Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Five

Monday 04.02.08
Short and Sweet.
Some of the models that Sigil have developed (actually these are probably built by SOE) are just awesome. This is one of the guard Mobs outside APW, giant mixtures of beetles and lizards. One thing I have noted is that screen shots simply don't do these models justice. You have to be in game to appreciate how well put together the models really are. VG is definitely one of the prettiest MMO's on the market.

R5, Vicus. Fell down and went splat.

Unfortunately we only got two runs at Archon Travix. He isn't hard, he is a simple fight, we just seem to be rushing him a bit. We are definitely getting better at this, our fifth week into the zone, our Ninth raid, our 33rd-37th hours, Travix will die soon and we are traveling well for a push into the Hub. I think next Thursday we will definitely make it, as there won't be a lot up for us we will try and push on for the Hub just so we don't have to grind through the trash night after night.

Archon Travix Waiting

Southern Armada would also like to thank whoever made Lisani's boobies. Due to a bug (one of the many) Lisani was shown stripped back to her base model, and what a base it is!. The entire guild took great delight in running over to have a look before the bug was fixed. Well done I say!.

Lisani, what an Elf!

Thursday 06.02.08
Formed up and straight in. It takes us about 1.5 hours to grind through all the trash to get to Travix. Its not that the place is swarming with trash, its not. But each trash fight has different nuances, each fight has different needs and we are learning new things about each fight as we repeat them. We are getting better and faster with each push but it would be nice not to have to do this grind every night, lets get to the Hub!. At the start of the fight we had a hitch hiker with us, a Knight from another Guild who for some reason decided to tag along on our little jaunt. At the beginning he was spouting out all sorts of useful things like "/say this mob has a knock back so only fight him with ranged". Yes, thanks, very helpful. We will use what works for us. He stopped and seemed to disappear after the boss asked him oh so politely to shut up. So we fought on without the benefit of all that knowledgeable advice and made it to Travix in very good time.

R5 Kindly dropped the Greatsword he has been holding on to for the last 4 weeks and as there don't seem to be any other 2H wielders in the Guild at the moment I won the roll!. Now if only Vicus would drop his Spear I would be in Dread Knight heaven!.

Travix waiting for a spanking

This time we took him down slow but steady. This becomes a very boring fight for the non main tank unfortunately. I switched to my 2H, I went into evade mode, I didn't hit any specials, no damage or aggro attacks. I simply stood there, did white damage and watched for the Curse. Thats it, takes about 5 mins to kill him and I cant do squat apart from base damage *Yawn*. I also got yelled at, naughty naughty Dread Knight!. The Boss called for DPS off and as I was just doing base damage (I mean really, I couldn't be generating less aggro if I was offering him a cup of tea and a lie down) I just let the damage run. The boss very correctly and forcefully reminded me that when he calls for DPS off it means everybody!. So with my ass red and feeling much chastened, we moved on past Travix and into unexplored territory.

Travix being spanked by a naked Pink Tank

We continued to fight on through, deeper into APW. There was some new and different trash and some new scenery until we reached the Warehouse. Now you have to remember we have NFI where we are going. We have no spoilers. no maps and we are learning by doing, so basically we are just wandering aimlessly while looking for the Hub. Its lucky that the dungeon is fairly linear or we could be lost for weeks!.

Just as we had engaged two mobs, the Wednesday lag hit us. Its amazing, whatever the process is thats occurring on the servers, it happens at 11PM AEST on the dot and lasts 2-3 minutes. This time, to make it extra special fun, it not only lagged us out on the pull, the zone then crashed and the whole raid was booted to desktop. We were dreading having to log back in to a fully populated zone, this time we were lucky and it seems the zone didn't re-pop on us the way it did last week.

It was getting late at this point, around 11pm and I think, like me, people were beginning to get tired and their feet were dragging. As we made our way deeper into the warehouse we ran straight into Zaraax. Now this is one huge ass mob and he hits like a Mac Truck. Even though we ended up with him more or less accidentally, we still managed to get him under control and in position. He was at about 90% when we started to get adds. We don't know if they were roamers, he summoned them or they just popped in the wrong spot, I guess we will learn next time. We elected to take the wipe and bypass Zaraax for a further push towards the Hub. Awesome Model, kudos on the design of this guy.

Skulls for hands!

Once we reformed we headed in again towards where we could see a faint blue glow, the hub maybe!. As we were pulling trash we also ran into Akym the Assassin. He hits hard but seemed like a fairly straight forward Tank and Spank.

