Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Six

13/03/04 Week FiftySix


And lo the LewtGods said "You have Sacrificed many Pallies, many Warriors, Clerics and Monks. Shadow Knights, Necro's and Rangers, all have fallen in the pursuit of the Rathe Council. So just for you, here is another shot at it."


Yup once again we lined up in the Plane of Earth and once again we prepped ourselves for smacking our heads against the brick wall that is the Rathe Council. I am not surprised that Guilds have broken up over this encounter. Its a nasty evil Encounter and I would like to beat the man who invented it. Massive Kudos to those guilds who had to do it pre the "balancing" that SOE did.


The frustration levels when the RC was impossible to beat must have been enormous. I can now understand all the ranting on the uber guild message boards.


We warmed up with a couple of kills in the Plane of Fire as we waited for people to log on. First to die was Criare Sunmane. I thought maybe we were a little light as we engaged with only about 40 people online. But it was obviously the right mix of people as we just nailed it.

Next up was a MOB we don't get to see that often. Arch Mage Yozanni caused the usual running in and out amongst the AOE waves. I got caught by one after misreading an AOE call, but it got cured pretty fast and I was fine to lay the smackdown in my own Necroish fashion.

I do love the Lich line of spells, without it Yozanni's mana drain DOT would have chewed through my mana and left my mana pool bare. Having to rely on the evil VOQ *shudder* is not something I would enjoy. I would love to see the new GOD upgrade of the Lich line but the way SOE has structured the spell drops and the methods and devices of getting into the new zones, 

I really doubt I will ever see one.

I have to say, although technically SA is one of the Guilds or close to being one of the Guilds that GOD was structured for, I'm really not impressed. XP zones that you REQUIRE a 10K+ 2200AC Warrior. That's just not fun because those Warriors aren't just hanging off tree's, they are damn rare. Maybe after we spend a few weeks farming Time, 10K Tanks will become more common, I don't know.

That was it for Fire. Suddenly, we had a flood of people coming online so the raid was hurriedly called to POEb to take advantage of the fact. We set up and began the pulls. Kez and the Officers explained the strat all over again, but largely I think they realized the bulk of us knew it by now. 

Some of the strats were mildly changed from last time, just to iron out the last few wrinkles and suddenly we were good to go!. Now I'm fairly sure that I am not going to be giving away anything uber sekret in the line of SA strats in the following write up. If I am someone please tell me!.

A Chanters Nightmare - A Rathe Councilman

The 10 or so Necro's online designated a single stay behind to hang with the chanters and stay in their channel. That person was to make sure the Chanters had enough mana and if needed call for dumps from the rest of the Necro's. The rest of us formed a roving band to both do as much DPS as we could (Limited to Touch of Mujaki only, not allowed to use DOT's and Neurotoxin is way to heavily resisted and mitigated) and to mana dump where called to by the heal groups.

Normally we would be battle rezzing as well but it wasn't needed this time. We pulled, 1, then 2, then 3 and in a rush 4, 5, 6. the Chanters had the mezzables under control. I think we got a bit cocky early on as we took 2 of the mezzables to 0% before mezzing. That is cutting it a little too close!.

So with the Chanters going insane dealing with the Rathe Council we began to pull the tankables. 7, 8, 9, 10 we got set up and in place. 11 was inc and being tanked and the countdown was on. Then it went wrong. Slowers were getting ganked on slow attempt, no Warrior had /DEF up, healers were dieing left and right. I got summoned and splatted. Then Kez called for all Tank Mez to die and to allow the killer mob to reset.

So after a massive drag/rez effort we were backup and in place. I really didn't know if we were going to be able to do it at this point. I admit it, I doubted!.

We reformed and pulled again. I was seriously beginning to wonder about the Sanity of our Chanters when I realized that one of them was singing a little song in /say that made no sense whatsoever. But we got 'em all setup again. 7,8,9,10. Then Kez made a big huge ballsie call.

With the 5 Tank Mezzed in place, with the Chanters going slowly loopy, he called a five minute halt to wait for a /DEF recycle. So we waited with 6 Chanter mezzed Rathe Councilmen and 4 Tank mezzed, biting nails, on the edge of our seats for a timer to count down to zero.

To me this shows huge confidence of the leader for his team. He knew we could do it and he relied on us to stay concentrated and keep it together and get this thing done!. Just before the call to pull the final RC member we also lost a Cleric on a Tank Mezz group. Healers stepped up and we continued flawlessly.

