Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Fourteen

Sunday 06.04.08
This is going to be another late update, the reason for which I will explain in this post. I'm a week behind all the time and I'm trying to catch up. I may not achieve that till Anzac weekend but I will try.

Wavebreaker goes down again. It was a long and ugly evening. For some reason we just couldn't put it together for the first couple of fights and his adds kept escaping us. There was much debate on the usage, methodology and usefulness of counter casting, but I think the fourth run at him proved the point. The counter casters kept it up and he only managed to get off two waves of adds, both of which were handled quickly. It took so long to kill him that we never really moved on to anything else and that was it for the night.


Monday 07.04.08
All the healers were asleep. Tanks were dieing left, right and center. The Inc would be called, mobs in, tank picks it up, positions it and dies. Next tank up, starts to build aggro, dies, third tank up, finally kills the mob, and this was on the trash!. It got better later on but from a tanks point of view the early part of the night sucked. Izemgeli the Lorekeeper decided to leash a few times but he died in the end.

We set up and raced through the cages. The Cartheon Lorekeeper was the first to go down and we headed further into the Cartheon Bookkeeper.

The Bookkeeper was a nightmare the whole raid was bouncing around the room like a box full of rubber balls. I actually ended up on a flaw in the wall at one point and sat and watched the fight from about 30 feet in the air. We spawned and nailed the Librarian in one sitting. I know there are better, faster ways to kill him, but we do it with one tank and non physical DPS. It may not be the best/fastest but it works for us.

The Subjugator gets snuffed. We have never lost to this guy so I don't know what it is he is supposed to subjugate. With a name like that he should be the boss mob of the entire zone!.

who went down without a reset on our third try. Meanwhile myself and We get to Palnepipe, set up and pull him fast. Its one long fight and we seem on the verge of failure all night. Mortewalon reset twice as the Pally in charge of him kept getting knocked back, so the raid leaders called the switch to Tremeeli and we killed him instead. Back to MortewalonGarbar are sitting on Palnepipe and keeping him occupied. Once we began to dance with the Gnome it all started to go wrong. Sanfy died with aggro and Garb picked Palnepipe up again. I crashed at a 10% threshold, Garb went down as I came back in, Nym went down and I picked it up again. I died at 40% and we played aggro bounce with the Sorcerers till the end of the fight. It was a hell of a fight but he did give up his phat phat loots in the end.

Palnepipe in the middle of room after bouncing all over the damn raid.

One thing that's seems to have come back for me since GU4 is really bad LOS issues. I took the screen shot below of me fighting a mob that is at least 15 feet away from me and facing the other way. I'm really glad I have "Shadow Step", an ability which ports me behind the mob, other wise I wouldn't get a hit on about 10% of all mobs pulled as I would be trying to find where the mob is really standing.

I was running North from the Guild hall when I came across the shot below. Looming out of the mist is a huge tower I had never seen before. Sitting on the edge of the jungle just offshore, it looked absolutely amazing in game.

I have been doing lots of diplomacy lately. I'm trying to build up my skill to make me that little bit more useful to the guild. Unfortunately the Diplomacy fan site VGTact's information is largely wrong. I spent a lot of time running around looking for quests/mobs that didn't exist before I realised that. They have a Wiki which hasn't been updated since the last big Diplomacy changes, sometime around GU3. I was lucky enough to chance on about 5 diplomacy mobs all close together in the Dwarf City of Bordinars Cleft. Ive out-leveled them now and I'm trying to find another decent spot to do diplomacy at level 13. If anyone can point me towards a good diplomacy resource please let me know!.

I had to take a shot of the Entrance to Bordinars Cleft. Its massive and hugely impressive as you approach it. They maybe short but they know how to build stuff!.

Cool Models in Vanguard file #768: Axle the Necromancer pet.

Thursday 10.04.08
home 6PM, now Okay. The reason all this is getting slow is that I got promoted this week. I was approached by my manager and then by his boss last week, and I took over running a team of 11 guys this week. Its a hell of a lot of new work as my current role isn't being immediately back filled. So I am trying to run 5-6 large projects, manage a team of extremely different personalities, keep my new boss happy, deal with normal problems and do large chunks of my own old job as well. I'm not getting home till well after 7PM. Considering I start at 7:45PM its not a bad days work. It will take me a bit of getting used to until I can sort things out but at the moment my freely available time has just disappeared.

DPS sucked again. We started off with only about 14 in the raid and headed into the Entrance wing. It actually took us two attempts to drop X77. That hasn't happened since the first time we tried to kill him!.

R5 snuffed it in the blink of an eye and we moved into X83's room. Now as I'm sure you remember we had our asses very thoroughly handed to us buy this guy the last time we met. We were determined not to let it happen again.

We set up and got x83 to 20% then wiped again. We spent so long getting ready and making sure everyone knew the strat that we had a spark roamer pop mid fight. Unfortunately he took out half the healers before we knew what had happened so we took the wipe and started again. The second run was a lot smoother, we took x83 to 15% but then wiped again. Just like last time when we completely failed to drop him after about 8 runs, we were having problems with aggro bouncing off the tanks onto DPS and healers. Now everyone was being extra careful, so we were sure that it wasn't our team, it had to be some in-game mechanic. I'm not sure why but it was decided that we would run past him and set up in the next room, to get more space for maneuver maybe. So he was trained away and the raid ran through the doorway and set up in the next room.

We set up and pulled him again. This time the kill was perfect and now we know his secret. Its the simple things that screw you up and in the case of x83 this is 100% true. This fight is a lot tougher than we expected because we overlooked one simple thing. Basically we assumed something and overlooked the possibility that he was doing more than one effect at a time. Anyway without explaining it in detail and spoiling it for those who haven't done him, we got him and he is on farm status.