Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Sixty Two

21/04/04 Week SixtyTwo

I hate Coirnav.

Big fat fishy swine that he is. Its not the fight I hate, the fight itself is a hell of a lot of fun. Its not the difficulty of maneuvering in the water, its not the lag, its the 2 hours setting up to actually start the fight. I hope, I pray that we will never ever be doing this fight again.

It went well and I think was possibly the fastest kill of Coirnav we have ever done. I believe that he died inside 1 minute this time.

Squiddy waiting to die

Dead fat Squid bastard

Coirnav died fast and dropped some decent Lewtz for once. I think we were still waiting on our Time instance to time out so instead of heading to Time we headed to Ferubi to try out the Smith Rondo event. Now this is a kind of bypass for the first 1-4 Trials in the Gates of Discord expansion. If your guild can complete this event, you can hail the ghost and you don't have to do the first 4 trials.

Now I've been told that most of the other Time Guilds on Prexus have wiped against this guy when trying him for the first time. We had a few hiccups but it really didn't seem that tough a kill to me. The only real problems we had were keeping the non-Mezzable add under control. But the off tanks stepped up, secondary healers kicked in and it was all good. He hits hard yes, he has lots of HP yes, but I couldn't see why he was considered to be tougher than an elemental God?.

I have spent the rest of the week trying to organise a run through Trials 5 and 6 to complete entry into GOD Tier 2. So far I am having no luck with multiple fails under my belt. The biggest problem I have is that these trials take 4-6 hours, I start to try and organise a trial group when I logon. But the people I need to make a successful trial group don't login till 9-10pm my time. I cant start a 4 hour trial that's going to finish at 2:00am. So I'm going to do my best to set one up for a saturday.

Anyway, I didn't get any shots of him as he is a relatively boring model of a male Erudite. That was it for me for the night. It was a relatively early logoff, being around 1:30am but there really didn't seem to be anything else up.

Now Weapon Master Vtiink Vzaan is one of the named's that pop during the Smith Rondo event. The big bitch was kind enough to drop a Muramite Plated Bracer and the officers were kind enough to award it to me!. Now this is a truly awesome bracer for a necro with both HP and Mana Regen and I am as stoked as I can be with it.

I am however going to have a rant. I have been trying to replace two things for ages. My Legs and my Robe both suck ass. They are easily my weakest pieces. Now I have kind of being holding off on loot lately hoping for a silk legs drop and then maybe a break into Time tier 5 and a Miraguls Robe. I have passed on cloaks, necks, primaries etc etc all in the hope of a Robe and Legs.

However now that I have broken down and requested and received the bracer, there is a little known piece of code buried deep in the Everquest executable that will run.

If Ulaa (received).Lewtz < Date.Week

GuildMob.Kill (next)
Drop *.Legs

Now I dunno why but it seems to work. Every time I go for and receive a great item, virtually the next thing to drop will be legs!. Ah well. NOTE: Plate Legs dropped in Tier 3 in Mondays Time run. See the code does exist!

Friday, which I was looking forward to in a big way just turned into absolute shite. At first I thought it was just us being crap again, but subsequent events led me to believe that it was in fact shitty international links. Basically we crapped our way through the Tier 1 events with several of the groups wiping, fire wiped twice in fact. We had to abandon the Tier 1 trials in the end and simply waited for the reset.

Second time round we were still lumpy but but we slowly made our way through. Finally we dropped the last mob in Tier 1 and Tier 2 opened up for us. That's when it all really turned to shit. We had groups wiping all over the place, mobs warping to us, bad pulls, "Ghosts" pulling mobs on top of groups. It all culminated in literally half the guild going LD at the same time. I didn't go LD at this point (unusual for me I know!) but I was getting massive lag with my meter redlining for minutes at a time.

We were about to clear the last mobs in Tier 2 when the mass link death happened. That was pretty much it for Time as I don't think the raid leaders figured this was going to be worth it. The guild was forming up at ZI and discussing where to go next when I went LD. I still don't know what caused it. I could reach any server local to me IE in New Zealand, but I couldn't see anything beyond the international routers. I think someone tripped over the plug.

