Vanguard Southern Aramada Raids Week Twelve

Monday 24.03.08
I know, I know I'm a week late. The week of hardware problems put me behind in my writing, so I am going to try and rush this one a little more than I normally would and get it out a bit faster. Monday was the last day of the Easter holidays here in Sydney so we were a little short on people. I believe the Sunday raid was called off completely as there weren't enough people to attack anything at all. I had every plan to attend the Sunday raid, right up until I found out we had people staying overnight in my computer room. That made it a bit hard to sit here with the speakers going, TS blaring and have people trying to sleep at the same time. Ah well.

Initially we started Monday with two groups only. We headed in to the Entrance wing, more on a "lets see how this goes" than any sort of expectation we would get too far. Surprisingly we ended up doing really well. We quickly cleared through to a Malfunctioning X77 and with about 14 people in the raid, engaged and dropped him. The fight was as smooth as silk and we continued on without a backward glance.


Next up was the not so mighty Guardian R5. He snuffed it in what I suspect may have even been record time.

At this point it's a long grind to get to Enraged X83, so it was decided we would backtrack and head to the storehouse for a run at Archon Travix. We headed out from the storehouse with the anticipation of a quick run through to Travix and with only 2 and a half groups we were quickly smashing our way though the Entrance wing. Akym the Assassin was the first in line to die.

Akym was closely followed by the Shadow Soul. Even for trash named, these guys both drop some nice gear, it is of course mostly /grats Rot with us which is sad, but occasionally we get a newbie come along and its usually decent upgrade gear for them.

Finally we get to Archon Travix, Nym is up front and we smoke the tall, skinny swine. This was clean a kill as we have ever had on Travix.

This time he was kind enough to drop one of my 'wanted' items. The Drape of the Coalition is a great back piece and a nice upgrade from my Hegnarians cloak. No one else rolled on it!. I couldn't believe it. I gained some mitigation, but I'm maxxed out anyway and I gained 155 HP!. Actually I think all the other tanks already have it so its not so surprising that no-one else rolled. I am slowly approaching my goal HP of 12k. I think at this point its time to start looking at carefully dropping out items I have gained purely for the mitigation and start looking for items which will increase my melee damage percentages. It would be nice if it was possible to see what your true mitigation was instead of just 65.01% against level 50. I'm fairly sure my true Mit would be up in the 80's but I cant tell.

We had several shots at Zaraax, more to see what the fight would involve than any real expectation of killing him. It was getting late at this point and I think we had 2-3 attempts before we decided to call it a night. This guy intriques me I must admit, he is supposed to be the toughest fight in APW, tougher than the General, but we keep bypassing him. I'm not so intrigued that I want to stay out of the Cartheon wing, I really want to clear that whole wing. I reckon we should be able to get Cartheon done in one night and put it on farm status.

That was really it for Monday night, I think we all signed off about 11:30 or so and headed to bed.

Thursday 27.03.08
A full raid this time. All set up and good to go we headed straight in for Palnepipe. Izemgeli the Lorekeeper fell down and went boom. He dropped the Plated Boots of Izemgeli which, again, no one else rolled for!. Woot another 114 HP!, dropped a little bit of Mitigation and picked up some additional damage!. I'm at 11,409 hp now when fully raid buffed.

We cleared quickly through the Cartheon Wing with only one major wipe. Basically we pushed a little too far, too fast when we were passing through the cages. We were in the middle of the second room when we started to get roaming adds, now normally this would not be too much of a problem and the CC team would have them nailed down as fast as they are inc. Unfortunately we seemed to get unmezzable after unmezzable. To start with, the tanks were picking them up nicely and they were being off tanked with the raid smacking them down one by one. Then we ran out of tanks as each tank was already on a Mob and we still had unmezzables roaming in. We almost had it and I think we possibly could still have survived with each tank on multiples, but the wipe was called so we took it and reset quickly.

This time we were a little bit more patient and we waited till we had a good clear way through the main cages. We made it to Variumus the Subjugator in about the same time it took us to reach Palnepipe's room last week.

