Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Sixty Six

31/05/04 Week Sixty Six

Well the week started off fairly simply with a quick Ragefire kill. There was a Guildie who needed him for his click-stick so a half dozen or so of us zoned into Skyfire and trounced him. This is the 3rd or 4th one of these I've done I think. I never get tired of killing Dragons and Giants!.

We also had a bit of a pickup Paffa kill. It was more for old times sake than any real hope the fat bastard was actually likely to drop anything useful. I think in the end we got a mask that someone happily took!. This guy is a joke, they put one of the most useful DOT class items in the game and made it so rare as to be an utter waste of time. Why, what was the point?. Rarity is good yes as its nice to be able to display a rare item to your friends and enemies. But the drop rate on this guy is just utterly ridiculous.

Monday rolled around, we rolled into Time and blitzed our way through 1,2,3.

If I was in a pickup group and this guy was this close to me, I would more than likely be looking at the "Loading.. Please Wait screen" shortly thereafter. Tier 3 is just a solid and fun Zergfest. Pull em fast, pull em hard, keep em coming. Monks die a lot in this tier it seems, but hey that's what they are there for!.

Once we zoned into Tier 4 we first went for Saryrn and Terris Thule. Both of these young ladies are solidly in "Pharmage" category for us now. Neither of them exactly give us much trouble.

Next up, the Zek Brothers. Vallon and Tallon. Not quite in the farmage category yet but getting close. We had to reset on the first run at Tallon but we have Vallon down to a fine art and rarely lose anyone to him.

That was it for Monday Night. There wasn't a whole lot all that exciting about it, it was a good solid Lewt Pharming run. One thing that was interesting tho, we can now easily clear through Tiers One, Two, Three and Four in a single night. Once we add some more DPS through drops and the over all power level of the guild increases, I believe we will be clearing Time in a single night easily.

Par for the course Sony patched and fucked up. The so called "further improvements in pathing and collision detection" for the new DirectX9 engine made MOB's un-wallable Now for those who don't raid on a regular basis there are essentially two primary ways to control a MOBs positioning during a fight. The first and most common is Cornering (also knowing as "AOW'ing the MOB"). Basically you shrink your MT as small as he/she will get, put him in a corner and everyone gets in behind the MOB. There is a very good reason for this on specific MOBs which I'm sure you can figure out yourself. The MOB faces the MT with is back exposed, simple enough.

The second method is "Walling" and is a little more complex. Basically the MOB and the MT face each other with one side hard against a wall. The rest of the melee place themselves in a 30 degree arc on the opposite side from the wall and the MT and they try to balance their "Push" against MOB movement, this is to keep the mob pinned against the wall and not moving.

Now the happy little Collision detection fix meant that both of these methods were impossible. As soon as any MOB in Time touched a wall it warped back to its spawn point and then began summoning the raid members one by one. This of course is a "Bad Thing"(TM). We learned that this was going on from Guilds who were raiding earlier than us, so with the anticipation of not being able to Corner or Wall any Time Gods we cleared through Tier 1 and headed for Tier 5.

First up of course was the AOE clearing of the Tier 5 Gods armies. This is fun and with all spell effects on is actually very pretty!.

First up, Rallos Zek. We have beaten him twice now, but not being able to corner an AOE rampaging MOB that gets tougher the longer he lives, makes this kill a hell of a lot harder. So we formed up, buffed up and went in. We had the adds under control and Rallos positioned in the center of the room, but the room positioning got away from us and Rallos began to rampage through the Tanks and the Clerics. Reset was called and we left him to his own devices while we rethought our strat and worked on a few other Gods.

Cazic Thule. This swine is the target I had been waiting for all week. We buffed up after Rallos, setup and pulled. I was sitting at my PC chanting "ROBE ROBE ROBE" as he died. He went down very easy, even having to keep him in the middle of the room wasn't too hard as he is a pretty straightforward tank fight. Pooby did a great job of walking him around the room with the melee all pushing him in little circles.

Kez kneeled over his prostrate corpse and I waited on the Lewtz messages. I had my "Yes Please" all typed and waiting. Woot there was the Robe! My tell went in and knuckles white I waited for the decision of the Officers. After some deliberation they awarded this to me! Woohoo!!!!!. That's an EQ dream complete for me. Many people sent me many nice tells and said many nice things to me that night. It was a hell of a great feeling!.

I remember being on Karana and sitting here at work as the Lewtz info from POP began to flow in. I remember seeing the info on Allakhazam's about the Time Silks and thinking, damn I will never see any of that. I will never get into POP, I will never get to Time!.