Once he was out of the way we made it to the Warehouse hub and we were going to log it out there. For various reasons unrelated to APW raiding, one of our Clerics had managed to get bonded to the Hub portal, so he ported back to the Hub just so we could check how far away the Hub was from where we were. Surprise, surprise it turned out he was only about 150 yards from where we were standing. So taking his direction we pushed on. It was after midnight at this point and everyone was getting damn tired. But we cleared through some more trash and voila!, we made it to the Hub! Everyone attuned to the two portals and we are now in a good position to pick up the hub quests and to explore into the surrounding wings.

First things first however, Zaraax must die!.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Four

29.01.08

I was late again dammit. I was all sorted out to be at the raid by 7:30 and for some reason my ADSL link dropped for about 15 minutes, repeated reboots of the router and NIC didn't help so it was after 8:00pm before I made it to the raid. We formed up quick and moved in even quicker. It was easily the best start so far. We were almost at the x83 before we lost anyone at all. The timers weren't up on X83 or X77 so we didn't get a shot at them. R5 died in the usual fashion and we headed straight for the General. R5 has an awesome sword. I have seen another Dreadknight carrying one and the Graphic is fantastic. He just doesnt seem to want to drop it for us.

We formed up and I was designated Main Tank for this fight. Ive revised my reasons for that, I think I'm main tank because the Warriors have better snap aggro and its them we have to rely on to maneuver the Adds as they pop. Who cares, MT'ing this guy is an absolute blast, in fact MT'ing anything is huge fun, I'm so glad I decided to switch back to tanking from being a caster. In this fight all I have to do is stay concentrated on pumping out as much aggro as I can generate and watching my HP for the occasional use of a Rune.

The first run against Vicus was really a tester, getting out feet wet to see how we would handle the fight. He went down to 56% and we wiped when I died and Vicus got loose in the healers. Once the healers go down its a dead raid. This fight got a bit exciting as someone aggroed him off me and I had to do some fast taunting and maneuvering to hold him and get him back in place.

The second run was a lot closer. We re-set and pulled quickly after the first wipe. This one just felt better from first aggro for some reason. It got lumpy in parts, especially when the Adds dropped two healers due to unfortunate positioning. However we got the bastard down to about 36%.

You know the saying third times the charm?. We set up and pulled. Mezzers had the adds as soon as they popped, the off tanks put the adds exactly where we wanted them and the DPS laid the serious smack on Vicus. We got through the first wave, Vicus is down to 50%, lost two healers, its all good, battle rez and keep going. Sort the adds and lay the big bang down on him again. At the end of the second wave he is at about 10%. So with a pet, me , dots and nukes from everyone else we stay on him as they deal with the third wave. The raid drops the first add and its decided that we would lay the smack on him and just keep the add mezzed.

At 3% I finally took a screenie, he seemed to have been hanging there forever, healing was really good and DPS was beginning to chop into him. I knew we had him. Its a weird feeling, I had been so concentrated on holding him in place and maintaining aggro for so long that when he finally dropped I had a massive surge of adrenalin. What A Buzz!.

Dead Vicus.

One of the two best 2h weapons in the game drops from Vicus. The Spear of Devotion is what all well dressed Dreads are wearing, unfortunately much like the R5 Greatsword we didnt see it on this run. The heal team did a superb job in this fight with at least 2 of them going down during the fight. they managed to keep the bulk of the raid (and me!) alive all the way through. Ive been a raid healer, it sucks. I bow down to anyone who can do it well and consistantly. All of us are learning our jobs and all of us recognise that. By the time I made it to Prexus in EQ I had already been playing a Necromancer for close to 5 years. I knew that class inside and out solo, what I really had to learn fast was grouping and raiding skills, but they were just changes in methods I had been using for a very long time. Most of us have only been playing Vanguard for a year at this point so we all have a long way to go before those reactions, those things that became close to "inherent" in our reactions within EQ start to happen in this new game.

Since we had about an hour to kill at this point we decided to push further in to the zone and see what we could see. We made it up to Archon Travix and stopped there to set up to engage. He has a tricky pull to clear the entrance to his lair. I think we were all getting tired at this point and we couldnt quite co-ordinate the effort effectively. We wiped twice and at that point it was time for me to turn into a pumpkin and head for beddy byes.