Once Variumus was out of the way we began the process of clearing through the rest of the wing to Palnepipes room. We definitely have the multi pull thing down now, its a lot easier with 3 tanks that's for sure and doesnt involve lots of Necro sacrifices on the mob split. So we set up for Palnepipe and quickly have the little swine inbound. The brains of the outfit have modified the plan a little and we are going to drop the body guards before Palnepipe the Mastermind. To avoid the stun we are keeping Palnepipe above 90% while the bodyguards are killed.

Sanfy is on the Cold Bodyguard with Nym on the Fire bodyguard, Garbar is primary and I'm secondary on Palnepipe. It all starts pretty slowly as we get everything positioned and begin to wind up damage on Sanfy's target, I think everyone was trying to be really careful about their aggro control. We have wiped in front of this guy too many times and everyone was determined he is going down. The first bodyguard drops and the raid moves across to the second. At this point Garbar is doing white damage and taunting, no specials, I have auto attack off and I am just taunting. Palnepipe seems to have some kind of radius damage though and he is still hitting me with some kind of damage, every now and then I get an aggro reaction special pop up, which should only happen if I am getting hit. However at no point do I actually see any damage land on me, so Im not sure why I am seeing the specials.

The second Bodyguard drops and the raid heads across to Palnepipe. At this point I start to ramp up the damage and aggro. I am throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him, nukes, dots, debuffs, snares, attacks that ignore mitigation, anything I can do to piss him off. He drops through 90 and he is still stuck on Garabar. At 80 I see the aggro switch to a caster and know Garb is stunned. I pick him up and we continue on with his HP slowly dropping. *SPOILER AHEAD READ NO MORE IF YA DON'T WANT TO KNOW*

I think you can guess where this is going, roughly every 10% he lands a one minute long stun on the main tank. So each tank in turn has to be ready to pick up aggro as the last tank is stunned. We quickly adjusted the fight, the brains of the outfit were rotating tanks through MT duties as each one was stunned. Palnepipe dropped like the little girly man he really is and we had him dead first run!.

What a blast!. This is a fun fight!. I have to say I used to think PoP was possibly the best series of raid fights I had been involved in, followed by some of the GOD fights (both EQ references for those who aren't sure) but I have been converted to APW. The designer of these fights and this dungeon needs huge kudos for the way the whole thing is put together. I look forward to each new fight as each time we have no idea what we will encounter next. By the way if you are ever in Palnepipe's room, Look up!. I have a screenshot here but it really doesn't do the view justice.

Next up its Athriss, we can see her through the doorway once Palnepipe is dead, we have shadow diamonds to do some summoning in the Portal room but we really want to push through to the next Boss. We enter the room of Athriss Essal which in itself, is well worth the journey. She stands beneath a huge square that hangs from nothing in the middle of the room, she emotes that she summons energy from this huge cube during the fight. She has some of the coolest looking spell animations, golden spheres which jet out of her hands and explode on her target.

We have NFI about this fight so the first couple of engages are just about learning what it is that she does. We didnt spend too long here, I think we got 3 engages in before we called it a night and headed to bed. I can see us spending some time with her as this is looking like a complicated little fight.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eleven

Monday 18.03.2008
I made it to the Sunday raid in good time and after the success they had last week in getting Wavebreaker to 10% I figured this was going to be a push over. The great post GU4 patch gods had something else to say about it. I wont go into too much detail other than to say, don't schedule raids less than 2 days after a major patch. We got hit with every glitch and problem you could think of, from the lag monster beating us repeatedly, to the log off and all the buffs you cast disappear to the I cant attack bug etc etc.

After last weeks hardware fiasco I am all raided up and good to go well before 7:45pm on Monday Night. There seemed to be a lot more tanks than usual tonight. Normally its Me and Garbar, or Me and Nymeria. Tonight we have both of them AND a Pally. Filthy do-gooding interloper be off!. So after the traditional "Good a pally to sac, it will be a great loot night!" jokes, we head into the Cartheon Wing and we are progressing pretty well to start. We power into the early stages of the tunnels looking for Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. We only had one small glitch in an other wise smooth ride when Garbar got hit with an knock back while facing the wrong way. He looked great as he sailed up and over the balcony and down into the water below, like a little Dwarvish falling star. Zel actually managed to get smacked over the edge as well, I'm not sure how Zel went over, but we had to wait for both to die before they could be rescued. Its easier to pull a tombstone up a level than it is to use /rope apparently.

