and headed out of the Temple of Wind. It was getting pretty damn late at this point but I was determined to hang on as long as I could. SA headed out to the Tower of Solusek Ro for a couple of quick Named drops. Now I know we have only been doing Sol Ro Tower for 2 weeks, but it really is getting faster and faster. We cleared though the Trash Named’s:

Generic Picture of Trash Named_001

Generic Picture of Loot Named (Jiva_001)

I like these kills. They are really fast to clear to and kill , and they drop guuuuuuud loot, I could happily go on farming them for some time to come. At this point however we started to head to The Protector of Dresolik. I think I got about 3/4’s of the way there and realized I was actually asleep, so I figured I should make it officially asleep and headed to bed.

During the course of the week I joined up with Genosin and Axixs deep in the newly revamped Greigs End to kill the Servitor or Luclin for A Glowing Orb of Luclinite.

We tried it the first time with no slower and I couldn’t keep Genosin healed using Zevfeers Theft of Vitae and Shadowbond, even with Laurwen throwing CH’s on Genosin as well. Laurwen and I were both running out of mana too fast. So we roped in Axixs for slowing and KEI (for Laurwen and Genosin) and we went again. The second time round we dropped him handily. We got the Orb and I managed to run Garakk into Griegs to grab the Sombrous Claidmore that also dropped!. Woot now that was a fun way to spend an evening!

I also managed to get Garakk on a fast Hedge run for my Terris Thule flag during the week, now being a tank on this run was a lot of fun!. 18 or so people is a good number to be a tank for.

Damn he is still ugly

Finally we get LDoN launched. I was half way through my Chardok Rings quest when the servers went down. I logged out in the Frontier Mountains having found and done the Sarnak Spy section. I AM going to finish this damn quest this time. Anyway LDoN launched and everyone and his dog was in an LDoN dungeon, I didn’t manage to get into a Dungeon group, but I didn’t exactly try too hard either. I will give it a go tonight tho.

Ah fuckit I was going to make this long and involved and really draw it out. But I cant do it I just want to show you now.

How to Have one of the best nights possible in Everquest.
By Ulaa Grimsoul

1. Zone into The Plane of Tactics.
2. Pull triggers.
3. Kill Tallon Zek perfectly

4. Kill Vallon Zek perfectly

5. Kill The Fake Rallos Zek perfectly

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you The Southern Armada’s path into the Elemental Planes.
6. Rallos Zek the Warlord. OWNED

Not only did we do this as a pickup raid, not only did we do this without a full Southern Armada raid team, not only did we do this on our second ever run at him, not only did we do this as a 2 day a week raiding guild, but we did it damn near perfectly.

I was sitting in front of my monitor, all the DOT’s I could load running hard, with Rallos Zek at 2%, pounding my fists on my desk and bouncing up and down in my seat yelling “come on you MOTHERFUCKER!!”.

I’m sitting here at work 12 hours later and just thinking about this again has got a smile on my face and a thrill running through me. Southern Armada SNUFFED Rallos Zek the Warlord at 11.48PM NZ Time Wednesday September 10th. Fuck I love you guys.

Big huge respect to Servalan, Genosin, Attann and Wolfe for running one of the fastest put together and best led Raids I have ever been on. The pulling, the raid control, the off tanking, the discipline all excellent. I owe you guys so much beer it isn’t funny. See me in Sydney for major payback !

Everquest Southern Armada Week Thirty Three

09/10/03 Week ThirtyThree

Look its really simple. If you are NOT flagged for the the Sol Ro zone then you can get into the zone with the 85/15 raid rule. This rule will ALSO allow you to get into the Chamber of Sol Ro. However, once you get into the Chamber and disband from the raid if you are NOT flagged for the ZONE you must log out to a twink, or log in and out continuously before the 3 minute warning is up. Once everyone is invited into the chamber then you can be invited to the raid safely.

If you are flagged for the Sol Ro Zone, you only need to get into the Chamber under the 85/15 rule. Once you are IN the Chamber you can disband and just sit and wait for the next set of instructions as you will NOT get the 3 minute warning.

Its not bloody rocket science.

As you can probably tell I was a little frustrated at last Monday nights raid. Pay attention, listen to the raid leaders and if you get aggro stand and fucking DIE. After about an hour or two’s pissing about we finally managed to get everyone into his chamber.

He was waiting for us and this time the bastard had a sneaky plan!. His plan involved running throughout the raid and randomly smacking people down instead of focusing on Pooby. Unfortunately his plan was better than our plan and it was “Camp the Clerics”. We reformed fast, dropped the repops and pulled him again.

This time he died and not a bad attempt for a raid of 43 I thought. We handed out the PhatLewtz and headed out to the Elemental Plane of Water. I must admit I breathed a sigh of relief as I thought we were going to go and do Plane Of Earth rings.

Now although POE is boring due to the hours and bloody hours of clearing trash, POW is just an insane lag fest. I am going to have to spend a couple of thousand dollars to update my PC just to be able to raid in there.

First up we went for Hydrotha. He is a right pain in the ass because he has this nasty tendency to blind the MT and then bloody move. It makes it rather hard for the MT to hold aggro. We had gained a few people after the Sol Ro kill but we had lost a few as well, so we went into the fight with about 45-50 people in the raid.

Once again we needed to feed Main Tanks to the MOB and at the point we were about to feed him Pallies he died. According to EQWatcher I managed to do about 55K on him *grin*. Kez called for an emergency Rez of the MT’s “eyes”. I sat, memmed Rez, waited for Refresh, cast, and about 2 seconds later got a tell from a fellow Necro saying “I have rezzed him”, err bugger, so did I. I wonder if he got a 100% xp rez as he was rezzed twice?.

At this point due to all the pissing about during the SolRo fight, and the fact that Aussie is now 3 hours behind me so the Raid doesn’t start till 10PM my time, it was getting bloody late. I hung in for one last mini named A Hraquis Arch Magus (I think that was the name). We dropped him with ease. SA went on to do another mini I believe.

Raid night this week was supposed to be tonight (Thursday), fortunately the folks over at SOE have decided to have a patch tonight, so the raid has been moved to Friday night. Now this can be good and bad, sometimes when we logon after a patch the big American guilds have left us something, or sometimes we are just well placed for repops. At other times there is just absolutely nothing up. Its pure luck, but no matter what is up, we will find it and we will kill it, even if we have to do it with only half the people you are “supposed” to have for that fight.

We will find out Friday night I guess!. Me and my whisky bottle will be there!.

Nothing stops the Armada.