Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Six

Monday 11.02.08
Monday night prior to the raid we flagged a few more people. My regular group of players all needed a flagging (A flagging!, a flagging!) so we headed to Jharru Flats and killed Lord Fumbeso in one clean encounter. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that lord Fumbeso is an easy, one group encounter. While its not particularly difficult for experienced raiders, you are definitely going to need a minimum of 2 full groups to take him down. 3 would definitely be better.

Lord Fumbeso

One of my old gripes in EQ was Green things aggro-ing me. I couldn’t get XP from them, they didn’t have a hope in hell of killing me, so why in the hell did green mobs like goblins insist on the Suicide option and throw themselves at me. Its annoying, all they do is get in the way and slow you down. Unfortunately VG has followed the same path and little grey things insists on my providing them with the assisted suicide option. Hell in EQ we were regularly killing Gods, Goblins didn’t have a snowballs chance. Here’s a little grey bug annoying the hell out of me just outside APW.

Kill me Please!

Initially I thought we were going to jump past the entrance and straight to one of the Hub points. Instead we headed in via the entrance wing.

Dead X77

One of the more interesting graphical bugs I have seen so far. The facial effect is from a de-buff that a Warehouse Firesoul casts on anyone in range. For some reason Zarthaz has retained the effect, but only on his face. I actually think it looks awesome, I would love a face mask with that effect!. A word here about Zarthaz, he has been pulling raid mobs for SA since the early days of EQ and was a core member of the legendary EQ pull team. He is currently the only member of the SA Vanguard pull team. If he doesn’t show up one day, we are going to have some serious problems. At the moment we have 2-3 people in each role who can fill in in the event of someone being away, tanks priests etc. The only exception to that rule is Zarth and the pull team. Raid pulling is an art and is different in each game. Zarthaz has been learning APW for the last 6 weeks, he has no substitute person to train up or to learn with. Without another Monk or other puller in place there will come a day when we are going to have serious issues…

We got our asses handed to us big time. We simply could not get past Enraged X83. We were actually tracking really well for a shot at Vicus. We made it to X83’s spot at about 10:00pm and set up for him.
First Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe
Second Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe
Third Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe

I think you can see where this is going. For some reason we just could not get him down. He kept smacking us down and smacking us hard. This sort of thing happens to SA occasionally and I don’t really know why. We know the encounter, we know what the mob is going to do, we know how to kill him but we just cannot get it together to drop him. He died in the end but he certainly took all the fun out of the kill by repeatedly wiping the floor with us and delaying us past a point where we had time to drop Vicus.

Enraged X83 beating us up (again)

Thursday 14.02.08
We sneaked in the back way and headed straight to the Hub. We were there for about a half hour to sort out armour quests and get those who were capable of it, set up in Class specific Quest arms. I was lucky enough to be one of three people to be in a position to finish mine. They are rather hard to see unfortunately as they sit between the large shoulders and huge gloves, but I get the feeling the full suit is going to look awesome!.

Once we were done with questing we headed in the back way to go and see Archon Travix. I cant remember this being a difficult fight. I’m fairly sure he died clean with no faults.

I don’t have a lot more for this raid as it went quite late on Thursday night and I had to be up early the next day. We went up to the Hunter Valley to go and see the Raggamuffin Concert at the Wyndam Estate Winery. We had an absolutely awesome weekend and will definitely be going back for next year!.

However it did put the kybosh on the regular note taking I normally do for these blogs. I would normally sit down the next day and make notes of what happened and when, how the raid went, sort out and edit the pics etc. As I was sitting in a pub in Raymonds Terrace getting pissed on Friday night, I missed out on doing all of that. So bugger it, its a short post 🙂

Next time come with me to Raggamuffin!

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Five

Monday 04.02.08
Short and Sweet.
Some of the models that Sigil have developed (actually these are probably built by SOE) are just awesome. This is one of the guard Mobs outside APW, giant mixtures of beetles and lizards. One thing I have noted is that screen shots simply don’t do these models justice. You have to be in game to appreciate how well put together the models really are. VG is definitely one of the prettiest MMO’s on the market.

R5, Vicus. Fell down and went splat.

Unfortunately we only got two runs at Archon Travix. He isn’t hard, he is a simple fight, we just seem to be rushing him a bit. We are definitely getting better at this, our fifth week into the zone, our Ninth raid, our 33rd-37th hours, Travix will die soon and we are traveling well for a push into the Hub. I think next Thursday we will definitely make it, as there won’t be a lot up for us we will try and push on for the Hub just so we don’t have to grind through the trash night after night.

Archon Travix Waiting

Southern Armada would also like to thank whoever made Lisani’s boobies. Due to a bug (one of the many) Lisani was shown stripped back to her base model, and what a base it is!. The entire guild took great delight in running over to have a look before the bug was fixed. Well done I say!.

Lisani, what an Elf!