One of two Quotes of the week:
" That was so much fun I let a little bit of pee out"
Aegis after the death of Vicus

Thursday 30.01.08

We formed up quickly (I had parked myself outside so I didnt have to run for miles). The devs have stated that in GU4 they are planning on re-arranging the Riftways to make them more useful. I so hope they put one down near APW. The run all the way from the northern elf Village everytime for raids is a pain. I can understand wanting to make the world seem bigger, absolutely, I'm against insta ports everywhere. But having to run down there 2 days a week is making me want to stay there and not log on for general play. So Ulaa stays parked outside the APW Gates all the time. X83 , X77 and R5 died easy and fast. We lost one person on X83 apart from that they were all perfect kills.

Enraged X83, being enragey

So with Vicus still on lockout we headed up to Archon Travix again. This time clearing his guards was flawless and we very quickly had him standing alone.

So with no idea how this fight goes, I lie, we had one idea, we engaged and started to smack him down. We had him postioned, DPS was on and all was going well until the first add. Even then we handeled it and he was under control. We got him down to under 80% first run and we only lost it when I died. His damage is really spikey, I had been throwing in Runes to stay up and mitigate as much of his damage as possible. Unfortunately he spiked when I had no runes refreshed and down I went. After that he was in amongst the raid and it was all over. So we formed up again and headed back in.

This time I died almost instantly. I had over 11500 HP fully buffed, max mitigation and I snuffed it anyway. I have been called recently on criticisim of Healers. I've gone back and read over my old stuff and I haven't criticised anybody. What I have done is tried to be honest about what I see happening within an engagement. The heal team is shaping up to be really good. We have gone through encounters where they have worked their butts off, throwing out fast heals to save dress wearers and keeping the MT's up at the same time. In this case that didnt happen. Nym picked up the fight and held Travix in place. Kuurgen went down.

Standing outside a zone, waiting to see what happens in an engagement sucks. You cant see whats going on or how everything is going, you can hear whats happening in the voice channel but cant contribute. I imagine its like listening to sport on the raidio, its a very poor subsititute to actually being there. We had an add, it was offtanked, Nymeria went down. Garbar is now tanking named and add.

Quote of the Week Two:
"Get a Tank on that add"
Xardan, not seeming to realise 3 of his 4 tanks were standing at zone in...

It didnt matter, we had the skinny bastard, he was going down. He was at 20% when we had back spawn adds pop and take out our heals within seconds. That was that. It doesnt matter, we know we can take him and hopefully once he is down we are fairly close to the hub!.

Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 3)

I am loving Australia, I really am and to be honest I cant see us going back to New Zealand in the foreseeable future. Its possible that Sydney may not remain home forever, but I think Australia will be. Don't get me wrong, I love NZ, its a beautiful country and has a lot of really good things going for it, but at the moment we just cant afford to live there. I'm not pointing the finger at any one political party or politician as the blame needs to be laid across all of them.

For the last 20 years, pretty much as long as I have been working full time, all I have heard from NZ politicians is that we need to keep wages low to compete with Asia/keep inflation down and that the "Trickle down" theory will work, we just have to let corporations make even bigger profits. Now like me you can probably see the holes in this argument.

1. Corporations don't pass profits down to workers. They just don't work that way.
2. Even if corporations wanted to raise the workers wages (this will occur when the snouted ones become airborne) the government has a policy of keeping wages low. Corporations cant raise wages as it will lower profits and raise inflation.

To make a long story short, this has led to en extended period of New Zealand workers getting the shaft. If you are getting a wage rise which simple grants you cost of living increases you are doing really well. On top of the wages issue is the problem of massive immigration and a large immigrant student population fuelling a house prices boom. So the NZ worker is making very little money to allow NZ to compete with Asia. Meanwhile the Asians are moving into NZ in huge numbers and bringing all their money with them.

So now NZ workers, whose real wages have risen something like 20% in the last 15 years cannot afford to buy property in their own country as property prices have increased on average by 200%. Meanwhile corporate profits have increased 300% and politicians salaries by 100%. The cost of living in NZ is massive. They have screwed up, they have created a system whereby they cannot raise workers wages, but if they don't raise wages they will lose all their educated, experienced and skilled workers to other countries.

Ignore all the politicians and accountants and what they will tell you; this is my experience as a New Zealand worker.