As well as rescuing Zel and Garbar from their watery deaths, we also managed to kill Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. We decided to bypass the first side room in the cages and head straight for the second side room so we could set up for the Librarian. As we passed through the second cage room things started to get exciting. We managed to pull 2 mobs as we moved and were working on taking those out. As they were going down we picked up another roamer, then another, then another!. At one point we had at least 5 mobs in camp 2 of which were unmezzable, the tanks picked up the unmezzables fast, the healing never dropped, the crowd control was beautiful and the DPS never pulled a mob away from a tank. It was one of those fights that when you finish, take a deep breath and realise everything had just gone perfectly, in what could have been a very nasty CR. Unfortunately for us, after such a great fight the Librarian wasn't up. This is actually the second time we have come through and he hasn't been roaming the corridors. Either he is on some weird timer we don't know about, or he is bugged, you choose.

So we clear through the cages, drop down the lift and lay some smack on Varimurus the Subjugator. I like Varimurus, he is a fun fight, short sharp and just a little bit sweet!.

We cleared through the multi pulls on the way to Palnepipes room like they just weren't there and very quickly we were set up for Palnepipe. We had all roamers down, just him and his bodyguards waiting to die.

So its INC!, we split em and have them nicely positioned. The raid leaders have decided that we will kill each body guard slowly first, then take on Palnepipe. It was all going beautifully at first, Palnepipe was in place with Garbar holding him, we whittled down the first body guard and headed over to the second. He was about half way dead when we lost control of Palnepipe. We didn't realise at the time that Palnepipe has a nice long stun, as soon as Garbar was swaying in place the swine ran over and started to smack the healers around. Wipe.

So we set up and get ready again. At this point we are under a bit of time pressure as we really aren't sure of when the first re pops will begin. The split happens and we are good to go. This time we decide to change the order the body guards die in, we form up on the first bodyguard and start to cream him. He has an annoying knock back but seems to do a lot less damage than the other one who seems to have a hell of a lot more HP. He is about 50% down when Nymeria succumbs to the beating of the other bodyguard and its a wipe.

Third run, This time I stayed with Garb on Palnepipe so that we could try and get a tank transition happening. Its all going really well, Garb got stunned I picked up the named and we kept at it. We were just working on the first bodyguard when Nym died again, wipe. I don't know why Nym went down, he had good healers and he has more HP than me, maybe there is a damage spike in these bodyguards that we don't know about.

One thing we did learn. There is no safe spot in this room. As we were rezzing back in, the re pops began to appear. Repeated attempts to re-break the room failed and in the end we were forced to give up. The raid ended around 1145 and it was beddy bye time.

Thursday 21.03.08

Bad lag issues, bad post patch issues, No librarian, hows that for a summary. Actually there was a little more to it than that or this would be a damn short blog. We headed into Cartheon Wing and dropped Izemgeli the Lorekeeper.

The librarian isn't up again, so its straight through to Varimurus the Subjugator.

We are ready to rock in Palnepipes room by 9:40pm. We are all happy with this as it means we have all night to plug away at him. Its only an hour and forty minutes from entering the zone to his room. We form up and get the split happening. This time we decide to attack Palnepipe the Mastermind directly instead of his bodyguards. Garbar tanks him to start and I am picking up the rotation when he stuns, we easily get him down to 50% when Nym goes down again. More than likely caused by the nasty server lag we had been experiencing all evening. We wipe. Just as we are rezzing in to get ready for a second run at him, a server restart is announced. We hung on for about 40 minutes but the server didn't come up and there was no message on when it would come up. So the raid was called. I don't mind losing to a mob, I really don't, I HATE losing to lag, server glitches, restarts etc.