Well thanks to everyone in the guild I have achieved all of that. Everything from here on in is just cake as far as I'm concerned. In fact I now need something else to aim for. I was thinking maybe aiming for 7K buffed HP but that feels a little too lewt centric for me. I think I will just continue trying to max out my trade skills and then try and come up with another Goal. I have found without some sort of over arching goal I tend to get very bored with EQ very fast. Just aiming for the next AA really isn't that interesting to me. In fact I find XP comes a lot faster if I relax and don't actually try too hard for it.

I've been hanging out for the Robe as the last piece of a full set of Elemental silk. So for the last few months I haven't been sending tells on anything at all. Finally I can send tells again, to celebrate I even sent some tells on Melee Lewtz later on in the night!

Anyway. Summary.

Cazic Thule Dead. Robe (Me!) Bertoxxulos also dead shortly after.

Then we headed back to Rallos. So far we had Cazic and Berty under our belts, it was time for another shot at the big boy. There was much pessimism in the Necro Channel. I'm beginning to think that whenever the Necros think there is a fail on the cards, its almost a guaranteed indicator of success!.

So we pulled him, we positioned him and smoothly, he died. Not even a hiccup. We had to feed him a couple of Tanks, and quite a few Pallies were sacrificed to the Greater Gods of Phat Phat Lewtz, but in the end he snuffed it.

So with Rallos out of the way we faced up to the one God we still hadn't defeated. Innoruk, the God I chose as my Deity five years ago without having a clue what it meant. We still had the problem that we couldn't wall or corner him or his adds, he had to be kept in the center of the room and balanced perfectly. There was a quick strat session and we engaged.

The first 5 minutes or so of the fight went well. We had him positioned well, he was being kept stable in the middle of the room. Then his adds popped. Now we initially thought that they were free to roam, so we had snare/root teams assigned to keep them out of our hair. Unfortunately as they popped we found out they are in fact tethered, so the snare teams would pull them out and away from Inny and they would warp back.

So we now have Inny slowly dropping and 2K hitting adds rampaging through the raid. The pallies and offtanks stepped up, the snare teams did an amazing job of keeping them as occupied as they possibly could. They would finally get a snare/root on an Add and everyone just tried to move away. The Necros were just laying the smack down. I was throwing everything I possibly could at Innoruuk. DOT's, nukes, taps anything that would land.

As the fight progressed, Inny dropped further, more Adds popped, more people died and it got nastier and more unruly. We had adds all over the place, I got kicked by an add in passing for 800hp, they were crushing Clerics and Healers and slowly taking out the tanks. We had him below 10%, then 5%, then he was in Death Walk.

I was OOM and medding to be able to land taps on him. Taps are pretty cheap mana wise so I was just chaining him with Touch of Mujaki. I dropped a LifeBurn on him at about 5% or so. Man I wish that Life Burn could Crit. Suddenly he was at 0%, we had sod all people still up and the adds were still all over the place. I was nuking for all I was worth and all of a sudden he dropped like a stone. BAM the last God between us and Quarm hit the deck.

We still hadn't finished with this fight yet. Most of the guild was down and we still had a butt load of deep red adds alive. I was completely OOM having dropped my wad on Inny so as the tanks were engaging the remaining Adds, I was medding to try and be able to still contribute to the fight. I was throwing out a few Dots here and there and dumping to clerics when I got dropped by a roamer. Suddenly there was all this red spam on my screen and I was dead before I was even aware of the first hit.

We were rezzing like mad to try and bring as many people as possible back into the fight as it was still balanced on a knife edge. I ran back through the tiers to Tier 5 and just as I reached my corpse a Rezz window popped up in front of me, I took the rezz, looted and began to med again. In the 2 minutes it took me to zone back to Tier 5 the whole situation had changed.

From being down to about 15 people still in zone as Inny dropped we now had enough tanks to cope and the Clerics and Healers seemed to be back in the fight. The Root/Snare teams were keeping their mobs locked down and we were back under control again. To me there was never a feel of desperation, or "we may lose this", it was always just a feeling of "oops, there was a bit of a boo boo but we can beat this".

Finally the last of the ads dropped., Everyone was rezzed back in and Kez called the raid to Tier 6 and Quarm.

There he was. The end of a year and a quarter road. Quarm. We had absolutely no idea about this fight beyond you need all resists as high as possible. So we pulled him, we engaged and we got him to 78% on our first try. With no prep and no knowledge of the fight I thought that was pretty damn good. 3% more and he would have dropped a head. To me that means he is eminently killable and he will die within the next week or two.

I feel a "State of the Game" coming on and I am currently working on it. It will more than likely go up with this weeks update.