We are Live!...

Current Killing Blow count: 22

Well we finally got SA formed last night. Southern Armada now has a presence in 3 games, WoW, WAR and EQ2. I must admit I had a fall back, if we hadn't been able to get enough SA people on-line to be able to actually form the guild, I was going to join TOG. The Older Gamers are a very large Aussie based organisation who have a presence in multiple MMO's as well as Clans in FPS games, tactical ladders etc. They have been around for a while and I have seen them in several games in the past. When I have encountered their members they have always been decent people and if SA wasn't going to get off the ground that was basically going to be my new home.

However we managed to easily get enough people on-line and in The Inevitable City and Southern Armada went live in WAR. At the moment obviously we are only very small but we will use the same sort of recruitment system as Shinrai has adopted in WoW. Basically we make it a lot easier to get in, but its also a lot easier to get booted. We want to expand, but not at the expense of the SA way of doing things. Unfortunately Zarthaz has chosen to side with the forces of Order on an open RVR server and he will not be joining us. If we do get to a decent size who is to say we wont have an Order branch as well for Alts and something different. I was actually thinking we could call an order Guild "Northern Armada" :)

A very very small part of
The Inevitable City

I've been busy levelling up as fast as I can to get past all the stuff I have already done. I've made my way to level 15 and completed all of the current quests available in my Tier for Chaos and Greenskin. I was considering a little trip across to the Dark Elf lands to both have a look around and to check out their quests. Don't get me wrong I have still skipped hundreds of quests as I have outlevelled them, I've just managed to clear the quest lines in the particular areas that I have inhabited.

Beta was fun and this is how I looked at the end of my last day in the Beta before go live.
Some of the most fun quests I've done so far have been the ones in the Troll lands. The Troll models are just awesome looking with different colours and skin textures on each one, the quests are fun with a decent mix of fedex, kill that, PQ's etc. Its enough to keep you entertained and running about the place.

a Plaguewood Troll

I had an excellent couple of nights in Stonetroll Crossing both in open RvR and scenarios. I actually had 2 scenarios run to full term and time out. For those who haven't played WAR, Stonetroll is a chaos human scenario where you have to get a flag in the centre of the map and then take it to 3 different map areas to "capture" those areas for your side. There are a couple of caveats:
Once you have the flag you have two minutes to make it to and capture an area, if you don't the flag reseats and you start again
It takes 3 seconds of uninterrupted time to capture an area, if you are interrupted by attack you have to start the 3 seconds again.
The entire scenario takes 12 minutes.

So basically neither side could force the scenarios and they timed out, 12 minutes of battling the enemy!.

Usually stone troll is dominated by one side or the other and won or lost easily, so people are starting to learn how this stuff works and its getting harder.

Now I'm not saying this game is perfect, it definitely has bugs. One of them is Biletongue. He is the boss at the end of one of the Stonetroll PQ's. We completed the second stage and Biletongue became attackable, I engaged and he one shotted me. Just a touch over powered!.

Biletongue

I have also had several one on one and small group battles in the open field areas. In one I got utterly ganked as I ran into 3 bright wizards, one snared me, the other two smacked me down. Its ok, I took careful note of their names and I will see them again, oh yes I will!. I am hanging out for the anti snare buff BO's get at some point, snares really really drive me nuts as there seems to be at least 3-4 Order classes with a snare including a nasty one that the Bright Wizards get which is also a substantial DOT. As soon as I can break snares, the bloody bright wizards and Engineer's are toast.

I am a kiwi, but on the SA-WAR KOS list I have added a Guild called "fluffy kiwis" just cause the name is so stupid. Much like the guild "The Elite" on Darklands I take great pleasure in smacking any of them I have met during scenarios or RvR.

RvR stories
I was happily killing npc dwarves in droves when I noticed what I thought was a named Dwarf, so I charged him. He took off and I realised he was a player trying to sneak in amongst the NPC's to get some sneaky attacks in on us. He took off back to the cover of his warcamp and I didn't quite have the legs to catch him so I let him go, but I decided to keep an eye out for him as i figured he would be back. Sure enough a couple of minutes later he starts to sneak back. I kept an eye on him making like I didn't know he was there.

As soon as he was in range I made sure I had my snare up and charged him, I got the snare on him straight away and started to hammer him. He took off back to his base, but I made sure the snare stayed on and I followed him all the way into his base. I had 3 NPC's on me by the time I got the final blow on him, I'm sure he thought once he was inside his warcamp he was safe. I turned around, hit sprint, outpaced the npcs and went back to the PQ. About 15 minutes later he was back, this time with buddies and it turned into quite a long protracted battle. RvR rocks.

I got involved in another battle across a wall where Greenskin and Dorf PQ's are on opposite sides of the wall. We were happily outpacing the Dorf killing speed and they kept losing their PQ's. So they decided that it was going to be easier to come across and try and stop us. They attacked en mass while we were heavily engaged with large numbers of NPC's. The battle raged for a good 15 or so minutes with Dorfs and ourselves rezzing and racing straight back into the battle. We finally managed to complete the PQ with about 30 seconds to spare and the Dorfs at that point backed off. It was an awesome battle with no quarter given on either side. Kudos to the Dorf Skum for a great fight.

Undead Dorfs

Ulaa at 10th Level

I will update the screenie every ten levels so I can track how the 'look' changes.

No one is reading me!, Its a beautiful thing!

I have checked my blog stats and since I posted that SA has left VG, I haven't had a single reader. That's right not one!. And you know what, I'm bloody happy about it. When I originally started blogging, or as it was known back then "learning to write HTML code so I could write a website so I could put some shit in the web" there was never an anticipation of having actual readers.

What I was laughingly referring to as my website went through several iterations over the years, from my own personal one written when I was a student, to domainadmins.com written with a SQL back end and CSS. Eventually I moved on to this blog in the last year or so, because Google make it so much easier than I was ever able to code it myself. Plus its all backed up and available on Googles servers forever. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if I'm dead and you are still reading through this 100 years on.