1. The cost of living in Sydney (one of the most expensive places in Australia) is lower than it is in Auckland. I pay less for food, power, transport, petrol, gas, water, clothing, shoes and going out.
2. I get more money in my pocket at the end of the month in Sydney than in NZ. I pay less tax, and what tax I do pay I can claim back and end up with a cash bonus at the end of the year.
3. I make 30% more NET in Sydney than I was making in NZ.
4. One of the politicians arguments for staying in NZ is that its a beautiful country. I can assure you that Australia is also beautiful. we have done a lot of driving in NSW and I can assure you there are some fantastic places to see.
5. The weather. You don't realise just how much it rains in NZ until you don't live there. I hate rain, I love warmth.

I saw a statistic recently that 40,000 New Zealanders a year are leaving the country. I cant believe that the Politicians don't look at numbers like that and ask themselves where they went wrong.

Having said all of that, there is a place in NZ that is my little piece of Heaven. If I had my choice this is where I would love to be.

Manganui Harbour.
'Manganui' is a Maori word meaning "Big Fish"

The view south from the deck at Coopers beach

2 minutes from Manganui.

The view North from the deck at Coopers beach
2 minutes from Manganui.

Coopers beach is my little piece of Paradise and always will be. In order to ever be able to afford to live there, I will have to spend the next 20 years working in Australia. There is something wrong with that.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 3

22.01.08

A new week and a new raid. Until we get to the APW Hub there isn't going to be a whole lot of variance in what to say. Ooo look we killed Enraged X83 and Malfunctioning X77 again!. Ah well, they are still fun fights.

Monday we didn't have a lot to do as the X83 and X77 don't spawn till tomorrow so we cleared through and headed straight for General Vicus. It took us about 2 hours to get to him so we knew we were going to have time to have several runs at him. Nymeria the Pink Power Ranger had been tanking all the trash and mini named's all the way into the zone till we reached Vicus. Its actually harder to off tank than to main tank in this game. You want to stay on the aggro list, but you don't want to get into the habit of stealing aggro. This presents a conundrum as you can take aggro simply by pumping out damage and you cant really tell what the MT's current aggro level is like. So all you can do is hit the occasional aggro inducer and your specials and wait for him to turn. If he turns to you, all you can do is go defensive and wait for the other tank to take it back, or if he turns to someone squishy, you hit your rescue and start to pump out aggro.

Warehouse Firesoul hits us with an AOE

We caught the Guardian R5 on the way into Vicus. He was extremely nice to us and dropped a whole lot of goodies, rather than the 2 or three he usually does.

Guardian R5 on the way in

The boss man put me front and center for the fight against Vicus, mainly I think cause I had done it before and he has a nasty knock forward. I describe it as a reverse Punt. Basically whatever direction you are facing is the direction you are going to go flying about 50 feet every 30 seconds to a minute. So you have to tank him facing a wall and be prepared to be running back a lot to try and keep him in position. I think that at a particular percentage he also switches the punt to another direction and you start to fly to his left, instead of straight forward, so there are some interesting tanking mechanics to cope with.

On top of that he has several adds. He spawns two 53 6 dots to help him out which you also have to have a strat for. So we setup for the first run. We've got the room cleared, we have a strat worked out and communicated, everyone knows what they are doing and we are good to go. Inbound.

Engage!

We got him positioned and started in on him, gentle to start with as we need his adds and we don't want to pull aggro onto the casters. So the adds pop and we have them dealt with. This is where we start to see some new effects on him. The casters are getting massive damage against him, huge crits, the mezzers have the adds under control so we lay into him. I'm holding aggro fairly well, I'm throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him to keep him focused on me. He is a tough bugger as on top of everything else he is life tapping me for a 2k heal every round. Using this strat we got him down to (I was concentrating so I think) about 60% before we got overwhelmed by his adds.

Bugger, close but no cigar but its all good as we have now learned a couple more things about him. We refine the strat and set up for another go. Unfortunately we weren't 100% sure on the timing of his adds so we stopped for a bit to wait for his room pop. It turned out to be quite a long wait as his room guards seem to be on longer timers than most of the rest of APW so far. We had just cleared the room when everybody lagged out. Really, really lagged out. The the whole raid gets dropped and we are all sitting at the logon screen. Zarthaz logs in to check it out and we have a full zone reset, with a full pop. Damn it, now we have to clear the whole damn thing again in the face of active opposition from roamers. I thought we had the log on timed really well. We avoided most of the roamers and got everyone back in and in place to start the event again.

