19/11/04 The
end.
Wow.
Both literally and figuratively.
Southern
Armada is moving to the World
of Warcraft.
The Glory of
SA will now shine in Multiple games. We have membership in Everquest2,
Everquest1 and World of Warcraft. SA will survive multiple games
I think, simply because we are all older players and into it for
the fun as opposed to the PhatLewtz or the being L33t.
There are still
some staying to continue on in EQ. There are some going to EQ2
but the bulk
of us are moving to WoW.
It all came
down to a post on the guild Message Board by the Great Bear Our
leader Kezlar. He essentially said what everyone was thinking.
He had had enough, it wasn't fun anymore and the on going lack
of people showing up to raids was telling him that was true for
a lot of other people.
That basically
opened the floodgates and we all simply poured out.
GOD broke EQ
for a lot of us. POP was superb, a lot of fun, GOD was awful and
sucked all of the fun out of the game. Its nice that SOE apologized
and flew lots of people to see them so they could say sorry. But
after that nothing changed, there was a big burst of publicity
and then SOE went back to its usual dead silence.
I would have
been angry once, but not anymore. They have just lied, broken
promises, nerfed, failed to communicate, insulted the player base
and generally acted like they don't have a clue once too many
times. Even those in a coma can awake from their sleep and say
enough.
Thanks for
5+ years of EQ. Its been a blast and I will leave this web-log
up for some time to come yet.
There are many
very good people still staying in EQ1 and I believe they will
rebuild and continue on very successfully.
Ulaa has gone
to sleep.
She sits dreaming
on the shores of the Plane of Tranquility looking out over the
entrance to the Elemental Plane of Fire. She is in Lich form,
gently bobbing up and down, with her faithful pet standing at
her shoulder.
There she will
sit until one day, maybe, I may venture back into EQ.
I want to continue
doing these gaming blogs however.
Its been a
hell of a run. Its been nearly 6 years.
Friday, November 19, 2004
A new beginning
This was intended as the blog of Ulaa the Necromancer, Prexus Server, Everquest. In the last few days there have been massive changes in that arena however which I will report here. After 6 years Southern Armada is moving from Everquest to the World of Warcraft.
Personally I have been getting tired of EQ. Its been getting harder and harder to log in either for raids, for XP or just for stuffing about. It has come out in the last few days it has come out that I haven't been the only one feeling like that. On Monday the guilds leader, Kezlar the Prophet (the Bear) announced he was leaving for WoW and asked if any of the remaining membership wanted to join him.
I didn't need to think about it for even a second. When I first started in EQ I joined a guild with little thought of the time zones involved and the problems they would bring. So I started on a server called Karana which turned out to be largely dominated by GMT Guilds and players (-12 hours from my time) I spent three and a half years on Karana, for most of it I was in a guild called The Silent Watch.
TSW was a great guild and was on its way up into the end game when it imploded for the third and last time. At that point I decided I needed to examine why I played this game and did I want to continue?. In the end I decided I did want to continue but I didn't want to stay where I was doing what I was doing. I wanted to go raiding and see the high end game. To do that I needed to find an Aussie/Kiwi raiding guild in my time zone that was still a bit 'casual'. I couldnt afford the time to join a 7 day a week 5 hour a night raiding guild.
After a little bit of searching I found The Southern Armada, transferred to Prexus and began my career as a raider into the high end game. I loved SA. I had people in my own time zone to talk with and group with, I had people who understood my cultural references (I got very sick of explaining to Americans that 'pissed' doesn't mean angry) and I got to raid twice a week.
SA traveled up into the end game via the content of Velious and Luclin. On the way up I got to kill all of the old 'name' targets of the Game. I was there for the death of Aten Ha Ra, The Emperor Ssraezha, the Avatar of War, Rallos Zek and Coirnav. I was part of the team that triumphed over The Rathe Council and Xegony. We dropped Quarm and progressed through Gates Of Discord to Qvic.
It was enough. After 6 years, the last 2 years of which have involved getting to sleep at 2am (when raids finish) twice a week, it was enough. The Gates of Discord expansion is essentially what broke EQ for me. I feel like the Developers and management of EQ at that point broke faith with the players and put out a product purely for the money with no regard for the players.
Now the argument can be made that they are a company and they are there to make money and that is perfectly legitimate. However, we the players are the driving force behind the game. Without us there is no game and no money. SOE essentially ignored us and produced a steaming pile of unfinished, cheaply produced, poorly put together crap and asked us to pay 69.95 for it.