Finally we had a /def tank good to go and number 11 was inbound. Heal rota kicked in and the Necros were finally allowed to use DOTs again. I loaded up mister Number Ten and he went down fast.

"Kill 'em all" was the call and every one of the Rathe Council members we had under control died rapidly. At this point the clock is ticking. This is where we failed last week as we didn't manage to kill the final RC member fast enough. Teeth were gritted, rings clenched and we hunkered down to get it right this time.

The Twelfth was quickly inbound and just as quickly dead. I got splatted after Life Burning and being summoned for low HP aggro, but I did my 10K or so of damage first.

I got rezzed back in and I had just recovered my gear and memmed my spell set when we got auto aggroed from the Avatar of Earth. Man we were just not ready, we lost 5 Main Tanks in seconds, slowers were being splatted on cast again, no one was ready for this. I was at about 5% mana and medding as hard as I could. Finally we got stabilized on a Twink(?) tank, the heal chain stayed on him and I bet he got the thrill of his life most unexpectedly tanking the Avatar of Earth!

I managed to lay a Horror or two and a couple of Mujakis on him but I never had the mana to really lay into him. Once we had the Tank/Cheal stable tho he was always going to go down.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the object of 4 weeks work by Southern Armada. The Corpse of the Avatar of Earth. The Rathe Council has fallen before the might of the Southern Armada!

And this guy is the result of all that work. *Pop* an Essence of Earth and Grats to everyone who got their Flags!. Three down one to go!

And Grats to Alone X!. The Avatar was kind enough to drop a Sword of Primordial Power. With a Blade of Carnage and your new sword you are going to be an absolute aggro monster! Good on you mate you earned it!

Just to make absolutely sure they were all dead we ran over to the spawn point where I took this shot of an Empty Rathe Council throne!.

Because it makes me feel good, here is another Dead Avatar. 4 weeks work went into this screen shot, crawling ever closer to the goal each time. Failing last week with only seconds to go was just heartbreaking. But we more than made up for it Thursday night!.

This is so very wrong. I still feel dirty, but scrubbing isn't making it go away. Last week a Chanter (who shall remain nameless but Ill get you Wolfe :) ) cast Illusion Halfling on the whole Group. So this is Ulaa as a Halfling. I look much cuter as a DE, but I'm damn cute as a halfling too!. I think next to DE's the halfling female model is deffinitely one of the best looking in the game.

Now it is tradition on Prexus that After a big kill you, or someone else posts on the Prexus server message boards. This was duly done after the RC kill by one of our members. I don't ever post on the rant boards so I am going to have a little rant here.

A couple of weeks ago one or two of our members stepped out of line over a spawn of Coirnav that the Fallen Alliance had engaged. Now Prexus being a FCFS server if FA wants to engage Coirnav with 6 toons entirely naked, then good luck to them. They were there first, they honestly thought they had the numbers to engage, it was their first try, off they went and failed. Shit happens. I would have been happy for them if they had been successful. Jealous but happy.

Unfortunately, as described in the thread, /tells were exchanged, threats made and it all turned into bullshit. I was embarrassed by it all to be honest. It didn't need to happen and taking it up on the Prexus Rant boards was just stupid.

However in the later Grats on RC thread the Guild Leader of Fallen Alliance (who I have grouped with twice and seemed to be a nice person) brings up the old chestnut that Southern Armada is "fed" our strats by Unity. Yes some of our people raid with Unity, no they don't "feed" us strats.

The GL of FA is famous for (or at least he claims to) never reading spoiler sites and coming up with all the Kill strats that his Guild uses purely on his own. Good Luck to him and them, it seems to be working for them. I will say one thing however, if you are going to try and come up with a strat for RC by yourself, I would suggest it will break your guild.

A member of Talionis called Beluyen posted the following in the Rant thread. (Page 2, 9 posts down)

Well, yes - having your members familiar with encounters, know exactly what to do and when, what abilities any given mob has, where to position your raid/the mob for every mob you encounter, including time gods etc is an advantage given to you by Unity. So yes, they helped you win. You yourself said 85% of the guild was elemental flagged before you killed RZ for the first time, are you suggesting Unity didn't help you win that one too? How many SA members are Time flagged already?