I gave up about an hour later when I still couldn't get to the eqservers. SA went on to clear out POEb and had a reasonable loot night. It was still damn disappointing tho

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Sixty One

21/04/04 Week SixtyOne
Well Mondays Raid just utterly Rocked. We went, we saw, we kicked ass all the way to Tier4. Now we get to kill Gods!
First up this week was a little trip to kill Zordak Ragefire to finish off a Cleric epic. I don't think I've ever killed him before so adding one more Dragon to my list was a lot of fun!. I would much rather go off and kill a Dragon or other such quest mob than sit around on my ass LFG that's for sure.

Of course I made the classic NooB mistake of sitting off at a distance to cast on him and of course everything bounced. Note to self, you have to be literally under a Kunark Dragon in order to successfully land anything at all.

Monday of course was the reason I have been sucking up to the Girlfriend all week. The first of three raids kicked off with us clearing Tier one. The first Trials went damn near perfectly with us clearing all 5 in a really good time.

Initially we believed that we would be inside the instance reset time on Tier 2, we believed that right up until we opened the clock face and saw a fully re popped Tier 2. The 5 teams entered Tier 2 and began their clearing. The team I was in initially joined the Earth tier but we gated out and went back into the Undead and began clearing that.

Opening this is the goal

Earth had a few problems with Link Deaths on the pulls and thus they wiped twice. Finally we had the whole raid in place in Earth and we did a suicide clarence. We were absolutely down to the wire when the Earth named was finally pulled and killed. Everyone kept their heads tho and the raid stayed calm with pulls coming in and Mobs dieing in an organized fashion.

So with Tier 2 down we headed into Tier 3. Now this was where we stuffed up last time. We were under severe Time pressure now (For those who don't know each Tier in Time has its own time limit, fail it and you get bounced from the zone) and we needed to pull fast and consistently.

I don't know how Monks/SK's do it. They are primary pullers and they must die 10 times each on a given raid. I would be frustrated beyond belief but they just get up and go again for the next wave. /bow to you guys, your patience is phenomenal. The pulling was clean and fast with only one or two little glitches here and there.

After last time we had a strat figured out as to what to pull and how to deal with Multi's. Even with the speed we were clearing the zone it was still damn close and we threw everything including the kitchen sink at the last two named MOB's. POW they died and we started to get the zone emotes for the entrance into Tier 4!.

I know I bitched last week but damn this is our 4th, maybe 5th raid into Time and we have made it into TIER FOUR!!!. Holy Shit!. That's damn respectable in anybodies book!

So for the first time we zoned into Tier 4 and took a look around. Its basically a big room with 4 Gods standing around, Saryrn, Terris Thule, Vallon Zek, Tallon Zek.

Terris Thule waiting to die

Saryrn also waiting her turn

We decided to take on Saryrn first and formed up at the tables. Discussion of possible tactics took place, starts were called and we were in!. Poor Sanfy, assigned the difficult task *Not* of positioning her, he equipped his two lucky mugs and charged!. As soon as he approached Saryrn his DI fizzled and he immediately went splat!

That put a wee dent in our plan but we recovered and Saryrn was soon in the right spot. Now here is my problem. Being a Necro i have spent a lot of time putting AA's into useless stuff like Crit Dots, Lightning Reflexes, HP's etc etc when i should have been putting them into Resists!. Saryrn has a REALLY nasty AE manadrain with a rapid recast. Now even with all my resist gear on I can only manage an unbuffed DR of around 230.

With buffs I'm around 400, which means I got hit with every single round of AE and was damn soon OOM. The initial Saryrn pull didn't go well anyway and at about 80% we mem-blurred her and sent her back to her spawn.

Mmm we had a little think, I'm sure the officers channel was just a blur at this point and we reset and headed back in. This time went a lot faster (I went OOM at the same damn rate but oh well) and a lot cleaner. We had her down at 30% with the two waves of adds dealt with when Kez pulled the plug due to the Clerics being OOM.

That was it for the night for me and Southern Armada all logged shortly after. Second raid of the week is tonight and Saryrn and Terris Thule will both die. The Zek brothers are supposed to be some of the toughest Mobs in the Tiers short of Quarm so we will have to see how we go with them. I know they have stopped a few guilds cold.

Wednesday. 

SOE decides to patch, they don't announce it anywhere, they don't tell anyone, they just emote a few hours before the fact that they are taking the servers down. Fuckers.

Thursday.

