Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Six

13/03/04 Week FiftySix


And lo the LewtGods said "You have Sacrificed many Pallies, many Warriors, Clerics and Monks. Shadow Knights, Necro's and Rangers, all have fallen in the pursuit of the Rathe Council. So just for you, here is another shot at it."


Yup once again we lined up in the Plane of Earth and once again we prepped ourselves for smacking our heads against the brick wall that is the Rathe Council. I am not surprised that Guilds have broken up over this encounter. Its a nasty evil Encounter and I would like to beat the man who invented it. Massive Kudos to those guilds who had to do it pre the "balancing" that SOE did.


The frustration levels when the RC was impossible to beat must have been enormous. I can now understand all the ranting on the uber guild message boards.


We warmed up with a couple of kills in the Plane of Fire as we waited for people to log on. First to die was Criare Sunmane. I thought maybe we were a little light as we engaged with only about 40 people online. But it was obviously the right mix of people as we just nailed it.

Next up was a MOB we don't get to see that often. Arch Mage Yozanni caused the usual running in and out amongst the AOE waves. I got caught by one after misreading an AOE call, but it got cured pretty fast and I was fine to lay the smackdown in my own Necroish fashion.

I do love the Lich line of spells, without it Yozanni's mana drain DOT would have chewed through my mana and left my mana pool bare. Having to rely on the evil VOQ *shudder* is not something I would enjoy. I would love to see the new GOD upgrade of the Lich line but the way SOE has structured the spell drops and the methods and devices of getting into the new zones, 

I really doubt I will ever see one.

I have to say, although technically SA is one of the Guilds or close to being one of the Guilds that GOD was structured for, I'm really not impressed. XP zones that you REQUIRE a 10K+ 2200AC Warrior. That's just not fun because those Warriors aren't just hanging off tree's, they are damn rare. Maybe after we spend a few weeks farming Time, 10K Tanks will become more common, I don't know.

That was it for Fire. Suddenly, we had a flood of people coming online so the raid was hurriedly called to POEb to take advantage of the fact. We set up and began the pulls. Kez and the Officers explained the strat all over again, but largely I think they realized the bulk of us knew it by now. 

Some of the strats were mildly changed from last time, just to iron out the last few wrinkles and suddenly we were good to go!. Now I'm fairly sure that I am not going to be giving away anything uber sekret in the line of SA strats in the following write up. If I am someone please tell me!.

A Chanters Nightmare - A Rathe Councilman

The 10 or so Necro's online designated a single stay behind to hang with the chanters and stay in their channel. That person was to make sure the Chanters had enough mana and if needed call for dumps from the rest of the Necro's. The rest of us formed a roving band to both do as much DPS as we could (Limited to Touch of Mujaki only, not allowed to use DOT's and Neurotoxin is way to heavily resisted and mitigated) and to mana dump where called to by the heal groups.

Normally we would be battle rezzing as well but it wasn't needed this time. We pulled, 1, then 2, then 3 and in a rush 4, 5, 6. the Chanters had the mezzables under control. I think we got a bit cocky early on as we took 2 of the mezzables to 0% before mezzing. That is cutting it a little too close!.

So with the Chanters going insane dealing with the Rathe Council we began to pull the tankables. 7, 8, 9, 10 we got set up and in place. 11 was inc and being tanked and the countdown was on. Then it went wrong. Slowers were getting ganked on slow attempt, no Warrior had /DEF up, healers were dieing left and right. I got summoned and splatted. Then Kez called for all Tank Mez to die and to allow the killer mob to reset.

So after a massive drag/rez effort we were backup and in place. I really didn't know if we were going to be able to do it at this point. I admit it, I doubted!.

We reformed and pulled again. I was seriously beginning to wonder about the Sanity of our Chanters when I realized that one of them was singing a little song in /say that made no sense whatsoever. But we got 'em all setup again. 7,8,9,10. Then Kez made a big huge ballsie call.

With the 5 Tank Mezzed in place, with the Chanters going slowly loopy, he called a five minute halt to wait for a /DEF recycle. So we waited with 6 Chanter mezzed Rathe Councilmen and 4 Tank mezzed, biting nails, on the edge of our seats for a timer to count down to zero.

To me this shows huge confidence of the leader for his team. He knew we could do it and he relied on us to stay concentrated and keep it together and get this thing done!. Just before the call to pull the final RC member we also lost a Cleric on a Tank Mezz group. Healers stepped up and we continued flawlessly.

Finally we had a /def tank good to go and number 11 was inbound. Heal rota kicked in and the Necros were finally allowed to use DOTs again. I loaded up mister Number Ten and he went down fast.

"Kill 'em all" was the call and every one of the Rathe Council members we had under control died rapidly. At this point the clock is ticking. This is where we failed last week as we didn't manage to kill the final RC member fast enough. Teeth were gritted, rings clenched and we hunkered down to get it right this time.

The Twelfth was quickly inbound and just as quickly dead. I got splatted after Life Burning and being summoned for low HP aggro, but I did my 10K or so of damage first.

I got rezzed back in and I had just recovered my gear and memmed my spell set when we got auto aggroed from the Avatar of Earth. Man we were just not ready, we lost 5 Main Tanks in seconds, slowers were being splatted on cast again, no one was ready for this. I was at about 5% mana and medding as hard as I could. Finally we got stabilized on a Twink(?) tank, the heal chain stayed on him and I bet he got the thrill of his life most unexpectedly tanking the Avatar of Earth!

