Finally its here!.
Vanguard Game Update 3.2 and 3.3 were delayed so long they were ultimately released simultaneously as a single patch. The whole of SA was absolutely chomping at the bit to get into the zone and get killing. Its been a hell of a long wait, for me its been nearly 3 years since I last raided with SA, but everything that I have read about the APW raid game says that its a lot of fun.
Before you can zone into the Ancient Port Warehouse you have to find and defeat a wandering named, this guy is up simultaneously in 3 different zones across each of the 3 continents. They dont seem to be too hard to find. Once you have the quest for the gateway you are given a little vial of poison. Now here is an Southern Armada super sekret strat (tm) for ya. Use the little vial on the named BEFORE you attack him. This weakens him and turns him into a new mob type which is eminently killable. If you don't, much like a silly pink Warrior of my acquaintance, you will find out that he does about 95,000 damage per hit. Thats not even a one shot!, even fully raid buffed thats like a 0.1 shot!.
To make a long story much shorter, we found heem we keeled heem. Actually we killed him with 15 people and only 2 healers as we were a bit short of people that night.
So after the hand in and clutching our shiny, newly minted keys, we rolled into the much vaunted, long awaited Ancient Port Warehouse. Would it be as good as our anticipation?, would it be horribly buggy and lagged out beyond playability the way the VG boards had been claiming? would it be full of hundreds of yard trash to pull?. Well first off you zone into a kind of entry room with 2 Gnomes and a large metallic statue. The Statue is named Cerulean and hands you a number of quests which can only be completed by killing named's deeper into APW and then finding an NPC even further into the Zone.
One of the Gnomes does sod all and just gives you some text, but the second Gnome serves a vital purpose. He lets you repair armor and weapons right at the spawn point. Now this is a well placed Gnome, without this guy Raiding and learning in the zone would be a hell of a lot harder. So a good layout to start with. At this point in time we didn't have anywhere near the people we needed online to start a raid so its good bye for now and we will see you real soon...
So, its a couple of days later and we are formed up for the first raid on Monday night. I had run down and parked myself right outside the gateway on Saturday, knowing I wouldn't be online for several days and wanting to be there well and truly on time. Note to self, don't fall into the damn harbor. There is quite literally no way out of the damn harbor once you get wet. You cant climb out of the water anywhere, I spent an hour swimming around the edges of the damn pool trying to find a ramp or ladder, or some way out of the water before I gated out and ran back.
Anyway, we formed up, buffed up and headed down the elevator. The first mob we saw died pretty cleanly. A Guardian B27 stands at the entrance to the zone, we saw, we pulled, he fell over.
Now its not all that easy and I have to admit we wiped several times on the way to our first named. So far, I have to say huge Kudos to SOE for this zone. Even the trash is challenging. If you are an experienced raid guild this wont cause you too much pain, but its going to throw you some serious curve balls as you learn. If you are a Guild new to raiding, this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun and a huge challenge!.
Little things like Fire mobs which, if you cast fire spells on them, the fire actually heals them for the damage dealt. These are only small things but they add some nice twists to the genre and as almost every mob has some twist like that, it adds up to a challenge on each fight and makes each fight different. Rather than every single fight being simply pull and clear the trash till you get to the next boss, each fight has its own unique signature and needs to be planned for.
So finally we get to the first Boss. His name is "A Malfunctioning X77" and he stands alone in a huge hall, the X77 himself is actually in a small alcove surrounded on three sides by archways, this should have been a hint. So we clear around him and then have a wee conversation about how he is going to die. The brains in the guild make the call, and we move in. (I'm not the brains, I'm a tank, I stand where I'm told to and get hit a lot!)
Now I don't want to actually talk a lot about the specifics of this fight. This is still a really new experience for almost everyone and I don't want to provide any spoilers for future people coming through this zone. Suffice it to say this guy has a surprise in store for you!.
Engaged with A Malfunctioning X77
The first attempt we wiped early when he sprung his trap, second attempt he went down to 13% and 3rd attempt he died smooth, if not easy.Our first dead APW Boss!
I got loots!. X77 was kind enough to drop a quest piece for my Dread Knight armor set. I am determined to get a complete Armor set out of APW. I have seen a couple of links of some awesome two handers which drop in APW as well. With the changes coming down the pipe which will make Dreads 2H tankers I am looking forward to getting to play with some of those. One of the images Ive seen was a sword which looked like a flaming version of the swords issued to the Uruk Hai in the movie Lord of the Rings. As a 2h sword it looked damn impressive.
We continued onwards after dropping X77 and made our way further into the zone. We have no idea where we are going so we were really just exploring and trying to get our bearings. We came across a mob that looked like it might be a named, called Guardian R5. The raid stopped, we rebuffed, made sure the engagement instructions were clear, carefully positioned tanks and healers and pulled. We were very careful with our aggro and the raid leaders were extra cautious on engagement and damage. We had no idea what this guy was going to do or what he was possibly capable of. In the end he did nothing and we dropped him like an orc pawn. I didn't even take screenies, I didn't think he was important!.
We then wiped on the very first trash pull after R5!.
Its all good. I'm thoroughly enjoying APW so far and if this is a taste of things to come I can see us enjoying the zone all the way through!. We will be raiding Wednesday and Thursday this week so there will be lots more update goodness and dead bosses!.
Wednesday 19.12.07
One thing I would like to say first off is a HUGE thank you to my own personal Tank Crack dealer. Zarthaz has been making me awesome weapons since my mid 20's, every time I am ready for an upgrade he is there with one already made or asking me what Procs I would like on the one he is about to make. 2 thumbs up for the mighty Monk Weaponsmith!.
