"Gimmee the beat boys and free my soul I want to get lost in the rock and roll and drift away.."
This Update brought to you by Uncle Kracker, Staind and WAY to much Caffeine.
A couple of weeks ago I said that I thought the progression through the Tier 3 planes was there in order to teach you stuff that a guild was going to need in the Elementals, stuff like Off Tanking, Effective Mezzing, AEing etc etc. Well one of the lessons I didn't realize we were being taught was patience. Tuesday nights raid kicked off in the Elemental Plane of Earth or the "Elemental plane of Endless Fucking Trash Clearing" as I am starting to call it.
First up we headed on down the left wall to a little visit with the biggest Crocodile in Norrath, Lockjaw's bigger brother Tantisala Jaggedtooth.
He's big, he's ugly, he's green and he's stupid, kind of the Incredible Hulk of Crocs. He also has a nasty ass disease based DOT. For once I actually remembered to bring the resist gear and I managed to come through the fight relatively unscathed and delivered about 45K worth of DOTs (according to that fine program EQwatcher.)
We TL'd back to zone in and began to pull the Rock Ring. Here is where the endless pulling of trash comes in. First you have to clear all the trash in the path to the Ring.
Then once the trash is clear you actually start to pull the elements of the ring itself and the mini bosses.
Thousands of these guys
Finally after a million hours of clearing the junk we get to pull and kill Peregrin Rockskull.
After all the waiting he was actually a relatively easy kill. Then we began the pulls for the Ring of Mud. The Monks must have been going out of their tiny little minds run pull FD, repeat endlessly. At least some of the MoBs in this ring are a little more interesting that just straight up Melee kills. The 5 triggers you have to kill all spawn little baby Muddites at various points during their demise.
Most guilds Mezz the adds and kill them after the main MOB is dead, not us. Kez decides we are just going to AOE them, the suicide chanters get into place, the Wizzies load up, the Mudlets pop and, well what do you know it works! So the remaining triggers and their Muddites all get dealt with in the same way. Once the last of the triggers dies you get an auto-aggro of 4 Red Con to 65, Filth Gorgers. Can't be mezzed, these bastards just steam rolled over us. We managed to finally take out all three and had to keep one Tank Mezzed until we could rez and rebuff.
Finally the main named is incoming, this guy is nasty, nasty, nasty. Hits like a small locomotive and hits fast.
He wasn't tougher than Pooby and the tank/heal team tho and we smacked him down. For some reason Caniella was on the Mobs hit list last night, named would be called, Cani calls the start of the rotation, Named engages Pooby for a few seconds, reaches across, casually smacks down Cani and goes back to beating on Pooby. Happened a couple of times, odd.
At this point we were starting to lose people left and right as it was getting late in Aussie. The Officers had someone check the Plane of Fire for Targets and decided to stay in POE. So next up was the Vine Ring.
The travel across to the Vine Ring Platform was NOT clean, when the officers say "stay high on the wall" people thought they were obviously only kidding as we somehow managed to aggro MOBs on the plain up onto the wall.
The screenie above isn't good but its about all I got to see of the final Ring. I hung out till about 2.00AM NZ time and finally had to go to bed. I think SA were well on track to finishing the ring. They were about 3/4's of the way through from what I could see.
I'm kind of glad I went to bed when I did as I walked into a shit fight as soon as I got to work, so 4 hours sleep isn't a lot but its better than nothing.
I have to say one thing. Back on Karana during one of The Silent Watch's periodic split ups I got sick of posting goodbyes as half the guild left. So I made a post on that board which essentially said I will never post another goodbye to anyone, and I haven't since then.
Many people leave the game and for many different reasons, some burn out, some get sick of people they have to deal with, some just stop enjoying it. Some people eventually come back and take up where they left off. I have met people who have taken 1-2 years off and come right back to the game as if they never left. I know people who drop in and out of the game for a couple of months at a time.
Just recently SA has suffered a couple of losses of players for one reason or another and I feel compelled to break my rule. I am not going to post it on a message board, but Axixs, Jeks, Lyrique you will be missed by this Necro and many others and I hope one day to meet you in game again. /respect
Well Friday rolls around, I settle in with my bottle of Whiskey, coke, ice, everyone is out, EQ is happily fired up and glaring out of my ancient (but 21 inch) IBM Monitor. First up, Sol Ro. This fat bastard is becoming a regular fixture as an opener for Southern Armada's raids. So we all race into the Tower of Solusek Ro and form up. In our typically fast fashion we are good to go in minutes and start the trash clearing.
Once again it becomes a nightmare trying to get people into the Tower. The raid leaders again display insane patience with everyone and we finally get everyone into the chamber and we are good to go. Now I have to say here, that I really didn't think we were going to be able to do this. You see we had a very "light" raid, only 54 in at the kill. Normally when guilds are first setting out to do Sol Ro they take him on with at least a full raid. Here we are trying to do it 20 people short of a full raid, and that's a respectable amount of fire-power missing.
Solusek Ro thinking he is about to gain a level from SA
Sol Ro feeling very embarrassed
I should know by know, never doubt the Southern Armada when we want a Mob dead. We are the very definition of "the little guild that could". I don't know of any other Elemental level guilds on any other server in the game who only raid 2 days a week.
So after ganking Solusek Ro, the Burning Prince we headed off to the Elemental Plane of Water to have a go at some new and interesting ( and possibly more difficult! ) Mobs.
So a quick AOE TL out of the chamber and on to POW. We formed up and headed out towards our first target, Grioihin the Wise. I have killed this guy before with Unity and he is a nasty bastard. He has a pretty unresistable AOE stun that makes it tough for Clerics to heal and for tanks to hold aggro. We set up on the opposite side of the Chamber from him and pulled.
Oops that didn't go to well. Pooby downed, clerics stunned, Mr Wise poofy boy rampaging and one rounding tanks, off tanks, non tanks, me. It was ugly. So we all ran back from our respective bind points and we rezzed back into the fight spot. The crappy thing about the whole zone is its underwater. So when you get rezzed in and all your buffs are down you need to find your EB item FAST or risk drowning.
So we pulled him in for a second time. I would hate to be a tank or monk for these POW fights, As a caster I can just sit at the back and unload, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, it just changes the spells I cast, but for a tank its a whole new world of positioning, mob push, movement etc.
No mob for a long time has stumped us twice however and the second time around he died, stomped by the Oggie Tank!
So Grioihin the Not So Wise Anymore behind us we moved on through the zone towards Krziik the Mighty. I think they got the names mixed up as the Wise was definitely tougher than the Mighty who fell before us at the first pull. It may not have been a pretty kill, but hey we were still doing this with 55 people. These are Mobs that smack down full raids of 65's, we were doing it with 55, and not everyone was 65!.
That was about it for me for Friday's raid. A surfeit of Whiskey and a very long week and I realized during the last fight with the Mighty that I was in fact asleep. I was still casting, but fully asleep. I came too just as I was about to fall out of my chair and the Mob died. So a quick gate out and that was the end of Friday nights raid for me.
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