Now oddly enough Talionis had at least 20 members of their Guild Backflagged by the Nameless Order before Talionis had killed Coirnav or RC. Can you spell Hypocrite Beluyen?

I would suggest in reply, as any person who has spent more than five minutes Raiding will I think agree, that I can feed you every strat in the game for every mob, yet having those strats still wont guarantee you success. I have been a member of Guilds that if we had had all the strats still couldn't get to where SA is now. Beating the encounters with our numbers requires discipline, skilled players and well led raids.

We haven't been fed anything by anyone. A number of our membership had previously been on Fenin Ro Raids with Unity. We still ended up failing on him 5-6 times till we worked out the positioning and we eventually worked out how to do it differently than Unity. We don't go into encounter's with a strat all laid out before us. Sometimes (like FA did against Coirnav) we will kick off an encounter just to see what happens and then refine from there.

Yes many of our members were Elemental flagged before we killed Rallos Zek. I will however raise three points.

One: we didn't enter the Elemental Planes as a Guild till WE killed Rallos.

Two: Watching someone else do it and doing it yourself is COMPLETELY different. We failed a number of times on Rallos, also by the time we were actually capable of killing Rallos we had to wait a long time for a free spawn as a number of guilds were ahead of us on the hunt to the Elementals.

What this meant was that we spent a lot longer farming in POP than most guilds do. This in turn meant that proportionally SA was better equipped than the average first attempt on RZtW. Thus when we finally got a serious shot at him he died fast. The first time we actually killed him was a non standard Guild raid.

Three: Three maybe four members of SA are Time flagged as far as I know. I'm still waiting on my first Coirnav kill to complete my key. Hell if you want to know the entire history of SA and every single target we have killed for the last 56 weeks start here at week one and read forward.

Yes we went into the RC encounter with some idea of how it worked. We still managed to pull the wrong mobs at the wrong times, we still failed to get MOBs under control properly, we still had to work out how to get and control aggro on the MOBs etc etc. That took us 4 weeks of throwing ourselves at the RC until we finally did it. We crawled a little bit further through the encounter with each try.

Going into an encounter like the RC blind is just insane. You will get owned over and over and over. It is as much a test of patience and perseverance as it is a test of strictly controlled and applied power. So good luck to FA with RC. I really hope you can do it within 4 months of the first time you engage.

Remember one thing. We raid 2 nights a week, not the 5-7 nights a week every other guild, who is at the same level as us raids. (including Fallen Alliance) We are also at the wrong end of a long raid chain that starts on the east coast of the USA about the time most of us get up to go to work. When we get a shot at a MOB we have to make it count, so Maddie, jealous much?.

I would suggest that we have gotten where we are because we have a fantastic Heal team, a superb Pull team, a great set of Officers, excellent raid leaders and a generally older and more mature set of players. I would be very interested to know how many other 2-day a week raid guilds are this close to Time.

Ah well regardless of what idiots and assholes think or say. We know that have gotten where we are on our own merits and the Fish dies next!.

Thursday rolls around. Posts are made on the Guild message board. Coirnav is next. Be there. Initially we had Coirnav tapped to pop in the Plane of Water at around 11:45PM AEST. Now I am 2 hours ahead so we were looking at hoping for an engage at 2:00AM NZ Time. I knew this was going to hurt. I even considered having someone bot me, but after some thought I said " Fuckit I am not missing our on our first kill of anything." I was prepped to hang till I had to go to work and just game straight through if I had to.

So I was extremely happy to logon ( a bit late as I had to do a wee bit of GF factioning ) and see the MOTD saying that Coirnav had already popped and was waiting for us. I expected we would head straight for him but Kez wanted to wait for more people to logon so we headed to the Elemental Plane of Earth for a quick Croc kill.

We decide to do something a little different this time and instead of beating Tantisala Jaggedtooth with Spells and weapons. We did it the fast way and just stuck a Tree through her back.

Next up was a wee jaunt into POEb. This was a very fast clear. We had one wakeup call with Warlord Ginlotaken wiping the raid. We had our first "Cleric camp" call from Kez in a loooooong time. First I knew something was wrong was just after the inc call, I look up and noticed that about half the raid was dead. That's how fast it happened, Ginlotaken is MEAN. We reformed, rezzed up and the next take down was smooth as silk.

However getting wiped by a mob like Ginlotaken is not a good indicator when you are about to go up against one of the toughest encounters in the game. By all accounts Coirnav isn't that hard to kill. He has bugger all HP and sod all resistance's. The problem is getting to him.