Thursday 06.02.08
Formed up and straight in. It takes us about 1.5 hours to grind through all the trash to get to Travix. Its not that the place is swarming with trash, its not. But each trash fight has different nuances, each fight has different needs and we are learning new things about each fight as we repeat them. We are getting better and faster with each push but it would be nice not to have to do this grind every night, lets get to the Hub!. At the start of the fight we had a hitch hiker with us, a Knight from another Guild who for some reason decided to tag along on our little jaunt. At the beginning he was spouting out all sorts of useful things like “/say this mob has a knock back so only fight him with ranged”. Yes, thanks, very helpful. We will use what works for us. He stopped and seemed to disappear after the boss asked him oh so politely to shut up. So we fought on without the benefit of all that knowledgeable advice and made it to Travix in very good time.

R5 Kindly dropped the Greatsword he has been holding on to for the last 4 weeks and as there don’t seem to be any other 2H wielders in the Guild at the moment I won the roll!. Now if only Vicus would drop his Spear I would be in Dread Knight heaven!.

Travix waiting for a spanking

This time we took him down slow but steady. This becomes a very boring fight for the non main tank unfortunately. I switched to my 2H, I went into evade mode, I didn’t hit any specials, no damage or aggro attacks. I simply stood there, did white damage and watched for the Curse. Thats it, takes about 5 mins to kill him and I cant do squat apart from base damage *Yawn*. I also got yelled at, naughty naughty Dread Knight!. The Boss called for DPS off and as I was just doing base damage (I mean really, I couldn’t be generating less aggro if I was offering him a cup of tea and a lie down) I just let the damage run. The boss very correctly and forcefully reminded me that when he calls for DPS off it means everybody!. So with my ass red and feeling much chastened, we moved on past Travix and into unexplored territory.

Travix being spanked by a naked Pink Tank

We continued to fight on through, deeper into APW. There was some new and different trash and some new scenery until we reached the Warehouse. Now you have to remember we have NFI where we are going. We have no spoilers. no maps and we are learning by doing, so basically we are just wandering aimlessly while looking for the Hub. Its lucky that the dungeon is fairly linear or we could be lost for weeks!.

Just as we had engaged two mobs, the Wednesday lag hit us. Its amazing, whatever the process is thats occurring on the servers, it happens at 11PM AEST on the dot and lasts 2-3 minutes. This time, to make it extra special fun, it not only lagged us out on the pull, the zone then crashed and the whole raid was booted to desktop. We were dreading having to log back in to a fully populated zone, this time we were lucky and it seems the zone didn’t re-pop on us the way it did last week.

It was getting late at this point, around 11pm and I think, like me, people were beginning to get tired and their feet were dragging. As we made our way deeper into the warehouse we ran straight into Zaraax. Now this is one huge ass mob and he hits like a Mac Truck. Even though we ended up with him more or less accidentally, we still managed to get him under control and in position. He was at about 90% when we started to get adds. We don’t know if they were roamers, he summoned them or they just popped in the wrong spot, I guess we will learn next time. We elected to take the wipe and bypass Zaraax for a further push towards the Hub. Awesome Model, kudos on the design of this guy.

Skulls for hands!

Once we reformed we headed in again towards where we could see a faint blue glow, the hub maybe!. As we were pulling trash we also ran into Akym the Assassin. He hits hard but seemed like a fairly straight forward Tank and Spank.

Once he was out of the way we made it to the Warehouse hub and we were going to log it out there. For various reasons unrelated to APW raiding, one of our Clerics had managed to get bonded to the Hub portal, so he ported back to the Hub just so we could check how far away the Hub was from where we were. Surprise, surprise it turned out he was only about 150 yards from where we were standing. So taking his direction we pushed on. It was after midnight at this point and everyone was getting damn tired. But we cleared through some more trash and voila!, we made it to the Hub! Everyone attuned to the two portals and we are now in a good position to pick up the hub quests and to explore into the surrounding wings.

First things first however, Zaraax must die!.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Four

29.01.08

I was late again dammit. I was all sorted out to be at the raid by 7:30 and for some reason my ADSL link dropped for about 15 minutes, repeated reboots of the router and NIC didn’t help so it was after 8:00pm before I made it to the raid. We formed up quick and moved in even quicker. It was easily the best start so far. We were almost at the x83 before we lost anyone at all. The timers weren’t up on X83 or X77 so we didn’t get a shot at them. R5 died in the usual fashion and we headed straight for the General. R5 has an awesome sword. I have seen another Dreadknight carrying one and the Graphic is fantastic. He just doesnt seem to want to drop it for us.

We formed up and I was designated Main Tank for this fight. Ive revised my reasons for that, I think I’m main tank because the Warriors have better snap aggro and its them we have to rely on to maneuver the Adds as they pop. Who cares, MT’ing this guy is an absolute blast, in fact MT’ing anything is huge fun, I’m so glad I decided to switch back to tanking from being a caster. In this fight all I have to do is stay concentrated on pumping out as much aggro as I can generate and watching my HP for the occasional use of a Rune.

