Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fourty Six

06/01/04 Week Forty Six

And Lo the Lewt Gods looked down and they saith "all the American Guilds shall go back to school/work etc. Thusly they shall not be able to kill all of the good spawns and give The Southern Armada a good shot at them. And they did, and it was good. Verily"

Monday was a very, very good day for us. The PhatLewtz just rained from the skies and we plowed through content like it was Kunark Dragons. First up was much goodness in the Elemental Plane of Fire. For various reasons it seems that the other top guilds on the server were hanging about trying to cockblock each other and left us with all sorts of goodies up!

General Druav Flamesinger was the first to die. As usual he died pretty fast, but for once he didn't drop the Sword of MezzBreaking and instead dropped a rather sweet mask.

Quavonis Firetail came in rather earlier than I expected, one second I was chatting in group, the next a Phoenix was swooping down on me!. He went down FAST, faster than we have ever dropped him before.

Thirdly was the bitch. Babnoxis Queen of Spiders.

Last but most certainly not least was the mega tank General Reparm. Not only did he die. But he died flawlessly, yup that's right, we didn't even deign to sacrifice a Pally. A perfect kill.

That was it. We whacked 4 named's in Fire in less than an hour!!. So next it was off to the Elemental Plane of Earth for some rings. Kez decided we need to do at least one more flagging run at the Arbitor of Earth, and as all 4 rings and the Handbag and Shoes mob was up he figured tonight was as good a night as any.

Now many people have bitched that I don't tend to post any details about the Earth Rings. Mainly that's because they are so damn boring. But for the Whiners here is Ulaa's quick and dirty guide to getting flagged for POEb.

Step 1: Kill the ring of Mud
Step 2: Kill the ring of Stone
Step 3: Kill the ring of Dust
Step 4: Kill the ring of Vine
Step 5: Kill Tanitsala Jaggedtooth
Step 6: Kill the Arbitor of Earth
Step 7: Hail the PP

There you go, all the information you could possibly need!. Of course the first thing you need to do is kill LOTS of these:

Then prepare yourself to kill lots of Trees:

Then LOTS of Armadillo's:

There aren't quite as many of these guys to kill but there is still enough of them to be annoying.

Once you have killed all of that, you can now start on the rings. Remember of course that you will have to go back and kill the preceding MOB's many times over before finishing the 4 rings. So then its time to kill Mangled Vegerog's, lots and lots and lots of them. They come in groups, they hit really hard, they are mean. Kill them fast.

Once you have cleared all of those guys, Derugoak Bloodwalker will come running up, yell "Tag you are IT!" and then run away again. Of course his 'tag' does about 3K of damage so its a good idea to be well and truly ready for him!.

BTW Kez, I won the bet, where is my 100pp!? Kez put up 100PP for the first one to be summoned by Derugoak Bloodwalker, now NO ONE can generate aggro like a Necro, so I gave it my best shot and about 10 seconds later I was the first pinkish smear in the mud. Shortly thereafter, one by one all of the Necro's (and one Wizzie who really wants to be a Necro) on the Raid (11?, 12 of us maybe?) got summoned and splatted.

Once you have finished the Vine Ring, its time for the Dust ring. Go and find a couple of hundred Dust Devotee's and clear them out.

Once all the Devotee's are dead, pull in the assorted named's and kill them all, finally you are left with a Perfected Warder of Earth.

Tired yet?. You are only half way through at this point. Next up its the Ring of Mud. First up kill a lot of Sludge Lurkers. Not as many as the number of Devotee's you have to kill, but they are considerably tougher.

Once all the Lurkers are dead its AOE time!

Then of course its named time, a Monstrous Mudwalker is INBOUND!, kill him and that's the Ring of Mud done. Now you are of course going back and killing MOB's one through four at least 20 times between each ring aren't you?!.

Next its time to break it up a little. So the "HandBag and Shoes" MOB is ready to die. Tanitsala Jaggedtooth has kept the guild rich, once she is skinned and cured, there are jackets, shoes, boots, handbags, hats, coats for everyone in the guild and tons left to sell to others!