I managed to lay a Horror or two and a couple of Mujakis on him but I never had the mana to really lay into him. Once we had the Tank/Cheal stable tho he was always going to go down.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the object of 4 weeks work by Southern Armada. The Corpse of the Avatar of Earth. The Rathe Council has fallen before the might of the Southern Armada!

And this guy is the result of all that work. *Pop* an Essence of Earth and Grats to everyone who got their Flags!. Three down one to go!

And Grats to Alone X!. The Avatar was kind enough to drop a Sword of Primordial Power. With a Blade of Carnage and your new sword you are going to be an absolute aggro monster! Good on you mate you earned it!

Just to make absolutely sure they were all dead we ran over to the spawn point where I took this shot of an Empty Rathe Council throne!.

Because it makes me feel good, here is another Dead Avatar. 4 weeks work went into this screen shot, crawling ever closer to the goal each time. Failing last week with only seconds to go was just heartbreaking. But we more than made up for it Thursday night!.

This is so very wrong. I still feel dirty, but scrubbing isn't making it go away. Last week a Chanter (who shall remain nameless but Ill get you Wolfe :) ) cast Illusion Halfling on the whole Group. So this is Ulaa as a Halfling. I look much cuter as a DE, but I'm damn cute as a halfling too!. I think next to DE's the halfling female model is deffinitely one of the best looking in the game.

Now it is tradition on Prexus that After a big kill you, or someone else posts on the Prexus server message boards. This was duly done after the RC kill by one of our members. I don't ever post on the rant boards so I am going to have a little rant here.

A couple of weeks ago one or two of our members stepped out of line over a spawn of Coirnav that the Fallen Alliance had engaged. Now Prexus being a FCFS server if FA wants to engage Coirnav with 6 toons entirely naked, then good luck to them. They were there first, they honestly thought they had the numbers to engage, it was their first try, off they went and failed. Shit happens. I would have been happy for them if they had been successful. Jealous but happy.

Unfortunately, as described in the thread, /tells were exchanged, threats made and it all turned into bullshit. I was embarrassed by it all to be honest. It didn't need to happen and taking it up on the Prexus Rant boards was just stupid.

However in the later Grats on RC thread the Guild Leader of Fallen Alliance (who I have grouped with twice and seemed to be a nice person) brings up the old chestnut that Southern Armada is "fed" our strats by Unity. Yes some of our people raid with Unity, no they don't "feed" us strats.

The GL of FA is famous for (or at least he claims to) never reading spoiler sites and coming up with all the Kill strats that his Guild uses purely on his own. Good Luck to him and them, it seems to be working for them. I will say one thing however, if you are going to try and come up with a strat for RC by yourself, I would suggest it will break your guild.

A member of Talionis called Beluyen posted the following in the Rant thread. (Page 2, 9 posts down)

Well, yes - having your members familiar with encounters, know exactly what to do and when, what abilities any given mob has, where to position your raid/the mob for every mob you encounter, including time gods etc is an advantage given to you by Unity. So yes, they helped you win. You yourself said 85% of the guild was elemental flagged before you killed RZ for the first time, are you suggesting Unity didn't help you win that one too? How many SA members are Time flagged already?

Now oddly enough Talionis had at least 20 members of their Guild Backflagged by the Nameless Order before Talionis had killed Coirnav or RC. Can you spell Hypocrite Beluyen?

I would suggest in reply, as any person who has spent more than five minutes Raiding will I think agree, that I can feed you every strat in the game for every mob, yet having those strats still wont guarantee you success. I have been a member of Guilds that if we had had all the strats still couldn't get to where SA is now. Beating the encounters with our numbers requires discipline, skilled players and well led raids.

We haven't been fed anything by anyone. A number of our membership had previously been on Fenin Ro Raids with Unity. We still ended up failing on him 5-6 times till we worked out the positioning and we eventually worked out how to do it differently than Unity. We don't go into encounter's with a strat all laid out before us. Sometimes (like FA did against Coirnav) we will kick off an encounter just to see what happens and then refine from there.

Yes many of our members were Elemental flagged before we killed Rallos Zek. I will however raise three points.

One: we didn't enter the Elemental Planes as a Guild till WE killed Rallos.

Two: Watching someone else do it and doing it yourself is COMPLETELY different. We failed a number of times on Rallos, also by the time we were actually capable of killing Rallos we had to wait a long time for a free spawn as a number of guilds were ahead of us on the hunt to the Elementals.

What this meant was that we spent a lot longer farming in POP than most guilds do. This in turn meant that proportionally SA was better equipped than the average first attempt on RZtW. Thus when we finally got a serious shot at him he died fast. The first time we actually killed him was a non standard Guild raid.

Three: Three maybe four members of SA are Time flagged as far as I know. I'm still waiting on my first Coirnav kill to complete my key. Hell if you want to know the entire history of SA and every single target we have killed for the last 56 weeks start here at week one and read forward.

Yes we went into the RC encounter with some idea of how it worked. We still managed to pull the wrong mobs at the wrong times, we still failed to get MOBs under control properly, we still had to work out how to get and control aggro on the MOBs etc etc. That took us 4 weeks of throwing ourselves at the RC until we finally did it. We crawled a little bit further through the encounter with each try.

Going into an encounter like the RC blind is just insane. You will get owned over and over and over. It is as much a test of patience and perseverance as it is a test of strictly controlled and applied power. So good luck to FA with RC. I really hope you can do it within 4 months of the first time you engage.

Remember one thing. We raid 2 nights a week, not the 5-7 nights a week every other guild, who is at the same level as us raids. (including Fallen Alliance) We are also at the wrong end of a long raid chain that starts on the east coast of the USA about the time most of us get up to go to work. When we get a shot at a MOB we have to make it count, so Maddie, jealous much?.