I went off and spent some money, bought some crap gear and added up some tribute points. So with level 5 DR running I headed off to the Plane of Time and formed up for Earth. The Earth trial is the only one I haven't done so far and was quite fun!. Its pretty basic. Kill MoB's. Kill adds as they spawn, kill boss. Simple really. It was quite cool actually because after we were done, we got to sit on our asses and wait for everyone else to finish the other 4 trials!!. Usually the group I am in ends up doing at least two sometimes threeTrials.

Earth Trial Boss

  

Now for some reason I kept missing stuff tonight, like MA calls, raid instructions etc etc. Normally I am really attentive about that kind of thing but I kept finding myself about to engage and still not having a clue about who was where and doing what. I can only conclude I was having mini naps with my eyes open. I was bloody tired all the way through this raid. Its been a damn long week here at work and I really needed some sleep.

Anyway we made it though the Trials pretty fast this time. We had one booboo with the Water Trial where the tank went down. It all worked out well though as our Rangers are so damn Uber they tanked the Water boss instead!

So with all 5 Trials down we headed up into Tier 4. Saryrn was waiting for us. This time we knew what we were doing and formed up fast. Strats were called and in we went. She died perfectly this time and we finally began to see the dreams of CandyLand begin to come true. Time is like Vex Thal for big toons. The Lewtz are Phat, and when we get to the point that we can clear Time in a single session, then the Lewtz will truly flow.

Poor Saryrn. Dead at the hands of the Southern Armada again

So our next target was going to be Terris Thule. This fight is very similar to the Saryrn fight, with nasty AOE's and nasty adds. So we rebuffed and went in. I'm not sure what happened on the first pull but we lost Tanks pretty rapidly. I think its having the Tanks standing in Water and being pushed in/out by TT during the fight. This requires the Clerics to be in/out of the water as well which must be a constant pain in the ass while you are trying to keep a CH chain running.

Anyway we aborted the fight and headed back to the Table to reform. We reassessed our strat, rebuffed and went in again. This time the fight went a lot smoother and Terris Thule fell quietly before us. The clean up after the fight was a bit messy but a hell of a lot of fun. We had chanters OOM running around trying to avoid the MOBs that were chasing them as the Necros tried to pump them with enough mana to get off just one more mezz. Meanwhile the off tanks were hurriedly beating down the unmezzable adds. All of this was going on after Terris Thule was dead and Lewtz were being called. Was a hell of a fun fight!.

Next up. The Zek brothers. Now these two have a reputation as being the toughest of all the Time Gods. Particularly little brother Tallon.

Vallon Zek waiting on us.

Tallon Zek waiting to kick our ass.

So once again we reformed and got set up for a new encounter ( I love going into a new fight!, you never know what is going to happen!) This Tallon is a big brother to the little boy in the Plane of Tactics. He hits harder, faster and his AOE's are worse. So I really wasn't anticipating a first time win. We aborted at about 95% because we got brother Vallon as an add.

I don't know how we managed to add him. It may even have been me, I know I went around the corner a bit to wide as I didn't realize that there was no wall between Vallon and Tallon. So we aborted fast and reset the brothers.

We reformed and went in a second time, and again we got Vallon as an add. This time I know it wasn't me as I stayed damn tight going around that corner. I'm not sure what it was that was causing the aggro. Talon's AOE is big enough to hit Vallon?, some one not realizing Vallon is there?, someone going LD and training him?. No idea.

So for the 2nd time we wiped with Tallon barely scratched. At his point it was around 1:30am and I was fading in and out I must admit. I really, really wanted to hang out for just one more attempt but I simply couldnt do it. I knew Friday morning was going to be painful anyway, but logging an extra half an hour earlier can make the difference between the work day being painful or sheer torture.

For some reason last night I went through butt loads of pets. I must have lost at least 15 pets for various reasons. 170pp down the tubes. Ah well, them's the breaks.

I know everyone has items they drool over and there are a couple of things in Time I am keeping an eye out for, but for me its the thrill of being there. I don't think "another item" would keep me up till 2:00am most raid nights, dropping another MOB will. Missing out on loot doesn't bother me, but missing out on the first time that SA broke into Tier 2 and 3 the other day really pissed me off.

The third raid this week is tonight (Friday) and me and my bottle of Bourbon (Yay I can drink!) will be there with bells on.

Well Friday rolled around and due to circumstances beyond my control I was about 20 minutes late for the raid. I didn't miss anything tho and we were still forming up for the Tier One Trials. We started pretty much as soon as I logged on and I was assigned to the Air trial group. I headed over to the zone in still sorting out my channels etc. I completely fucked up and zoned into the Fire trial instead.