The first run against Vicus was really a tester, getting out feet wet to see how we would handle the fight. He went down to 56% and we wiped when I died and Vicus got loose in the healers. Once the healers go down its a dead raid. This fight got a bit exciting as someone aggroed him off me and I had to do some fast taunting and maneuvering to hold him and get him back in place.

The second run was a lot closer. We re-set and pulled quickly after the first wipe. This one just felt better from first aggro for some reason. It got lumpy in parts, especially when the Adds dropped two healers due to unfortunate positioning. However we got the bastard down to about 36%.

You know the saying third times the charm?. We set up and pulled. Mezzers had the adds as soon as they popped, the off tanks put the adds exactly where we wanted them and the DPS laid the serious smack on Vicus. We got through the first wave, Vicus is down to 50%, lost two healers, its all good, battle rez and keep going. Sort the adds and lay the big bang down on him again. At the end of the second wave he is at about 10%. So with a pet, me , dots and nukes from everyone else we stay on him as they deal with the third wave. The raid drops the first add and its decided that we would lay the smack on him and just keep the add mezzed.

At 3% I finally took a screenie, he seemed to have been hanging there forever, healing was really good and DPS was beginning to chop into him. I knew we had him. Its a weird feeling, I had been so concentrated on holding him in place and maintaining aggro for so long that when he finally dropped I had a massive surge of adrenalin. What A Buzz!.

Dead Vicus.

One of the two best 2h weapons in the game drops from Vicus. The Spear of Devotion is what all well dressed Dreads are wearing, unfortunately much like the R5 Greatsword we didnt see it on this run. The heal team did a superb job in this fight with at least 2 of them going down during the fight. they managed to keep the bulk of the raid (and me!) alive all the way through. Ive been a raid healer, it sucks. I bow down to anyone who can do it well and consistantly. All of us are learning our jobs and all of us recognise that. By the time I made it to Prexus in EQ I had already been playing a Necromancer for close to 5 years. I knew that class inside and out solo, what I really had to learn fast was grouping and raiding skills, but they were just changes in methods I had been using for a very long time. Most of us have only been playing Vanguard for a year at this point so we all have a long way to go before those reactions, those things that became close to “inherent” in our reactions within EQ start to happen in this new game.

Since we had about an hour to kill at this point we decided to push further in to the zone and see what we could see. We made it up to Archon Travix and stopped there to set up to engage. He has a tricky pull to clear the entrance to his lair. I think we were all getting tired at this point and we couldnt quite co-ordinate the effort effectively. We wiped twice and at that point it was time for me to turn into a pumpkin and head for beddy byes.

One of two Quotes of the week:
” That was so much fun I let a little bit of pee out”
Aegis after the death of Vicus

Thursday 30.01.08

We formed up quickly (I had parked myself outside so I didnt have to run for miles). The devs have stated that in GU4 they are planning on re-arranging the Riftways to make them more useful. I so hope they put one down near APW. The run all the way from the northern elf Village everytime for raids is a pain. I can understand wanting to make the world seem bigger, absolutely, I’m against insta ports everywhere. But having to run down there 2 days a week is making me want to stay there and not log on for general play. So Ulaa stays parked outside the APW Gates all the time. X83 , X77 and R5 died easy and fast. We lost one person on X83 apart from that they were all perfect kills.

Enraged X83, being enragey

So with Vicus still on lockout we headed up to Archon Travix again. This time clearing his guards was flawless and we very quickly had him standing alone.

So with no idea how this fight goes, I lie, we had one idea, we engaged and started to smack him down. We had him postioned, DPS was on and all was going well until the first add. Even then we handeled it and he was under control. We got him down to under 80% first run and we only lost it when I died. His damage is really spikey, I had been throwing in Runes to stay up and mitigate as much of his damage as possible. Unfortunately he spiked when I had no runes refreshed and down I went. After that he was in amongst the raid and it was all over. So we formed up again and headed back in.

This time I died almost instantly. I had over 11500 HP fully buffed, max mitigation and I snuffed it anyway. I have been called recently on criticisim of Healers. I’ve gone back and read over my old stuff and I haven’t criticised anybody. What I have done is tried to be honest about what I see happening within an engagement. The heal team is shaping up to be really good. We have gone through encounters where they have worked their butts off, throwing out fast heals to save dress wearers and keeping the MT’s up at the same time. In this case that didnt happen. Nym picked up the fight and held Travix in place. Kuurgen went down.

Standing outside a zone, waiting to see what happens in an engagement sucks. You cant see whats going on or how everything is going, you can hear whats happening in the voice channel but cant contribute. I imagine its like listening to sport on the raidio, its a very poor subsititute to actually being there. We had an add, it was offtanked, Nymeria went down. Garbar is now tanking named and add.