So after 6 years of unfinished, buggy content, lack of communication with the players, indeed outright abuse of the player base, broken promises and appalling customer service I decided to hang up my Scythe with the rest of the Guild and go to WoW.
So the internet Blog of the Adventures of Ulaa the Necromancer will stay where it is as a testimonial. This newly created Blog will continue as the adventures of Ushnak the Ork and The Southern Armada in the World of Warcraft. This blog will be updated weekly, or as close to weekly as I can manage in between play, work and maintaining real world relationships. I know I had a decent readership for the EQ blog. Hopefully I can manage to entertain a few people in this blog as well.
Well first entry. The World of Warcraft is released 23/11/04. I cant wait.
The reason I went to this format is that you the reader can post comments. Its always nice to get some feedback, in fact its hugely encouraging.
Personally I have been getting tired of EQ. Its been getting harder and harder to log in either for raids, for XP or just for stuffing about. It has come out in the last few days it has come out that I haven't been the only one feeling like that. On Monday the guilds leader, Kezlar the Prophet (the Bear) announced he was leaving for WoW and asked if any of the remaining membership wanted to join him.
I didn't need to think about it for even a second. When I first started in EQ I joined a guild with little thought of the time zones involved and the problems they would bring. So I started on a server called Karana which turned out to be largely dominated by GMT Guilds and players (-12 hours from my time) I spent three and a half years on Karana, for most of it I was in a guild called The Silent Watch.
TSW was a great guild and was on its way up into the end game when it imploded for the third and last time. At that point I decided I needed to examine why I played this game and did I want to continue?. In the end I decided I did want to continue but I didn't want to stay where I was doing what I was doing. I wanted to go raiding and see the high end game. To do that I needed to find an Aussie/Kiwi raiding guild in my time zone that was still a bit 'casual'. I couldnt afford the time to join a 7 day a week 5 hour a night raiding guild.
After a little bit of searching I found The Southern Armada, transferred to Prexus and began my career as a raider into the high end game. I loved SA. I had people in my own time zone to talk with and group with, I had people who understood my cultural references (I got very sick of explaining to Americans that 'pissed' doesn't mean angry) and I got to raid twice a week.
SA traveled up into the end game via the content of Velious and Luclin. On the way up I got to kill all of the old 'name' targets of the Game. I was there for the death of Aten Ha Ra, The Emperor Ssraezha, the Avatar of War, Rallos Zek and Coirnav. I was part of the team that triumphed over The Rathe Council and Xegony. We dropped Quarm and progressed through Gates Of Discord to Qvic.
It was enough. After 6 years, the last 2 years of which have involved getting to sleep at 2am (when raids finish) twice a week, it was enough. The Gates of Discord expansion is essentially what broke EQ for me. I feel like the Developers and management of EQ at that point broke faith with the players and put out a product purely for the money with no regard for the players.
Now the argument can be made that they are a company and they are there to make money and that is perfectly legitimate. However, we the players are the driving force behind the game. Without us there is no game and no money. SOE essentially ignored us and produced a steaming pile of unfinished, cheaply produced, poorly put together crap and asked us to pay 69.95 for it.
So after 6 years of unfinished, buggy content, lack of communication with the players, indeed outright abuse of the player base, broken promises and appalling customer service I decided to hang up my Scythe with the rest of the Guild and go to WoW.
So the internet Blog of the Adventures of Ulaa the Necromancer will stay where it is as a testimonial. This newly created Blog will continue as the adventures of Ushnak the Ork and The Southern Armada in the World of Warcraft. This blog will be updated weekly, or as close to weekly as I can manage in between play, work and maintaining real world relationships. I know I had a decent readership for the EQ blog. Hopefully I can manage to entertain a few people in this blog as well.
Well first entry. The World of Warcraft is released 23/11/04. I cant wait.
The reason I went to this format is that you the reader can post comments. Its always nice to get some feedback, in fact its hugely encouraging.
Friday, November 12, 2004
Everquest Raids Southern Armada Week Eighty Six
12/11/04 Week
Eighty Six
This week is close to identical to last week with one small exception.
Monday: Time
We romped through killed everything, received vast amounts of Phat Phat Lewtz. It was good (I wasn't there)
Thursday: Uqua
We formed up in Yxtta and it wasn't looking good initially. We were damn low on Warriors and on Clerics. I was honestly wondering if they would call the raid due to low attendence. We kicked off the instance with 2 Warriors and 5 Clerics (2 of those were bots), fortunately our Druids have been breeding and we have millions and millions of them, so we weren't hurting too bad on the heal-age.
