07/11/03 Week Thirty Seven
Yes I know I am a useless git for not updating faster. Ill tell you what, if someone wants to come here, take over either: Veritas backups, sorting out the crappy backup robot, managing EPO, updating EPO server and database to the latest version, managing security, managing other department heads, managing my staff, interfacing with the Domino mail admin and keeping him happy, managing virus outbreaks, deploying AV into regional offices that pop up out of nowhere after a virus outbreak, saying "please do it all for us", soothing users, dealing with idiots springing projects on me at the last minute, reading the massive amount of documentation I have to plow through at the moment just to come up to speed on the backup environment and just doing all the general crap that comes with supporting users and the idiots we laughingly refer to as "Helpdesk". Take over any of that and I will update a hell of a lot faster I promise.
I had to do some fast talking and a hell of a lot of work to get my trip to the Bay of Plenty changed from Tues/Wed to Mon/Tues. Then when I got down there I had to do even more work to get everything I had to do done in time to get back on Tuesday for raid night. Damn this EQ Stuff is hard work!.
So we are going to kick off with a quote from the (these days) highly elusive Hilly beast.
This little gem popped up during a discussion on how mentally deficient Warriors are. I'm not sure how it ended up on Monks, but Hilly pretty much captures the essence of "Monk" perfectly there !.
First up Tuesday night was the Elemental Plane of Earth.for another Run at the Arbitor. To be honest the POE runs are now so fast, so confusing ( and to be honest so buggy ) that a lot of the time I have no idea what is going on or what part of which ring we are pulling. Large chunks of the early parts of these rings we now AOE pull. To those who have doubted that SA AOE's to clear level 60+ trash in POE here is a picture for ya!
Immediately following the AOE ring clearing, which is a hell of a lot of fun, comes Rockskull.
Dumb as a rock (of course) he charges in and goes *SPLAT* against the solid wall that is SA.
There was a butt load of other targets being killed during this time and not a whole lot to differentiate them. Basically I saw "assist on TARGET" for about 3 hours. In fact it felt a lot like the Bertoxxulous ring, there was always MOB's in camp, usually more than one, there was always more MOB's on the way and I spent most of the time facing the wall.
We seemed to move about the zone a bit and multiple rings seemed to often be being pulled at once. I think at one point we were pulling both the Ring of Mud and the Ring of Dust at the same time.
Finally we moved off to kill what my GF refers to as the "Coat and Shoes MOB." She like's to be called when we engage, so she can watch the Croc die and fantasize about all the shoes and handbags she could get out of him!
Finally for this raid we headed into a spot we had only been once before but this time we were determined to get us some new Flaggage! First up we cleared the nasty trash that spawns around the Arbitor.
This time we cleared through the spawns and charged him in his room. Without the adds that we got from Re-spawn last week, he is a gimp and he went down fast before the might of Southern Armada. Ding Woot! Welcome to Ragrax, Stronghold of the Twelve!.
That was it for the night and much satisfied I logged at about 1.45am or so.
After such a good nights raiding on Tuesday I was looking forward to another great raid Thursday. For some reason, SA can put on a show of might and skill unmatched by just about anyone else on the server one day, the next day we are making Newb mistakes that would get us kicked off a ToV raid. I have no idea why, but if you are going to start to fuck up, attacking Fenin Ro in the Plane of Fire is really not the place to start. Kez was so pissed off after an hour or two of it he threatened to log, that's something I've never seen him do before.
Now this update is being written a good week or two after the fact due to the constraints of being insanely busy at work, its slowed down a little now so I am able to update. I had to ask Anobis (Gnomes, Just say NO!) for the timeline of some of the events so all faults are completely his, not mine cause I am perfect.
This Fridays run was basically one giant tilt at the Elemental Plane of Fire. We zoned in and headed immediately to what is colloquially known as "the picnic tables". We formed up for a go at the ArchMage. Now, like the Spider Bitch Babnoxis, this guy has a really nasty AOE mana drain dot. Now when you drain my mana I am pretty much utterly useless so MOB's that mana drain I particularly hate. We tried something a little different in the way of positioning and where we hid the casters to avoid this dot.
Unfortunately it really didn't work, I was hit with the dot on the pull and after casting a BOT, FP and an SK I was OOM and the MOB was only at about 85%.
At about 40% I then saw a call that I haven't seen since a ToV raid back on Karana; "Camp the Clerics". That was kind of a shock I must admit. But damn it, it was the right call. Clerics camped out, we took the wipe, reformed, made some adjustments to Pull locations, sorted out an effective AOE call and Mr Yozanni was inc again.