Quote of the Week Two:
“Get a Tank on that add”
Xardan, not seeming to realise 3 of his 4 tanks were standing at zone in…

It didnt matter, we had the skinny bastard, he was going down. He was at 20% when we had back spawn adds pop and take out our heals within seconds. That was that. It doesnt matter, we know we can take him and hopefully once he is down we are fairly close to the hub!.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 3

22.01.08

A new week and a new raid. Until we get to the APW Hub there isn’t going to be a whole lot of variance in what to say. Ooo look we killed Enraged X83 and Malfunctioning X77 again!. Ah well, they are still fun fights.

Monday we didn’t have a lot to do as the X83 and X77 don’t spawn till tomorrow so we cleared through and headed straight for General Vicus. It took us about 2 hours to get to him so we knew we were going to have time to have several runs at him. Nymeria the Pink Power Ranger had been tanking all the trash and mini named’s all the way into the zone till we reached Vicus. Its actually harder to off tank than to main tank in this game. You want to stay on the aggro list, but you don’t want to get into the habit of stealing aggro. This presents a conundrum as you can take aggro simply by pumping out damage and you cant really tell what the MT’s current aggro level is like. So all you can do is hit the occasional aggro inducer and your specials and wait for him to turn. If he turns to you, all you can do is go defensive and wait for the other tank to take it back, or if he turns to someone squishy, you hit your rescue and start to pump out aggro.

Warehouse Firesoul hits us with an AOE

We caught the Guardian R5 on the way into Vicus. He was extremely nice to us and dropped a whole lot of goodies, rather than the 2 or three he usually does.

Guardian R5 on the way in

The boss man put me front and center for the fight against Vicus, mainly I think cause I had done it before and he has a nasty knock forward. I describe it as a reverse Punt. Basically whatever direction you are facing is the direction you are going to go flying about 50 feet every 30 seconds to a minute. So you have to tank him facing a wall and be prepared to be running back a lot to try and keep him in position. I think that at a particular percentage he also switches the punt to another direction and you start to fly to his left, instead of straight forward, so there are some interesting tanking mechanics to cope with.

On top of that he has several adds. He spawns two 53 6 dots to help him out which you also have to have a strat for. So we setup for the first run. We’ve got the room cleared, we have a strat worked out and communicated, everyone knows what they are doing and we are good to go. Inbound.

Engage!

We got him positioned and started in on him, gentle to start with as we need his adds and we don’t want to pull aggro onto the casters. So the adds pop and we have them dealt with. This is where we start to see some new effects on him. The casters are getting massive damage against him, huge crits, the mezzers have the adds under control so we lay into him. I’m holding aggro fairly well, I’m throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him to keep him focused on me. He is a tough bugger as on top of everything else he is life tapping me for a 2k heal every round. Using this strat we got him down to (I was concentrating so I think) about 60% before we got overwhelmed by his adds.

Bugger, close but no cigar but its all good as we have now learned a couple more things about him. We refine the strat and set up for another go. Unfortunately we weren’t 100% sure on the timing of his adds so we stopped for a bit to wait for his room pop. It turned out to be quite a long wait as his room guards seem to be on longer timers than most of the rest of APW so far. We had just cleared the room when everybody lagged out. Really, really lagged out. The the whole raid gets dropped and we are all sitting at the logon screen. Zarthaz logs in to check it out and we have a full zone reset, with a full pop. Damn it, now we have to clear the whole damn thing again in the face of active opposition from roamers. I thought we had the log on timed really well. We avoided most of the roamers and got everyone back in and in place to start the event again.

So we hit the roamers and get them out of the way. We start to clear his guards. The last bodyguard is inc and we are set to have another go.

errrr, suddenly I’m dead with the guard at about 3% down, the guard is rampaging, Nym picks him up, then hes dead. It all went horribly wrong and we have a Guard inside the raid beating on casters. I think the healers were asleep or possibly afk, all the tanks died so damn fast. So that was it for Monday. It was after 11pm and there was no way we were going to get in and get set again before midnight.

Wednesday
We formed up at 8:00pm and headed in. We blitzed through the early parts of the dungeon clearing our way though the trash almost like it wasn’t there. The Guardian R5 stood in our way for about a minute before he fell down (he?/she?/it?). Once again he failed to drop the Greatsword.

Guardian R5 from an elevated perspective

Apart from the usual suspects cough*sorcerers*cough we hadn’t lost anyone by the time we reached Malfunctioning X77. The X77 dropped easily and smoothly, we didn’t even lose a tank during the transitions.

Waiting to die

We smashed him down without even pausing for breath and headed on for the Enraged X83.

Enraged X83 inc for a bitch slappin

We dropped the X83, looted up and moved on to General Vicus. Now I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail but the strat is definitely coming together. This time we had Vicus at under 40% and he id definitely killable by us. Its not the fight against Vicus we are losing, its the fight against game mechanics and bugs. If everything in the game worked the way we expected it to with no faults and no bugs, he would have died, unfortunately a few things didn’t quite fall into place and we failed on him.