I would suggest that we have gotten where we are because we have a fantastic Heal team, a superb Pull team, a great set of Officers, excellent raid leaders and a generally older and more mature set of players. I would be very interested to know how many other 2-day a week raid guilds are this close to Time.

Ah well regardless of what idiots and assholes think or say. We know that have gotten where we are on our own merits and the Fish dies next!.

Thursday rolls around. Posts are made on the Guild message board. Coirnav is next. Be there. Initially we had Coirnav tapped to pop in the Plane of Water at around 11:45PM AEST. Now I am 2 hours ahead so we were looking at hoping for an engage at 2:00AM NZ Time. I knew this was going to hurt. I even considered having someone bot me, but after some thought I said " Fuckit I am not missing our on our first kill of anything." I was prepped to hang till I had to go to work and just game straight through if I had to.

So I was extremely happy to logon ( a bit late as I had to do a wee bit of GF factioning ) and see the MOTD saying that Coirnav had already popped and was waiting for us. I expected we would head straight for him but Kez wanted to wait for more people to logon so we headed to the Elemental Plane of Earth for a quick Croc kill.

We decide to do something a little different this time and instead of beating Tantisala Jaggedtooth with Spells and weapons. We did it the fast way and just stuck a Tree through her back.

Next up was a wee jaunt into POEb. This was a very fast clear. We had one wakeup call with Warlord Ginlotaken wiping the raid. We had our first "Cleric camp" call from Kez in a loooooong time. First I knew something was wrong was just after the inc call, I look up and noticed that about half the raid was dead. That's how fast it happened, Ginlotaken is MEAN. We reformed, rezzed up and the next take down was smooth as silk.

However getting wiped by a mob like Ginlotaken is not a good indicator when you are about to go up against one of the toughest encounters in the game. By all accounts Coirnav isn't that hard to kill. He has bugger all HP and sod all resistance's. The problem is getting to him.

If RC is about sustained and specific application of power, then Coirnav is about fast and wild killing yet in a very precise manner. We have never had problems with the DPS section of the encounter, our problem has always been with the control aspects of the encounter prior to actually getting to Coirnav.

To be perfectly honest I was sitting in Coirnav's lair and thinking I would be happy just to actually see FishBoy this time. After the POEb clear we had immediately headed down to Coirnav. I logged out and turned absolutely every graphics option that I could, off. My PC was a really nice one, 2 years ago. I really seriously need to upgrade it, as a place like the Plane Of Water I have to turn everything off just to be able to maneuver properly.

We formed up and Kez and the officers obviously spent a lot of time working out how we were going to do this. The tactics were very slightly changed from last time and I think people had a better idea of how the encounter was going to work this time. Encounters like this one (also like RC) almost require you to go through them multiple times so that each and every person knows their place and what is going to happen.

I was in the pull team again. Having turned off every graphics option I was able to move around a lot more freely this time and felt a lot more confident about my overall role. In fact I felt a whole lot better in general about how I did in this raid. I felt like I managed to contribute and actually make a difference

I got my engage music sorted and good to go and the song of the night was Nicklebacks cover of a Classic Elton John Track - "Saturday Nights Alright for Fighting" (*Hug* in game MP3 player), the raid was taught, questions asked and answered and heart absolutely hammering we were good to go.

I was FD'd in front of the cave as the trigger was pulled over my head. I watched the HP drop on the trigger, trigger died, *Pop* I went into Coirnav's lair. That's all the detail you are going to get!.

The babies were dieing relatively fast, tho the third wave seemed to come in a little slow. At this point I was back with the raid /assist nuking and AOEing with my pathetic little 155 Nuke. What the hell it all helps!.

Named's came inc and the modified strats worked perfectly! Named's were under control and the babies were still dieing. POP Real named's. Servalan you fucking rock. That was one of the best Pulls I have ever seen, it was an absolute work of art. How you did it I will never, ever know, but just wow.

Real named's down. Into the cave!. This is further than we have ever gotten before!. This time we actually get to engage Coirnav!. The BURN call goes up as soon as we get to him. I positioned myself just in front of him but the waves of movement from the main raid just behind me kept moving me,so I ran off to the side a bit and began to cast.

Now I'm not sure if I got pushed into his range by waves of movement or he summoned me. But I got 2 dots on and got splatted. I had LB up, I had 6200 HP and was good to go for major nukeage and I never got to use it.

I zoned back into POK with Coirnav at 80%. Announcements were being called in /GU

70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%

Then it went quiet. I'm sitting in front of my PC, nearly 2am, the whole house is asleep, hunched over, fists clenched, stomach rolling over and over, chanting GO GO GO GO GO under my breath. The last few seconds stretched and stretched. I saw:

5
4
2
1
0

The last few seconds ticked over agonizingly, I couldn't do anything, had I caused a fail dieing too soon?, would my 6k of LB damage have made all the difference?, were we going to fail in death walk the same way we did with Rydda'Dar and have to do it all again?.

DEAD.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Coirnav the Avatar of Water's Corpse.

The celebrations continued for about 20 minutes with fireworks going off over head the whole time. The sense of relief was almost palapable. We had done it. A journey that started over a year ago with our first killings in the Plane of Innovation was finished. We are now the fifth guild on Prexus to enter the Plane of Time. We are one of only 170 or so guilds (estimated) game wide to have entered Time. In a couple of months or less we will be one of less than 100 Guilds to have Dropped Quarm.