We headed into Uqua after the usual clear of Mindrider. I actually survived Mindrider for once, mainly by spending 50% of the fight FD. I must admit I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention to the initial pulls. But they were tight!, the SA machine was in action and we were clearing rapidly through the zone trash.
Before we even realized it we were at the first trap room, through it, and clearing to the Constructs. We began to have a few LD's and we pulled both the Construct of Fury and the Construct of Rage at the same time.
I saw the two of them thundering down the corridor at me at the same time and thought " Fuck this is it, this is a wipe". But we handled it!. We were under strength (raid wasn't full) and short key classes, but everyone pas concentrating and playing to the top of their game. Offtanking worked perfectly and we burned down the Constructs one by one.
We cleared down and split the raid to take on Tqiv Araxt the Enraged and Tqiv Qukret the Furious. The first time we did these kills they stayed with 1-2% of each other from start to finish. But for some reason this time they got very lopsided and at one point Tqiv Araxt the Enraged was nearly 20% ahead of his mate. We slowed down one side and kept the DPS up on the other side and they died fairly cleanly.
Right at the end of the kill we lost a tank and a cleric to Tqiv Qukret the Furious and suddenly we had death adds in the middle of what was a seriously weakened raid force.
For those unaware: You have to kill the Furious and the Enraged within about 20 seconds of each other so you have to split your raid to do it. They both have nasty mana drain /hp drain /spell cast delay AOEs and they both have a bad habit of porting random members of the groups attacking them to the other side of the zone. I started this fight on the Furious and was ported and finished the fight on the Enraged.
We managed to get the death adds under control, barely, but we did it. I FD'd and waited to see what was going to happen and whether I was going to be needed for raid Rezzing. thankfully I wasn't and we reformed. We began to clear down to the second trap room. We started to get a bit slack at this point and a few comments were made by officers along the lines of "come on guys keep concentrating". It only takes one seconds in attention in a place like Uqua and you are fucked.
What I don't understand is why, when you have all week to fuck around and be a dick head you feel the need to do it on a raid as well?. Cant people reign in their bullshit for the 3-5 hours required twice a week?.
The raid was definitely slowing down. DPS dropped slightly at this point but we were still making progress. We crushed the Devastating Construct and finally that irritating zone wide AOE was off.
We took a wee break at this point to refocus, take a pee and generally get our heads around the job to come, the death of Vrex Barxt Qurat.
We prepped, strat was called, we buffed and engaged. This time, instead of looking around for adds to mezz or dealing with any other crap I concentrated on doing the one thing that a Necro does better than anyone else given a long enough fight and a mob with low resists. I pumped out damage.
I had running on him:
Dark Nightmares
Pyre of Mori
Night Fire
Funeral Pyre of Kelador
Blood of Thule
Nights Beckon
Pyrocruor
and I was chain tapping.
That's about 2500/tick not including Crits and tapping every tick for 1100. I also had normal pet on him and the clickie pet from the epic. He also got a fully raid buffed life burn (8523). I smacked his ass!.
Vrex Barxt Qurat died slowly and smoothly. I don't think there was ever a moment that I doubted he was going to die once we were past the initial engage.
We burned him down to 90% and handled the 12 adds beautifully. We kept one add alive and formed up for the second run. We rezzed people and rebuffed when needed. The call was made and we started to take down the last standing add.
The last add dies and Nymeria is doing a hell of a job of keeping Barxt's attention. We all start to burn. Fuck any adds, Chanters will deal with them or Rangers and Pallies will lock them down. Everyone is doing this beautifully, the Southern Armada slaughter engine is in motion and performing at peak.
This week is close to identical to last week with one small exception.
Monday: Time
We romped through killed everything, received vast amounts of Phat Phat Lewtz. It was good (I wasn't there)
Thursday: Uqua
We formed up in Yxtta and it wasn't looking good initially. We were damn low on Warriors and on Clerics. I was honestly wondering if they would call the raid due to low attendence. We kicked off the instance with 2 Warriors and 5 Clerics (2 of those were bots), fortunately our Druids have been breeding and we have millions and millions of them, so we weren't hurting too bad on the heal-age.
We headed into Uqua after the usual clear of Mindrider. I actually survived Mindrider for once, mainly by spending 50% of the fight FD. I must admit I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention to the initial pulls. But they were tight!, the SA machine was in action and we were clearing rapidly through the zone trash.
Before we even realized it we were at the first trap room, through it, and clearing to the Constructs. We began to have a few LD's and we pulled both the Construct of Fury and the Construct of Rage at the same time.