I first started to get actual regular readers when I was writing the EQ raiding blog for Southern Armada. People started to ask in game and through emails "when's the next one going up?". What freaked me out most was when a couple of people posted from over seas. One guy posted from an Internet cafe in Spain. He was an Aussie touring Europe and he had found the raiding blog and read it end to end. Apparently it cost him an absolute fortune to sit in the Cafe all day but he wanted to see what happened at the end. I don't think I've ever been so complemented in my life!, someone actually paid real money, and money they couldn't afford, to read my words!.

When SA moved to World of Warcraft I tried to keep up the blogging but for various reasons that I have discussed in depth elsewhere, I simply couldn't find the commitment or the time. Again we moved, this time to Vanguard, I really enjoyed blogging Vanguard Raids, but again it came down to time availability. Its impossible to find enough time to be committed to actually play the games and raid as well, let alone spend the time to do all of that and spend 4-6 hours a week writing up an entertaining and reasonably intelligent blog.

I found it harder and harder to enjoy. We would have a good night in VG and get a good or particularly hard kill and I would get tells "This will be up on the blog tomorrow wont it!" which put all sorts of pressure on me. Now I don't mind pressure, I work in a very high pressure kind of job, but the pressure was starting to intrude on the relaxation time. I was feeling like I couldn't enjoy the game cause I wasn't spending time on the blog. Then I started to get weeks behind with the raids and I felt even worse. The issue got so bad I stopped blogging and I stopped playing which pleased nobody, least of all me.

What I am getting around to in all of this, is that with no more readers, the pressure is off. I can update when I want, about what I want again. I may blog regularly about WAR, or not. If I can get an SA chapter going in WAR I will and I may even blog about it. Whether we do start a chapter or not will depend on how many regular SA members decide to give the game a go. There may be none, in which case I will be very sad and I will be looking for a Guild as a new home in WAR.

I will however wait for the inevitable collapse and shakedown. What usually happens is that the quick to organise "pre-release guilds", in my experience usually fail spectacularly in a welter of recrimination and abuse.

I am trying to find a backup of my old website which had all the sigs that I ever made for anyone on display. I really hope I can find them cause some of them were really good and I would like to show them off again.

We are at the dawn of a new age

We are at the dawn of a new age.

Five years ago there was a term thrown around a lot by marketing people to describe those who were liable to pick up on new technology as soon as it arrived, that term was "early adopters" As with most things on the rapidly changing face of the web this term is already out of date. I believe there are so many emerging new fields that a blanket term like "early adopters" simply can't be applied.

Look at the rapidly changing tech behind blogging. This is a field that 2 years ago didn't exist. Blogging was something us geeks did in the privacy of our own homes, throwing ideas and concepts out into the virtual ether as fast as we could develop them. Fast forward 24 months and the parts of the 'Net that deal with Blogs and Bloggers even has its own name, the blogosphere. Politicians take it seriously, News organizations discuss the death of the Newspaper and both the political sphere and professional News organizations are debating whether Bloggers are Journalists and should their activities be protected by law?. All this because a couple of Geeks liked to tell the world how they were feeling via the medium of HTML.

Back to "early adopters" and the evolution of gaming. Currently we are eagerly awaiting what is generally accepted as being the 3rd generation of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. 3rd generation?, in Europe that's barely time to claim you have started a successful business, in genetics you haven't even started to see any sort of true variation, even in the development of something as new as the automobile, the third generation would only put us in the 1930's. As gamers and game developers we are only just beginning to explore the very edges of the massive virtual worlds that well eventually explode out of the development studios.

Men like Raph Koster, Peter Garriot (Lord British) and Brad McQuaid (Aradune) we will some day look back on as contributing to the foundations of the worlds of the future, both virtual and RL. Thanks to the efforts of these men and others like them in the last 5 years we have experienced an evolution of the English language the like of which hasn't been seen since the Angles ran into the Saxons a thousand years ago. The Leet of hackers became multiplayer FPS jargon, became MMO speak and has moved into the world as TXT language. The makers of games like Quake and Half-life forced a massive and rapid evolution of 3D video cards, the MMO makers took the expanded graphics capabilities and ran with them to create worlds that became more and more immersive.

People said there was no more space in the MMO market for another player, that the MMO genre was a limited one, there were even articles about the death of Massively Multiplayer gaming and then came Blizzard and the World of Warcraft. In the space of one day Blizzard blew all previous business models out of the water when they claimed a sell through of 600,000 units in the first 24 hours. A year earlier nobody would ever have believed that such a thing was possible. Within a year they were claiming 2,000,000 players in the Western world and talking about another 2,500,000 in China, within 3 years they are talking in terms of 10 million players.

Suddenly the MMO wasn't just an American phenomenon, the bulk of the cash flow was coming from outside the continental USA, people all over the world, mothers, fathers, grandparents, bankers, mechanics were switching on to this new thing called massively multiplayer and they were having an absolute blast. Those of us who had already played through Ultima On-line and Everquest watched this sudden eruption of new players with a wary eye. Would they stay?, would they change the genre? would all the carefully built social norms we had evolved from our previous gaming experiences disappear?.

The answer to all of these questions appears to be Yes. They have stayed, the genre is changing and so are the social models we had evolved. And yet we are only just starting, even Blizzards massive player base of a claimed 10 million accounts is minuscule compare to the largest selling games of all time. Biggest selling game of all time is Super Mario Brothers with sales of 40.24 million boxes. Final Fantasy (series) 32,000,000 Gran Turismo 17,000,000 Legend of Zelda (series) 36,000,000 The Sims (series) 100,000,000

More information can be found at: http://www.video-games-survey.com/software.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_video_games

Suddenly we are talking about serious money. When you consider the current business model of buy and then pay to play, executives at companies like Sony and Microsoft look at game sales like that and probably start to dribble. Imagine everyone who purchased Halo and Halo 2 signing up to pay Microsoft 10US$ a month to play on-line. The growth and decade long dominance of Sony as a player in the world of electronics was started with the Walkman but was continued with the Playstation. Its only in the last few years with the emergence of Microsoft into the console market that a true competition has evolved, something which is all good for gamers.