If RC is about sustained and specific application of power, then Coirnav is about fast and wild killing yet in a very precise manner. We have never had problems with the DPS section of the encounter, our problem has always been with the control aspects of the encounter prior to actually getting to Coirnav.

To be perfectly honest I was sitting in Coirnav's lair and thinking I would be happy just to actually see FishBoy this time. After the POEb clear we had immediately headed down to Coirnav. I logged out and turned absolutely every graphics option that I could, off. My PC was a really nice one, 2 years ago. I really seriously need to upgrade it, as a place like the Plane Of Water I have to turn everything off just to be able to maneuver properly.

We formed up and Kez and the officers obviously spent a lot of time working out how we were going to do this. The tactics were very slightly changed from last time and I think people had a better idea of how the encounter was going to work this time. Encounters like this one (also like RC) almost require you to go through them multiple times so that each and every person knows their place and what is going to happen.

I was in the pull team again. Having turned off every graphics option I was able to move around a lot more freely this time and felt a lot more confident about my overall role. In fact I felt a whole lot better in general about how I did in this raid. I felt like I managed to contribute and actually make a difference

I got my engage music sorted and good to go and the song of the night was Nicklebacks cover of a Classic Elton John Track - "Saturday Nights Alright for Fighting" (*Hug* in game MP3 player), the raid was taught, questions asked and answered and heart absolutely hammering we were good to go.

I was FD'd in front of the cave as the trigger was pulled over my head. I watched the HP drop on the trigger, trigger died, *Pop* I went into Coirnav's lair. That's all the detail you are going to get!.

The babies were dieing relatively fast, tho the third wave seemed to come in a little slow. At this point I was back with the raid /assist nuking and AOEing with my pathetic little 155 Nuke. What the hell it all helps!.

Named's came inc and the modified strats worked perfectly! Named's were under control and the babies were still dieing. POP Real named's. Servalan you fucking rock. That was one of the best Pulls I have ever seen, it was an absolute work of art. How you did it I will never, ever know, but just wow.

Real named's down. Into the cave!. This is further than we have ever gotten before!. This time we actually get to engage Coirnav!. The BURN call goes up as soon as we get to him. I positioned myself just in front of him but the waves of movement from the main raid just behind me kept moving me,so I ran off to the side a bit and began to cast.

Now I'm not sure if I got pushed into his range by waves of movement or he summoned me. But I got 2 dots on and got splatted. I had LB up, I had 6200 HP and was good to go for major nukeage and I never got to use it.

I zoned back into POK with Coirnav at 80%. Announcements were being called in /GU

70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%

Then it went quiet. I'm sitting in front of my PC, nearly 2am, the whole house is asleep, hunched over, fists clenched, stomach rolling over and over, chanting GO GO GO GO GO under my breath. The last few seconds stretched and stretched. I saw:

5
4
2
1
0

The last few seconds ticked over agonizingly, I couldn't do anything, had I caused a fail dieing too soon?, would my 6k of LB damage have made all the difference?, were we going to fail in death walk the same way we did with Rydda'Dar and have to do it all again?.

DEAD.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Coirnav the Avatar of Water's Corpse.

The celebrations continued for about 20 minutes with fireworks going off over head the whole time. The sense of relief was almost palapable. We had done it. A journey that started over a year ago with our first killings in the Plane of Innovation was finished. We are now the fifth guild on Prexus to enter the Plane of Time. We are one of only 170 or so guilds (estimated) game wide to have entered Time. In a couple of months or less we will be one of less than 100 Guilds to have Dropped Quarm.

Grats guys, we made it. We are at the very top of the game. Nobody believed that we could do it. Even our fellow ANZAC guild's gave us shit. But we persisted, we perservered and we DID IT!!!! We are in Time.

The celebrations even continued into the Plane of Knowledge!.

I logged off and headed for bed. There was no way in hell I was going to get to sleep and sure enough I spent most of the night before the alarm went off thinking about what we had just done.

Well my day is done. Im going to go out now and have several large beers to celebrate.

NOTE I got home this evening and did the last bit of my Time key (Thank you Gnosie, Xardan and Garaneb for completeing the box!) I then spent a lot of the evening helping other people complete their entry into Time! It was a great feeling to be able to say "Welcome to Time" as each group zoned in for the first time!