Grats guys, we made it. We are at the very top of the game. Nobody believed that we could do it. Even our fellow ANZAC guild's gave us shit. But we persisted, we perservered and we DID IT!!!! We are in Time.

The celebrations even continued into the Plane of Knowledge!.

I logged off and headed for bed. There was no way in hell I was going to get to sleep and sure enough I spent most of the night before the alarm went off thinking about what we had just done.

Well my day is done. Im going to go out now and have several large beers to celebrate.

NOTE I got home this evening and did the last bit of my Time key (Thank you Gnosie, Xardan and Garaneb for completeing the box!) I then spent a lot of the evening helping other people complete their entry into Time! It was a great feeling to be able to say "Welcome to Time" as each group zoned in for the first time!

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Five

11/03/04 Week Fifty Five


Another week, another series of runs at the Rathe council. We had two shots on Monday. The first went bad when an unnoticed resist slipped by a Chanter and a Rathe Councilman got lose. End of Chanters. So we reset, had a wee rest, waited for the RC to regen and went again.
I timed this one, it took us a little over an hour to get the 10 RC under control and to pull the 5th for killing. Now depending on whose timer you listened to, we failed to kill the 6th and last RC by 7-30 seconds.

I was sitting in front of my PC all hunched over, punching the air and yelling at my monitor at 2am as I really thought we had it and were about to finally succeed against the RC. Alas it wasn't to be and I logged, disapointed at just after 2AM.

The last attempt was made with 66 people as we had a full group of people leave after the first fail. The ironic thing is that if any one of those people has stayed and contributed DPS, I believe we would have succeeded.

We were so so close. Thursday (Tonight) the RC dies, and then it's on to Coirnav. The thought of dropping both Coirnav and the RC in one night just gets me hard.

Next weeks update will include screenshots of a dead Avatar of Earth and a dead Coirnav.

Well thanks to SOE's complete inability to correctly test anything, we had 3 days of "emergency" patch's. It was widely reported by the people that play on the Test serve, that the pet haste bug had been /bug reported for some time and SOE pushed it to the live servers anyway.

If you aren't going to pay attention to the people who are supposed to be the ones who test stuff, then why bother having a fucking Test server in the first place?

Well we never had enough people online to make an attempt on the RC anyway. I don't know if people read about the patch and decided to not log on or what, but it was a pretty piss poor turnout for what would have been a major kill for SA. So instead of a shot at RC we headed into Fire and POEb and did a bit of Fast farming. Much much Phat Lewtz was handed out and we managed to clear out POEb in less than an hour.

First up was Babnoxis the Spider Bitch in the Elemental Plane of Fire. We were so pissed about losing our raid time to another patch we just out and out ganked her.

Since he was up, we were in zone, and we didn't have a lot of other targets we pulled and killed Druav. Yay another Mezzbreaker. I think the first Elemental item we will ever have rot will be that sword. If I could get Garakk into Fire it would be an awesome twink weapon, but I'm fairly sure all of our mains have it at this point.

Then it was off to the Elemental Plane of Earth and a fast kill of the Mud Ring. We always seem to do Mud, maybe cause its closest and it's a quick kill with decent Lewtz for its difficulty.

We are definitely getting better at POEb as well. We cleared the whole zone of Giant named's in slightly less than an hour.

War Chieftain Galronar

That was it. Hugely frustrated we all gated out and logged as the servers came down for the 3rd three hour patch in a row. RC dies next Monday!.

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Four

8/03/04 Week FiftyFour
Well there hasn't really been a huge amount of movement this week. The raids on Monday and Thursday can be lumped into one single event. The Rathe Council. Both Monday and Thursday we setup for a run against the Mud Ring as we waited for people to logon. We have this down to a fine art now and the Monsterous Mudwalker died efficiently.

Then came the zone into POEb. Now Monday we fought through the zone to the RC fight spot. Thursday we just avoided it all together and COH'd in. There were many giants killed, much PhatLewtz dropped. Once again I present a Generic Giant 01 as a representative of all the MOB's that died during the fight in.

A_Giant_01

Finally we made it to the fight spot and set up. This week we threw ourselves at this event three times. Monday once, Thursday twice. Each time we got just a little bit further in. The final attempt on Thursday had us with 10 RC members under control. We were about to pull the 11th when we had a wave of LD's. We managed to keep it together even with the LD's for about a half an hour. But the cascading problems got worse and worse until, after (3 HOURS of solid mezzing) the Chanters finally lost control of one of the MOB's and it was all over.

Big, Huge, Massive props to the Chanters. These guys are standing toe to toe with a MOB that can single round them, they are casting a mezz every 30 seconds or so, attacking the mob to maintain aggro and constantly tashing and they did this for three HOURS during one attempt.! /bow. 

You guys rock!!.

Well next week we get to do it all over again! The Rathe Council MUST die.

We drop the RC, then we drop Coirnav and the bulk of the Guild is Time keyed. Then we can farm the Gods at our leisure, when we aren't in Time. We need to do Xegony, Coirnav and the Rathe Council at least twice each just to prove the first kill's weren't flukes!.

I've done a bit of wandering around in Ferubi lately and I have to say the new MOB's are very cool looking. The zones are boring, all just cut and paste type construction, obviously the days of designing Zones like Guk or Karnors castle are gone. Now its just take texture (A), room type (B), corridor (C), repeat A+B+C ad nauseam.

Pxxet Elite Brawler

A Ra'Tuk Decapitator

The Yard trash in the new GOD zones is insanely powerful. they don't seem to have huge resistance's (good), but they hit insanely hard (bad) and they have butt loads of HP (bad). Oh and did I mention they aggro if you even look at them funny?. So multiple mobs in camp are a common occurrence and you must have decent CC even if its just a Necro snaring, pulling the mob away and rooting it.