Once the big boys start playing, things tend to get moving fast, competition brings development (second only to war) throw the gaming toys into the mix with the world of the on-line warrior; fighting to keep the corporations out of your hard drive and TV, the fighters for digital freedom and open source , the communities of players itching to get their hands on the tools to modify gaming platforms and take them to places the original engineers simply could never have conceived of. Mix all of that into the emergence of broad band, into a world were data and money moves faster than anyone would have believed a decade ago.

The world wide web, once a place for freaks to download porn and share small programs they had written with their friends, has now broken into the homes and businesses of everyman, the modern business world would virtually collapse without the ability to push huge amounts of data around across international boundaries at high speeds. When all of those things come together in the heads of people who are programmers, bean counters, hardware and network engineers, artists and writers, all of whom are fundamentally Gamers, the future is unleashed. Give these teams access to faster CPU and GPU's, more and faster RAM and FSB, bigger and faster drive space and the bandwidth to push all this data around and the possibilities of what can be done with this tech become limitless.

Seamless, immersive living worlds become a reality. Gaming goes beyond simply being a "Game" and becomes a way of life. I think we will look back in 20 years and from our comfortable force feedback seats, wearing our 3D display cups over our eyes and we will remember that there was a time Before Warcraft (BW) and time Post Warcraft (PW) and that the time Post Warcraft evolved in ways we couldn't even begin to imagine as we sat in front of our desktop monitors and read actual text on a 2D flat screen.

We will come to a time where we are always on-line in our virtual worlds from our personal mobile networks. Software will flow from us like expelled breath, businesses will fight wars across binary battlefields of data and people once regarded as freaks and geeks, people who once proudly wore the tag "Gamer" will stride across the digital medium as Warriors and Wizards of the new reality, only now they will be working for countries, intelligence agencies and Corporations.

We are at the Dawn of a new age...

WAAAAGH! - Again

One of the things I've seen a lot of bitching about on various web boards is a perceived "imbalance" of sides. The usual whine goes something like "Waaah Order has 2x as many players, there is no way destruction can win". I have to say bollocks to that. I'm 15 now and I've been participating in PQ's, scenarios, solo questing, open RvR and battleground RvR. Every single thing that you do generates influence points, completing a questing, participating in a PQ etc. So even if you don't directly participate in RvR, you are still contributing to your sides victory simply by showing up and playing. You can PvE all the way to the top, apparently you can PvP all the way as well.

Influence points go to a running total of "who owns the zone". Battlegrounds and open RvR tend to generate more direct influence, however I've been in a lot of fights now and "who has more peeps" on the ground has sod all to do with victory. If a battleground has a massive imbalance it will shut down and send the players back to their start points.

Open RvR is a little different, if there is a massive imbalance it can make a considerable difference, however this game is strongly tactical and a well organised team will decimate a zerg rush. The focused fire power of a number of DPS classes will crush any target its directed at. Once you add in the use of siege weapons, which can change a teams advantage in seconds then there is a lot more to it than just the numbers of people engaged.

Once guilds start to get seriously involved (and they are beginning to) and people sort out how the game is played, RvR will be dominated by tactical squads of skilled players. A team that knows what they are doing will beat a zerg rush every time. I was involved in a keep siege last night where the enemy were using boiling oil to defend their gates and we were using siege weapons (buy able from your friendly local neighbourhood dealer for only 20silver!) to attack the defenders at the top of the towers. Open field RvR is one thing, fighting inside a building is a completely different experience and I'm really looking forward to large keep sieges and city fights!.

I went and had a look at The Inevitable City last night, the Chaos home town. I have to say WOW. I have no idea how it gets taken by the enemy but its HUGE. Ogrimmar looks like shite next to it and it stands up against even best of the VG dungeons without the corresponding hit from framerate.

One of the things I'm enjoying is that there is always a choice of things to do, you can PvP (solo or groups) you can PQ (solo or groups), you can run scenarios (groups), you can run battlegrounds (groups), you can solo quest or you can just explore. This is all without the advantages of a guild to chat and learn with. I ran around between all of the above last night, both in green skin lands as well as Chaos lands. At the moment all the good PvP is in Chaos territory as the cowardly Dorfs don't seem to want to defend their own lands. This is going to be a game that will be better the more people that play. If every PQ is full, every open RvR field is raging, battlegrounds are restarting every 10 minutes and players are everywhere this game will rock.

My one concern would be a lack of people. If a server is half full I think the experience will suffer as, like VG the world is truly massive. It wont feel "empty" like VG did as the world is very cleverly designed to keep your horizons low, there is always a new village or war camp just over the horizon. The fun in the game tho comes from its interaction with other players and without them the game will suffer. I certainly hope they have the technology to be able to run 10,000+ players simultaneously on a single server, then WAR really will be everywhere all the time!.

I really hope we can get an SA presence going in WAR. It will be a huge amount of fun to share the battles of this new world with my comrades in arms of the last decade.

WAAAAGH!

Ulaa Da Black Ork Level 14 beta

WAAAAAGGH! The NDA is down!.
I logged into Warhammer Beta last night and had an absolute blast. I fought in 5-6 PvP battles both in Battlegrounds and in open RvR zones. Now PvP is something I've never, ever done before and I loved it. After each fight you can see the "zone" capture tabs swaying one way or another between Order and Destruction as to who owns the area. Initially Destruction was dominant and the zone capture was definitely moving towards Orkies, then the Order guys started to rally and by the end of the night although order hadn't gained ground, destruction had definitely lost ground.

