Time, ahh Time.
Farm Farm Farm. We are getting pretty good at this now. We have a complete Time clear down to about three and a half hours. Not bad considering our first full single raid Time clear was about 5 hours.
We have this down to a fine art, although we can still occasionally get sloppy and have trouble with a god or two. We had a couple of fails against Tallon Zek a few weeks ago for no other reason than we weren't paying attention.
Farming Time is good tho and lots of people still have plenty of slots and focus effect to replace or upgrade. Personally I'm still trying to upgrade 1 earring and 1 focus item. The earring is the last sub 100HP item I still have.
This weeks time raid was really good for me. I finally replaced my cloak which I have been trying to replace for over a year. I was awarded a cloak when we were raiding Shei Vinitras in the Akheva Ruins which was 90/100 and some stats. It was close to one of the first items I was ever awarded when I got to Prexus. It was a damn nice cloak at the time.
As we started moving through POP many many good cloaks started to drop (Fire was particularly good for this) and I always held off on them thinking I could wait till the rest of the guild all had one and they started to rot. We never quite got to the rot stage though so I kept waiting.
So we get into Time and I'm still waiting on a cloak, a few drop now and again, several of which had excellent focus effects for a Necro and I keep sending tells, but I never managed to have enough points at the time. So in the end I just said fuckit and went for any decent dropped cloak. Finally last week the Guild officers were kind enough to award me one!.
As the night progressed we also have a Circlet of Flowing Time drop. Now this is an item I have had my eyes on for some time so I figured what the hell and sent a tell and I got it!. OMG two in a night!. Woot I was just about bouncing out of my seat!.
The focus I'm trying to replace is Spell haste. I had a haste item in my range slot, but I upgraded that slot and lost the focus. I know that the hastes are only 20% or so, but the delay is definitely noticeable on most of my spells. I've been looking around for haste focii, but again they always seem to drop at just the wrong time. Ah well, it will happen one day.
Time is a funny place. You work immensely hard to get there and when you get there each encounter is fun and scales nicely. When you first get into Time the fights are quite tough until you work out the methods of beating them. Then once you have beaten it a few times and added a couple of full clears worth of drops to your guild your Guilds power ramps up exponentially.
I can understand why OOW and GOD are as hard as they are. Even ignoring the addition of an extra 5 levels we are a different guild to what we were pre-Time and we had only been in there 5 months prior to the GOD release. The amount of DPS that is added after your Tanks/Melee classes start to acquire Time weapons and your casting classes add a couple of K of mana to their mana pools is enormous.
Add to that the addition to all your tanks of a couple of hundred points of AC and several K of HP and your team is a very different one to that which dropped your final Elemental God and broke into Time.
We have also been doing buttloads of Epics lately. It seems everyone has the bug and is going for their epic weapon. One Friday I was logged on and I ended up doing 9 epic hits in a row. The bard one was the most fun so far I thought with several kills across Norrath.
Kill
A Dire Leech to spawn...
Kill
A Dire Kodiak to spawn...
****** This
update bought to you by too much Coffee and Avril Lavigne *******
Uqua. Damn we got close this time. It wasn't a perfect run by any means but it was a lot smoother than some of our recent runs.
We had our usual little diversion to drop Pixxt Suir Mindrider on the way through Yxtta
Once
again just as we engage I got distracted and once again I ended
the fight a thin red smear on the ground. Every expansion has
its bugbears. For me it was Tallon Zek in POP. He nailed me every
single fight. I think I survived 1 fight of all the times we killed
him. In GOD it appears to be the Mindrider. I have yet to survive
a fight with her and shes not exactly a tough kill.
SA
chomping at the bit to kill Barxt
We have the
clearing of the corridors down now. The multi pulls and traps
are well handled by the Chanty team and their new Mezz spells
or the off tanks will keep them under control. We still managed
to wipe in the first Fire Trap room with a key call that not only
set off the trap, it also opened the door. Go figure.
We cleared past the Furies, then the Avatars to the final encounter with Barxt. We knew we were going to get 12 ghosts at 80% as we had been at this point before. We were prepared for that and we handled them easily. After that point we had no idea what was going to happen.
We kept one of the ghosts alive till we were rezzed, medded and ready and then killed it. At this point it was 2:00am. I would normally log now but I was bound and determined to see this through. So I settled in, propped open my eyelids with toothpicks and Barxt was inbound at bard speed. We were expecting anything and only knew as much of the encounter as we had managed to get thru the week before, I didn't get to drop much in the way of DOTs on him as I was looking around the room checking to see if anything was popping and needed mezzing.