So we hit the roamers and get them out of the way. We start to clear his guards. The last bodyguard is inc and we are set to have another go.

errrr, suddenly I'm dead with the guard at about 3% down, the guard is rampaging, Nym picks him up, then hes dead. It all went horribly wrong and we have a Guard inside the raid beating on casters. I think the healers were asleep or possibly afk, all the tanks died so damn fast. So that was it for Monday. It was after 11pm and there was no way we were going to get in and get set again before midnight.

Wednesday
We formed up at 8:00pm and headed in. We blitzed through the early parts of the dungeon clearing our way though the trash almost like it wasn't there. The Guardian R5 stood in our way for about a minute before he fell down (he?/she?/it?). Once again he failed to drop the Greatsword.

Guardian R5 from an elevated perspective

Apart from the usual suspects cough*sorcerers*cough we hadn't lost anyone by the time we reached Malfunctioning X77. The X77 dropped easily and smoothly, we didn't even lose a tank during the transitions.

Waiting to die

We smashed him down without even pausing for breath and headed on for the Enraged X83.

Enraged X83 inc for a bitch slappin

We dropped the X83, looted up and moved on to General Vicus. Now I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail but the strat is definitely coming together. This time we had Vicus at under 40% and he id definitely killable by us. Its not the fight against Vicus we are losing, its the fight against game mechanics and bugs. If everything in the game worked the way we expected it to with no faults and no bugs, he would have died, unfortunately a few things didn't quite fall into place and we failed on him.

This is where the night turned to complete shit. We didn't have any one in place with a rezz stone. The only person to survive the encounter had no stone at all. This isn't the first time and this is really basic shit everyone should have learned in grouping. Every FD class should always have a rezz stone from every single priest class. So now we are a 2 hour grind away from another shot at General Vicus and naked. Basically at this point we got rattled. this is where we should have dug deep, said ' we can do this' and headed on back in. Instead people just seemed to lose confidence or simply stopped paying attention I don't know.

Basically the next two hours sucked. in the first run in we cleared every encounter like a knife through butter. In the second run in we were rattled, people were dieing, over aggroing and generally running around like idiots. We didn't even get back to X83' death spot. We wiped for the second time in very quick succession about 3/4s of the way back in and it was declared over. Vicus would have to wait for another week

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 2

17/01/08

What a complete turn around from our last raid. We went through the opening stages of Ancient Port Warehouse like a knife through butter. There was no raid wipe after every mob and only a very few people pulled aggro off the main tanks.

I was late due to being told by the wife that as there was a raid break, there was also a play break, so I haven't been online at all since late December. I logged on to find myself in Martok on Kojan where I had been practicing Diplomacy. So to reach the Southern Swamps, especially now that Rudolph no longer flies, was going to be a long run!.

I was so excited I forgot to get pics of the first Boss!. Never mind I will pick some up next week as we will have a full pop next week for Wednesday. This was only a very short week as we really only came back on the Wednesday night. We cleared through the early part of the zone extremely quickly. The only deaths we had were from the usual suspects *cough* sorcerers*cough* who weren't keeping an eye on their aggro.

One thing I think people don't quite understand is that each tank has an extremely different way of gaining and holding aggro. Warriors have a lot of snap aggro, Paladins have a lot of powerful rescues and Dread Knights take some time to build rage. Each tank classes aggro abilities need to be handled differently by the raid. Once I have good aggro it becomes very hard to take it off me, but it does take me some time to build it up to a level at which the DPS classes can unleash.

Our first target of the night was x77 (which I forgot to get photo's of) he dropped as clean as a whistle. Next up was an enraged x83. Now I really like this fight, theres a tank rotation and you get bounced about 40 feet in to the air. Its a fairly straight tank fight with a twist. Hell I'm just loving the tanking. Raid tanking really is everything I thought it would be. I get butterflies every time we engage and a huge buzz when the target goes down.

Enraged X83

After some more clearing of trash we got to General Vicus. We haven't killed him yet but we get closer with every try. I suspect that we will find when we finally get to the central Hub of APW that there will be a shortcut to most of these mobs and we will be able to avoid a lot of the trash. However we haven't raided together, in some cases for years, so all the trash clearing and general raid discipline is very good practice. We are definitely getting better at it and its getting a lot easier to clear through the crap. Everybody is learning their classes a little bit better and what they can and cannot do. We are learning about aggro control in APW (very different than WoW and EQ) , how the game handles different scenarios and where the bugs are.

We will get there, its all good practice and its all good fun!.

General Vicus in the dim distance