Reading the manual also showed me a lot of stuff they are planning for guilds and it all looks really cool. Being in a guild is going to be a lot more than just a shared chat channel, Guilds have levels and can affect and be affected by the world. Guilds will be able to design their own Heraldry and the Standard bearer for a Guild will provide the Guild with a definite advantage on the battlefield.

Public quests are cool, I participated in 3 different public quests, you can end up in a PQ without even realising it just by joining in a group that's in an area where a PQ is ongoing. All the quests I did come with a real sense of humour, the gobboe wolf rider wants you to kill the orcs boars to feed his wolves, the orc boar boy wants you to kill the gobboes wolves to feed his boars. Every thing that you do contributes to zone control and the War, from joining a PQ, fighting in PvP, to making and selling goods to other players.

PvP is going to be interesting, the green skins seem to have lots of Tanks and DPS, the Dorfs have lots of DPS and healers. Those bloody Dorf tank/healers are HARD to kill. PvP is easy to enter and a fight (at the level I'm at) is about 12 minutes. I have entered a couple of open PvP zones and had some small battles, Im really looking forward to getting thousands of people on line and having huge battles. I got XP and a title for dieing so much in one battle :). I got an achievement for the numbers of criticals I had done in PvP. The lorebook is fantastic, its a game unto itself and ALL the lore/knowledge for the game is in there if you want to read it.

Orc quests are fun, yes there is the usual go and get me X, but there is always a twist. Go and get the head of this dorf, take it back to town and put it on a spike cause it will make this gobboe laugh, talk to the gobboe once done. Go and find unconscious dorfs, put them in this barrel and then kick it off the side of the battlements , we are having a competition to see who gets the barrel furthest etc etc

I am seeing higher level Black Orcs around, I can tell they are Black Orcs because of the model and I know they are higher level because of the cooler gear and adornments they have. I also know whether a BOrc has gone down a defensive or a DPS path from their gear.

Graphically, the world has a sort of WoW look, but I wouldn't mistake one for the other and the models look utterly different. Think WoW landscapes, burned, strewn with debri and corpses and Vanguard models. I have this nasty feeling I am going to be spending a lot of time killing filthy dorfs, then filthy humies, elvses etc. I knew from the minute I stepped into the world that I was in an orc encampment and that I was in the gathering of the next WAAAAGH and exactly who my enemies are.

This game rocks and I would highly recommend peeps giving it a shot.

I've been playing for about 5 days solid now. I haven't found any of what I would call major bugs yet. I've seen one graphics anomaly (one mob in a bunch of about 20 was all warped) I have had one CTD. That wasn't to do with the application, it was related to the authentication server crashing. I had one piece of equipment that I couldn't equip till I logged out and back in again.

The PvP and PvE streams are beautifully integrated. You get PvE quests in PvP areas and vice versa. There are PvP quests around the killing of different enemy classes (they say it much better in the quest but its like kill a dorf priest, engineer and warrior) and you get gold and XP as a reward. You get a PvE quest to scout an area (such as a remote tower) in a PvP area. There are literally hundreds of quests.

I have finished Tier One (thats a PvP tier) in Orc lands, so now whenever I enter a PvP zone at level 12 I get a warning and then I get turned into a chicken!. So I have moved up a Tier to Tier 2 and I am starting to PvE and PvP in there. To give you an idea of how much content there is, I would guess-timate that I have done maybe 30% of the content in the Ork/Gobbo PvE T1 zones (about 4-5 "zone areas" in each zone, about 2-3 PQ's per zone area). I have done about 20% of the PvP content and participated in only 2 of the battle grounds in those areas. I spent some time in the Chaos Zones doing PQ's, quests and PvP and I've done maybe 10% of that content. I could easily create alts in each area cause they are all so utterly different.

PvP seems to be run in two ways. There is zone based PvP where you sign up to a battle queue and when there is enough people a battle is created. This can have as many as 36 players per side involved. I've seen 3 battlegrounds so far, one in Chaos, two in Green skin lands. Think WOW battlegrounds but with different objectives, in some its hold certain points, in others its kill the messenger etc. Then there is open world PvP, where you are warned when you enter the area that you are in a PvP area. each area will have multiple objectives to take and hold. There will be quests in the RvR area (Both PvE and PvP quests) you can choose to do them or not. Two I liked were "Blood on your hands" and "Green Faced Killa" which are repeatable and involve killing enemy players for an xp reward.

The designs of the battlegrounds are the same of the open world PvP, so after doing an instanced based battleground, eventually you will reach the real world area which is the same place and recognise it. The PQ's work in the same way, you will get a PVE quest to go to a certain area and kill stuff and on the way there, or while there, you may run into an area that's a part of a PQ. Joining a group in a PQ or anywhere in the world is as easy as "show me open groups" button and "join" button. PQ's have their own rewards based on something called "reknown" which you earn by taking part in PQ's. PQ's also have RvR elements. You may be doing a PQ to kill the Dwarf attackers and be busy killing NPC's. The Dwarf PC's will have a PQ to kill Ork Attackers. Whoever finishes first resets both of the PQ's, so you could be interfering with the enemies plans. War really is everywhere.

Some players may flag themselves RvR and attack you while you are doing a PQ under cover of the NPC's (I've had this several times) so then you are fighting PC's and NPC's together. Its a blast.

A new look...

As you may have noticed there is a slightly new look here. This is actually a cut and paste of the work of 3 different blogsters and I will be crediting them with links as soon as possible. Unfortunately I am sitting here freezing my ass off and I wont be doing it tonight.

Southern Armada has left Vanguard as you may have guessed. I still think its the best game no one ever played but, probably unsurprisingly, I feel deeply betrayed by both the game and its makers. I think the new guys have done really well to get VG to where it is and in 12-18 months its really going to be superb, but I wont be there.