I can survive a couple of decent smacks from Fire/Earth trash and get an FD off. The basic trash in GOD can one round me.

So another week of the Rathe Council Coming up!.

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Three

1/03/04 Week Fifty Three

It has been pointed out to me that this update is a little late. In fact this is very true, in my defense I do have to say that these take quite a lot of work and effort to write. I have to edit the pics to make them viewable, create the page, setup the file structure, write the page, re read it, spell check it, read and edit it again, do all the linking, spell check again, update the front page link to the new weekly page and then upload everything.


There is at least 8 hours work goes into each of these little missives and I have to try and do it all between actually doing work. If work is busy (which it is at the moment with big projects on) then updates unfortunately come a little slower.


First up Monday was a wee jaunt into the Elemental Plane of Earth. We decided to drop the Mud ring, because, well its easy, and we were still waiting on people to log on. The big target for tonight was to be Coirnav but we needed a solid raid to even contemplate hitting him. So until people had logged on we did a wee warm up. Lots and lots of dead earthy type things later, we squashed the Monsterous Mudwalker.

We didn't do any more in Earth (thank God) and headed over to the Elemental Plane of Fire which had some very nice juicy targets up. The first to die was an old friend we hadn't seen for quite some time. Blazzax the Omnifiend came charging in and was promptly stopped by a wall of Pooby. He almost looked puzzled as Pooby, SA and Poobies Blade of War carved him a new hole from which to breathe.

Next up was Babnoxis the Spider Bitch. I really, really hate her. She drains my mana. She died. 'Nuff said.

We left fire totally clear. I was hoping for a surprise birdie pop such as we had last week but alas it was not to be. So we all trundled merrily off to everyone's favorite zone, the Elemental plane of Water. This time however instead of having just one mob up we had damn near a full pop, something we have very rarely seen in Water. We began rapidly clearing our way down through the zone trash to the lower levels.

The first Fishy we met was Hydrotha. Being a straight melee mob he was easily ganked. Straight melee are my favorite mob's, no dodging AE's, no crappy mana drains. Just set up a CH rot, pull the Mob and kill.

Next came Krizik the Mighty. Now the trick with Water is all in the positioning. It must be an absolute nightmare for the tanks to get into position and stay there. They are moving in 6 axes, up, down, forward, back, left right and being in water, any movement near you can then cause you to move around even more.

This is a problem for casters as well, as soon as you're moved due to someone swimming past, you immediately get an "interrupted" message. Krizik is a really hard mob to position and usually any fight with him is messy as he runs all over the place.

Then came Ofossaa. We had one shot at him a couple of months ago when we first headed into the Plane of Water and he happily knocked us back. We were determined to return the complement and this time he died smoothly and cleanly.

Finally we came up against Griohin the Wise. Now we have nailed this guy on several occasions so it was no real surprise to anyone that he died, well maybe he was a little surprised. If Water was up a bit more often we would happily move into it and farm.

Finally we had enough peoples to attempt the Big Fish Himself. we headed down to his lair. This was our 4th run against him and we changed our tactics a little to try and overcome issues we had seen the week before. We did a lot better this time but once again failed on True Named control. For some reason we seem to do everything else well, we have the timing down, but the true named's just run riot.

I felt a lot better about what I was doing as I had a lot better understanding of what was going on and what it was I was wanted to do. Still too many people dicking about tho, still to many people asking afterward "so wasn't I supposed to do that?. Pay attention for fucks sake and we can get past this guy, concentrate for one hour is all it takes. Coirnav is the road block to Time. We can do the Rathe Council easy, for Coirnav we really have to get our shit together. Ah well next time.

Coirnav 4
Southern Armada 0

We held a little raid in the middle of the week as a bit of a back flagging exercise. I took Garakk along hoping for a bit of flaggage but it wasn't quite to be. As a warm up we dropped Paffa and then moved on to the Named's in the Plane of Storms to finish off a few keys. I had no parts for the BOT key when we started I now only need beard, bone and medallion to finish. I'm hoping over the next couple of weeks we get to do a few more runs into the Plane of storms.

It was actually a hell of a lot of fun doing basic raiding as Garakk and I hope to do more of it.

Thursday kicked off with the raid starting in the Elemental Plane of Fire. Once again, due I think, to everyone ahead of us now being deep into Time, we were seeing MOBs up that we rarely had in the past. So Arch Mage Yozanni was the first beastie inbound. His AE mana drain DOT is not only nasty but it has a massive range. So we casters were forced high up on the wall's and a rota call was set up so we could avoid it.

Dawneyes was kind enough to make a surprise appearance shortly after Yozzanni died. Sanfy equipped his Mugs(tm) and the big chicken also laid his life down for the betterment of Southern Armada.

Finally for Fire we had Quavonis Firetail. He was a bit painful on the pull and the pull team had a bit of a problem with him. But eventually he was brought to the raid and he died.

I have to say what's up with Bracers dropping?, or not dropping I should say. I've been hanging out waiting on a silk bracer drop for the last 6 weeks or more. We have killed numerous MOBs over the period that are capable of dropping them yet we have seen absolutely none at all. I think the loot lever is stuck somewhere, maybe we need to be saccing more Shammies?, Kez come here for a sec...

