Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eight

Monday 25.02.08
We have visitors!. I received a very pleasant note the other day from Jelaza Binjali a Ranger of the Nova guild on Seradon. Apparently she has been following the adventures of Southern Armada for quite some time and stopped by to say she enjoyed the blog. Thank you very much Jelaza, its always nice to know that someone's actually reading this thing!.

This screen shot was taken on the way to the Jagund the Wavebreaker raid. It was one of those moments that occasionally happen in Vanguard when you round a corner or come over a hill and the view is just breathtaking. One of the great things about this game is that anything you can see you can reach. Everything in one of your views is an object you can travel to, its not one of those nasty backdrops that hints but doesn't deliver. I've said it before and I will say it again, this is definitely one of the best looking games on the market today and easily the prettiest MMO.

We have decided to do an extra raid a week. So for those who are interested we are going to start tackling the overland bosses of Vanguard. Its not for loot nor glory as they have all been killed before and the loot isn't that fantastic, its just for the sheer fun of killing something new and interesting. We were quite short of people for the Wavebreaker encounter and knew sod all about it, so we pulled him the first time with no expectations of actually killing him. I think we got him down to about 90% before he popped adds that we weren't ready for and we wiped. Over the course of the next few hours we pulled him repeatedly and wiped repeatedly. I'm not going to go into too much detail for the sake of those who haven't tried him out yet, suffice it to say we were a tank, a healer and some DPS short. Everyone had a blast and I'm really looking forward to go back and giving him another shot. I don't think he is a tough fight, we just need the right mix of people.

For those who haven't tried them, I can highly recommend the overland raid mobs for a bit of fun. They don't require the investment of time that APW does and they can be knocked over in fun couple of hours in an evening. Pulling Jagund is an adventure in itself!.



Formed up into APW and headed into the Cartheon wing again. Someone cast a Kobold illusion on me which I thought was really cool!. So here I am as Ulaa, the kobold Dread Knight!.

We headed in the same way as last time and quickly met and dealt with Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. As we were moving towards the cages we ran into a new named. Now this new Boss wasn't up the last time we came through so we have no idea where he came from. We engaged Vahsren the Librarian at the entrance to the cages. I think he went down to about 86% before we wiped against him. Once we were back in and ready we tried again and wiped again. However after the second reform he didn't roam back to us. We didn't know where he had gone and Zarthaz couldn't see him anywhere. So we shrugged, said "Welcome to Vanguard" and moved deeper in.
The cages are an interesting space, obviously someone in the Vanguard design team really doesn't like the 'sit, pull, kill' method of raiding so there isn't a lot of places in APW where you can do that. The cages take things a step further again, its a space where the spawn time is so fast you have to keep moving through. Everyone needs to be on the ball and everyone needs to do their job. Mobs are coming at you thick and fast here and you really cant stop and hang around. The first safe spot is occupied by the Cartheon Bookkeeper. He isn't a tough fight and drops nothing, so we aren't entirely sure of his purpose. When you engage him he seems to be reading a book and chanting, we think there is a possibility that killing him weakens something further in, but we don't really know.

Move through the cages a bit further and you run into the Cartheon Bookkeepers twin, the Carthon Lorekeeper. He has a huge knock back and is a pain in the ass as a tank. I actually enjoy the fight tho, there is something about flying through the air that makes me think of kids and swings. Once we had the Lorekeeper cleared we decided to use his room to try and pull Vahsren the Librarian who seemed to be roaming in the area. It didn't take long to have him inc and Nymeria the little pink tank, soon had him engaged. I can't remember how many shots we had at him, it may have been 2 or 3 before he died. Again not a spectacularly tough fight but with the usual APW twist. I don't want to spoil it for anybody so I will just say, there isn't a lot for the melee classes to do in this one.


So we moved down the cages and made it to the down lift. I remembered my mistake from last week and managed not to wipe out the entire raid again. We formed up and cleared forward from the lift entrance. There seemed to be a quest NPC to the north of us and there was a named ahead so it was Onward we go!. Zarthaz had Varimurus the Subjugator inbound very quickly and he died very quickly. Again not a spectacularly tough fight. It's not the Bosses that take so long for us to conquer in APW, it's all the trash clearing. To be honest that's fine with me, you have to wade through a lot of dross to get diamonds. The boss fights are generally so good, such a great balance between difficulty and frustration that the trash clearing isn't quite so painful. Its not like in EQ in the Planes of Power expansion where you literally (in some cases) had hours and hours of trash clearing to do before you go to the boss encounter.