Currently I'm in EVE, I'm playing a little bit of WoW. Oddly enough I'm really enjoying the current run through WoW. I have a regular group Sundays and Wednesdays and we are playing through the classic content and just taking our time with it. Its actually a lot of fun to not be blasting through content as fast as I can just to reach 'raid' level.

I have also been seriously looking at WAR the soon to be released Warhammer MMO from Mythic Entertainment. I have never been a big fan of PvP ever since the days of getting repeatedly ganked by 12 year olds in the early days of UO. Two reasons really, there has never been a game (apart from EVE and Lineage2) where PvP actually mattered. In most mainstream games, EQ, WoW are the two main ones I am thinking of, there is no real point to PvP. Its simply something that has been thrown in to keep a certain portion of the populace happy. WoW definitely has done PvP better than EQ ever did and EVE and L2 have proved that you can provide meaningful PvP in a mostly controlled fashion.

Now the chaps who are making WAR are the same people who really introduced structured PvP to MMO gaming. Mythic Entertainment built a little game called "Dark Age of Camelot" (still around by the way) which encouraged players to PvP in a structured way using an architecture which they called Realm vs Realm (RvR). The idea was that you would join a side and battle other sides for control of points throughout the world. Even in DAOC there was no early point to the RvR apart from the glory of owning a control point, little by little they added in reasons to fight with buffs and gear which could be gained from PvP in the world.

WAR uses the same RvR structure but has taken the lessons learned by Mythic as well as incorporating the Iron Grip(tm) that Games Workshop maintains over their IP and built a game where PvP and RvR matters, where every single thing that you do contributes in some fashion to the war effort and the 25 years of Warhammer history and backstory is honored. They have built a game where you are introduced to PvP right from the start instead of racing to the top levels and finding 'Oh now is when I start to PvP'. Its not out yet and the NDA hasn't lifted so all this is pure speculation, but from what I am seeing so far in the various public utterances of fans and Mythic is that the game is fun!.

WAR won IGN best game of E3 2008, Gamespy top ten game of E3 2008, Voodoo Extreme best game of E3 2008 so it seems like its not complete crap and what the devs are telling us is true.

The proof is of course, in the playing.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Fifteen

Sunday 13.04.08
We were very low on people for this fight. Sundays are an optional raid night for us so some weeks it can be a little low on available people. We waited a lot longer than we normally would for people to log on but in the end we engaged with only 16 in the raid. I had some link problems with repeated link deaths, so I was put on the left side as back up off tank and we had a Pally and a Warrior as primary pickup tanks. Now the APW loot must seem somewhat lopsided to anyone who has spent any time in there. The ratio is definitely on the side of Medium wearers, then Heavy wearers and finally the Lighties get a look in. Now the mighty Wavebreaker appears to be on the other side of the fence, he drops almost exclusively light stuff. So it surprises me that we get so few light wearers showing up for the Sunday fights.

We engaged Wavebreaker and the right side pickup tank and his backup went down very quickly against the first set of pops, due to very unfortunate positioning. So I left my spot on the left and and picked up the adds. We stayed like that all through the fight and the big boy gave up his lootz very quickly.

We then did more scouting work on Warders. I know we have to learn the fight, but it just feels like we haven't got this at all. We form up, pull one, wipe and do that repeatedly. Its just not a whole lot of fun. We have never even dropped a single Warder or even managed to get one under control.

Monday 14.04.08
I started to crash out repeatedly again. For this night it seemed my disk issue was sort of back. At one point I was repeatedly losing both disks to "Unexpected removal of the device" errors. Its like when you pull out a USB drive without removing it properly. Its the same error message and its bloody frustrating to see when its being applied against a SATA2 disk which is in use at the time. In the end after repeated reboots and running chkdsk multiple times it just sort of came right and its been good ever since. I have this feeling I will be going through bouts of disk problems, probably until I rebuild my PC again

We decided to have a bit of a retro night and we were a bit all over the place. First we cleared the entrance, X77 first then an easy x83 kill. No problems with X83 at all this time. The Enraged is definitely on Farm status.

x77

X83

Then it was backwards to the hub and a back clear to Shadowsoul and then Travix. We had one small issue where one of our Bards forgot to call the curse and we had a large angry skele pop in the middle of our raid during the Travix fight. He was quickly off tanked and Travix went down without any problems. We are definitely getting the hang of this APW thing.


We turned around and headed back to the Hub where Zaraax proceeded to show us his ass repeatedly. The problem we are having is the adds. Do you charm them?, kill them?, AOE them? he didn't go down this week but we are definitely getting closer. Lots of debate though on which are the right tactics to use and where exactly to engage him.

Thursday 17.04.08
Cartheon, Izemgelki the Lorekeeper goes down first. We had some serious glitches in the cages with multiple pulls, almost wipes and waaaaaayy to many mobs in camp. In the end we comfortably cleared out the Lorekeeper and Bookkeeper and took it to Vahsren. We had an accidental aggro of the two books and had to off tank them pretty quickly without any real prep. We got down to healing Garbar the MT with a single healer, but in the end Vahsren dropped.



Subjugator, dead again.

We engaged Palnepipe very late. It was almost 1130pm before we pulled him for the first time. No real issues with the fight and he was snuffed by Midnight.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Fourteen

Sunday 06.04.08
This is going to be another late update, the reason for which I will explain in this post. I'm a week behind all the time and I'm trying to catch up. I may not achieve that till Anzac weekend but I will try.

Wavebreaker goes down again. It was a long and ugly evening. For some reason we just couldn't put it together for the first couple of fights and his adds kept escaping us. There was much debate on the usage, methodology and usefulness of counter casting, but I think the fourth run at him proved the point. The counter casters kept it up and he only managed to get off two waves of adds, both of which were handled quickly. It took so long to kill him that we never really moved on to anything else and that was it for the night.