I saw the two of them thundering down the corridor at me at the same time and thought " Fuck this is it, this is a wipe". But we handled it!. We were under strength (raid wasn't full) and short key classes, but everyone pas concentrating and playing to the top of their game. Offtanking worked perfectly and we burned down the Constructs one by one.
We cleared down and split the raid to take on Tqiv Araxt the Enraged and Tqiv Qukret the Furious. The first time we did these kills they stayed with 1-2% of each other from start to finish. But for some reason this time they got very lopsided and at one point Tqiv Araxt the Enraged was nearly 20% ahead of his mate. We slowed down one side and kept the DPS up on the other side and they died fairly cleanly.
Right at the end of the kill we lost a tank and a cleric to Tqiv Qukret the Furious and suddenly we had death adds in the middle of what was a seriously weakened raid force.
For those unaware: You have to kill the Furious and the Enraged within about 20 seconds of each other so you have to split your raid to do it. They both have nasty mana drain /hp drain /spell cast delay AOEs and they both have a bad habit of porting random members of the groups attacking them to the other side of the zone. I started this fight on the Furious and was ported and finished the fight on the Enraged.
We managed to get the death adds under control, barely, but we did it. I FD'd and waited to see what was going to happen and whether I was going to be needed for raid Rezzing. thankfully I wasn't and we reformed. We began to clear down to the second trap room. We started to get a bit slack at this point and a few comments were made by officers along the lines of "come on guys keep concentrating". It only takes one seconds in attention in a place like Uqua and you are fucked.
What I don't understand is why, when you have all week to fuck around and be a dick head you feel the need to do it on a raid as well?. Cant people reign in their bullshit for the 3-5 hours required twice a week?.
The raid was definitely slowing down. DPS dropped slightly at this point but we were still making progress. We crushed the Devastating Construct and finally that irritating zone wide AOE was off.
We took a wee break at this point to refocus, take a pee and generally get our heads around the job to come, the death of Vrex Barxt Qurat.
We prepped, strat was called, we buffed and engaged. This time, instead of looking around for adds to mezz or dealing with any other crap I concentrated on doing the one thing that a Necro does better than anyone else given a long enough fight and a mob with low resists. I pumped out damage.
I had running on him:
Dark Nightmares
Pyre of Mori
Night Fire
Funeral Pyre of Kelador
Blood of Thule
Nights Beckon
Pyrocruor
and I was chain tapping.
That's about 2500/tick not including Crits and tapping every tick for 1100. I also had normal pet on him and the clickie pet from the epic. He also got a fully raid buffed life burn (8523). I smacked his ass!.
Vrex Barxt Qurat died slowly and smoothly. I don't think there was ever a moment that I doubted he was going to die once we were past the initial engage.
We burned him down to 90% and handled the 12 adds beautifully. We kept one add alive and formed up for the second run. We rezzed people and rebuffed when needed. The call was made and we started to take down the last standing add.
The last add dies and Nymeria is doing a hell of a job of keeping Barxt's attention. We all start to burn. Fuck any adds, Chanters will deal with them or Rangers and Pallies will lock them down. Everyone is doing this beautifully, the Southern Armada slaughter engine is in motion and performing at peak.
Barxt
died about 2:00am New Zealand time and Southern Armada beat the
guild killer. Uqua has been known to break guilds completely,
but we did it, we made it past the little bastard and zoned into
Qvic
- Prayer Grounds of Calling.
The
question which has reared its ugly head in the last few days is
a slightly different one. Southern Armada can beat anything that
SOE can throw at us, we know that now.
Will
we be beaten by the combined might of Worlds of Warcraft and Everquest
2?. Will SA survive?. I'm certainly willing to put my skills and
efforts into the "yes" category.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Everquest Raids Southern Armada Week Eighty Five
7/11/04 Week
Eighty Five
Pain, much pain. I am suffering from the delayed effects of a motorcycle crash I had recently. I have developed a condition called Torticollis or "angry neck'. What it comes down to is that my neck, shoulder and arm are causing me severe pain. I cannot get comfortable and I am eating painkillers like lollies. So far I have seen a Doctor, an Osteopath and a Chiropractor. I am also getting massages and all of this is costing me a fucking fortune. No one yet has given me anything beyond "it takes time". Well they have all said it should get better within 5-7 days and I'm now in my 11th day with no relief.