This is where the night turned to complete shit. We didn’t have any one in place with a rezz stone. The only person to survive the encounter had no stone at all. This isn’t the first time and this is really basic shit everyone should have learned in grouping. Every FD class should always have a rezz stone from every single priest class. So now we are a 2 hour grind away from another shot at General Vicus and naked. Basically at this point we got rattled. this is where we should have dug deep, said ‘ we can do this’ and headed on back in. Instead people just seemed to lose confidence or simply stopped paying attention I don’t know.

Basically the next two hours sucked. in the first run in we cleared every encounter like a knife through butter. In the second run in we were rattled, people were dieing, over aggroing and generally running around like idiots. We didn’t even get back to X83′ death spot. We wiped for the second time in very quick succession about 3/4s of the way back in and it was declared over. Vicus would have to wait for another week

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 2

17/01/08

What a complete turn around from our last raid. We went through the opening stages of Ancient Port Warehouse like a knife through butter. There was no raid wipe after every mob and only a very few people pulled aggro off the main tanks.

I was late due to being told by the wife that as there was a raid break, there was also a play break, so I haven’t been online at all since late December. I logged on to find myself in Martok on Kojan where I had been practicing Diplomacy. So to reach the Southern Swamps, especially now that Rudolph no longer flies, was going to be a long run!.

I was so excited I forgot to get pics of the first Boss!. Never mind I will pick some up next week as we will have a full pop next week for Wednesday. This was only a very short week as we really only came back on the Wednesday night. We cleared through the early part of the zone extremely quickly. The only deaths we had were from the usual suspects *cough* sorcerers*cough* who weren’t keeping an eye on their aggro.

One thing I think people don’t quite understand is that each tank has an extremely different way of gaining and holding aggro. Warriors have a lot of snap aggro, Paladins have a lot of powerful rescues and Dread Knights take some time to build rage. Each tank classes aggro abilities need to be handled differently by the raid. Once I have good aggro it becomes very hard to take it off me, but it does take me some time to build it up to a level at which the DPS classes can unleash.

Our first target of the night was x77 (which I forgot to get photo’s of) he dropped as clean as a whistle. Next up was an enraged x83. Now I really like this fight, theres a tank rotation and you get bounced about 40 feet in to the air. Its a fairly straight tank fight with a twist. Hell I’m just loving the tanking. Raid tanking really is everything I thought it would be. I get butterflies every time we engage and a huge buzz when the target goes down.

Enraged X83

After some more clearing of trash we got to General Vicus. We haven’t killed him yet but we get closer with every try. I suspect that we will find when we finally get to the central Hub of APW that there will be a shortcut to most of these mobs and we will be able to avoid a lot of the trash. However we haven’t raided together, in some cases for years, so all the trash clearing and general raid discipline is very good practice. We are definitely getting better at it and its getting a lot easier to clear through the crap. Everybody is learning their classes a little bit better and what they can and cannot do. We are learning about aggro control in APW (very different than WoW and EQ) , how the game handles different scenarios and where the bugs are.

We will get there, its all good practice and its all good fun!.

General Vicus in the dim distance

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 1

Monday 17.12.07
Finally its here!.
Vanguard Game Update 3.2 and 3.3 were delayed so long they were ultimately released simultaneously as a single patch. The whole of SA was absolutely chomping at the bit to get into the zone and get killing. Its been a hell of a long wait, for me its been nearly 3 years since I last raided with SA, but everything that I have read about the APW raid game says that its a lot of fun.

Before you can zone into the Ancient Port Warehouse you have to find and defeat a wandering named, this guy is up simultaneously in 3 different zones across each of the 3 continents. They dont seem to be too hard to find. Once you have the quest for the gateway you are given a little vial of poison. Now here is an Southern Armada super sekret strat ™ for ya. Use the little vial on the named BEFORE you attack him. This weakens him and turns him into a new mob type which is eminently killable. If you don’t, much like a silly pink Warrior of my acquaintance, you will find out that he does about 95,000 damage per hit. Thats not even a one shot!, even fully raid buffed thats like a 0.1 shot!.

To make a long story much shorter, we found heem we keeled heem. Actually we killed him with 15 people and only 2 healers as we were a bit short of people that night.

So after the hand in and clutching our shiny, newly minted keys, we rolled into the much vaunted, long awaited Ancient Port Warehouse. Would it be as good as our anticipation?, would it be horribly buggy and lagged out beyond playability the way the VG boards had been claiming? would it be full of hundreds of yard trash to pull?. Well first off you zone into a kind of entry room with 2 Gnomes and a large metallic statue. The Statue is named Cerulean and hands you a number of quests which can only be completed by killing named’s deeper into APW and then finding an NPC even further into the Zone.

One of the Gnomes does sod all and just gives you some text, but the second Gnome serves a vital purpose. He lets you repair armor and weapons right at the spawn point. Now this is a well placed Gnome, without this guy Raiding and learning in the zone would be a hell of a lot harder. So a good layout to start with. At this point in time we didn’t have anywhere near the people we needed online to start a raid so its good bye for now and we will see you real soon…

Cerulean

So, its a couple of days later and we are formed up for the first raid on Monday night. I had run down and parked myself right outside the gateway on Saturday, knowing I wouldn’t be online for several days and wanting to be there well and truly on time. Note to self, don’t fall into the damn harbor. There is quite literally no way out of the damn harbor once you get wet. You cant climb out of the water anywhere, I spent an hour swimming around the edges of the damn pool trying to find a ramp or ladder, or some way out of the water before I gated out and ran back.

