Sunday, June 06, 2004

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Sixty Seven

06/06/04 Week Sixty Seven
We had a wee issue with entering Time on Monday in that another guild's instance was still in effect. So we had to wait for it to Time out. This has happened to us once before and we ended up being completely unable to enter Time at all. So we headed over to the Elemental Plane of EarthB and cleared it.

We still couldn't wall any MOBs due to the usual high level of SOE patch quality control so we had to keep all the MOBs including the Boss out from all walls and pin them. It certainly makes EQ harder that's for sure.
TimeB boss
With TimeB out of the way and the phat Lewtz just beginning to flow we headed back to Time. The first attempt at zoning in wasn't successful so Kez called a five minute time out and we all went and had a bit of a break. The second attempt was fine and we headed into Tier One.

I love these Models.
I would love if my 65 Pet could look like the non cavalry version of this. Having one of these giant bad boys standing at my right shoulder would look very very cool.
That was really about it for Monday. We cleared through Tier One, Two and Three and left it it that.

Thursday rolls around, we zone in, clear Tier One and head straight for Tier 4. Shortly before zone in I found out that I have blown 15k worth of Tribute points. I must have forgotten to turn them off after the last raid and I've been playing all week. So 20 minutes before raid start I find I cant run any tributes at all damn it. So my resists were a little lower than I was happy with, but ah well, nothing to be done.
Saryrn died first.
Followed closely by Terris Thule.
Then it was time for the Zek Brothers. The last patch apparently had fixed some of the Time wall warping issues but not all of them so we were forced to be extremely careful in how we engaged and positioned MOBs. Tallon didn't give us many issues..
but Vallon did. We just couldn't get one of his adds under control, the swine just wouldn't snare and was racing around throughout the raid. I actually thought we were going to wipe but he eventually did go down with about 20 people still attacking. I got summoned and splatted with him at about 2%. He died, it was sad.
Straight through to Tier 5 and after clearing the Gods "armies" we set up for Cazic Thule. I had all my fingers and toes crossed for another Robe drop. I want all of the casters to get one of these and Cazic is the most likely to drop it. Unfortunately he snuffed it but refused to cough up another Robe.
So with the disappointment of no Robe under our belts we headed over to Rallos Zek. The Raid Leaders decided to not corner him and see if we could just keep him in position in the center of the room again. We were doing really well up until about 50%. I had the misfortune of failing to notice two failed FD attempts in a row and ended up on his AOE rampage list. Faster than i could blink I was dead. He hit me for around 2950, 2680, 2560 and that was it for me. I have to say Lightning Reflexes 5 at 15 AA's was obviously worth it. <-- Sarcasm
So after the reset we pulled Bertoxxulous while waiting for the Warrior disciplines to reset. After the Rallos fight we had quite a few leave and we engaged Berty with 64 in the raid. The difference those 8 people made was huge. Our DPS was noticeably lower and at this point I really began to notice the lack of Tributes running.

Normally we would find Berty not a huge problem but this fight seemed to drag on forever. Eventually he snuffed it but it was an ugly messy fight.
So we headed back to Rallos.
We have dropped him once (twice?) and we are suddenly having problems with him. Usually once SA has mastered a target we never really have problems with it again. But Rallos has defeated us over and over. We can handle his adds, we have enough DPS but there is a point at about 40% where we begin to lose it. The fight doesn't collapse and we suddenly wipe, it just starts to go all wobbly, we hang on and on but never quite get it back together.

So after the second wipe I logged. It was a little early, only about 1:45am but that was pretty much it for the raid. Its odd, we are definitely getting better at Tiers 1-4, we can clear everything in there with no issues. Cazic Thule and Bertoxxulous are definitely on the farm list but Inny and Rallos are still managing to evade us regularly.

I had a little bit of a spazz on the SA boards a week or so ago that I feel I should apologize for. The issue arose during a discussion of the GOD trials. Now I have tried these trials over and over and over. I have tried them with pickup groups, I have tried them with Uber Guilds members I have tried them with all SA groups and I just have not been able to get past the damn things. The revelation this week that the entire GOD expansio was tuned for level 70 suddenly make's a hell of a lot of sense to me.

But during the course of this discussion I went off. All I can attribute it to was stress ( Come back Boss all is forgiven! ) . My apologies to those who were forced to read it.

I have in fact (Thank you Feranis and all those who were in the Trial 6 group on Friday night) passed Trial 6 and I am now simply trying to get past Trial 5. I put a group together on Saturday afternoon, which after 4 hours wiped umpteen times and we were only half way through. There was nothing wrong with the group per se, they were all good players, it just didn't quite gel for some reason. Ah well onward and upward and I shall try again this weekend.

The frustration for me over these Trials is having to find at least 4-6 hours of time to do them. Hell I leveled to 65 and 200 AA's on 4 hours a night. The weird thing is that once I have done them and got them under my belt, I am more than willing to do them over and over and over again to flag all those who need them. Much like Time flagging, I hated the hanging around for the Coirnav event, RC plain sucked for everyone, but once flagged for those kills I continued to show up for all of them so that everyone else could get theirs too. I just like having them done for myself, then I can "relax" I guess.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to continue doing these. I am guessing that we will be farming Time for some time to come, at least 6 months. There really isn't a whole lot of excitement to be generated or written about when doing instance#156 and Time_God#199. I will possibly have to change the format of this weekly missive somewhat and see what other EQ /SA related stuff I can come up with. Haven't decided yet. Stay Tuned!.

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