Monday 07.04.08
All the healers were asleep. Tanks were dieing left, right and center. The Inc would be called, mobs in, tank picks it up, positions it and dies. Next tank up, starts to build aggro, dies, third tank up, finally kills the mob, and this was on the trash!. It got better later on but from a tanks point of view the early part of the night sucked. Izemgeli the Lorekeeper decided to leash a few times but he died in the end.

We set up and raced through the cages. The Cartheon Lorekeeper was the first to go down and we headed further into the Cartheon Bookkeeper.

The Bookkeeper was a nightmare the whole raid was bouncing around the room like a box full of rubber balls. I actually ended up on a flaw in the wall at one point and sat and watched the fight from about 30 feet in the air. We spawned and nailed the Librarian in one sitting. I know there are better, faster ways to kill him, but we do it with one tank and non physical DPS. It may not be the best/fastest but it works for us.

The Subjugator gets snuffed. We have never lost to this guy so I don't know what it is he is supposed to subjugate. With a name like that he should be the boss mob of the entire zone!.

who went down without a reset on our third try. Meanwhile myself and We get to Palnepipe, set up and pull him fast. Its one long fight and we seem on the verge of failure all night. Mortewalon reset twice as the Pally in charge of him kept getting knocked back, so the raid leaders called the switch to Tremeeli and we killed him instead. Back to MortewalonGarbar are sitting on Palnepipe and keeping him occupied. Once we began to dance with the Gnome it all started to go wrong. Sanfy died with aggro and Garb picked Palnepipe up again. I crashed at a 10% threshold, Garb went down as I came back in, Nym went down and I picked it up again. I died at 40% and we played aggro bounce with the Sorcerers till the end of the fight. It was a hell of a fight but he did give up his phat phat loots in the end.

Palnepipe in the middle of room after bouncing all over the damn raid.

One thing that's seems to have come back for me since GU4 is really bad LOS issues. I took the screen shot below of me fighting a mob that is at least 15 feet away from me and facing the other way. I'm really glad I have "Shadow Step", an ability which ports me behind the mob, other wise I wouldn't get a hit on about 10% of all mobs pulled as I would be trying to find where the mob is really standing.

I was running North from the Guild hall when I came across the shot below. Looming out of the mist is a huge tower I had never seen before. Sitting on the edge of the jungle just offshore, it looked absolutely amazing in game.

I have been doing lots of diplomacy lately. I'm trying to build up my skill to make me that little bit more useful to the guild. Unfortunately the Diplomacy fan site VGTact's information is largely wrong. I spent a lot of time running around looking for quests/mobs that didn't exist before I realised that. They have a Wiki which hasn't been updated since the last big Diplomacy changes, sometime around GU3. I was lucky enough to chance on about 5 diplomacy mobs all close together in the Dwarf City of Bordinars Cleft. Ive out-leveled them now and I'm trying to find another decent spot to do diplomacy at level 13. If anyone can point me towards a good diplomacy resource please let me know!.

I had to take a shot of the Entrance to Bordinars Cleft. Its massive and hugely impressive as you approach it. They maybe short but they know how to build stuff!.

Cool Models in Vanguard file #768: Axle the Necromancer pet.

Thursday 10.04.08
home 6PM, now Okay. The reason all this is getting slow is that I got promoted this week. I was approached by my manager and then by his boss last week, and I took over running a team of 11 guys this week. Its a hell of a lot of new work as my current role isn't being immediately back filled. So I am trying to run 5-6 large projects, manage a team of extremely different personalities, keep my new boss happy, deal with normal problems and do large chunks of my own old job as well. I'm not getting home till well after 7PM. Considering I start at 7:45PM its not a bad days work. It will take me a bit of getting used to until I can sort things out but at the moment my freely available time has just disappeared.

DPS sucked again. We started off with only about 14 in the raid and headed into the Entrance wing. It actually took us two attempts to drop X77. That hasn't happened since the first time we tried to kill him!.

R5 snuffed it in the blink of an eye and we moved into X83's room. Now as I'm sure you remember we had our asses very thoroughly handed to us buy this guy the last time we met. We were determined not to let it happen again.

We set up and got x83 to 20% then wiped again. We spent so long getting ready and making sure everyone knew the strat that we had a spark roamer pop mid fight. Unfortunately he took out half the healers before we knew what had happened so we took the wipe and started again. The second run was a lot smoother, we took x83 to 15% but then wiped again. Just like last time when we completely failed to drop him after about 8 runs, we were having problems with aggro bouncing off the tanks onto DPS and healers. Now everyone was being extra careful, so we were sure that it wasn't our team, it had to be some in-game mechanic. I'm not sure why but it was decided that we would run past him and set up in the next room, to get more space for maneuver maybe. So he was trained away and the raid ran through the doorway and set up in the next room.

We set up and pulled him again. This time the kill was perfect and now we know his secret. Its the simple things that screw you up and in the case of x83 this is 100% true. This fight is a lot tougher than we expected because we overlooked one simple thing. Basically we assumed something and overlooked the possibility that he was doing more than one effect at a time. Anyway without explaining it in detail and spoiling it for those who haven't done him, we got him and he is on farm status.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Thirteen

Sunday 30.03.08
As usual I placed myself on the top of the hill above the Wavebreaker kill zone and logged out, leaving myself ready for Sunday. I logged in a bit late and everybody was already there and ready for buffing. We got set up and pulled Wavebreaker very quickly. It was all going really well until me (right side off tank) and my back up off tank got snuffed simultaneously. The adds have a freeze type stun which seems to turn you into what looks like a block of ice. Wavebreaker also has an AOE foot stomp called Shatter, my advice is don't be freeze stunned and in the radius of Shatter, as it took two tanks out in less than an second!.