Fire was clear so it was over to the Plane of EarthB to clear a few more named's. Now I would provide piccies but basically all the mobs look exactly the same as any thing you are likely to see in BOT. So here is a Generic_Giant_01 to represent the 2 hours we spent killing named's and trash in EarthB. I really seriously hate EarthB. Although its a fast clear and the loot is damn good I cant land nada on the named's.

Nuking the trash is fine, but when a named comes in I can blow an entire mana bar and not do more than 1k damage. FP, SK, BOT, DP, Neuro, CoC, Horror, Pyrocruor all resisted 100% I can land ToM lifetaps but they are so heavily mitigated its not worth casting. ToM is normally a 850 tap and I am landing it consistently for less than 100. This isn't just one time. This is every time we enter POEb. So on named's I just don't do anything now except maybe pump someone who may need it. /cry

I gotta ask where the hell is everyone?. We are two targets short of the Plane of Time. After we get into Time its all Candy, its like Vex Thal for the big boys. A month in Time and we will happily be farming Quarm and everybody will take a massive leap in power. So where has everyone gone?. For many of the pre elemental targets we had full raids plus extra groups. Now even an hour or two or three after raid time starts we are struggling to make 50 people.

A couple of people are away for one reason or another and have announced it on the message boards, that's cool, so where's the rest?

I know people have lives etc etc but this has been going on for weeks now. Where has everyone gone?. We simply cannot take out targets like Coirnav/Rathe Council without a full Guild pop, we need numbers for the sheer DPS. Are people no longer interested?, does no-one want to make it into Time as much as me?. If we do make it into Time will all these people suddenly turn up and whine about not having keys? Cause its a key not a flag, 85/15 doesn't work. Much like POEb if you don't have a key, you don't get in, ask Vuurya exactly how frustrating that is.

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fifty Two

19/02/04 Week FiftyTwo
Well I've been thinking long and hard about how to present this. I've started this year in review about 5 or 6 times and trashed it cause it just didn't seem to work. So rather than be a smart arse I'm just going to give you a little history of Ulaa.


Ulaa GrimSoul came to life about 4 years ago. She was created in the early hours of the morning in early January 2000. The name came from a song I was listening to on the radio. I was sitting in front of my PC at 2am about to give EQ a second go.


I had logged into Karana for the first time ever in early March (or a week after the game was released by Amazon.com which ever is correct) I had tried several classes, the first being a Human Monk out of Qeynos, unfortunately Monks had no way to mitigate aggro when the game was released and I spent a lot of time dieing. So I decided to try a Troll Shadow Knight.

I had this concept of the big evil Troll wielding a massive 2 handed blade and charging into his enemies. As we all know by now, the XP penalty for Hybrids at the time were simply horrendous and 2h slashing has only really become a viable alternative in the last 12 months 3 years later. 


So after much frustration I abandoned him and started a Troll Warrior. Thus Garakk was born.
Garakk quickly reached 17th level and then ventured into Befallen. It was at this point I developed my life long loathing of Druids (unless they Cyber me :) ). I attempted to help out a Druid and for my pains ended up with my body rotting in the base of Befallen and losing everything on the corpse. So there I am with a naked weaponless 17th Troll Warrior and absolutely no ability to twink him back up to playable. After 6 months or so of play it was at this point I abandoned the game for the first time.


However I never cancelled the account. So after a number of months I loaded it all up, patched it and started again. This time I had done some research and the general consensus seemed to be, that the best class in the game for twinking another toon was a Necro. So of course with the avowed intention of twinking out Garakk I logged in and fired up a Necro. An Erudite Necro. 


After about 15 levels of running my ass around the forest completely blind I gave up.
I was however determined not to give up on the game again. So I tried another Necro, and another and another. I tried every combo of Race and Sex there was. None of them really suited me and I kept deleting them. 


And thus we return to sitting in front of a monitor at 2am trying to come up with a name for the new Female Dark Elven Necromancer that I was about to create. As usual I was looking around the room trying to come up with some sort of decent name which is my usual method of naming a toon.
The radio had just launched into Jeff Waynes "War of the Worlds" and the Martian's cry rang out through the room.
"oooooooolllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaa"


After a little playing with the phonetics, Ulaa logged into Neriak for the first time. This time I researched before I leaped. I found out what the spells did, I worked out good solo hunting spots for the next level set, I printed out maps etc. I did all this with the intention of getting Ulaa to a high enough level to be able to twink out Garakk. Then Kunark came out, top level went to 60 and the cost of good twinkage went through the roof.


At this point I was in love with my Necro anyway. I had abandoned the idea that she was only for twinking and she had quickly become my main. Along the way I met up with the Guild leader of The Silent Watch ( a UK based guild +12 hours out from my time zone) and joined them, I discovered EqNecro which had just rocked my world and I was happily looking forward to 49 and my new big red skelly pet!.


Move along a few years. Kunark is out, then Velious, then Luclin, PoP has just been released and I have hit 60/25 soloing all the way. I have spent years watching TSW raid into places like HoT and NToV and been unable to join them. I have managed to tag along on one or two raids but only by throwing a sickie and taking the day off from work.


I have spent years reading sites like eqmaps, allakhazam's and drooling over loot in zones I was never going to see. Emp key?, impossible, never going to happen. Vex Thal is so far out of my league it may as well be in another game. Break 2k self buffed?, maybe but only if I spend a lot of time farming for PP. Full spell book?, never going to happen. Funeral Pyre is one of those spells I will never see, 61+ spells were just never going to be possible for me unless they came down into the under 1k platinum range.


