Southern Armada Raid blogs

Half way there. I have now got week 40 up and done. There were a total of 86 weeks so I am about half way through. It has taken me a week to go from 31 to 40. I wish there were a neat little import tool for me to suck in all the data from the original HTML files, but there isn't so it all has to be cut and paste by hand.

I want to get it up into blogger tho so its safe and I don't ever have to do this again. One other distraction this week has been that I have purchased, had installed and picked up my new pipes. They fucking rock! Pics to go up soon!.

Southern Armada Raid blogs

I am still slowly doing them, I have fixed the text in the weeks up to week 32 and now just have to hand paste the images across. I will get a few more done now as I can do this while playing EVE.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Fifteen

Sunday 13.04.08
We were very low on people for this fight. Sundays are an optional raid night for us so some weeks it can be a little low on available people. We waited a lot longer than we normally would for people to log on but in the end we engaged with only 16 in the raid. I had some link problems with repeated link deaths, so I was put on the left side as back up off tank and we had a Pally and a Warrior as primary pickup tanks. Now the APW loot must seem somewhat lopsided to anyone who has spent any time in there. The ratio is definitely on the side of Medium wearers, then Heavy wearers and finally the Lighties get a look in. Now the mighty Wavebreaker appears to be on the other side of the fence, he drops almost exclusively light stuff. So it surprises me that we get so few light wearers showing up for the Sunday fights.

We engaged Wavebreaker and the right side pickup tank and his backup went down very quickly against the first set of pops, due to very unfortunate positioning. So I left my spot on the left and and picked up the adds. We stayed like that all through the fight and the big boy gave up his lootz very quickly.

We then did more scouting work on Warders. I know we have to learn the fight, but it just feels like we haven't got this at all. We form up, pull one, wipe and do that repeatedly. Its just not a whole lot of fun. We have never even dropped a single Warder or even managed to get one under control.

Monday 14.04.08
I started to crash out repeatedly again. For this night it seemed my disk issue was sort of back. At one point I was repeatedly losing both disks to "Unexpected removal of the device" errors. Its like when you pull out a USB drive without removing it properly. Its the same error message and its bloody frustrating to see when its being applied against a SATA2 disk which is in use at the time. In the end after repeated reboots and running chkdsk multiple times it just sort of came right and its been good ever since. I have this feeling I will be going through bouts of disk problems, probably until I rebuild my PC again

We decided to have a bit of a retro night and we were a bit all over the place. First we cleared the entrance, X77 first then an easy x83 kill. No problems with X83 at all this time. The Enraged is definitely on Farm status.

x77

X83

Then it was backwards to the hub and a back clear to Shadowsoul and then Travix. We had one small issue where one of our Bards forgot to call the curse and we had a large angry skele pop in the middle of our raid during the Travix fight. He was quickly off tanked and Travix went down without any problems. We are definitely getting the hang of this APW thing.


We turned around and headed back to the Hub where Zaraax proceeded to show us his ass repeatedly. The problem we are having is the adds. Do you charm them?, kill them?, AOE them? he didn't go down this week but we are definitely getting closer. Lots of debate though on which are the right tactics to use and where exactly to engage him.

Thursday 17.04.08
Cartheon, Izemgelki the Lorekeeper goes down first. We had some serious glitches in the cages with multiple pulls, almost wipes and waaaaaayy to many mobs in camp. In the end we comfortably cleared out the Lorekeeper and Bookkeeper and took it to Vahsren. We had an accidental aggro of the two books and had to off tank them pretty quickly without any real prep. We got down to healing Garbar the MT with a single healer, but in the end Vahsren dropped.



Subjugator, dead again.

We engaged Palnepipe very late. It was almost 1130pm before we pulled him for the first time. No real issues with the fight and he was snuffed by Midnight.

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.

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.

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)

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.!