One problem I have is that even when sick I usually at least have the option to play EQ and make me feel better. Unfortunately at the moment I cant even do that as I find it even more painful than the normal level of pain to sit at the PC. So I haven't been able to play ANY PC games in 2 weeks! *twitch*
This update will thus be brief.
Monday: Time
We romped through killed everything, received vast amounts of Phat Phat Lewtz. It was good (I wasn't there)
Thursday: Uqua
Fucked up badly. We wiped before we even made it to the first AOE room. We then managed to totter our way through to the Construct of Fury and the Construct of Rage and managed another partial wipe.
We dropped Tqiv Araxt the Enraged and Tqiv Qukret the Furious and then managed to wipe again, twice.
At this point the Raid leaders called it, mainly because the more you wipe, the harder the end zone bosses get, so at this point Vrex Barxt Qurat would be unbeatable.
I almost think some days that Time is bad for us. We can cruise through Time and we often do. This makes us lazy and its not until we run into a zone like Uqua where we need the discipline that got us to Time that we really start to mess up.
Pain, much pain. I am suffering from the delayed effects of a motorcycle crash I had recently. I have developed a condition called Torticollis or "angry neck'. What it comes down to is that my neck, shoulder and arm are causing me severe pain. I cannot get comfortable and I am eating painkillers like lollies. So far I have seen a Doctor, an Osteopath and a Chiropractor. I am also getting massages and all of this is costing me a fucking fortune. No one yet has given me anything beyond "it takes time". Well they have all said it should get better within 5-7 days and I'm now in my 11th day with no relief.
One problem I have is that even when sick I usually at least have the option to play EQ and make me feel better. Unfortunately at the moment I cant even do that as I find it even more painful than the normal level of pain to sit at the PC. So I haven't been able to play ANY PC games in 2 weeks! *twitch*
This update will thus be brief.
Monday: Time
We romped through killed everything, received vast amounts of Phat Phat Lewtz. It was good (I wasn't there)
Thursday: Uqua
Fucked up badly. We wiped before we even made it to the first AOE room. We then managed to totter our way through to the Construct of Fury and the Construct of Rage and managed another partial wipe.
We dropped Tqiv Araxt the Enraged and Tqiv Qukret the Furious and then managed to wipe again, twice.
At this point the Raid leaders called it, mainly because the more you wipe, the harder the end zone bosses get, so at this point Vrex Barxt Qurat would be unbeatable.
I almost think some days that Time is bad for us. We can cruise through Time and we often do. This makes us lazy and its not until we run into a zone like Uqua where we need the discipline that got us to Time that we really start to mess up.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Everquest Raids Southern Armada Week Eighty Four
19/10/04 Week
Eighty Four
Time, ahh Time.
Farm Farm Farm. We are getting pretty good at this now. We have a complete Time clear down to about three and a half hours. Not bad considering our first full single raid Time clear was about 5 hours.
We have this down to a fine art, although we can still occasionally get sloppy and have trouble with a god or two. We had a couple of fails against Tallon Zek a few weeks ago for no other reason than we weren't paying attention.
Farming Time is good tho and lots of people still have plenty of slots and focus effect to replace or upgrade. Personally I'm still trying to upgrade 1 earring and 1 focus item. The earring is the last sub 100HP item I still have.
This weeks time raid was really good for me. I finally replaced my cloak which I have been trying to replace for over a year. I was awarded a cloak when we were raiding Shei Vinitras in the Akheva Ruins which was 90/100 and some stats. It was close to one of the first items I was ever awarded when I got to Prexus. It was a damn nice cloak at the time.
As we started moving through POP many many good cloaks started to drop (Fire was particularly good for this) and I always held off on them thinking I could wait till the rest of the guild all had one and they started to rot. We never quite got to the rot stage though so I kept waiting.
So we get into Time and I'm still waiting on a cloak, a few drop now and again, several of which had excellent focus effects for a Necro and I keep sending tells, but I never managed to have enough points at the time. So in the end I just said fuckit and went for any decent dropped cloak. Finally last week the Guild officers were kind enough to award me one!.
As the night progressed we also have a Circlet of Flowing Time drop. Now this is an item I have had my eyes on for some time so I figured what the hell and sent a tell and I got it!. OMG two in a night!. Woot I was just about bouncing out of my seat!.
The focus I'm trying to replace is Spell haste. I had a haste item in my range slot, but I upgraded that slot and lost the focus. I know that the hastes are only 20% or so, but the delay is definitely noticeable on most of my spells. I've been looking around for haste focii, but again they always seem to drop at just the wrong time. Ah well, it will happen one day.
