Well this week has largely been bloody annoying, along with a reoccurrence of Link Deaths out of the blue, which caused me to miss a raid on Tuesday, we all had a particularly frustrating raid on Thursday.
Its actually been suggested that there hasn't been much to say about our raids recently. Unfortunately this is true. We got to the point where it was Fire - Cleared, Water - Cleared, Earth - Cleared etc. There's not really a lot to say when you are clearing a zone for the fifth or sixth time. I guess it will be a bit more interesting once we hit the Time Gods. I believe we will clear Tier 4 this coming week, or at the very least make a serious dent in it.
We zoned in to Elemental Plane of Time on Monday to be greeted with the news that our instance had re spawned and we were heading in fresh. So we formed up, set up the Teams and kicked off the Trials. We seemed to have a frustrating time of it with fails in the first attempt on 3 out of five. The bizarre part is we failed the easy ones and succeeded on the hard ones.
I was in a group that completed Undead and Fire, the two hardest instances. I have to say that despite the frustration factor the Trial's are a hell of a lot of fun. I'm sure we will get to a point where we just blitz thru them, but right now they are challenging enough to be a lot of fun. And after all, there is no reward without trying.
So we formed up for a second attempt, made a few adjustments and headed back to the Trials. This time I was slated for water and was on the run to the trial entrance when I was Disconned. Now many people I know will disagree with me, but for me there is nothing in the world as frustrating as a disconnect because there is NOTHING that you can do about it. I have had to get up and go outside for a breath of fresh air on certain occasions after a disconn, mainly because if I didn't I would have thrown my monitor through the wall.
Anyway, I waited a bit, tried to logon, no dice, no connection, I checked my Ping Streams ( I run four Pings continuously at various locations on the Internet and my network whenever I am playing EQ) and they all said there was no internet beyond my NIC card. After reboots, checking settings, trying a few tricks and 2 hours of stuffing about, I rang my DSL provider.
"Oh Yes sir, we have determined from trended usage patterns that Tuesday night after 11PM is the least used time of our DSL service, so we have taken down the entire network to do some work on the core switches" AAAARRFGGGHHHHHH!!!
Fucking assholes, thanks for the email, mail out or other notification that you are about to take down my corporate DSL link. Telstra Suck. Telecom's and Banks. If they actually treated people decently from the start, they wouldn't have to spend millions of dollars on advertising to persuade us that they are "decent folks".
Anyway, that was the end of Tuesday nights raiding. I gave up and went to bed frustrated beyond belief. What made it worse was Southern Armada cleared the Time A trials for the first time, cleared Tier 2 and made good progress on Tier 3 and I missed it. AAAARRRGGGHHG!
So Thursday rolled around. Now after they did their "maintenance" on Tuesday night I have been having a rather nasty bout of LinkDeaths. The last time this happened I spent a lot of time and effort and abuse persuading the local Telco that the LD's were their problem and not my PC/ NIC. I finally got some results after getting our corporate account manager to step in, and a techie arrived at my house, replaced about 20 meters of cable and completely rewired my jacks.
That actually cured my LD problem for about the last 6 months. Now its back. Joy.
Additionally of course after the last patch I am now also getting EQ Client Crashes, so all in all its been bloody annoying. Anyway we formed up and dropped the Trials in TimeA. I had just clicked into my second trial 10 seconds after the Tanks and Clerics had gone in, when my screen went black and i dropped to desktop on Zone.
Once again the internet had disappeared and I had to simply sit and wait for my NIC to be able to see beyond the cable jack. Finally I got a response and logged back in. It seems that my group had zoned in and wiped, so a second group had to be assigned to go in to clear the Trial. This meant more delay and all the Trials are on strict Timers.
Once the fifth and last trial was cleared there was then confusion about where we were meant to be. I was were I thought I was supposed to be until i was told, rather forcibly that I was in fact in the wrong spot and I needed to make my way reasonably rapidly to Tier 3.
So after the confusion was cleared up we started to pull. Unfortunately by this point we had now wasted a significant amount of time. Tier 3 it seems you have to pull hard and fast. We needed to have 2-3 Mobs in camp all the time. Now this wouldn't normally have been a problem apart from the fact we played like a bunch of individuals, not as a team.
The MOBs in here are mean and there are a lot of them, we needed to be on the ball and we simply weren't.
However we basically we stuffed it completely. Every now and again we can show up and just play like complete Newbs, like a bunch of Ebays on their first raid and Thursday was just such a occasion. Part of the problem I think, is that we are experiencing low raid numbers again. We were trying to clear Tier 3 with 60ish people which meant our DPS was suffering significantly.
I don't get it. We worked our assess off to get into Time. We put in the hours, hell the Days, we learned the strats and did them over and over to get them down and kill out targets. Now we have actually reached our goal, now we are in the Candy land that is Time and fewer people are showing up.
Anyway. Once we had been bounced from the Zone after the Timer expired we went looking for other stuff to kill and Plane of Fire just happened to b in the process of popping.
So we slowly began to clear Fire. We had lost a few people after we had been booted from Time so DPSW was even lower. I was pretty knackered and pretty disappointed about our Time fail, but I decided to hang out to help. We pretty much trounced the fire mobs with no real problems. Everything got pulled and killed, even General Reparm fell over with no huge problems.
That
was it for me and I logged at about 2:00 am. Next week we are
raiding three days in an effort to intensively learn Time and
progress through to at least the Gods of Tier 4. I have cleared
it with the GF and I will be there with bells on!.
/wave
Nobby
I hope the trip is treating you and Sonja well!.
I hope the trip is treating you and Sonja well!.
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