Now we are ready to kill the last ring. Its time for the Ring Of Stone. This is the best ring in the Zone for me cause we get to run into the middle of a huge pile of MOBs, who are all deeply distracted by the Chanters they are trying to kill, and cast my rather pathetic AOE. Woot its a blast!

To be honest at this point it was around 2:30AM and I went LD right before the named got pulled. I tried to get back in for about 5 minutes, looked at my watch, looked at the 1018 message clearly displayed on my screen and gave up and went to bed. SA went on to happily clear the Ring and then promptly dropped the Arbitor. So you will have to figure out the Arbitor tactics all for yourselves!. Woot Flags all round!

I do have to say Thank you Lord Innoruk, there will be a lot fewer Earth rings in my life. Now the bulk of the guild are POEb flagged we can start having a go at the named's in POEb!.

Tuesday, I got home from work thinking "I am tired after a long raid last night. I shall have an easy evening and then log early and go to bed." But NO!. First thing is I get a tell "Want to go to VP?" Hell yes!. I got my key to Veeshan's Peak a week or two ago but beyond zoning in I haven't used it. So myself and the two mighty Pallies Ometiklan and Ellyrion head over to VP. No one else wanted to play with us.

We zone in, clear the entrance, and Elly has to log. So Omet organizes a few more to join us and after a bit of a wait they arrive. So with a little preliminary set up we pull Hoshkar.

Unfortunately even with 4 of us we didn't have enough DPS and eventually he wore us down. So a quick wipe, reform, call for reinforcements and with a full group we pull him again.

This time we happily snuffed him. I thought maybe that people had just come to drop the one dragon, but I am learning that once SA gets a sniff of Dragon flesh it becomes an addiction and they cant stop. Or at least that's true for me and the rest of the group seemed happy to continue the Dragon slaughter. So we fought our way further in with the help of some guesswork and old maps and the next to die was Silverwing.

Then we headed over to the lair of the mightiest Dragon of the Kunark Era, Phara Dar! Now it turns out that Phara Dar is behind a locked door. But with the help of a some smart thinking by Genosin and a co-operative Racnar we actually got past the door and headed down to see the mighty Dragon!.

The door that could not stop us.

Initially we were a bit worried, Phara dar in her day was a massive MOB to kill and we weren't sure if, even now, we could do it. We needn't have worried.

Something I didn't know, Phara Dar is the only Dragon in the game I have met who has a room for her treasure hoard!.

A quick pause to take some pics:

The Veeshan's Peak crew. L to R
Ulaa, Genosin, Maltalbus, Feninie, Bilbax, Ometiklan

Another thing I didn't know, you can zone out of Phara Dar's room straight to the Plane of Air (The old one, not the Elemental Plane) so we did that and proceeded to clear the first isle just for fun.

Now considering the difficulty of getting the key to get into Veeshan's Peak, considering that there was no gate/summon and no GM help for this Zone for at least 3 years, considering that there is no easy way out except to fight through, even for Kunark era MOB's the loot here is shite.

Why would you go through all the difficulty and potential loss of fighting here when you could get equally good, if not better items in Sebilis or Karnor's for a lot less risk and danger. I think the 'idea' of Veeshans's Peak, a high end raiding, difficult to get keyed for, Dungeon is a good one (VT was maybe a little too difficult and insanely boring to get keyed for but was along the same lines.)

There are so many dungeons like this scattered throughout the world, underutilized but with a good basic design foundation. With a little reworking this would be a fun crawl for a single 60-65 group or a full raid zone. As it is, its fun, I'm glad I did it, I will do it again just cause I like killing Dragons, but it is ultimately pointless.

Wednesday.

As per usual the opener was the Elemental Plane of Fire. Now there wasn't the same plethora of killing goodness that was up on Monday but we certainly seemed to come out at the end of the night with a decent amount of PhatLewtz! We were all really hoping for a shot at the Gods. I know I am getting a little frustrated at not at least getting to give them a go now and again and I'm sure others feel the same. Unfortunately on the server we live on there isn't a lot we can do about it.

The whole reason for a Wednesday raid was that Fenin Ro was possibly going to be up. Unfortunately Talionis got to him before we could.

I was chatting with some Necro's from other servers in a chat channel and when I said there will soon be 5-7 Guilds in the Elemental Plane of Time on Prexus they were amazed. The most any of them had in Time on their servers was 3.