We setup and went again. This time it all went beautifully and we managed to keep him down to two waves of adds. It certainly took a while to whittle him down, but over all the whole fight was as smooth as silk. The first wave of adds were handled and positioned quickly and efficiently. We wiped them out and moved straight back to the big guy. I stayed off to the right, in range to add DPS but ready for the next set of adds, which in the end never came. Dropping him was almost an anticlimax!. The loot was definitely in the Dress Wearer sphere which was great as the loot we are getting in APW is definitely medium/heavy leaning so far. I think we will be back for this guy several times over the next couple of weeks even if just to make the dress wearers happy.

Since we had time, we figured we would go and have a shot at the Warders of Nusibe. Now we had a go at these guys a couple of months ago, just before APW came out and they spanked us good and hard and sent us home. Now we have a lot better gear, some upgraded spells and improved DPS we thought we would give it another go. After an hour or so and never even looking close to dropping any of the Warders we left it and I think we will come back to these guys in another couple of weeks. This is one tough encounter to figure out.

Monday 01.04.08
We formed up and headed into the Entrance wing again. I think at this point we can say we are still in farming mode. When APW was first released there was a lot of talk on the VG forums about how fast some of the first APW kills occurred and how fast APW was completely cleared. The forum cowboys declared that APW was now "done". They decided that since APW was all finished, VG was now going to be boring again. I think a lot of that kind of overly aggressive talk comes from people who have never raided at all, or people who are only just getting into raiding for the first time. Those of us who could be called veteran raiders, and this goes for any group of raiders who have spent a few games playing at this level, would agree that the first kill is only the first step. Every time a raid fight is released, its nice to have the first kills sure, but what you are aiming for is the next expansion. You go into every raid with the idea that when you have conquered this expansion, the next one will require you to have spent several months gearing up in order to conquer the next expansion.

I would suspect that when the next raid level dungeon is released, it will be balanced around the idea that you and your guild have already spent several months gearing up in APW first. If they build a raid expansion and balance it against non-APW guild power, then the APW guilds will tear through it like its not there. This of course will cause all those people who haven't spent any time in APW to claim its unfair and that they should have equal access to the new content the same as the long experienced raid guilds. I'm here to tell you now, it just doesn't work that way. If your guild plans on Raiding Vanguard for the long term, then I would suggest getting into APW as soon as possible and for as long as possible. You will need to hit mobs repeatedly in order to get the specific pieces of gear to power up your tanks, to get the spells for your casters etc.

I suspect these are the primary reasons we are spending so much time in the Entrance and Cartheon wings of APW. We could probably begin to push into the other wings now, but we want to make sure that every member who wants an item or a spell from these two wings, has that item or spell. The more DPS, the more healing power the more mitigation, the better for the next set of mobs we tackle.

We smacked X77 like he was made of butter.

Rather than fight through to the Enraged x83 and the General, we turned around and headed back to the portal. We gated back to the hub and began to fight our way back into the Entrance wing. First up was the Shadowsoul. I might stop mentioning him, even for a mini named he is pretty weak. We took down Archon Travix without any problems, looted, and moved back to the hub for a shot at Zaraax.

This was really our first serious try at Zaraax. We have had a go at him before but never with any serious intent. Its usually more along the lines of; we are here, lets give it a go. Now although we never got Zaraax to less than 80%, this one has to be counted as a win. We found a way to slow his adds and roamers, we found a much better spot to kill him and we were definitely improving against him every time. This looks like its going to take some time to learn but its going to be a satisfying kill when we get it.

Thursday 04.04.08
Straight into the Cartheon wing, smacked Izemgeli.

Thursday raids are a funny one for us. We swap Wednesday and Thursday to give as many people as equal a chance as possible to comer along to the raids. For some reason Wednesday is DPS night and Thursday isn't. I check the raid window at the start of the night and apart from our one Monk, we had no dedicated DPS classes, no bards. We were also short our usual Necromancer as his PC fell down and went boom, so we are down about 2K hp on the tanks. This makes killing anything in APW a hell of a lot harder. We headed in as fast as possible and considering our lack of DPS, it really wasn't very fast at all. We headed into the cages, went left and smacked the Cartheon Lorekeeper with the anticipation of spawning Vahsren the Librarian. Once the Lorekeeper was down, we headed back to the start room and began the pulling to clear through the middle.

We never moved from that spot for the next 1-2 hours. Without the DPS, we just couldn't keep up with the spawn rate in the cages. Add to that the occasional wipe and it was just a long hard grind. When we saw the server down message from SOE I have to admit it was almost a relief to get it over with. Rubbing your nose against a grindstone is a quaint saying, its not a lot of fun to actually do.

Servers went down at 10:30 and we were out of there.

Vanguard Southern Aramada Raids Week Twelve

Monday 24.03.08
I know, I know I'm a week late. The week of hardware problems put me behind in my writing, so I am going to try and rush this one a little more than I normally would and get it out a bit faster. Monday was the last day of the Easter holidays here in Sydney so we were a little short on people. I believe the Sunday raid was called off completely as there weren't enough people to attack anything at all. I had every plan to attend the Sunday raid, right up until I found out we had people staying overnight in my computer room. That made it a bit hard to sit here with the speakers going, TS blaring and have people trying to sleep at the same time. Ah well.

Initially we started Monday with two groups only. We headed in to the Entrance wing, more on a "lets see how this goes" than any sort of expectation we would get too far. Surprisingly we ended up doing really well. We quickly cleared through to a Malfunctioning X77 and with about 14 people in the raid, engaged and dropped him. The fight was as smooth as silk and we continued on without a backward glance.


Next up was the not so mighty Guardian R5. He snuffed it in what I suspect may have even been record time.

At this point it's a long grind to get to Enraged X83, so it was decided we would backtrack and head to the storehouse for a run at Archon Travix. We headed out from the storehouse with the anticipation of a quick run through to Travix and with only 2 and a half groups we were quickly smashing our way though the Entrance wing. Akym the Assassin was the first in line to die.