This time we ganked the bastard and kind of wondered how we could have made it look so hard the last time. As an encore we pulled and killed Magmaton thus confirming that he too is well and truly on the farm list.
Then Kez called us forward to begin Fenin, woot! a MOB I have never seen! a new and completely interesting encounter!. We pulled the trigger and began to clear through the (inevitable) endless amounts of Yard Trash.
During all of this Kez took up his usual position as sacrificial lamb and designated PhatLewtz Sacrifice and in fact ended up taking several for the team!. It was also at this point he got a little testy as people where pissing about for some reason. We had lots and lots of deaths from MT's, Clerics, OffTanks etc etc. People just weren't paying attention it seemed to me, and in a place like the Elemental Plane of Fire, if you didn't bring it, you may as well just fuck off home cause you will just get beaten like a punk.
So after a bit of abuse and some screaming and the use of the symbol keys on the key board from Kez and the raid leaders, we finally began to get our act together. Things slowly began to become a lot smoother to the point that we ended up using Pets to tank and just getting Druids to heal them while the Clerics and Warriors lounged about in the sun with their feet up,
In no particular order (Mainly cause I cannot for the life of me remember the actual order of the pulls) we smacked:
Any omissions or any incorrect entries are entirely the fault of the Gnome as he told me to do it. Now the only MOB who even vaguely got frisky was Warlord Prollaz who decided to lay down the challenge.
We just killed him slow for that.
Finally after killing through the endless trash and sameness, its sort of like XP grinding really, you know you have to do it, and you know as you get better at it and more powerful it will all go a lot faster, but that doesn't make it any less painful, we made it to the Temple of Fenin Ro himself.
We formed up on the wall and pulled out the Omni Magus Crato for his share of the smack down.
This guy is HUGE, Pooby only just came up to the top of his ankles. At this point the next mob was Fenin Ro, so we put our game faces on and the Pull Team called "Fenin Ro INC"
Fennin Ro, The Tyrant of Fire
Fenin is a cool looking MOB, he really is a fabulous model. I think the mace is a little ghey but beyond that he is well impressive. He also managed to wipe us before he even hit 80%.
So we "Camped Clerics" for the second time that night, reformed, rebuffed and Pulled again.
SMACK Fenin laid the beat down on us a little faster for the second attempt. This time the reform was a little slower, it was getting later, a few people logged, a few more made it to the raid late and I suspect a lot of debate was going on inside the officers channel as to appropriate tactics. My guess (and I am an amateur at this compared to many) is that we had two problems. This mob is largely a MOB you need high range damage DPS against as he has insane rampage damage. Any Tank that's not the MT with a fast CH chain on him, that goes near him just gets splatted.
Unfortunately that night we only had 2-3 Rangers on the raid, so a significant part of our ranged DPS was missing. Another large part of our ranged DPS is the 10+ regular Necro raiders. Unfortunately Fenin is HIGHLY Poison and Disease resistant and of course Fire immune. The only spell any of us could land that can do significant damage to him is Horror. Of 10-12 Necro's on the raid only 1 of us has Horror. The rest are reduced to Splurt and SK, so there to was another massive cut down in our DPS.
So we are already reduced in our sheer damage output, add to that the fact that at one point we only had 6-8 Clerics online, tho this number fluctuated during the night, and we were well short of Healing power as well. Fenin Ro strikes me a lot like Rydda'dar in that the fight is all about fast, heavy Healing, MT getting aggro and then just burning the fucker down as fast as you possibly can. A few more Clerics in the Chain, a few more Druids and Shammies etc for fast spot healing, a few more Rangers for DPS, a few more Necro's with Horror and he will die with no issues.
As it was, Pull.....
After the rezzes Kez asked us to dig in and give him one more try. For the Sydney-siders I guess it it was about 12:30am at this point, for me it was around 2:30am and I was just about asleep at the keyboard. But I took a big swig of Rum and Coke, propped my eyelids open and steeled myself for another go. This time the sorting of the pull took even longer and Kez completely changed the tactics for the engage. I don't remember exactly what percent we wiped at but it was definitely our best effort of the evening thus far. The changes to tactics definitely improved things and I have no doubt Fenin with fall to us soon.
Fenin is the first MOB to have just stopped us in our tracks for a very long time. Not even Rallos Zek managed that.
After Rezzes, it was about 3:00am and time for me to fade away. The remaining updates will be coming hard on the heels of this one, so keep your eye's peeled this week as we have had a great few days of raiding recently!
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