Everquest Raids Southern Armada Week Eighty Six

12/11/04 Week Eighty Six
This week is close to identical to last week with one small exception.


Monday: Time
We romped through killed everything, received vast amounts of Phat Phat Lewtz. It was good (I wasn't there)


Thursday: Uqua
We formed up in Yxtta and it wasn't looking good initially. We were damn low on Warriors and on Clerics. I was honestly wondering if they would call the raid due to low attendence. We kicked off the instance with 2 Warriors and 5 Clerics (2 of those were bots), fortunately our Druids have been breeding and we have millions and millions of them, so we weren't hurting too bad on the heal-age.


We headed into Uqua after the usual clear of Mindrider. I actually survived Mindrider for once, mainly by spending 50% of the fight FD. I must admit I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention to the initial pulls. But they were tight!, the SA machine was in action and we were clearing rapidly through the zone trash.


Before we even realized it we were at the first trap room, through it, and clearing to the Constructs. We began to have a few LD's and we pulled both the Construct of Fury and the Construct of Rage at the same time.


I saw the two of them thundering down the corridor at me at the same time and thought " Fuck this is it, this is a wipe". But we handled it!. We were under strength (raid wasn't full) and short key classes, but everyone pas concentrating and playing to the top of their game. Offtanking worked perfectly and we burned down the Constructs one by one.


We cleared down and split the raid to take on Tqiv Araxt the Enraged and Tqiv Qukret the Furious. The first time we did these kills they stayed with 1-2% of each other from start to finish. But for some reason this time they got very lopsided and at one point Tqiv Araxt the Enraged was nearly 20% ahead of his mate. We slowed down one side and kept the DPS up on the other side and they died fairly cleanly.


Right at the end of the kill we lost a tank and a cleric to Tqiv Qukret the Furious and suddenly we had death adds in the middle of what was a seriously weakened raid force.
For those unaware: You have to kill the Furious and the Enraged within about 20 seconds of each other so you have to split your raid to do it. They both have nasty mana drain /hp drain /spell cast delay AOEs and they both have a bad habit of porting random members of the groups attacking them to the other side of the zone. I started this fight on the Furious and was ported and finished the fight on the Enraged.


We managed to get the death adds under control, barely, but we did it. I FD'd and waited to see what was going to happen and whether I was going to be needed for raid Rezzing. thankfully I wasn't and we reformed. We began to clear down to the second trap room. We started to get a bit slack at this point and a few comments were made by officers along the lines of "come on guys keep concentrating". It only takes one seconds in attention in a place like Uqua and you are fucked.


What I don't understand is why, when you have all week to fuck around and be a dick head you feel the need to do it on a raid as well?. Cant people reign in their bullshit for the 3-5 hours required twice a week?.


The raid was definitely slowing down. DPS dropped slightly at this point but we were still making progress. We crushed the Devastating Construct and finally that irritating zone wide AOE was off.


We took a wee break at this point to refocus, take a pee and generally get our heads around the job to come, the death of Vrex Barxt Qurat.
We prepped, strat was called, we buffed and engaged. This time, instead of looking around for adds to mezz or dealing with any other crap I concentrated on doing the one thing that a Necro does better than anyone else given a long enough fight and a mob with low resists. I pumped out damage.


I had running on him:
Dark Nightmares
Pyre of Mori
Night Fire
Funeral Pyre of Kelador
Blood of Thule
Nights Beckon
Pyrocruor
and I was chain tapping.


That's about 2500/tick not including Crits and tapping every tick for 1100. I also had normal pet on him and the clickie pet from the epic. He also got a fully raid buffed life burn (8523). I smacked his ass!.


Vrex Barxt Qurat died slowly and smoothly. I don't think there was ever a moment that I doubted he was going to die once we were past the initial engage.


We burned him down to 90% and handled the 12 adds beautifully. We kept one add alive and formed up for the second run. We rezzed people and rebuffed when needed. The call was made and we started to take down the last standing add.


The last add dies and Nymeria is doing a hell of a job of keeping Barxt's attention. We all start to burn. Fuck any adds, Chanters will deal with them or Rangers and Pallies will lock them down. Everyone is doing this beautifully, the Southern Armada slaughter engine is in motion and performing at peak.

Barxt died about 2:00am New Zealand time and Southern Armada beat the guild killer. Uqua has been known to break guilds completely, but we did it, we made it past the little bastard and zoned into Qvic - Prayer Grounds of Calling.

The question which has reared its ugly head in the last few days is a slightly different one. Southern Armada can beat anything that SOE can throw at us, we know that now.

Will we be beaten by the combined might of Worlds of Warcraft and Everquest 2?. Will SA survive?. I'm certainly willing to put my skills and efforts into the "yes" category.