Second raid, we formed up pretty quickly, buffed up and headed straight in. We knew that the Malfunctioning X77 was going to be dead to us but the zone so far seems pretty linear so we basically headed in the same direction. We were definitely moving better than we were on Monday night and we had the strat for the trash mobs down pretty tight.
Quote of the Night
Aegis: "We are moving a lot faster tonight folks, after learning a bit about the zone last night I plan to treat this place with a little less respect"
And we did!. It only took about 15 minutes to reach the Malfunctioning X77 room and clear past it. We dropped the Guardian R5 again easy peasy and learned a bit about how to split multiple mobs. The Fire and Ice guardians are Evil if pulled together. Basically a Fire Guardian hits you with an AOE fire DOT which is also a debuff for Ice damage. So if you pull them simultaneously you get debuffed for both the types of damage you are about to take and wipe quickly. Trust me we know this. (Does that explanation make any sense?, I hope it did) So we figured out a quick and easy method of getting the two types separated and happily smashed our way through.
I think one of our major weaknesses as a Guild at the moment is having only one Monk. If Zarthaz cant be available for a night we are going to find this zone a lot harder to deal with. So we finally made our way to an "Enraged X83". There are a couple of really cool looking traps along the way and at least 2 levels to the zone that we could see, at least one of which was partially submerged. I guess we will go back and explore downstairs at a later date. So we form up around the X83. He is standing in a doorway with several roamers on fast pops, both in the room beyond him and in the room you have to kill him in.
Enraged X83 waiting to die
Now we haven't read any spoilers on these encounters, in fact information on this encounter was offered and was turned down repeatedly. We are here to learn it for ourselves and beat it on our own merits. Garbar and myself were nominated as Main Tanks and set ourselves up in the corner for the pull. We had no idea what was coming but pulling this guy was going to be fun!.So Garb pulls and has aggro. I'm sitting there, got my debuffs on him, hitting him a little bit, ramping up the aggro slowly. I want to be on his aggro list but not take it off Garb. This can be a bit of a balancing act with various abilities and types of attacks but is really a lot of fun. We are kind of expecting something to happen at 80% and it does. POP he hits me and Garb with a massive push back which pops me about 20 feet up the wall and does a complete aggro wipe. I'm still hitting him and I grab aggro. The tank swap goes fairly smoothly, I blow both my Runes to compensate for healing spikes and stay up. Ok, if thats all hes got we have this motherfucker.
Steady and smooth he drops to 20%. At that point it all goes horribly wrong. Garb and I drop to 30K damage hits and he proceeds to smash his way through the entire Guild roster. Bugger.
We form up and try again. We engage and POP a Chaotic Spark appears in the room and aggros the healers at about 90%. That one didn't count, we didn't have a chance to even do any serious damage. So we wipe, form up, clear the re pops and off we go. The Brains of the outfit have a theory that this is all about the speed at which we drop the mob. He has to die inside of (I think?) 10 minutes or he goes on a massive damage rampage.
Waiting to Pull
Being a Raid Tank in VG is very different to both Soloing and Grouping. I am learning little bits about how to use various abilities that get very few usages during normal play. For example, to make it easier for Garb to take aggro off me as we go into Tank transition I pop my Bleak Foeman ability which stops me attacking completely and blocks all attacks for about 10 seconds. I am still on the aggro list, but as soon as he does his wipe its so much easier for Garb to get the aggro he needs. Another ability set is are my two Runes. I have 2 of them, a 25% all incoming block and a 100% all incoming block. I'm learning to use them to smooth out damage/healing spikes during fights. There are other things I'm figuring out uses for as well, its all a huge learning process as I have never MT'd Raid mobs before. I get butterflies before each boss pull!.
Everybody is learning tho and I think Southern Armada are going to become a raid force to be reckoned with.
A Tanks view of the Enraged X83 fight. Smack those knees!
This time it went perfectly. We sped up the damage and he never had a chance to Rampage. One dead X83.
Even the corpse shows the lockout timer
We actually had roamers pop as we were looting and almost wiped again to stupid Guardians and Sparks. But we gritted our teeth, put out some damage and survived. We continued on through the zone clearing away the trash until we finally came across General Vicus. Now Im not 100% sure on this but I think this guy has an extremely good 2 Handed Sword drop. The one he was holding certainly looked extremely cool but whether its something he drops or a model I don't know. I'm trying to find an image I saw a couple of weeks back to the sword I described earlier to see if its the same one.
We cleared his Guards and formed up to have a go. It was getting really late at this point but we were determined to have at least one crack at him. I don't know what went wrong here. He seemed to pop 2 adds at about 86%, so maybe they are on timers. We tried various tactics of Mezzing, off tanking, kiting etc but in the end we wiped with him at about 80%. Its all good, its all learning for the next time we meet.
General Vicus proceeding to eat SA
Thursday 20.12.2007There are days when Southern Armada is superb. There are days when everybody does their job perfectly and the mobs fall before us like wheat before our scythe. This was not one of those days, in fact I would more aptly describe Thursday night like one long suicide run. The night went something like this:
Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill 3 mobs, Wipe. You get the idea. I don't really know what it was, maybe it was that several classes were missing due to the Xmas schedule, maybe it was people being asleep ( and I was guilty of this as well) maybe it was a lot of things I dont know.
All I know was that it was just damn hard work. We basically took 4 hours to reach exactly the same place it had taken us 2 hours ( and a boss mob kill) to reach the night before. Thus there are no pics and no points to make, other than TS can be a really good tool and a bane at the same time. Having officers argue over a proposed strategy for 30 minutes just left me confused about what it was we were supposed to do.
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