But I stayed on Karana, I hung out mainly because of loyalty to The Silent Watch. I had been in the guild 3+ years and I thought we were friends. Fuck was I wrong. The guild imploded badly with real life mates screwing each other over. That ended, it was bad. So a bunch of us managed to recreate the guild and we started again. We had recruiting going, we were farming up POG and HOT to equip the lower members of the guild and fuck me if it all didn't happen again.


So with two guild implosions in 2 months and now unguilded at 60 I looked around and wondered why I was playing this game. I essentially came to the conclusion that what I really wanted was to see the high end game. After 4 years of play I wanted more than just watching Raids in /GU and wondering what it was like to take out big names. I had put in the effort that was required to level to 60+ and it seemed to me that I had seen none of the rewards in terms of both loot and experiences.


So I started looking for an ANZAC raiding guild. I found a number of them ranging from the hard core raiders Cold Fury on Quellious through to small family type guilds much like TSW had been at the start of the guild. Then I found Southern Armada. They raided two days a week which was perfect for me. Even tho I was still going to have to stay up till 2am in order to be able to stay with most raids, I figured that was the sacrifice I was going to make in order to experience the high end game.


So I logged onto Prexus and had a look around, contacted an officer and had a chat and quickly made my mind up that I was going to transfer. So 100$NZ later I was on Prexus, naked, broke and running to catch up with my first raid.


And what a raid it was. I had never experienced anything like Southern Armada in full flow. The speed of the setups, the pulls and the kills were just phenomenal. I was used to 2-3 hours of buffing and pissing about until the raid even moved to engage the trash. Not SA, they just pulled and killed as they went. There was a level of, I guess you would call it professionalism that I had simply never experienced before.


The first raid I went on, I not only saw Xanamech and Manaetic Prototypes in the Plane of Innovation that I had never seen before, but I also saw and contributed to a raid on a GOD!!. That first night we headed into (and failed against) Terris Thule . That one raid was worth every bit of the100$ transfer fee as far as I was concerned.


I had now done something I had only dreamed about and engaged a MoB in a zone that preciously I had only read about. It continued to get better. The second raid that week we headed over to Ssra and engaged the Cursed cycle. Until then I had zoned into Ssra once to summon some corpses and that was it. I was just in 7th Heaven.


As the weeks passed, I got more confident as a raider and we worked through a few more kills. It took us a few weeks of trying out different strats but eventually we put Shei Vinitras on the Farm list. I received my copy of Funeral Pyre as a guild hand out after a Shei kill, something I will never forget. Slowly we geared up, more and more Mobs died to us and we were killng faster and faster.


The Emperor of Ssra is one kill I will always remember mainly because I didnt get to bed untill 4:00am, but mostly cause, holy shit, I just killed the Emperor!. The first kill so very nearly turned to shit, but due to skill,class and everybody just pulling together to do their jobs we pulled it out and he died. Kez's start call of "Bring me Snakes" has become Legend.


Shortly thereafter followed Grummus, Terris Thule finally fell and turned out to be easy once we worked out how to kill her, Aerin'Dar and big brother Rydda'Dar both fell to us. Rydda'Dar was a real pain in the ass and stopped us dead for a little while. It took us 7 runs at him to finally take him out. Then we moved up a Tier and it all got harder.
Agnarr the Stormlord finally died to us but only after a really nasty wipe the first time we zoned in, Kez said he "Just wanted to test the strat". Then we ran up against Lord Mithaniel Marr who wiped us several times before we got the hang of him, Bertoxxulous the big meanie, we made the event look easy but Bert sure wasnt, and finally the big man himself died to us, Rallos Zek the Warlord.


All the way through, on every kill we were learning. We learned off tanking on multiple heavy targets, we learned speed killing, fast crowd control, multi splitting, applying power and damage with strict limits in order to bring a mob down under control. We learned we needed discipline and to listen carefully. On every kill we learned more and more patience as the amount of trash we had to clear through got bigger and bigger.


We also made it a point to all get Emperor keyed and then VT keyed. We dropped the Emperor of Ssra several times and his oppo over in Seru, the Lord Inquisitor as well. To finish off the Luclin set we also made it a point to get into Vex Thal and fight our way all the way to Aten Ha Ra. I don't know how guilds managed to farm that for months. No wonder people simply went crazy while doing it.


Hell, I was now Elemental flagged. I couldn't believe it. The day I zoned into the Elementals was huge. This was certainly a place that less than a year ago I would never have believed I would ever see. Once we had enough keyed the back flagging ended and we spent a couple of months farming the Elemental Plane's and dropping every MoB we came across. We even dropped General Reparm the first time we encountered him which was quite a feat.


Then it was time for the Gods. Finally the Elemental guilds above us had moved into Time and we were able to get a clear shot at them. Fenin frustrated us several times. We had about 8-10 runs at him before we finally worked out the positioning and dropped him. Xegony was the next to fall and suddenly we were only 2 Gods from entering the Plane of Time. I personally had snuck into a Unity Raid and I only need 1 key (Cornaiv) before my Time key is finished.


I still like saying that, I am one God Kill from the plane of Time. It just makes me go all wobbily. In the last twelve months Southern Armada has gone from being "the little guild that could" to being one of the top Guilds on the Prexus server.


If all goes well we will be the fifth guild on Prexus to step foot into the Plane of Time and the Fifth guild to drop Quarm. Where SA goes from there, only the Officers know, but I know that at that point I will have achieved more on Prexus, seen more, done more and killed more than I ever thought possible. SA has moved in 12 months from just venturing into the Planes of Power and having trouble with MoBs like Terris Thule and Behemoth to killing Elemental Gods.
Ulaa is now 6100hp raid buffed (about 3500 Unbuffed) with a manapool over 5k and a full spell book. 


