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.