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 Six

30/10/03 Week ThirtySix

Wow what a week. I am pretty much completely shattered. If my boss ever leaves and they ask me to take over, I have no idea what he gets paid but it ain't worth putting up with the shit I have had to for the last three weeks.

Tuesday nights raid, the only Kez run raid of this week kicked off in the Elemental plane of Earth. After the last few attempts at POE we have had a lot more experience at the rings and we are a hell of a lot faster. First up was a quick run at the worlds biggest Croc. My GF came in during the fight and all she could say when she saw Tantisala Jaggedtooth was "oooo handbag and shoes!"

The Croc died fast and we moved down and began the pulls to clear the way to the Ring Of Vine. We wiped out several generations of Bloodthirsty Vegerog's before finally getting to the boss of the Vine Ring.

Now at one point I would have said this guy was tough. Its amazing what a few weeks of farming the Elemental planes can do for you. In fact we are so contemptuous of Derugoak Bloodwalker now that we don't even use a real tank on him.

I have to admit something. Now this is rather embarrassing but its better to be honest about these things rather than let them fester and just make your life worse. Southern Armada has a Gnome Warrior. I know, I know, I have let the dirty little secret out of the bag. But now its out in the open, don't you all just feel better, no more hiding, no more sneaking around and lieing. Say it loudly with me.
We have a GNOME warrior!!.

We have also figured out some really good uses for a Gnome warrior. Dieing a lot is one use, and tanking completely crap mobs when you don't want to waste a Pally on them :)

Actually if I was Derugoak Bloodwalker I would be highly embarrassed that I was beaten by a Gnome!. I would hide my head in shame and never darken the face of Norrath again!.

Anyway, enough Gnome Punting, nah one more /punt!.

Next up we took over the plinth that the Ring of Vine spawns on and started pulling the Ring of Dust.

A Dust Devotee

Now the last time i did this with the good folks over at Unity it took forever to pull and clear through the Devotee's. SA just pulled 'em 3 or 4 at a time and wiped them out. I think we had cleared through all of them in about 20 minutes and it was time for the boss. Unfortunately I didn't get to get a picture of him as it was INC *splat*, too fast for me to get a screenshot.

So at this point we headed over to the cave at the back of Jaggedtooths spawn point and started clearing the trash on the way to the Arbitor.

A Shimmering Gem Sentry

Now the Arbitor is the nasty bugger who stands between us and a Plane of EarthB key so we were particularly determined to take him out. We cleared all the way down through to his room with no problems. We had no real idea how this fight was going to go, as no-one had done it in detail before. One thing we do know now is that the repop in the room before the Arbitors is damn fast.

We pulled him, we were engaged, healing good on Pooby, DPS going well, he was going down nice and easy and *POP* we had 5 adds in the room.

A Mystical Arbitor of Earth

I was summoned by him at 34%, without the adds we had the fat bastard. Its cool, he dies next time and we get a key. We need to do a lot more farming of the Elementals before we start to look at POEb anyway. From what I understand we will need at least 3-4 tanks in the 9K+ region, so we are going to need a bit of Elemental Plate for a few tanks. We will probably pick up a few more Blades of War from Rallos Zek the Warlord as well.

Thursday was a fast and clean set of Kills in Plane of Fire. First up was Jaxoliz Dawneyes and his buddy Sunmane.

DawnEyes

Criare Sunmane

Both of them died really fast and really cleanly. I was close to having to log off at this point. I knew I was going to be up for a quiet night as I needed to do some serious faction farming with the GF. However I managed to hang around for General Druav Flamesinger's death.

I understand that after Flamesinger there was bugger all up, so everyone headed out to Vex Thal and cleared through to Blob2 and at that point everything worthy of killing was dead so that ended the night.

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.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Thirty Five

24/10/03 Week Thirty Five

I cant wait for Aussie to move ahead to DayLight Savings time. At the moment I am 3 hours ahead of Australia, so Raids are starting 7PM AEST and they are 10PM NZ time. Now this isn't a problem, what's annoying is that my self imposed cutoff point for raiding (unless its a really special case) is 2.00AM. That gives me about 4h:45mins sleep before work. Any less than that and I start to get cranky. The extra hours difference in start times means I am usually able to hang around for 3 targets instead of two. That is one of the reasons these weekly missives have been a little shorter than usual. I am just not able to hang around as much.I was playing my baby tank for a bit when my phone started to go ballistic, the network alert systems were telling me about a rather nasty Viral outbreak happening in a regional office. So exactly as the raid was about to start I had to log off and race into work to deal with it. By the time I got back, SA had made an attempt on the Wise in the Elemental Plane of Water and was heading for the Plane of Fire.

This weeks quote of the week brought to you by GNOMESEKS(tm)

Translation of above image, this conversation occurs after the incoming message of our Gnome Warrior, no really, stop laughing, he's a Gnome and a Warrior, its not that funny!. Well actually it is I guess :)The incoming message runs along the lines of >Gnosie tells the Raid: "assist me on There
it is coming to us for Gnomeseks!"

