Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eight

Monday 25.02.08
We have visitors!. I received a very pleasant note the other day from Jelaza Binjali a Ranger of the Nova guild on Seradon. Apparently she has been following the adventures of Southern Armada for quite some time and stopped by to say she enjoyed the blog. Thank you very much Jelaza, its always nice to know that someone's actually reading this thing!.

This screen shot was taken on the way to the Jagund the Wavebreaker raid. It was one of those moments that occasionally happen in Vanguard when you round a corner or come over a hill and the view is just breathtaking. One of the great things about this game is that anything you can see you can reach. Everything in one of your views is an object you can travel to, its not one of those nasty backdrops that hints but doesn't deliver. I've said it before and I will say it again, this is definitely one of the best looking games on the market today and easily the prettiest MMO.

We have decided to do an extra raid a week. So for those who are interested we are going to start tackling the overland bosses of Vanguard. Its not for loot nor glory as they have all been killed before and the loot isn't that fantastic, its just for the sheer fun of killing something new and interesting. We were quite short of people for the Wavebreaker encounter and knew sod all about it, so we pulled him the first time with no expectations of actually killing him. I think we got him down to about 90% before he popped adds that we weren't ready for and we wiped. Over the course of the next few hours we pulled him repeatedly and wiped repeatedly. I'm not going to go into too much detail for the sake of those who haven't tried him out yet, suffice it to say we were a tank, a healer and some DPS short. Everyone had a blast and I'm really looking forward to go back and giving him another shot. I don't think he is a tough fight, we just need the right mix of people.

For those who haven't tried them, I can highly recommend the overland raid mobs for a bit of fun. They don't require the investment of time that APW does and they can be knocked over in fun couple of hours in an evening. Pulling Jagund is an adventure in itself!.



Formed up into APW and headed into the Cartheon wing again. Someone cast a Kobold illusion on me which I thought was really cool!. So here I am as Ulaa, the kobold Dread Knight!.

We headed in the same way as last time and quickly met and dealt with Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. As we were moving towards the cages we ran into a new named. Now this new Boss wasn't up the last time we came through so we have no idea where he came from. We engaged Vahsren the Librarian at the entrance to the cages. I think he went down to about 86% before we wiped against him. Once we were back in and ready we tried again and wiped again. However after the second reform he didn't roam back to us. We didn't know where he had gone and Zarthaz couldn't see him anywhere. So we shrugged, said "Welcome to Vanguard" and moved deeper in.
The cages are an interesting space, obviously someone in the Vanguard design team really doesn't like the 'sit, pull, kill' method of raiding so there isn't a lot of places in APW where you can do that. The cages take things a step further again, its a space where the spawn time is so fast you have to keep moving through. Everyone needs to be on the ball and everyone needs to do their job. Mobs are coming at you thick and fast here and you really cant stop and hang around. The first safe spot is occupied by the Cartheon Bookkeeper. He isn't a tough fight and drops nothing, so we aren't entirely sure of his purpose. When you engage him he seems to be reading a book and chanting, we think there is a possibility that killing him weakens something further in, but we don't really know.

Move through the cages a bit further and you run into the Cartheon Bookkeepers twin, the Carthon Lorekeeper. He has a huge knock back and is a pain in the ass as a tank. I actually enjoy the fight tho, there is something about flying through the air that makes me think of kids and swings. Once we had the Lorekeeper cleared we decided to use his room to try and pull Vahsren the Librarian who seemed to be roaming in the area. It didn't take long to have him inc and Nymeria the little pink tank, soon had him engaged. I can't remember how many shots we had at him, it may have been 2 or 3 before he died. Again not a spectacularly tough fight but with the usual APW twist. I don't want to spoil it for anybody so I will just say, there isn't a lot for the melee classes to do in this one.


So we moved down the cages and made it to the down lift. I remembered my mistake from last week and managed not to wipe out the entire raid again. We formed up and cleared forward from the lift entrance. There seemed to be a quest NPC to the north of us and there was a named ahead so it was Onward we go!. Zarthaz had Varimurus the Subjugator inbound very quickly and he died very quickly. Again not a spectacularly tough fight. It's not the Bosses that take so long for us to conquer in APW, it's all the trash clearing. To be honest that's fine with me, you have to wade through a lot of dross to get diamonds. The boss fights are generally so good, such a great balance between difficulty and frustration that the trash clearing isn't quite so painful. Its not like in EQ in the Planes of Power expansion where you literally (in some cases) had hours and hours of trash clearing to do before you go to the boss encounter.


Thursday 28.02.08
You aren't going to believe this. To break up our week it was decided that we would go back through the entrance wing. We had a couple of APW newbies who were going to need some arms and there are a couple of other things in the entrance wing that people still want. So we formed up at the entrance lift, buffed up and headed down. The plan was to clear the whole wing in one night and at first it was looking damn good for it. I am seriously looking forward to the day we can just breeze through the entire entry wing without pausing. The usual suspects died fast and clean. Malfunctioning X77, Guardian R5, were smacked like they deserve to be. Then we got to Enraged X83. Not a problem I hear you say, you have already killed him repeatedly, he died on your second ever shot at him. Well tonight wasn't our night.

Malfunctioning X77 hanging about waiting to die

Guardian R5 giving up more Rot Loot

We wiped against this guy repeatedly. Initially I was getting quite angry with the rest of the raid. The tanks were doing their level best, we were throwing every aggro tool we had at him, everything including the kitchen sink was being used. The first time he left the tanks at the transition and went to smack the raid, I figured it was just someone being enthusiastic with the DPS. The third time it happened I was getting pissed off, why couldn't these people pay attention and just do their damn jobs?!. By the 5th time we were realizing something was wrong. He was aggro-ing on people who were FD and had never actually engaged him. No damage, no healing, no spells, no nothing, yet that person managed to pull him off the tanks during the change. By about the 8th wipe we began to figure out we just weren't going to beat him that night. It was beginning to get seriously depressing.

The 10th wipe?...

Now we know we can kill this guy, almost every kill has been flawless, until tonight. SOE is stealth patching some of the upcoming changes for Game Update 4. This means that on the actual day of release there is a lot less for you to download and a lot less load on their servers. However we have already seen a number of accidental releases of test code onto the live servers and I believe that this is an ongoing problem. As proof I have a buff in my tool bar which isn't supposed to be live yet, but the icon and tool tip were patched for Dread Knights several months ago, replacing an already existing ability. I am beginning to think that some of the "test" code is ending up live, so we are in a position where some abilities, some mobs, some game functionality is being changed, however not all of it. So a change may be on test which is supposed to affect ability A, or a mob has been buffed up to be tougher, or a spell function has changed to counter a new Mob ability. So they stealth patch the ability code and files in, and somehow several of the changes are somehow going live. I cant prove any of this, but I've been noticing changes in some of my abilities and I have noticed changes in the abilities of some other classes. Things that once were rock solid, that haven't changed since beta, are no longer behaving in quite the same way.

Like I said no proof but there is no way we were unable to control aggro on Enraged X83, unless some functionality somewhere had changed.