I simply wasn't paying attention to where I was, I thought I was in the right spot as I could see a couple of my group members on the same place. Turns out they were in the wrong place as well :/. I corrected my mistake immediately and gated out, but damn I felt like a twit.

So anyway, we pissed through the tier one trials. They aren't exactly trivial yet, but like most things, once SA has mastered something we very, very rarely ever fail at it a second time. In fact once we have beaten an encounter for the first time I cant think of a single time we have ever failed at it the second time around.

We had already cleared through Terris Thule and Saryrn on Wednesday, so Friday we formed up straight away for Tallon Zek. Much like Wednesday we didn't spend a lot of time on the first strat call. We were already buffed from the trials, so Kez called a strat modification and we went in.

Now the Zek brothers have (as I have said in the past) have stopped many guilds cold. There is at least one 7 day raiding Guild on Prexus that was stuck on him for close to 3 weeks. These two are just plain nasty. They put out a vast amount of damage and with their AE's and timed Adds can be damn tricky to deal with. So with much trepidation and the feeling that we will probably be doing this several times tonight, we engaged.

We had him positioned perfectly, the Clerics were in place, Pooby was laying the big smack down, and everyone was throwing everything they had at him. Slowly, slowly we whittled him down, he stayed positioned, DOTS were just hammering him. On a mob that I can lay everything on with no resists (NightFire, Blood of Thule, Funeral Pyre of Kelador, Saryns Kiss and Horror) I can be hitting a MOB for 1700+ a tick.

On Tallon I actually got 2 Crits in a single tick *hug CritDots3*, Horror for 1009 and BOT for 800ish, so that would have been about a 2500 tick!. I almost felt like a Wizzie!. Thank god I was FD at the time or I would have become a thin red Necro shaped smear.

As he went down we began to realize that we were going to win this. At 10% it was clear he was a dead Time God. But it wasn't till he died that we realized that this had been a flawless kill!. We didn't lose a single person, not even the puller!.

So after patting ourselves rapidly on the back we moved about 60 feet to the right and got ready for Vallon Zek. Now we have no idea how to handle any of these guys. The first attempt tactics don't really run beyond "we think he spawns adds sometime during the fight, dunno how many or when" so a new fight is always exciting. Vallon is going to be a pain in the ass, but he is definitely killable. We took 3 runs at him during the remainder of the raid, each time we got him to around 35% before his adds ran riot or he got loose and started to splat Clerics.

Anytime we can get a MOB under 50% on the first run I figure it is definitely killable. A few strat refinements (which I am sure better minds than mine are working on as I write this) and Vallon Zek too will die to Southern Armada!. Then its hello to Tier5!

We gave up on Vallon about 130am as our instance was about to time out. The rest of SA headed for Fire and a full pop was cleared as I understand. I headed off for bed and a long weekend of no EQ and heavy duty faction work to make up for 3 raids!.

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Sixty

16/04/04 Week Sixty
Well this week has largely been bloody annoying, along with a reoccurrence of Link Deaths out of the blue, which caused me to miss a raid on Tuesday, we all had a particularly frustrating raid on Thursday.


Its actually been suggested that there hasn't been much to say about our raids recently. Unfortunately this is true. We got to the point where it was Fire - Cleared, Water - Cleared, Earth - Cleared etc. There's not really a lot to say when you are clearing a zone for the fifth or sixth time. I guess it will be a bit more interesting once we hit the Time Gods. I believe we will clear Tier 4 this coming week, or at the very least make a serious dent in it.


We zoned in to Elemental Plane of Time on Monday to be greeted with the news that our instance had re spawned and we were heading in fresh. So we formed up, set up the Teams and kicked off the Trials. We seemed to have a frustrating time of it with fails in the first attempt on 3 out of five. The bizarre part is we failed the easy ones and succeeded on the hard ones.


I was in a group that completed Undead and Fire, the two hardest instances. I have to say that despite the frustration factor the Trial's are a hell of a lot of fun. I'm sure we will get to a point where we just blitz thru them, but right now they are challenging enough to be a lot of fun. And after all, there is no reward without trying.