Anyway, we formed up, buffed up and headed down the elevator. The first mob we saw died pretty cleanly. A Guardian B27 stands at the entrance to the zone, we saw, we pulled, he fell over.

Now its not all that easy and I have to admit we wiped several times on the way to our first named. So far, I have to say huge Kudos to SOE for this zone. Even the trash is challenging. If you are an experienced raid guild this wont cause you too much pain, but its going to throw you some serious curve balls as you learn. If you are a Guild new to raiding, this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun and a huge challenge!.

Little things like Fire mobs which, if you cast fire spells on them, the fire actually heals them for the damage dealt. These are only small things but they add some nice twists to the genre and as almost every mob has some twist like that, it adds up to a challenge on each fight and makes each fight different. Rather than every single fight being simply pull and clear the trash till you get to the next boss, each fight has its own unique signature and needs to be planned for.

So finally we get to the first Boss. His name is “A Malfunctioning X77” and he stands alone in a huge hall, the X77 himself is actually in a small alcove surrounded on three sides by archways, this should have been a hint. So we clear around him and then have a wee conversation about how he is going to die. The brains in the guild make the call, and we move in. (I’m not the brains, I’m a tank, I stand where I’m told to and get hit a lot!)

Now I don’t want to actually talk a lot about the specifics of this fight. This is still a really new experience for almost everyone and I don’t want to provide any spoilers for future people coming through this zone. Suffice it to say this guy has a surprise in store for you!.

Engaged with A Malfunctioning X77

The first attempt we wiped early when he sprung his trap, second attempt he went down to 13% and 3rd attempt he died smooth, if not easy.

Our first dead APW Boss!

I got loots!. X77 was kind enough to drop a quest piece for my Dread Knight armor set. I am determined to get a complete Armor set out of APW. I have seen a couple of links of some awesome two handers which drop in APW as well. With the changes coming down the pipe which will make Dreads 2H tankers I am looking forward to getting to play with some of those. One of the images Ive seen was a sword which looked like a flaming version of the swords issued to the Uruk Hai in the movie Lord of the Rings. As a 2h sword it looked damn impressive.

We continued onwards after dropping X77 and made our way further into the zone. We have no idea where we are going so we were really just exploring and trying to get our bearings. We came across a mob that looked like it might be a named, called Guardian R5. The raid stopped, we rebuffed, made sure the engagement instructions were clear, carefully positioned tanks and healers and pulled. We were very careful with our aggro and the raid leaders were extra cautious on engagement and damage. We had no idea what this guy was going to do or what he was possibly capable of. In the end he did nothing and we dropped him like an orc pawn. I didn’t even take screenies, I didn’t think he was important!.

We then wiped on the very first trash pull after R5!.

Its all good. I’m thoroughly enjoying APW so far and if this is a taste of things to come I can see us enjoying the zone all the way through!. We will be raiding Wednesday and Thursday this week so there will be lots more update goodness and dead bosses!.

Wednesday 19.12.07
One thing I would like to say first off is a HUGE thank you to my own personal Tank Crack dealer. Zarthaz has been making me awesome weapons since my mid 20’s, every time I am ready for an upgrade he is there with one already made or asking me what Procs I would like on the one he is about to make. 2 thumbs up for the mighty Monk Weaponsmith!.

Second raid, we formed up pretty quickly, buffed up and headed straight in. We knew that the Malfunctioning X77 was going to be dead to us but the zone so far seems pretty linear so we basically headed in the same direction. We were definitely moving better than we were on Monday night and we had the strat for the trash mobs down pretty tight.

Quote of the Night
Aegis: “We are moving a lot faster tonight folks, after learning a bit about the zone last night I plan to treat this place with a little less respect”

And we did!. It only took about 15 minutes to reach the Malfunctioning X77 room and clear past it. We dropped the Guardian R5 again easy peasy and learned a bit about how to split multiple mobs. The Fire and Ice guardians are Evil if pulled together. Basically a Fire Guardian hits you with an AOE fire DOT which is also a debuff for Ice damage. So if you pull them simultaneously you get debuffed for both the types of damage you are about to take and wipe quickly. Trust me we know this. (Does that explanation make any sense?, I hope it did) So we figured out a quick and easy method of getting the two types separated and happily smashed our way through.

I think one of our major weaknesses as a Guild at the moment is having only one Monk. If Zarthaz cant be available for a night we are going to find this zone a lot harder to deal with. So we finally made our way to an “Enraged X83”. There are a couple of really cool looking traps along the way and at least 2 levels to the zone that we could see, at least one of which was partially submerged. I guess we will go back and explore downstairs at a later date. So we form up around the X83. He is standing in a doorway with several roamers on fast pops, both in the room beyond him and in the room you have to kill him in.