I am in a position I never would have believed I would ever be. I own items I never would have believed possible and have focus effects for almost every occasion. To top it off I have had a real blast while raiding, all those long nights and exhausted days were well worth it.


On to the week's Raiding.
Well the first target of the night was the not so very mighty Quavonis Firetail. I don't know whether there just weren't enough people at the raid yet, or we just weren't paying attention, but Mr Firetail managed to wipe us quite effectively. For some reason this struck me as bloody funny at the time.

As soon as we re-sorted ourselves and formed up, we pulled him again. It struck me that even the second time around we seemed to be low on DPS and healage, as even against a mob as simple as Firetail we were losing Tanks. It seemed to take us ages to actually take him down, but ultimately, die he did.

Next up was the lovely Blazzax the Omnifiend. He didn't cause us even a little problem. However,once again it took us a little while longer to kill him than it has taken in the past. We still had people inbound to join the raid at this point and DPS still seemed low.

The next target was announced as Pyronis but as the pull teams were maneuvering to get the frog in place, Cruare Sunmane popped right in front of us. So Lufy loaded up his Steins(tm) and charged the future chicken burger. We beat him down pretty quickly and Pyronis was inc shortly after.

Frogs Legs mmmmmm

That was it for Fire, we pretty much had a full sweep with the exception of the Spider Bitch and the two generals Druav and Reparm. So with not a lot else up we headed over to the Plane of EarthB. I have to say I was really looking forward to this zone and ended up being really disappointed by it. The models are all rehashes of what you can already find in the Bastion of Thunder, nothing at all new or interesting. SOE you disappointed me.

War Chieftain Birak

War Chieftain Awisano

War Chieftain Galronar

The Warlord was the only guy who we had trouble with, by trouble, I mean we couldn't go full burn on him as he memblurs a lot. So slow and gentle was the order of the day and we slowly wore him away until he dropped.

Warlord Gintolaken

We zoned into POEb and set ourselves up for an attempt on the Rathe Council. I had to go to bed at this point, even tho it was relatively early. I had to be up at 6:00am to take the GF into work and it was 1:30am. Despite really wanting to stay I logged and headed for Bed.

After I left SA tried a couple of experimental pulls of the Council members and were doing really well until a wee mistake was made and an unmezzable was pulled. At that point everyone logged leaving a few key toons in place for an attempt later on.

The next raid of the week started in rather unusual circumstances. We had learned that the RC spawn we had left up had been taken out by someone else, so that was out. I had logged in early and after finding no groups available, I had set out to check and see if my solo spot was free in Fire.

For some reason GOD has just killed my ability to find groups. I have had one group since GOD was released for some reason, I used to be able to average one a day at least even if it was a simple run through an LDoN dungeon.

So I ended up at the picnic tables to find a number of the folks from Talionis about to pull the Fenin Ro trigger. I figured that was that and logged out thinking that we would not get a shot at Fenin that night. Once the raid was formed later on, we headed into Fire for a shot at Cruare Sunmane. Unlike last week we had no problems and promptly dropped the big chicken on his feathers.

At that point we discovered that our officers had been in contact with the officers online in Talionis. The people from Tali had had every intention of taking out Fenin but as it was late for them, many of them had logged leaving them not enough people to complete the kill. So rather than blowing the spawn and leaving, they had elected to leave us up one Named Trash and Fenin himself. They called their farewells and Good Luck's as they were leaving the zone. Extremely good of them I thought.

So after a fast run to the picnic tables area, with a nasty couple of incidents due to see invis mobs, we ran straight up to Fenin's area, formed up and pulled his Chief Lieutenant and leader of the Council of Fire, Warlord Prollaz.

Then it was Fenin Time. I LOVE killing Gods. Bring me more.

And that was that for fire. After Fenin went down Fire was completely clear. So after some scouting by the officer team we were called to the Plane of Water. Coirnav the big fish himself was up!. For some reason (I think the plane architecture was patched) we couldn't just COH into his room so after about a half hour fight into his room we were ready.

The strats were called and I ended up in a pull team. For some reason with something as complex as Coirnav on the go, a lot of people were pissing about, chatting in GU, talking in Raid etc etc. This is actually quite unusual for SA as when we come up against a target like a God we are usually all business. Consequently I proceeded to get quite bloody confused. Even with 5 minutes before the pull I was still trying to sort out what the deal was and exactly what was expected of me

With the help of Anobis (who had done this before) I finally got sorted and in position. Basically as I understood it, my job was to FD in front of Coirnav's lair and aggro a specific named as it came past. Once I had it on my tail I was to pull it back to my group who would then Root/Park it. Ok, so I got into position, practiced my run back to my group a few times so I knew where I was going in the zone and I was good to go. The trigger was pulled and we were off.

Ancient Regrua Sentinel

So at this point I ran up to the entrance to his lair, FD'd and waited for my named to come past. I also had a hot key set up to assist a rogue for targetting. The first I knew of the named popping was a group calling it was rooted and under control well past me. I never, ever saw it come past me or had it as an assist. Ok so a new target is designated for me and my group and I wait for that. The first I know of the new target appearing is my group calling that they had it rooted!.


Fuck I still didn't even get to see it go past. So I popped up, ran over to where my group had been and they were gone. I could see them casting but I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the hell they were. So at this point I ran back to the raid and started to assist on the AOE kills. From here it just all turned to crap with mobs all over the place. In the end we were all popped back to POK as the timer had run out and that, unfortunately, was the end of the Raid for Thursday.