It started to get fast and confusing at around 40%, he started to mitigate melee damage in a big way and was resisting a lot of my spells. I switched over to pure damage mode and was throwing everything I could at him.
He spawned 2 ghost Adds with nasty AOEs one of which was a mana drain and sent me OOM in seconds. I threw my pet, my epic Pet and an 8500 HP Life Burn at him. At that point I was completely OOM with no chance in hell of regenerating mana or life tapping hp back from the LB. Next time Ill go melee on his ass as well.
I got splatted with him at 16%. By the time I had zoned it was all over. We got him to 14% at our best. He definitely dies next week. I logged at 2:30am and left my corpse at the ZI. There was no way I was going to be able to hang around till 3:00am for a rez.
I had an extremely interesting conversation with a fellow necromancer called (Name withheld to protect the innocent) from The Nameless server. It appears he is an aussie from Melbourne and plays with a Taiwanese guild. He apparently enjoys the weekly adventures of The Southern Armada and the travels of Ulaa Grimsoul. He also expressed admiration for our progress as a 2 day a week raiding guild.
/Bow thank you mate, its always nice to hear from someone who enjoys reading these missives. It spurs me along to keep at them.
Interestingly enough there is something of an ongoing debate over "raider" vs "casual" play in EQ and EQ2. Anyone who doesn't raid always denigrates raiders as "7 day a week no life zerg army losers'. Every now and again I pop into this debate and point out that as a 2 day a week raiding guild we have managed to make it into time and are working our way into GOD. We may not be a bleeding edge guild but we aren't far behind them. We don't have "you must raid" rules, we don't even enforce a "you must raid if you are online" rule. If you want to raid you do, if you don't you don't, that's fine.
Most of our members are adults, with jobs, kids, lives. we try and start at 7PM AEST but we don't always, we do our level best to integrate latecomers into the raids and we can have people turning up all through the night.
We manage to maintain a good reputation on our server as an honorable and friendly guild. It is perfectly possible to do all of this. We are just a group of people who decided we all wanted to see the high end of the game and were willing to be disciplined enough to do it. If you have ever been on a raid with a high end guild you will know its a different game to raiding with "casual" guild or pickups.
I've done several pickup raids trying to get flags for my tank twink and they drive me nuts. People who cant get where they are supposed to be without dieing, people who chat over the raid leader and then get lippy when they are asked to tone it down. People who wander off just to see what's "over there" and then panic and train the raid when they get aggro, people who don't pay attention to what the raid leaders are saying and then ask "what do I do?" 5 seconds after engage. Healers who heal pullers (BAD).
These idiots of course are the same people who accuse raiders of being "7 day a week no life zerg army losers" and claim they should be given a full set of Time gear and every flag they ever wanted just for logging in. Its called discipline, learn the meaning of the word.
I've personally I've finally become comfortable with the term 'Uber' as defined by the casuals. Most of the casual people throw the term around like an insult. I wear it now as a mark of pride.
To them 'uber' means "7 day a week no life zerg army losers", to me it means many many days waking up feeling like spattered shit after a 2-3am finish. It means the team I am a member of achieving our goals despite the odds. It means belonging to a very tight team of players who will go out of their way to help each other and to move forward in the game. It means many things to many people. But to me its a term of pride.
It also helps that we have one of the best Guild Leaders I've ever come across, several superb Raid leaders , including 2 of the best raid leaders on the server, a great group of Officers, an awesome pull team and heal team, a heal team leader second to none and a skilled membership willing to put aside personal bullshit and work together for a common goal 2 days a week. All this in a "casual" guild.
Southern Armada Rocks.
We also have a Guild Leader who can be evil when he feels like it, or an extremely gullible Necromancer *cough* Kestakhan *cough*, you choose after reading the following.
During
my travels throughout OOW I have run into this wee puppy on a
number of occasions. Normally I dont mind, but on this particular
occasion he got a little too close for comfort.
Ulaa
has also had a few upgrades
recently. On top of her new robe and shield she also completed
her 1.5 Epic. I lot of people have bagged the new epics but I
had always wanted to do the Epic Quests (both 1.0 and 1.5) so
I was determined to complete the quest. So here are a few shots
with the new Toy.
I love it, I think its very cool and I am deeply grateful to all of the people who helped me out along the way with kills and other things.
I love it, I think its very cool and I am deeply grateful to all of the people who helped me out along the way with kills and other things.
Oh
and by the way guys. When Epic 2.0 is fixed (The Necro one is
currently bugged) I want to be doing that as well !.
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