Time is a funny place. You work immensely hard to get there and when you get there each encounter is fun and scales nicely. When you first get into Time the fights are quite tough until you work out the methods of beating them. Then once you have beaten it a few times and added a couple of full clears worth of drops to your guild your Guilds power ramps up exponentially.
I can understand why OOW and GOD are as hard as they are. Even ignoring the addition of an extra 5 levels we are a different guild to what we were pre-Time and we had only been in there 5 months prior to the GOD release. The amount of DPS that is added after your Tanks/Melee classes start to acquire Time weapons and your casting classes add a couple of K of mana to their mana pools is enormous.
Add to that the addition to all your tanks of a couple of hundred points of AC and several K of HP and your team is a very different one to that which dropped your final Elemental God and broke into Time.
We have also been doing buttloads of Epics lately. It seems everyone has the bug and is going for their epic weapon. One Friday I was logged on and I ended up doing 9 epic hits in a row. The bard one was the most fun so far I thought with several kills across Norrath.
Uqua. Damn we got close this time. It wasn't a perfect run by any means but it was a lot smoother than some of our recent runs.
We had our usual little diversion to drop Pixxt Suir Mindrider on the way through Yxtta
We cleared past the Furies, then the Avatars to the final encounter with Barxt. We knew we were going to get 12 ghosts at 80% as we had been at this point before. We were prepared for that and we handled them easily. After that point we had no idea what was going to happen.
We kept one of the ghosts alive till we were rezzed, medded and ready and then killed it. At this point it was 2:00am. I would normally log now but I was bound and determined to see this through. So I settled in, propped open my eyelids with toothpicks and Barxt was inbound at bard speed. We were expecting anything and only knew as much of the encounter as we had managed to get thru the week before, I didn't get to drop much in the way of DOTs on him as I was looking around the room checking to see if anything was popping and needed mezzing.
It started to get fast and confusing at around 40%, he started to mitigate melee damage in a big way and was resisting a lot of my spells. I switched over to pure damage mode and was throwing everything I could at him.
He spawned 2 ghost Adds with nasty AOEs one of which was a mana drain and sent me OOM in seconds. I threw my pet, my epic Pet and an 8500 HP Life Burn at him. At that point I was completely OOM with no chance in hell of regenerating mana or life tapping hp back from the LB. Next time Ill go melee on his ass as well.
I got splatted with him at 16%. By the time I had zoned it was all over. We got him to 14% at our best. He definitely dies next week. I logged at 2:30am and left my corpse at the ZI. There was no way I was going to be able to hang around till 3:00am for a rez.
I had an extremely interesting conversation with a fellow necromancer called (Name withheld to protect the innocent) from The Nameless server. It appears he is an aussie from Melbourne and plays with a Taiwanese guild. He apparently enjoys the weekly adventures of The Southern Armada and the travels of Ulaa Grimsoul. He also expressed admiration for our progress as a 2 day a week raiding guild.
/Bow thank you mate, its always nice to hear from someone who enjoys reading these missives. It spurs me along to keep at them.
Interestingly enough there is something of an ongoing debate over "raider" vs "casual" play in EQ and EQ2. Anyone who doesn't raid always denigrates raiders as "7 day a week no life zerg army losers'. Every now and again I pop into this debate and point out that as a 2 day a week raiding guild we have managed to make it into time and are working our way into GOD. We may not be a bleeding edge guild but we aren't far behind them. We don't have "you must raid" rules, we don't even enforce a "you must raid if you are online" rule. If you want to raid you do, if you don't you don't, that's fine.
Most of our members are adults, with jobs, kids, lives. we try and start at 7PM AEST but we don't always, we do our level best to integrate latecomers into the raids and we can have people turning up all through the night.
We manage to maintain a good reputation on our server as an honorable and friendly guild. It is perfectly possible to do all of this. We are just a group of people who decided we all wanted to see the high end of the game and were willing to be disciplined enough to do it. If you have ever been on a raid with a high end guild you will know its a different game to raiding with "casual" guild or pickups.
I've done several pickup raids trying to get flags for my tank twink and they drive me nuts. People who cant get where they are supposed to be without dieing, people who chat over the raid leader and then get lippy when they are asked to tone it down. People who wander off just to see what's "over there" and then panic and train the raid when they get aggro, people who don't pay attention to what the raid leaders are saying and then ask "what do I do?" 5 seconds after engage. Healers who heal pullers (BAD).
These idiots of course are the same people who accuse raiders of being "7 day a week no life zerg army losers" and claim they should be given a full set of Time gear and every flag they ever wanted just for logging in. Its called discipline, learn the meaning of the word.
