Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Thirteen

Sunday 30.03.08
As usual I placed myself on the top of the hill above the Wavebreaker kill zone and logged out, leaving myself ready for Sunday. I logged in a bit late and everybody was already there and ready for buffing. We got set up and pulled Wavebreaker very quickly. It was all going really well until me (right side off tank) and my back up off tank got snuffed simultaneously. The adds have a freeze type stun which seems to turn you into what looks like a block of ice. Wavebreaker also has an AOE foot stomp called Shatter, my advice is don't be freeze stunned and in the radius of Shatter, as it took two tanks out in less than an second!.

We setup and went again. This time it all went beautifully and we managed to keep him down to two waves of adds. It certainly took a while to whittle him down, but over all the whole fight was as smooth as silk. The first wave of adds were handled and positioned quickly and efficiently. We wiped them out and moved straight back to the big guy. I stayed off to the right, in range to add DPS but ready for the next set of adds, which in the end never came. Dropping him was almost an anticlimax!. The loot was definitely in the Dress Wearer sphere which was great as the loot we are getting in APW is definitely medium/heavy leaning so far. I think we will be back for this guy several times over the next couple of weeks even if just to make the dress wearers happy.

Since we had time, we figured we would go and have a shot at the Warders of Nusibe. Now we had a go at these guys a couple of months ago, just before APW came out and they spanked us good and hard and sent us home. Now we have a lot better gear, some upgraded spells and improved DPS we thought we would give it another go. After an hour or so and never even looking close to dropping any of the Warders we left it and I think we will come back to these guys in another couple of weeks. This is one tough encounter to figure out.

Monday 01.04.08
We formed up and headed into the Entrance wing again. I think at this point we can say we are still in farming mode. When APW was first released there was a lot of talk on the VG forums about how fast some of the first APW kills occurred and how fast APW was completely cleared. The forum cowboys declared that APW was now "done". They decided that since APW was all finished, VG was now going to be boring again. I think a lot of that kind of overly aggressive talk comes from people who have never raided at all, or people who are only just getting into raiding for the first time. Those of us who could be called veteran raiders, and this goes for any group of raiders who have spent a few games playing at this level, would agree that the first kill is only the first step. Every time a raid fight is released, its nice to have the first kills sure, but what you are aiming for is the next expansion. You go into every raid with the idea that when you have conquered this expansion, the next one will require you to have spent several months gearing up in order to conquer the next expansion.

I would suspect that when the next raid level dungeon is released, it will be balanced around the idea that you and your guild have already spent several months gearing up in APW first. If they build a raid expansion and balance it against non-APW guild power, then the APW guilds will tear through it like its not there. This of course will cause all those people who haven't spent any time in APW to claim its unfair and that they should have equal access to the new content the same as the long experienced raid guilds. I'm here to tell you now, it just doesn't work that way. If your guild plans on Raiding Vanguard for the long term, then I would suggest getting into APW as soon as possible and for as long as possible. You will need to hit mobs repeatedly in order to get the specific pieces of gear to power up your tanks, to get the spells for your casters etc.

I suspect these are the primary reasons we are spending so much time in the Entrance and Cartheon wings of APW. We could probably begin to push into the other wings now, but we want to make sure that every member who wants an item or a spell from these two wings, has that item or spell. The more DPS, the more healing power the more mitigation, the better for the next set of mobs we tackle.

We smacked X77 like he was made of butter.

Rather than fight through to the Enraged x83 and the General, we turned around and headed back to the portal. We gated back to the hub and began to fight our way back into the Entrance wing. First up was the Shadowsoul. I might stop mentioning him, even for a mini named he is pretty weak. We took down Archon Travix without any problems, looted, and moved back to the hub for a shot at Zaraax.

This was really our first serious try at Zaraax. We have had a go at him before but never with any serious intent. Its usually more along the lines of; we are here, lets give it a go. Now although we never got Zaraax to less than 80%, this one has to be counted as a win. We found a way to slow his adds and roamers, we found a much better spot to kill him and we were definitely improving against him every time. This looks like its going to take some time to learn but its going to be a satisfying kill when we get it.

Thursday 04.04.08
Straight into the Cartheon wing, smacked Izemgeli.

Thursday raids are a funny one for us. We swap Wednesday and Thursday to give as many people as equal a chance as possible to comer along to the raids. For some reason Wednesday is DPS night and Thursday isn't. I check the raid window at the start of the night and apart from our one Monk, we had no dedicated DPS classes, no bards. We were also short our usual Necromancer as his PC fell down and went boom, so we are down about 2K hp on the tanks. This makes killing anything in APW a hell of a lot harder. We headed in as fast as possible and considering our lack of DPS, it really wasn't very fast at all. We headed into the cages, went left and smacked the Cartheon Lorekeeper with the anticipation of spawning Vahsren the Librarian. Once the Lorekeeper was down, we headed back to the start room and began the pulling to clear through the middle.

We never moved from that spot for the next 1-2 hours. Without the DPS, we just couldn't keep up with the spawn rate in the cages. Add to that the occasional wipe and it was just a long hard grind. When we saw the server down message from SOE I have to admit it was almost a relief to get it over with. Rubbing your nose against a grindstone is a quaint saying, its not a lot of fun to actually do.

Servers went down at 10:30 and we were out of there.