So we formed up for a second attempt, made a few adjustments and headed back to the Trials. This time I was slated for water and was on the run to the trial entrance when I was Disconned. Now many people I know will disagree with me, but for me there is nothing in the world as frustrating as a disconnect because there is NOTHING that you can do about it. I have had to get up and go outside for a breath of fresh air on certain occasions after a disconn, mainly because if I didn't I would have thrown my monitor through the wall.


Anyway, I waited a bit, tried to logon, no dice, no connection, I checked my Ping Streams ( I run four Pings continuously at various locations on the Internet and my network whenever I am playing EQ) and they all said there was no internet beyond my NIC card. After reboots, checking settings, trying a few tricks and 2 hours of stuffing about, I rang my DSL provider.
"Oh Yes sir, we have determined from trended usage patterns that Tuesday night after 11PM is the least used time of our DSL service, so we have taken down the entire network to do some work on the core switches" AAAARRFGGGHHHHHH!!!


Fucking assholes, thanks for the email, mail out or other notification that you are about to take down my corporate DSL link. Telstra Suck. Telecom's and Banks. If they actually treated people decently from the start, they wouldn't have to spend millions of dollars on advertising to persuade us that they are "decent folks".


Anyway, that was the end of Tuesday nights raiding. I gave up and went to bed frustrated beyond belief. What made it worse was Southern Armada cleared the Time A trials for the first time, cleared Tier 2 and made good progress on Tier 3 and I missed it. AAAARRRGGGHHG!


So Thursday rolled around. Now after they did their "maintenance" on Tuesday night I have been having a rather nasty bout of LinkDeaths. The last time this happened I spent a lot of time and effort and abuse persuading the local Telco that the LD's were their problem and not my PC/ NIC. I finally got some results after getting our corporate account manager to step in, and a techie arrived at my house, replaced about 20 meters of cable and completely rewired my jacks.


That actually cured my LD problem for about the last 6 months. Now its back. Joy.


Additionally of course after the last patch I am now also getting EQ Client Crashes, so all in all its been bloody annoying. Anyway we formed up and dropped the Trials in TimeA. I had just clicked into my second trial 10 seconds after the Tanks and Clerics had gone in, when my screen went black and i dropped to desktop on Zone.


Once again the internet had disappeared and I had to simply sit and wait for my NIC to be able to see beyond the cable jack. Finally I got a response and logged back in. It seems that my group had zoned in and wiped, so a second group had to be assigned to go in to clear the Trial. This meant more delay and all the Trials are on strict Timers.


Once the fifth and last trial was cleared there was then confusion about where we were meant to be. I was were I thought I was supposed to be until i was told, rather forcibly that I was in fact in the wrong spot and I needed to make my way reasonably rapidly to Tier 3.


So after the confusion was cleared up we started to pull. Unfortunately by this point we had now wasted a significant amount of time. Tier 3 it seems you have to pull hard and fast. We needed to have 2-3 Mobs in camp all the time. Now this wouldn't normally have been a problem apart from the fact we played like a bunch of individuals, not as a team.
The MOBs in here are mean and there are a lot of them, we needed to be on the ball and we simply weren't.

Decorin Brawler

Amygdalan Knight

Mezzes being broken over and over and over, instructions being ignored, people taking long afk's, people wandering all over the pull zone. It was a fucking mess. Now admittedly after the last few patches there have been huge problems for all sorts of people. I'm not the only one who has been having crash problems and LD's so quite often there were several people (myself included) who weren't. online for instructions etc due to being LD.


However we basically we stuffed it completely. Every now and again we can show up and just play like complete Newbs, like a bunch of Ebays on their first raid and Thursday was just such a occasion. Part of the problem I think, is that we are experiencing low raid numbers again. We were trying to clear Tier 3 with 60ish people which meant our DPS was suffering significantly.


I don't get it. We worked our assess off to get into Time. We put in the hours, hell the Days, we learned the strats and did them over and over to get them down and kill out targets. Now we have actually reached our goal, now we are in the Candy land that is Time and fewer people are showing up.


Anyway. Once we had been bounced from the Zone after the Timer expired we went looking for other stuff to kill and Plane of Fire just happened to b in the process of popping.


So we slowly began to clear Fire. We had lost a few people after we had been booted from Time so DPSW was even lower. I was pretty knackered and pretty disappointed about our Time fail, but I decided to hang out to help. We pretty much trounced the fire mobs with no real problems. Everything got pulled and killed, even General Reparm fell over with no huge problems.