Thursday 28.02.08
You aren't going to believe this. To break up our week it was decided that we would go back through the entrance wing. We had a couple of APW newbies who were going to need some arms and there are a couple of other things in the entrance wing that people still want. So we formed up at the entrance lift, buffed up and headed down. The plan was to clear the whole wing in one night and at first it was looking damn good for it. I am seriously looking forward to the day we can just breeze through the entire entry wing without pausing. The usual suspects died fast and clean. Malfunctioning X77, Guardian R5, were smacked like they deserve to be. Then we got to Enraged X83. Not a problem I hear you say, you have already killed him repeatedly, he died on your second ever shot at him. Well tonight wasn't our night.

Malfunctioning X77 hanging about waiting to die

Guardian R5 giving up more Rot Loot

We wiped against this guy repeatedly. Initially I was getting quite angry with the rest of the raid. The tanks were doing their level best, we were throwing every aggro tool we had at him, everything including the kitchen sink was being used. The first time he left the tanks at the transition and went to smack the raid, I figured it was just someone being enthusiastic with the DPS. The third time it happened I was getting pissed off, why couldn't these people pay attention and just do their damn jobs?!. By the 5th time we were realizing something was wrong. He was aggro-ing on people who were FD and had never actually engaged him. No damage, no healing, no spells, no nothing, yet that person managed to pull him off the tanks during the change. By about the 8th wipe we began to figure out we just weren't going to beat him that night. It was beginning to get seriously depressing.

The 10th wipe?...

Now we know we can kill this guy, almost every kill has been flawless, until tonight. SOE is stealth patching some of the upcoming changes for Game Update 4. This means that on the actual day of release there is a lot less for you to download and a lot less load on their servers. However we have already seen a number of accidental releases of test code onto the live servers and I believe that this is an ongoing problem. As proof I have a buff in my tool bar which isn't supposed to be live yet, but the icon and tool tip were patched for Dread Knights several months ago, replacing an already existing ability. I am beginning to think that some of the "test" code is ending up live, so we are in a position where some abilities, some mobs, some game functionality is being changed, however not all of it. So a change may be on test which is supposed to affect ability A, or a mob has been buffed up to be tougher, or a spell function has changed to counter a new Mob ability. So they stealth patch the ability code and files in, and somehow several of the changes are somehow going live. I cant prove any of this, but I've been noticing changes in some of my abilities and I have noticed changes in the abilities of some other classes. Things that once were rock solid, that haven't changed since beta, are no longer behaving in quite the same way.

Like I said no proof but there is no way we were unable to control aggro on Enraged X83, unless some functionality somewhere had changed.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Seven

Monday 18.02.08

What a Night!. We absolutely blitzed the Entrance Wing!. I don't think anyone else needs the Arm pieces for the class armor quests, so apart from Travix and Vicus I don't think we will be back here for a while. We may head back in if we need to equip people with the Arm molds, but apart from that I think its time to try something new!. We absolutely slaughtered everything on our way through the Entrance. We were at Vicus and ready to engage by 9:30, an hour and a half to drop X77, R5, X83 and have General Vicus inbound is a record for us!. We were just absolutely creaming our way through the trash and the names only delayed us by a few seconds more. We were trying something a little different by having the Tanks call the aggro. Its an old-school EQ combat trick and it seemed to work well for us in VG.

Basically the idea is that each Tank class has different methods of generating aggro and the build-up of aggro is also different for each class. So each Tank was responsible for noting their own aggro and calling the DPS on for the raid. Up till now we have been letting the DPS classes join in as and when they felt like (with a suitable delay) and sometimes, if a tank has missed a few times, or they haven't had any decent aggro reactions the Mobs lock on the Tank can be shaky and the dress wearers die. Once people start to die the whole raid slows down as we need to buff and get them back on their feet. This way everyone knows where we are at in relation to aggro levels and DPS know they can lay into the Mob with relative safety.

X77 Preparing to Die

R5 about to give us phat loots

The R5 Greatsword dropped again with no other Dreads in the Raid, it went to a Warrior. What a waste!.

X83 waiting to Die

We got vengeance for X83 smacking us about last week. We pulled him slightly before we were ready but we adapted, got him in position and laid the smack down.

Vicus wants to play!