I've personally I've finally become comfortable with the term 'Uber' as defined by the casuals. Most of the casual people throw the term around like an insult. I wear it now as a mark of pride.
To them 'uber' means "7 day a week no life zerg army losers", to me it means many many days waking up feeling like spattered shit after a 2-3am finish. It means the team I am a member of achieving our goals despite the odds. It means belonging to a very tight team of players who will go out of their way to help each other and to move forward in the game. It means many things to many people. But to me its a term of pride.
It also helps that we have one of the best Guild Leaders I've ever come across, several superb Raid leaders , including 2 of the best raid leaders on the server, a great group of Officers, an awesome pull team and heal team, a heal team leader second to none and a skilled membership willing to put aside personal bullshit and work together for a common goal 2 days a week. All this in a "casual" guild.
Southern Armada Rocks.
We also have a Guild Leader who can be evil when he feels like it, or an extremely gullible Necromancer *cough* Kestakhan *cough*, you choose after reading the following.
Time, ahh Time.
Farm Farm Farm. We are getting pretty good at this now. We have a complete Time clear down to about three and a half hours. Not bad considering our first full single raid Time clear was about 5 hours.
We have this down to a fine art, although we can still occasionally get sloppy and have trouble with a god or two. We had a couple of fails against Tallon Zek a few weeks ago for no other reason than we weren't paying attention.
Farming Time is good tho and lots of people still have plenty of slots and focus effect to replace or upgrade. Personally I'm still trying to upgrade 1 earring and 1 focus item. The earring is the last sub 100HP item I still have.
This weeks time raid was really good for me. I finally replaced my cloak which I have been trying to replace for over a year. I was awarded a cloak when we were raiding Shei Vinitras in the Akheva Ruins which was 90/100 and some stats. It was close to one of the first items I was ever awarded when I got to Prexus. It was a damn nice cloak at the time.
As we started moving through POP many many good cloaks started to drop (Fire was particularly good for this) and I always held off on them thinking I could wait till the rest of the guild all had one and they started to rot. We never quite got to the rot stage though so I kept waiting.
So we get into Time and I'm still waiting on a cloak, a few drop now and again, several of which had excellent focus effects for a Necro and I keep sending tells, but I never managed to have enough points at the time. So in the end I just said fuckit and went for any decent dropped cloak. Finally last week the Guild officers were kind enough to award me one!.
As the night progressed we also have a Circlet of Flowing Time drop. Now this is an item I have had my eyes on for some time so I figured what the hell and sent a tell and I got it!. OMG two in a night!. Woot I was just about bouncing out of my seat!.
The focus I'm trying to replace is Spell haste. I had a haste item in my range slot, but I upgraded that slot and lost the focus. I know that the hastes are only 20% or so, but the delay is definitely noticeable on most of my spells. I've been looking around for haste focii, but again they always seem to drop at just the wrong time. Ah well, it will happen one day.
Time is a funny place. You work immensely hard to get there and when you get there each encounter is fun and scales nicely. When you first get into Time the fights are quite tough until you work out the methods of beating them. Then once you have beaten it a few times and added a couple of full clears worth of drops to your guild your Guilds power ramps up exponentially.
I can understand why OOW and GOD are as hard as they are. Even ignoring the addition of an extra 5 levels we are a different guild to what we were pre-Time and we had only been in there 5 months prior to the GOD release. The amount of DPS that is added after your Tanks/Melee classes start to acquire Time weapons and your casting classes add a couple of K of mana to their mana pools is enormous.
Add to that the addition to all your tanks of a couple of hundred points of AC and several K of HP and your team is a very different one to that which dropped your final Elemental God and broke into Time.
We have also been doing buttloads of Epics lately. It seems everyone has the bug and is going for their epic weapon. One Friday I was logged on and I ended up doing 9 epic hits in a row. The bard one was the most fun so far I thought with several kills across Norrath.
Kill
A Dire Leech to spawn...
Kill
A Dire Kodiak to spawn...
****** This
update bought to you by too much Coffee and Avril Lavigne *******
Uqua. Damn we got close this time. It wasn't a perfect run by any means but it was a lot smoother than some of our recent runs.
We had our usual little diversion to drop Pixxt Suir Mindrider on the way through Yxtta
Once
again just as we engage I got distracted and once again I ended
the fight a thin red smear on the ground. Every expansion has
its bugbears. For me it was Tallon Zek in POP. He nailed me every
single fight. I think I survived 1 fight of all the times we killed
him. In GOD it appears to be the Mindrider. I have yet to survive
a fight with her and shes not exactly a tough kill.