Akym was closely followed by the Shadow Soul. Even for trash named, these guys both drop some nice gear, it is of course mostly /grats Rot with us which is sad, but occasionally we get a newbie come along and its usually decent upgrade gear for them.

Finally we get to Archon Travix, Nym is up front and we smoke the tall, skinny swine. This was clean a kill as we have ever had on Travix.

This time he was kind enough to drop one of my 'wanted' items. The Drape of the Coalition is a great back piece and a nice upgrade from my Hegnarians cloak. No one else rolled on it!. I couldn't believe it. I gained some mitigation, but I'm maxxed out anyway and I gained 155 HP!. Actually I think all the other tanks already have it so its not so surprising that no-one else rolled. I am slowly approaching my goal HP of 12k. I think at this point its time to start looking at carefully dropping out items I have gained purely for the mitigation and start looking for items which will increase my melee damage percentages. It would be nice if it was possible to see what your true mitigation was instead of just 65.01% against level 50. I'm fairly sure my true Mit would be up in the 80's but I cant tell.

We had several shots at Zaraax, more to see what the fight would involve than any real expectation of killing him. It was getting late at this point and I think we had 2-3 attempts before we decided to call it a night. This guy intriques me I must admit, he is supposed to be the toughest fight in APW, tougher than the General, but we keep bypassing him. I'm not so intrigued that I want to stay out of the Cartheon wing, I really want to clear that whole wing. I reckon we should be able to get Cartheon done in one night and put it on farm status.

That was really it for Monday night, I think we all signed off about 11:30 or so and headed to bed.

Thursday 27.03.08
A full raid this time. All set up and good to go we headed straight in for Palnepipe. Izemgeli the Lorekeeper fell down and went boom. He dropped the Plated Boots of Izemgeli which, again, no one else rolled for!. Woot another 114 HP!, dropped a little bit of Mitigation and picked up some additional damage!. I'm at 11,409 hp now when fully raid buffed.

We cleared quickly through the Cartheon Wing with only one major wipe. Basically we pushed a little too far, too fast when we were passing through the cages. We were in the middle of the second room when we started to get roaming adds, now normally this would not be too much of a problem and the CC team would have them nailed down as fast as they are inc. Unfortunately we seemed to get unmezzable after unmezzable. To start with, the tanks were picking them up nicely and they were being off tanked with the raid smacking them down one by one. Then we ran out of tanks as each tank was already on a Mob and we still had unmezzables roaming in. We almost had it and I think we possibly could still have survived with each tank on multiples, but the wipe was called so we took it and reset quickly.

This time we were a little bit more patient and we waited till we had a good clear way through the main cages. We made it to Variumus the Subjugator in about the same time it took us to reach Palnepipe's room last week.

Once Variumus was out of the way we began the process of clearing through the rest of the wing to Palnepipes room. We definitely have the multi pull thing down now, its a lot easier with 3 tanks that's for sure and doesnt involve lots of Necro sacrifices on the mob split. So we set up for Palnepipe and quickly have the little swine inbound. The brains of the outfit have modified the plan a little and we are going to drop the body guards before Palnepipe the Mastermind. To avoid the stun we are keeping Palnepipe above 90% while the bodyguards are killed.

Sanfy is on the Cold Bodyguard with Nym on the Fire bodyguard, Garbar is primary and I'm secondary on Palnepipe. It all starts pretty slowly as we get everything positioned and begin to wind up damage on Sanfy's target, I think everyone was trying to be really careful about their aggro control. We have wiped in front of this guy too many times and everyone was determined he is going down. The first bodyguard drops and the raid moves across to the second. At this point Garbar is doing white damage and taunting, no specials, I have auto attack off and I am just taunting. Palnepipe seems to have some kind of radius damage though and he is still hitting me with some kind of damage, every now and then I get an aggro reaction special pop up, which should only happen if I am getting hit. However at no point do I actually see any damage land on me, so Im not sure why I am seeing the specials.

The second Bodyguard drops and the raid heads across to Palnepipe. At this point I start to ramp up the damage and aggro. I am throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him, nukes, dots, debuffs, snares, attacks that ignore mitigation, anything I can do to piss him off. He drops through 90 and he is still stuck on Garabar. At 80 I see the aggro switch to a caster and know Garb is stunned. I pick him up and we continue on with his HP slowly dropping. *SPOILER AHEAD READ NO MORE IF YA DON'T WANT TO KNOW*

I think you can guess where this is going, roughly every 10% he lands a one minute long stun on the main tank. So each tank in turn has to be ready to pick up aggro as the last tank is stunned. We quickly adjusted the fight, the brains of the outfit were rotating tanks through MT duties as each one was stunned. Palnepipe dropped like the little girly man he really is and we had him dead first run!.

What a blast!. This is a fun fight!. I have to say I used to think PoP was possibly the best series of raid fights I had been involved in, followed by some of the GOD fights (both EQ references for those who aren't sure) but I have been converted to APW. The designer of these fights and this dungeon needs huge kudos for the way the whole thing is put together. I look forward to each new fight as each time we have no idea what we will encounter next. By the way if you are ever in Palnepipe's room, Look up!. I have a screenshot here but it really doesn't do the view justice.

Next up its Athriss, we can see her through the doorway once Palnepipe is dead, we have shadow diamonds to do some summoning in the Portal room but we really want to push through to the next Boss. We enter the room of Athriss Essal which in itself, is well worth the journey. She stands beneath a huge square that hangs from nothing in the middle of the room, she emotes that she summons energy from this huge cube during the fight. She has some of the coolest looking spell animations, golden spheres which jet out of her hands and explode on her target.

We have NFI about this fight so the first couple of engages are just about learning what it is that she does. We didnt spend too long here, I think we got 3 engages in before we called it a night and headed to bed. I can see us spending some time with her as this is looking like a complicated little fight.