Enraged X83 waiting to die

Now we haven’t read any spoilers on these encounters, in fact information on this encounter was offered and was turned down repeatedly. We are here to learn it for ourselves and beat it on our own merits. Garbar and myself were nominated as Main Tanks and set ourselves up in the corner for the pull. We had no idea what was coming but pulling this guy was going to be fun!.

So Garb pulls and has aggro. I’m sitting there, got my debuffs on him, hitting him a little bit, ramping up the aggro slowly. I want to be on his aggro list but not take it off Garb. This can be a bit of a balancing act with various abilities and types of attacks but is really a lot of fun. We are kind of expecting something to happen at 80% and it does. POP he hits me and Garb with a massive push back which pops me about 20 feet up the wall and does a complete aggro wipe. I’m still hitting him and I grab aggro. The tank swap goes fairly smoothly, I blow both my Runes to compensate for healing spikes and stay up. Ok, if thats all hes got we have this motherfucker.

Steady and smooth he drops to 20%. At that point it all goes horribly wrong. Garb and I drop to 30K damage hits and he proceeds to smash his way through the entire Guild roster. Bugger.

We form up and try again. We engage and POP a Chaotic Spark appears in the room and aggros the healers at about 90%. That one didn’t count, we didn’t have a chance to even do any serious damage. So we wipe, form up, clear the re pops and off we go. The Brains of the outfit have a theory that this is all about the speed at which we drop the mob. He has to die inside of (I think?) 10 minutes or he goes on a massive damage rampage.

Waiting to Pull

Being a Raid Tank in VG is very different to both Soloing and Grouping. I am learning little bits about how to use various abilities that get very few usages during normal play. For example, to make it easier for Garb to take aggro off me as we go into Tank transition I pop my Bleak Foeman ability which stops me attacking completely and blocks all attacks for about 10 seconds. I am still on the aggro list, but as soon as he does his wipe its so much easier for Garb to get the aggro he needs. Another ability set is are my two Runes. I have 2 of them, a 25% all incoming block and a 100% all incoming block. I’m learning to use them to smooth out damage/healing spikes during fights. There are other things I’m figuring out uses for as well, its all a huge learning process as I have never MT’d Raid mobs before. I get butterflies before each boss pull!.

Everybody is learning tho and I think Southern Armada are going to become a raid force to be reckoned with.

A Tanks view of the Enraged X83 fight. Smack those knees!

This time it went perfectly. We sped up the damage and he never had a chance to Rampage. One dead X83.

Even the corpse shows the lockout timer

We actually had roamers pop as we were looting and almost wiped again to stupid Guardians and Sparks. But we gritted our teeth, put out some damage and survived. We continued on through the zone clearing away the trash until we finally came across General Vicus. Now Im not 100% sure on this but I think this guy has an extremely good 2 Handed Sword drop. The one he was holding certainly looked extremely cool but whether its something he drops or a model I don’t know. I’m trying to find an image I saw a couple of weeks back to the sword I described earlier to see if its the same one.

We cleared his Guards and formed up to have a go. It was getting really late at this point but we were determined to have at least one crack at him. I don’t know what went wrong here. He seemed to pop 2 adds at about 86%, so maybe they are on timers. We tried various tactics of Mezzing, off tanking, kiting etc but in the end we wiped with him at about 80%. Its all good, its all learning for the next time we meet.

General Vicus proceeding to eat SA

Thursday 20.12.2007
There are days when Southern Armada is superb. There are days when everybody does their job perfectly and the mobs fall before us like wheat before our scythe. This was not one of those days, in fact I would more aptly describe Thursday night like one long suicide run. The night went something like this:
Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill 3 mobs, Wipe. You get the idea. I don’t really know what it was, maybe it was that several classes were missing due to the Xmas schedule, maybe it was people being asleep ( and I was guilty of this as well) maybe it was a lot of things I dont know.

All I know was that it was just damn hard work. We basically took 4 hours to reach exactly the same place it had taken us 2 hours ( and a boss mob kill) to reach the night before. Thus there are no pics and no points to make, other than TS can be a really good tool and a bane at the same time. Having officers argue over a proposed strategy for 30 minutes just left me confused about what it was we were supposed to do.

Southern Armada Vanguard Week One Minus 16hours

Well its not long now. Vanguard will be released to the early purchaser crowd (of whom I am one) at 7am New Zealand time Saturday January 27th.

Southern Armada will be forming up on the Thunder Axe server not on the unofficial Oceanic server which has been organized by the affiliate site http://www.ausguard.com. There are many reasons for this but the primary one is contention. We don’t want to be on a server with multiple other Aussie raiding Guilds, although it does make it easier to recruit it may very well make raiding a lot harder as we will be racing for raid targets against other Aussie guilds. Its a lot easier to raid if your competition is in bed. Of course this can work against us in a lot of ways as well. If the hard core US guilds have completely cleared the server ( and this did happen to us in EQ) we can end up on a raid night with no targets up to hit. Now obviously its all a bit speculative at the moment as we have little or no idea about the raid game in VG. Lots of people have thrown around a number of 24 raiders and this number has become accepted as fact. I have yet to see a post from anyone official which has said anything beyond vague references about a raid total “less than EQ” , the only rough number I have seen is 24-36. I guess we will see.

