Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Eight

30/03/04 Week Fifty Eight


Well Monday rolled around, bright, fine and clear. Once again our raid was full of non-Southern Armada, once again we had all sorts of problems with them. The recent patches are also screwing people up with massive casting lag, mob lag, video lag, link deaths, bugs and just generally weird stuff happening. The game has become all but unplayable for some people and 
I'm surprised that we have managed to kill anything at all.


Well, all I can say is at least they are doing this now, rather than during our first weeks in Time. I'm really hoping that they have all this crap fixed soon 'cause they are making the game just plain not fun at the moment.


Anyway first up was the Elemental Plane of Earth. (not Yay). We needed to drop two rings in here to spawn the Arbitor. This will hopefully be our final killing of him and was basically done for back flagging. Again people started to come out of the woodwork for the flags. We had app's and un flagged from every top ten guild on Prexus I think. Mezzes were breaking, Chanters getting splatted all over the place.


I honestly don't believe the mess our raids have become is about us, at least I wasn't noticing our people on mezz breaks or on Mob aggro. As soon as we go back to just raiding with SA people, we will revert to our usual level of killing efficiency. I really don't know how the officers and raid leaders do it. The frustration levels must be enormous at the moment.


First up was the Vine ring. We actually headed into the fortress bit in the middle and did all of our pulling from there. I think I'm beyond hating Earth Rings, now I just feel a kind of resigned acceptance, I am extremely happy that we dont have to go back ever again though.
Next it was back to the ZI and get ready for the Mud ring.
Finally we headed over to Tanitsala Jaggedtooth's platform to get ready for the entrance to the Arbitors lair. This is where it all turned to shit. I don't know who aggroed them, I don't know where they came from or why. But suddenly we had 4-5 Dusty Warders in camp completely smashing the raid. Off tanking was tried for a bit, but whether it was lag or just too many of them, it didn't work and the call was made for clerics to camp.

Now the problem with this is that the Arbitor is on a timer and it was running. We not only had to rez and move in record time, we had to start pulling and killing the Arbitor guards at massive speed. I don't think we have ever cleared out the Arbitor caves at that kind of pace. It was absolutely phenomenal and compared to the crap that had been going on before, it was amazing.

I think our people just started to ignore the Non SA in the rest of the raid and began pulling hard, in typical SA fashion with Kez egging us on "Faster, Faster, FASTER". Something tells me he doesnt want to have to do Earth again either!.
I actually got asked at one point by a (nameless) Non SA if we were about to wipe. I asked why he thought that and the reply was that we had 3-4 Mobs in camp, 2-3 on the way and wouldn't that be too much to handle?. After I finished laughing I replied no, that was fairly normal when we get on a roll.

Finally we cleared to the Arbitor. To speed things up even more, we didn't even pull to our usual kill area. The problem with the pull was that the graphics bugs started to glitch us again. The Arbitor kept getting stuck on small protuberances in the tunnel and in the end we just rushed him. The CH chain started early on Pooby and we all raced ahead into the corridor.

Once again the AOE mana drain DOT got me, but not before I managed to at least get 5 dots running on him so I still did a butt load of damage. I saved Life Burn till last and hit him with it at 10% and there was a nicely satisfying drop in his HP bar when it landed.
That was it and we all gated out. I had to leave early and logged about 12:30am but SA went on and dropped everything worthwhile in POEb.

There wont be an update for Wednesdays raid as I was unable to be there. I think this is about the 2nd or 3rd raid I have completely missed in 58 weeks and I'm not happy about it. Basically I was informed on the raid morning that someone would be sleeping in my computer room that night. So I played an alt for a couple of hours and was forced to log about 9:00pm AEST just as the second pull of the RC was being handled.

Ah well I am happy to report that SA took down the Rathe Council with aplomb and then (I believe) went on to clear POEb again. So hopefully next week starts with a killing of Coirnav and end's with our first run at Time trials

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