Friday, August 27, 2004

Everquest Raids Southern Armada Week Seventy Eight

27/08/04 Week Seventy Eight
After clearing Ikkinz 4 twice now, we had enough people flagged to have a go at the next step up, Uqua the Ocean God Chantry.


We formed up in Yxtta and made our way across the zone to the entrance of Uqua which is an instanced zone.


We zoned in and immediately got hit with the zone wide AOE which is -300 to all stats. Its odd to have an int of 55 and I obviously take a big hit in my mana pool, but it's unresistable so there isn't a lot you can do about it. So we buff up with as many stat buffs as we can and begin the pulls.


The first pulls were extremely lumpy and we managed to wipe the raid twice within minutes of beginning. There is a trap close to the entrance, if you set it off you get 5 nasty MOBs inbound at once. You have to get all of them off tanked and under control as soon as possible or really bad things happen.


Here's the thing about Uqua; you cannot let anyone die, ever. Every time someone dies two things happen. The first is that a quad 1k hitting ghost spawns immediately. If you don't get the ghost under control quickly you soon have 2, then 3, then 4 of them on your hands up to a maximum of 8.


Once you have 2-3 of them rampaging plus the original pull, you basically are going to wipe.
The second thing that happens is that every mob in the zone gets very slightly tougher. Wipe too many times and the Mobs that are quad 1K hitters will end up as quad 2k hitters, and that's just the trash.


So once we had reformed after the first 2 raid wipes we slowly began to make our way forwards. We made it to the first of the Gas chamber rooms and managed to wipe again. Without giving too much away, you have to have the entire raid in a small room where a request is asked of the raid.


Answer the question wrong and 3 waves of 5K AOE's kick off. We figured out how this little trap worked after the first wipe and reform and got out of the room pretty damn quickly.


Beyond the first Gas chamber room is another trap and here is where we came unstuck. I logged at about 1:30am after our 3rd wipe in exactly the same spot. We just couldn't get the adds under control and people were dieing on each new pull. I was FD'ing and trying to stay alive after the wipe but the AOE kept popping me up from FD. The longest I managed to survive was 3 waves of AOE, but after I was down the third time someone got up and aggroed the MOBs. Once the person was dead there were about 5 Mobs standing around right on top of me. So once the AOE went off and I popped up, I was splatted.


At 1:30am I was insanely cold and shivering. That's with 2 gas heaters and a fireplace trying to keep the house warm. New Zealand has been hit with an ongoing series of vicious cold snaps in the last few weeks. Most of the country seems to be deep under a blanket of snow and ice and its really hard to sit in a room in front of a huge pane of glass which is sucking the heat out of the room (nice in summer of course) when its so cold you can see your breath.


Our Time raid went off as per normal. We actually started a little late due to delays in Tier 1, but we utterly blasted through Tier 2 and 3 and ended up close to on schedule. Bertoxxulous still refuses to drop the Veil. He dropped 2 a couple of weeks ago and has since made up for it by refusing to drop any more. Once again I had to log early due to the cold and was in bed by about 1:45am.

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