Quavonis Firetail

Magmaton

General Reparm

Blazzax the Omnifiend

That was it for me and I logged at about 2:00 am. Next week we are raiding three days in an effort to intensively learn Time and progress through to at least the Gods of Tier 4. I have cleared it with the GF and I will be there with bells on!.

/wave Nobby
I hope the trip is treating you and Sonja well!.

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Nine

09/04/04 Week Fifty Nine

We logged on full of anticipation. The final impediment on our trip to the Elemental Plane of Time was going to die tonight. Coirnav was up and he was on the menu. We did a fast clear (and I mean fast, this stuff just gets mown down by us now) of the Elemental Plane of Earthb. We just hammered Ginlotaken and his buddies.

But that was just the warm up. We flexed our muscles, stretched, stocked up on caffeine and headed down to the Plane of Water for Coirnav. Now I have to admit there was a certain amount of pessimism being felt in the Necro channel as we were forming up.

There were a large number of Non SA with us and there was quite a lot of stuffing around going on while strats were being called. Personally I had this one marked down as a fail. Just goes to show how much I know!. We formed up, got set up and everyone in place, I had my DI's up and was set up in the entrance to his lair good to go.

The pull was on. Everything was coming in smoothly, in fact we had to wait about 30 seconds for the 2nd wave spawn as the first one died so fast!. The AOE teams were doing a brilliant job. Root teams had their shit together and the pullers were bringing it all in a nice steady flow. Real names inc, down, move to the entrance, trash away, GO!.

I threw everything I could at him. Not a whole hell of a lot landed (I died before I could learn what did and did not land on him last time). So I managed to get Horror and Blood of Thule on him before he hit 60%. At that point I checked my health (full), hit the LB button and waited. WHAM. 6.2k of damage (damn I wish Life Burn critted). After that he was about 20% and I just started to chain tap him. I think I got to my 5th or 6th Mujaki when his health hit Zero and he fell almost directly at my feet!

Well we confirmed the first Coirnav kill last week wasn't a fluke. We not only nailed him on our second run, it was as sweet a kill as anyone could have managed.

So that was it for Water. After the Lewtz (and they were decently Phat this time) had been distributed we headed out to the Elemental Plane of Fire for some named clearing. Quite a lot of people logged out at this point. I was close to it myself but I really wanted to hang out a bit more and keeeeeeel a few more MOBs. I knew there was no way I was going to get to sleep so I figured I may as well be online a bit longer.

First to die was Quavonis Firetail. We only had about 40 online so the kill was a bit slow but what the hell he died.

Next up, my not favorite spider in the whole world, Babnoxis the Spider Bitch. In fact almost all of the spider mobs in EQ are stupidly hard to kill, what's up with that?. It was messy but hey, she died in the end and we didn't, which is a good thing.

That was it for me and I gated and logged. SA went on to clear Fire with Magmaton and Druav also dieng before they too began to log.

Wednesday we logged in and headed to the Plane of Time for the culmination of a years work. 

We formed up in the Plane and kicked off the Trials. Now we have absolutely no idea about the Trials so it was literally "Zone in and see what happens". I was assigned to a group and we headed to the Fire trial. For those who don't know the you have to complete 5 different Trials in Phase One, in one hour to move though to Phase Two. First time through I believe we got 3 out of the 5 trials complete before we timed out.

We got ready again, a few people left (for gods sake, be sitting at the Time zone in ready to go and in the raid channel, not on a bloody alt when we need you) We ran through the Trials again.

We got 3 down again, just different ones. So that was it. Our first run through the Trials wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad either. I have to say the time trials are actually a hell of a lot of fun too, they are certainly fast paced!. I've only seen Fire and Air so far but I'm sure I will get a run at all of them over the next few months.

Inferno Mephit

Now at some point during the night I was waiting on the call to zone in to a Trial and the GF came into the room and wanted to chat with me. So I turned away from the screen for a few moments. When I looked back, I nearly died of fright as I was confronted with close to the ugliest sight I have seen in 5 years of EQ. There it was covering my entire screen, hanging there. A close up of Pooby's ass!

One of the weird graphics glitches that have been happening after the switch to DX9 is this two tone effect on Xardans Robe. Apparently others see him in completely different colors entirely. He has also been told he is dressed in Green and White.

Xardan

Next week, more time Trials and I am reasonably confident Southern Armada will make it into Phase 2!