Simis:Gnomeseks is illegal in some areas.
Gohann: As it should be Sim.
Simis: So the "assist" is lifting him into position or something?
Simis: I don't even want to think about it
Shinime: I think we should use him as a butt plug, that's gotta be high aggro.
Simis: Why?, do you want to bathe him?

Thanks for that Simis, that not only woke me up, that woke the whole house up as I howled with laughter!

So shortly after composing myself, Kez called the raid to the Elemental Plane of Fire for our first attempt at Fennin Ro, The Tyrant of Fire. This was our first shot at him as he's pretty much permanently dead on Prexus, every guild on their way through the Elementals camps him, its almost a rite of passage.

So we formed up at the "Picnic Tables" and began to pull and clear trash.

A Guardian of Doomfire

There is lots of trash, not as bad as the POE rings and its relatively easy to clear through. The Clerics were having a wee sleep, as the pulls seemed to go INC, Dead Tank, Dead Tank, Dead Cleric, Dead Cleric, Tanks gets aggro, CH rotation kicks in. Maybe it was an international Cleric Holiday or something. Maybe the beer was too warm again?. It seemed to go away after a while and the rotations kicked in beautifully. We worked through a bunch of trash and mini nameds before we came to the first "tough" guy.

Azobian the Darklord

Mr Darklord there fell over like a girl. This is where the extra hour of time I will get when Aussie goes to Daylight Savings is going to be great. At this point its 2.00AM, I know the engage on Fennin Ro, The Tyrant of Fire is only 30 minutes away, but I simply cannot afford to stay awake any longer, so I had to log at this point and head to bed. SA stayed for at least 2 full attempts at Fenin, both failed and I have no idea how the fights went but it was more an information gathering exercise than anything.

Thursdays raid was a blast!, we headed straight to the Ssraeshza Temple for a fast Emperor gankage. Kez saying "Bring me Snakes!" is still one of my favorite engage calls of all time! Watching the Blood and the Guards coming at you and not being able to do a thing except trust your Guild mates is such a buzz!

We dropped the Emperor in rapid fashion and headed out to the Plane of Tactics for another run at Rallos Zek the Warlord. After two defeats by him last week we were itching for a rematch!. We still didn't have a completely full raid but we were about ten to fifteen people up on last week, so our DPS levels were just a notch higher.

Apart from a few early hiccups with assistance, the first three kills were just about perfect. Even when we ended up with 4 adds in the middle of the Rallos Zek fight, just as he was about to split, the Chanter team stepped up, everyone kept their heads and we just smacked them all down.

Tallon Zek

Vallon Zek

Vallon Zek x2

Rallos Zek

Now I was tasked with gating out first to start the summoning of those who died during the final part of the fight with Rallos. I don't think we even lost one person prior to him but we lost quite a few to the adds.

So I gate out and get ready for summons, disband from group and raid and start saying "invite me for summons". Now for most people this is a fairly simple procedure, target me and press invite. For those who seem to have an issue with this procedure, these are the rules of Necromantic summoning.

1.You have to be in the same zone as me.
2. You have to be in the same group as me.
3. You have to be in the same raid as me.
4. I have to have a coffin for the correct level of the spell
5. You have to have a corpse in the zone where you want to be summoned.

If any of the above is NOT true I cannot help you. Inviting me to join you if you are out of a group, but still in the raid isn't going to help anyone.

All of the above must be true or you are wasting your time.So after doing a hell of a lot of summoning we headed into the pit. I stopped at the top and DMF'd those who didn't have Levi as they were dropping over the edge. I swear I actually cast DMF on someone and it landed as they were over the edge and falling into the pit. A 10K fall would have ruined your day.

Finally, pets in place, all spells replaced with DOT's, Pooby in place, alt tanks assigned, suicide slower's ready, Clerics GTG and Rallos Zek the Warlord is INCOMING!

Last weeks fights with Rallos felt really different to this one, last weeks were edge of the seat "can we do it?, can we do it?", for me this fight felt almost pre-ordained. There was no doubt we can kill him, our technique was perfect, all we needed was the additional DPS added by an extra 10 -15 people and Rallos Zek Fell over like a fat man.
Not only that, he was good enough to drop us another Blade of War!. Grats Nym on your new pig sticker!

I have to say it still feels really weird to be fighting these MOBs and raiding these zones. I still remember sitting and working my way through the Planes in Allakhazam.com and thinking these are MOB's I will never see, fights I will never participate in. Every now and again I just have to shake myself and remind myself that I do in fact get to do this on a regular basis, I do get to see MOB's and Zones that probably 95% of the player base never will, and that I am part of a team that nails stuff like Rallos Zek every week!. Woot!