The Southern Armada logo, has for years been a crest of a sailing ship against a background of stars. We have used it on web pages, in custom Sigs, hell I even tried to get it onto a T-shirt. I lost a lot of images, including my complete collection of every custom sig I ever made when I came over to Sydney. Unfortunately this means that I don't have a copy of the old SA logo to work with. However as we were passing through APW we found the image below repeated all over the place. I am going to play with it and do my best to create it as a new logo.

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Now playing: El Barto & Liam B - Don't dance
Now playing: Lobsterdust - Marley Maiden (from Exodus to Revelations)

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Ten

Monday 10.03.08
Why, you ask am I late in posting this? The short answer for those of limited attention span who want to skip any non raiding content, is that I didn't actually get to go on a Raid last week.

The much longer, and if you are technically minded, slightly more interesting answer, goes back to when I came to Sydney from New Zealand. Before we found out we were moving to Sydney I had begun the process of building a new PC. I was researching every part, ensuring that I wasn't buying a dud and that I was getting the best price as I bought it. It took me months but I finally assembled all the pieces that I needed to build my Dream PC. Then we found out we were moving and in a very short period of time. I packed all my PC bits up carefully and consigned them to the not so gentle hands of a shipping company.

The day we had worked hard towards finally arrived, we jumped on a plane and we were in Sydney in 2.5 hours. Our possessions took slightly longer and arrived about 2.5 weeks later. The first thing I did when all my stuff arrived in Sydney was start building my new PC. Unfortunately after many hours and quite a bit of blood ( Custom PC cases are sharp!) the bloody thing wouldn't boot up. I couldn't even get it to POST, thats Power On Self Test for the non technical, thats what happens before all the text that scrolls up your screen, before the Windows screen. Basically a PC that won't POST, is very broken. So after a week of struggling with it, I ended up taking it to the local PC hardware guy to have a look at. 1000$ later I got back a working PC. Yay, sort of.

So some months go by, occasionally I have problems with boots, it hangs in BIOS load, sometimes Windows hangs, and freezes, I get little pop up error messages etc. Lots of niggling little problems, but no one thing I could pin a problem on. Then we get to last weekend, I fire up the PC, its Sunday and its raid night!, I'm getting pre-positioned for the raid, I'm halfway across Qualia when the PC freezes. Oh well, reboot and continue. Only there is no continuing. It hangs at boot, reboot, does it again, reboot get it into Windows, check the event viewer, the event viewer is solid red with disk errors, I get a pop up message about a disk error and being unable to flush to cache, disk hangs again.

This goes on for hours, I manage to get into the game briefly to tell everybody I wont be able to make the raid and go back to checking cables, I check the seating of Drives and Drive cables into the motherboard, running hardware level tests against the drives, heat tests against the CPU, RAM tests etc. In fact this goes on for days.

I talk about this with people at work trying to get some inspiration as to what may be causing this. I read constantly on drive faults, cache faults, anything about drives, I update all my drivers for graphics card, motherboard chip sets, sound card, BIOS, hard drive firmware, Direct X, in fact anything I can update, I do update. I am turning hardware caching on and off, moving page files, setting page file dynamic vs static, checking and replacing cables, changing power management profiles, anything I can think of or is recommended to me. At the end of it all I come to the conclusion that the motherboard is about to fail and I am going to have to take it back to the local hardware guy. I no longer have the space, the tools or the inclination to do this sort of work myself anymore.

At this point I have now missed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday raids. I have been off line for seven whole days, I'm beginning to feel bugs crawling under my skin.

About a week later I am deep into a Google search about the following error:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D."

This is the error that has is being generated every 30 seconds in my logs. This is the error that precedes every hang/crash. About 6 pages into the Google search I find this set of errors as part of a knowledge base article on Microsoft.com. What do you know!, this describes, exactly, all of the errors I have been having for the last 12 months. So I sign up, download and install the patch.

I haven't had a crash, hang or an error generated in any of my logs since. If I had upgraded my hardware I may have ended up with exactly the same error as the original fault was extremely rare and Windows related to start with. I make my living from computers, have done for a lot of years now and some days I just fucking hate them.