SA had an online meeting in Team Speak and Kez outlined the Officers new view for SA going into VG. It sounds to me like there is some serious discontent about the behavior of some of the membership from the WoW era. SA will now have two ranks within the membership.

Elders are those who have shown commitment to the Guild and to helping others within the Guild. These are people who show up to raid, who help out in gathering stuff for guild made components etc. They will get precedence in Raid slots and for gear.

Members are the more casual player members who don’t want to or cant commit to time online and cant raid as often.

The other change is that we are having our classes picked for us. In the past the Guild has required an even spread of classes in order to progress. Often this even spread of people aren’t there and you get raids with 12 tanks and 3 healers. Kez wants to sort this out to start with, so everyone has had to apply for their SA VG membership, state their 2 favored classes and the type of member they want to be (elder or member) The officers will decide who gets to be what.
Now I have been playing a Dread Knight since the class was released into the game last year. I am sure that there is a strong possibility I wont get this class as I’m sure there is at least one officer who will want to play a Dread. My secondary class choice is Monk and to be quite honest i would be quite happy with that. I played a Goblin Monk in Beta till about 15 and really enjoyed the experience. I would honestly be happy to play either class.

To be honest in my head this whole class choice and splitting of the membership feels a little premature. I can understand the officers wanting to get this sort of stuff sorted early on in the piece but I also think we really don’t know enough about the game, especially the game at later levels, to even begin to make this sort of division clear and concise. I have a point to make here. Lets say that I don’t get chosen to be an Elder, disappointing but fair enough, there are too many people and not enough slots. Now this means that I am free to choose my class. In that case I will more than likely choose a Dread or a Monk anyway. So I create my Dread, I level up, I join in with mini raids, I help with farming, I build myself up as a Weapon crafter, I join in the life of the guild as I would normally. I write this blog, I keep doing SA PR in and out of game etc

We get to raid level. No one has stepped down from the Elder role and I am still not an Elder despite all the effort I have put in. This means that I pretty much wont get to raid. Now raiding is why I play these games. Its what makes these games fun for me. If I am not an Elder ( and I am using the royal ‘I’ here, this can apply to anyone in the members position ) and I don’t get raiding slots. I have one choice if I want to raid and that is to leave SA. THAT is what I don’t like about this system. I don’t think we will end up with a have/have not problem between Elders and Members, I do think we will end up with a potential of a lot of resentment from established long term members.

Second issue.
I have chosen my Dread, leveled him up etc and an Elder steps down. I get picked to join the ranks of the Elders ( again royal “I” ) but there is already a Dread in the Elders and it was a Cleric that stepped down. Do I HAVE to start and PL a Cleric in order to join the Elders?. I hate playing bloody Clerics, after WoW I said never again. If I can join as a Dread doesn’t that blow the whole carefully laid class balance sheet out the window? and given that I can join as a Dread couldn’t everybody just have chosen their classes to begin with?

Third issue.
A Cleric steps down, I have worked really hard to join the Elders but I am playing a Dread. The Guild needs a Cleric and goes outside the Guild for recruitment. Someone comes in and steps right over me from the outside, despite all my hard work. Instant resentment and I’m back to only having the choice to leave.

There was a list of Classes people were wanting to play as their Choice posted to the SA Forum and it was pretty evenly split with about 6-8 people choosing classes within each archetype. I thought it was a pretty good spread and I think that trying to come up with the ‘perfect’ class spread just isn’t going to work.

I was talking with Anobis today and one of the things we both fondly remember from EQ and from Prexus was the SA ability of getting things done despite having completely the wrong class mix. I got asked once how many Wizzies for fast DPS we had when we beat Coirnav for the first time. The answer was only one, but we had 11 Necros. I really do understand that Kez and the Officers had a really bad experience with many of the WoW membership. But sitting at my desk listening to the TS chat the other day, I was reading the names of the people logged in and it struck me: This was the core of the old EQ raiding crew. These were the people who turned up to every raid and who worked with each other to help make the guild the best it could be for all its members. This wasn’t a bunch of 14 year old wankers only out for themselves.

I’m guessing that the system will stay flexible and the officers will do their best for the whole of the Guild. I have faith in the guys leading SA and I know if a system doesn’t work they will be flexible enough to rethink it.

I guess we will see what VG brings us.

Now normally I would have pictures to post but as there isn’t any game to take screen shots of I will have to leave you with a picture of a Pohutakawa, the NZ Xmas tree instead.

New Zealand Christmas Tree

Week One Minus 8 hours
I’m a Dread!

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.