What a Night!. We absolutely blitzed the Entrance Wing!. I don't think anyone else needs the Arm pieces for the class armor quests, so apart from Travix and Vicus I don't think we will be back here for a while. We may head back in if we need to equip people with the Arm molds, but apart from that I think its time to try something new!. We absolutely slaughtered everything on our way through the Entrance. We were at Vicus and ready to engage by 9:30, an hour and a half to drop X77, R5, X83 and have General Vicus inbound is a record for us!. We were just absolutely creaming our way through the trash and the names only delayed us by a few seconds more. We were trying something a little different by having the Tanks call the aggro. Its an old-school EQ combat trick and it seemed to work well for us in VG.
Basically the idea is that each Tank class has different methods of generating aggro and the build-up of aggro is also different for each class. So each Tank was responsible for noting their own aggro and calling the DPS on for the raid. Up till now we have been letting the DPS classes join in as and when they felt like (with a suitable delay) and sometimes, if a tank has missed a few times, or they haven't had any decent aggro reactions the Mobs lock on the Tank can be shaky and the dress wearers die. Once people start to die the whole raid slows down as we need to buff and get them back on their feet. This way everyone knows where we are at in relation to aggro levels and DPS know they can lay into the Mob with relative safety.
X77 Preparing to Die
R5 about to give us phat loots
The R5 Greatsword dropped again with no other Dreads in the Raid, it went to a Warrior. What a waste!.
We got vengeance for X83 smacking us about last week. We pulled him slightly before we were ready but we adapted, got him in position and laid the smack down.
Vicus is getting smoother and smoother. He only managed 2 Pops of adds before he went down. Beautiful aggro management by the Warriors and Mezzers and fantastic healing on me. He didn't have a hope in hell. This time he was kind enough to drop the Spear of Devotion!. I have spoken with Dreads in other Guilds who have dropped him over 20 times and have still only seen one of these!. No one else put their hand up for it so I now have the two best 2 handers in the game at the moment. The Spear and the R5 Greatsword. In Game Update 4 there are huge changes to the Dread Knight class coming and one of those changes is the ability to tank while using a 2H weapon, as if you were carrying a shield. This 2h Tanking specialist was my vision of the Dread Knight class from day one. I fought for this in beta against people who didn't want to be "forced" to wield a 2H. Its taken a long time but it will be here at the end of the month. I can turn down all my 1H skills and sell a whole lot of junk weapons that I have been carrying around forever just to practice my skills.
Even with the Spear equipped and putting myself into DPS stance I was taking aggro (unintentionally) from the Warriors. The Spear is another 800-1k damage per hit for me and will completely change my aggro profile once the new Dread Knight changes go in.
We turned around from Vicus, headed back to the entrance and ported to the Hub. We spent about half an hour in the Hub to equip 7 more people with Arm slots, Woot!. A huge grats to everyone and a massive upgrade across almost half the raiding guild. Once everyone had their shiny new Arms, we began clearing trash to get to Akym the Assassin for his dagger. He came in beautifully and died equally beautifully. Oddly enough, just as we were clearing more trash he popped again almost on top of the raid. We dealt with the trash and wiped him again, two loots within about 15 minutes of each other. Shadowsoul also died in here somewhere but I was getting tired at this point and neglected to get a piccy. Bad Dread Knight!.
For some reason Nymeria, one of our Warriors decided to Tank the entire night Naked. I have to say she did a pretty damn good job of it as well!
Thursday 22.02.08Our first night into a new wing!. We formed up and headed into the Cartheon Wing, west from the Hub (I think). We were making our way slowly into the wing and encountering some new and interesting trash Mobs when the call we all wait for went out, Named!. Woot!. We have no idea about this guy, don't know his special abilities, don't know how to fight him, so its pull and see time!. We pulled him into the tunnel and fought him which turned out to be a good thing as he has a decent knock back. Turned out he's not a tough fight, a fairly simple Tank and Spank.
So we fought our way deeper in. Its a fairly standard dungeon, until you reach the cages, this is where it gets interesting. The re spawn here is fast, very fast. There is no sitting in one spot and pulling to the raid or you just wont go anywhere. We crawled slowly into the area and made it to a new named, a Cartheon Book Keeper. We fought him in the passage way with tons of Mobs roaming all around us. I was put on watch out duty to look for anything that was likely to roam over the Raid and off tank it. In the end nothing did and the Book Keeper died. He drops nothing so it wasn't a huge loss.Cartheon Book-Keeper
The next fight was a bit more interesting. We had cleared the roamers and were prepping for the pull when he was accidentally aggroed. I was watching him at the time so I grabbed him and started to tank. The healing rota came on smooth and we basically adapted straight into the fight. It was all going well until he bounced the entire raid about 100' into the air. I'm not kidding his knock back is massive. We decided pretty quickly to fight him in his room but that knock back continued to be a serious pain in the ass. He snuffed it pretty quickly and we ground our way onwards.
Finally we made it to the downwards lift, well almost. We would have made it but us tanks managed to wipe the raid. Well technically I managed to wipe the raid. We were set up for a tank split, grab one, pull another to another location and tank em separately. I didn't realize quite how far back the healers were, when the mobs were incoming I stepped forward about 6 feet, literally, and I was slightly around a corner and out of LOS. Raid wipe. So we set up for the recovery. Just as we were going to be good for login the server crashed. Everyone was bounced to desk top and had to sit waiting for the damn thing to come up again. Normally it was pretty quick but for some reason this time it still wasn't letting people in 10 minutes later. At this point it was about 11:15 and I was knackered so I logged and picked up my corpse the next day.
This guy is cool, he is one of the named Mobs in the Nusibe Necropolis, I think he is an awesome looking model. The whole Necropolis is pretty cool as its all one long crawl to get where you need to go with ups and downs, twists and turns and mobs all over the place getting successively harder the deeper you go in.
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