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Now playing: DJ Le Clown - In Da Black (AC/DC vs. 50 Cent vs. Scissor Sisters)
Now playing: DJ Payroll - Daft Prayer (Bon Jovi vs. Daft Punk)

The First Dungeon Master

E.Gary.Gygax left us today to join the great gaming table in the sky. The creator of Dungeons and Dragons has died. I cannot say where my life would be today without him and the genre he created. His influence on my life has been massive.

May you roll the dice forever mate.
/mourn

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Nine

Monday 04.03.08
A short night this one. After last weeks fiasco we decided to go the other way round this time and approach the entrance wing from the rear. We have never done this before and figured it would present us with some challenges. We headed in and handled Akym the Assassin quickly.

Past Akym and straight down to Archon Travix. Perfect kill.

If I can give anyone any advice about General Vicus at all, its approach him from the other side. Its painful to grind through to him, but he is a hell of a lot easier to handle.

We formed up, figured out a strat for the slightly changed conditions and pulled him. The big issue with where we were fighting, was a very limited floor space with which to work. The first time we engaged it seemed that someone was breaking the mezzes and we wiped. The mezz rules were very carefully explained and we formed up and went again. However it appears that we aren't the only people experiencing unexpected mezz breaking.

One of Vicus little tricks is a forward punt of the main tank. He pushes the tank hard, in the direction the tank is facing. So if you don't hit the forward surface dead on, you ricochet and can literally end up anywhere. The first couple of punts I was fine, ended up in exactly the right position against the wall, ran back and kept at it. Then the first adds appeared and just as they were being handled, he punts me, I ricochet and end up inside the little tunnel where the slimes live. I don't have time or options, I run back and re-engage him. Of course the little slime comes with me, peels off and starts to beat the shite out of the healers. Now I should say we are trying to do this with only two tanks, me MT and Nym off tanking, so there wasn't anyone available to pick up the slime in time. Wipe.

The third time we were getting very very close to repop time. We pulled and had him under control, he was slowly dropping when we lost control of an add. Wipe and now its so late there really isn't a chance for another shot at him. Like I said, take him from the other side so that you have space to work with him, pulling him into the slime filled tunnel is definitely painful.

Thursday 05.03.08
So weeks are just weird, last week we couldn't kill Enraged, he just would not stay stuck on the Tanks. This week we breezed through the Cartheon wing with no problems. Only place we got stuck was in the cages with the rapid re-spawn. First to die of course was Izemgeli the Lawkeeper. He is quite a fun fight, of course you always want to fight him in a tunnel...

Initially I think we were going to blitz straight through the Cages and on to the Librarian. However it was decided that we would clear to the first safe room, drop the BookKeeper and use that room to fight the Librarian. Of course then the Librarian decided not to path past us and we had to fight through to the second room. This is the longest part of the dungeon so far, it took us about 45 minutes stuck in room one, before we made it to room two.

We dropped the Lorekeeper and prepped for the Librarian. I like the Lorekeeper fight, flying through the air! weeeeee...! These models are really cool!.


Finally after much cajoling by Zarthaz, the SA pull team, he was inbound. Vahsren the Librarian gets stuck on everything, if there is the smallest obstacle he gets stuck and heads back on his long walk, the best way to pull him is to wait for him to path past the room and then kill him. The problem of course is that he is on such a long path, that waiting for him is very boring if you get the timing wrong. Not really a lot for me to do in this fight, life tap occasionally, if I'm feeling daring I will drop a dot on him, that's about it. I am hoping that with the new spells coming in GU4 I will have a few more tricks to throw at him.

Vhasren gets boinked first time and we move on down the elevator to the lower levels. Its starting to get harder down here with the mobs mitigating better and hitting harder. We ganked Varimurus the Subjugator and headed west towards Palnepipe the Mastermind.

I really don't see why Varimurus is classed as a major named, he is one of the easiest kills we have had so far in APW. We headed towards Palnepipe and after some trials and travails (The splitting of Mobs gets fairly interesting in places) we made it to his room, but without time to engage him. We had a look around his room and it definitely looks like he is going to be an interesting fight.!