Vicus is getting smoother and smoother. He only managed 2 Pops of adds before he went down. Beautiful aggro management by the Warriors and Mezzers and fantastic healing on me. He didn't have a hope in hell. This time he was kind enough to drop the Spear of Devotion!. I have spoken with Dreads in other Guilds who have dropped him over 20 times and have still only seen one of these!. No one else put their hand up for it so I now have the two best 2 handers in the game at the moment. The Spear and the R5 Greatsword. In Game Update 4 there are huge changes to the Dread Knight class coming and one of those changes is the ability to tank while using a 2H weapon, as if you were carrying a shield. This 2h Tanking specialist was my vision of the Dread Knight class from day one. I fought for this in beta against people who didn't want to be "forced" to wield a 2H. Its taken a long time but it will be here at the end of the month. I can turn down all my 1H skills and sell a whole lot of junk weapons that I have been carrying around forever just to practice my skills.

Even with the Spear equipped and putting myself into DPS stance I was taking aggro (unintentionally) from the Warriors. The Spear is another 800-1k damage per hit for me and will completely change my aggro profile once the new Dread Knight changes go in.

My Pointy is Pretty!

We turned around from Vicus, headed back to the entrance and ported to the Hub. We spent about half an hour in the Hub to equip 7 more people with Arm slots, Woot!. A huge grats to everyone and a massive upgrade across almost half the raiding guild. Once everyone had their shiny new Arms, we began clearing trash to get to Akym the Assassin for his dagger. He came in beautifully and died equally beautifully. Oddly enough, just as we were clearing more trash he popped again almost on top of the raid. We dealt with the trash and wiped him again, two loots within about 15 minutes of each other. Shadowsoul also died in here somewhere but I was getting tired at this point and neglected to get a piccy. Bad Dread Knight!.

Akym the Assassin

For some reason Nymeria, one of our Warriors decided to Tank the entire night Naked. I have to say she did a pretty damn good job of it as well!

Nymeria the Nekkid Pink Tank

Thursday 22.02.08
Our first night into a new wing!. We formed up and headed into the Cartheon Wing, west from the Hub (I think). We were making our way slowly into the wing and encountering some new and interesting trash Mobs when the call we all wait for went out, Named!. Woot!. We have no idea about this guy, don't know his special abilities, don't know how to fight him, so its pull and see time!. We pulled him into the tunnel and fought him which turned out to be a good thing as he has a decent knock back. Turned out he's not a tough fight, a fairly simple Tank and Spank.

Izemgelli the LoreKeeper

So we fought our way deeper in. Its a fairly standard dungeon, until you reach the cages, this is where it gets interesting. The re spawn here is fast, very fast. There is no sitting in one spot and pulling to the raid or you just wont go anywhere. We crawled slowly into the area and made it to a new named, a Cartheon Book Keeper. We fought him in the passage way with tons of Mobs roaming all around us. I was put on watch out duty to look for anything that was likely to roam over the Raid and off tank it. In the end nothing did and the Book Keeper died. He drops nothing so it wasn't a huge loss.

Cartheon Book-Keeper

The next fight was a bit more interesting. We had cleared the roamers and were prepping for the pull when he was accidentally aggroed. I was watching him at the time so I grabbed him and started to tank. The healing rota came on smooth and we basically adapted straight into the fight. It was all going well until he bounced the entire raid about 100' into the air. I'm not kidding his knock back is massive. We decided pretty quickly to fight him in his room but that knock back continued to be a serious pain in the ass. He snuffed it pretty quickly and we ground our way onwards.
Finally we made it to the downwards lift, well almost. We would have made it but us tanks managed to wipe the raid. Well technically I managed to wipe the raid. We were set up for a tank split, grab one, pull another to another location and tank em separately. I didn't realize quite how far back the healers were, when the mobs were incoming I stepped forward about 6 feet, literally, and I was slightly around a corner and out of LOS. Raid wipe. So we set up for the recovery. Just as we were going to be good for login the server crashed. Everyone was bounced to desk top and had to sit waiting for the damn thing to come up again. Normally it was pretty quick but for some reason this time it still wasn't letting people in 10 minutes later. At this point it was about 11:15 and I was knackered so I logged and picked up my corpse the next day.

This guy is cool, he is one of the named Mobs in the Nusibe Necropolis, I think he is an awesome looking model. The whole Necropolis is pretty cool as its all one long crawl to get where you need to go with ups and downs, twists and turns and mobs all over the place getting successively harder the deeper you go in.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Six

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

Lord Fumbeso

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

Kill me Please!

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

Dead X77

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

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

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

Enraged X83 beating us up (again)

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

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

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

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

Next time come with me to Raggamuffin!

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Five

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

R5, Vicus. Fell down and went splat.

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

Archon Travix Waiting

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

Lisani, what an Elf!

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

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

Travix waiting for a spanking

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

Travix being spanked by a naked Pink Tank

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

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

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

Skulls for hands!

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

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

First things first however, Zaraax must die!.