So first up was the two birdies. Jaxoliz Dawneyes was the first to die.

Followed closely by Criare Sunmane

And General Druav Flamesinger was the last target we dropped in Fire. These kills are beginning to feel suspiciously like farming, but what the hell, they drop some damn good lewtz.

As that was it for fire, we headed across to the Elemental Plane of Air which (apart from Xegony herself) was almost a full pop. So we headed over, formed up and started clearing the first isle. The first named we encountered was Baltaldor the Cursed.

I find Air quite odd in that you have a combination of insanely tough named's and then named's that you kill and didn't even realize that they were named's Baltador is one of those. There doesn't seem to be any sort of logical progression of toughness from the zone in MOB's to Sigismond.

Once clearing through the named's we finally get to the trigger and drop an Elemental Masterpiece.

With him dead we can no pull and kill an Avatar of Smoke.

We then had more un-noticed named trash. I didn't even realise we were killing Queen Silandria until the Raid Leaders called her loot.

It then appeared that we spent at least an hour killing Birds for no other reason that Kez doesn't like them

After Polly Parrot had died for the umpteenth time we headed over to start the Sigismond Event. Unfortunately its really hard to get pics of this event as the spiders involved are all quite small and transparent. Basically you pull and kill a bazillion baby spiders until you spawn an Archwalker.

Do that 3 times and you spawn Sigismond Windwalker . Oh and did I mention this is all on a timer so you have to do this really fast? Sigismond himself is really nasty. He hits like Reparm with the same 3500HP proc and casts an AE Silence as well. We fed him tanks for 30 seconds or so, he procced on the first 3 and dropped them immediately, then, once the heal chain caught the rhythm we fed him his ass.

I am also moved to mention that I just broke 6K raid buffed and 3500hp unbuffed!. Am I uber yet? *grin*. On Mondays Raid I was kindly awarded Miraguls Gloves of the Risen Souls. On Wednesdays raid I was also very kindly awarded a Gleaming Pendant of Xegony. At this point I am probably at zero or less for merit, but woot!. However with Raid loot coming in at the rate we have been seeing it recently I believe everyone has been doing hugely well in regards drops.

The officers are doing massive job and the guild is just increasing in power exponentially..

Also this week on Tuesday I finally finished the Spirit Wracked Cord quest that I have been doing for the better part of two years! Thank you muchly to Pano, Bilba and Elly who came across from Fire to help me kill the final MOB!. This week I have added about 220hp easily!.

That's the second run we have done at Sigismond, I have a feeling that although we now have a couple of Xegony keys there will be at least one more spider event in our future. By the way, no I don't get told this stuff by officers. Everything said here is PURE speculation on my part and is not to be taken as gospel/policy by anybody, at anytime.

When we first started Raiding Fire/Air/Earth/Water we were taking quite some time to clear through the zones and drop the Named's. A month or so of Farming the Elementals (OMFG just check out the PhatLewtz!) and we are just gutting these zones now.

Our DPS is through the roof, mana pools and regen are hugely improved, almost everyone now has full spell books, those of us who were relatively new to high end raiding now have a lot more raiding experience, the big bunch of Xserver transfers are now fully integrated and the whole guild is just ITCHING to get at Time. We are very ready for the Gods and I fully believe when we finally get a shot at them we will utterly gank them.

It was suggested to me once that SA is a "Lucky" guild in that we don't have anyone else (at the moment) raiding in our time zone. It was also suggested by the same person that if we did have that competition (we used to by the way) we wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced through the game as we are.

I would suggest in return that although we do not have time zone competition, we are in fact at the back end of a daily raid schedule that starts about 7am AEST and ends just before we log on to Raid. In other words KTF, NO, Unity, Talionis, ShA and FA all raid before us and usually manage to happily clear the best parts of the server on a regular basis.

This is not a whine, its a fact and part of life. I'm just not sure how this qualifies us as lucky. If we were at the start of that killing rotation, even with other guilds as competition we would be in Time now.

I would also suggest that if anyone can point out another 2 day a week Raiding Guild who is within 4 Kills of Time I would be very very surprised.

We are Ready for the God's
We are Ready for Time
Bring it on