SA
chomping at the bit to kill Barxt
We have the
clearing of the corridors down now. The multi pulls and traps
are well handled by the Chanty team and their new Mezz spells
or the off tanks will keep them under control. We still managed
to wipe in the first Fire Trap room with a key call that not only
set off the trap, it also opened the door. Go figure.
We cleared past the Furies, then the Avatars to the final encounter with Barxt. We knew we were going to get 12 ghosts at 80% as we had been at this point before. We were prepared for that and we handled them easily. After that point we had no idea what was going to happen.
We kept one of the ghosts alive till we were rezzed, medded and ready and then killed it. At this point it was 2:00am. I would normally log now but I was bound and determined to see this through. So I settled in, propped open my eyelids with toothpicks and Barxt was inbound at bard speed. We were expecting anything and only knew as much of the encounter as we had managed to get thru the week before, I didn't get to drop much in the way of DOTs on him as I was looking around the room checking to see if anything was popping and needed mezzing.
It started to get fast and confusing at around 40%, he started to mitigate melee damage in a big way and was resisting a lot of my spells. I switched over to pure damage mode and was throwing everything I could at him.
He spawned 2 ghost Adds with nasty AOEs one of which was a mana drain and sent me OOM in seconds. I threw my pet, my epic Pet and an 8500 HP Life Burn at him. At that point I was completely OOM with no chance in hell of regenerating mana or life tapping hp back from the LB. Next time Ill go melee on his ass as well.
I got splatted with him at 16%. By the time I had zoned it was all over. We got him to 14% at our best. He definitely dies next week. I logged at 2:30am and left my corpse at the ZI. There was no way I was going to be able to hang around till 3:00am for a rez.
I had an extremely interesting conversation with a fellow necromancer called (Name withheld to protect the innocent) from The Nameless server. It appears he is an aussie from Melbourne and plays with a Taiwanese guild. He apparently enjoys the weekly adventures of The Southern Armada and the travels of Ulaa Grimsoul. He also expressed admiration for our progress as a 2 day a week raiding guild.
/Bow thank you mate, its always nice to hear from someone who enjoys reading these missives. It spurs me along to keep at them.
Interestingly enough there is something of an ongoing debate over "raider" vs "casual" play in EQ and EQ2. Anyone who doesn't raid always denigrates raiders as "7 day a week no life zerg army losers'. Every now and again I pop into this debate and point out that as a 2 day a week raiding guild we have managed to make it into time and are working our way into GOD. We may not be a bleeding edge guild but we aren't far behind them. We don't have "you must raid" rules, we don't even enforce a "you must raid if you are online" rule. If you want to raid you do, if you don't you don't, that's fine.
Most of our members are adults, with jobs, kids, lives. we try and start at 7PM AEST but we don't always, we do our level best to integrate latecomers into the raids and we can have people turning up all through the night.
We manage to maintain a good reputation on our server as an honorable and friendly guild. It is perfectly possible to do all of this. We are just a group of people who decided we all wanted to see the high end of the game and were willing to be disciplined enough to do it. If you have ever been on a raid with a high end guild you will know its a different game to raiding with "casual" guild or pickups.
I've done several pickup raids trying to get flags for my tank twink and they drive me nuts. People who cant get where they are supposed to be without dieing, people who chat over the raid leader and then get lippy when they are asked to tone it down. People who wander off just to see what's "over there" and then panic and train the raid when they get aggro, people who don't pay attention to what the raid leaders are saying and then ask "what do I do?" 5 seconds after engage. Healers who heal pullers (BAD).
These idiots of course are the same people who accuse raiders of being "7 day a week no life zerg army losers" and claim they should be given a full set of Time gear and every flag they ever wanted just for logging in. Its called discipline, learn the meaning of the word.
I've personally I've finally become comfortable with the term 'Uber' as defined by the casuals. Most of the casual people throw the term around like an insult. I wear it now as a mark of pride.
To them 'uber' means "7 day a week no life zerg army losers", to me it means many many days waking up feeling like spattered shit after a 2-3am finish. It means the team I am a member of achieving our goals despite the odds. It means belonging to a very tight team of players who will go out of their way to help each other and to move forward in the game. It means many things to many people. But to me its a term of pride.
It also helps that we have one of the best Guild Leaders I've ever come across, several superb Raid leaders , including 2 of the best raid leaders on the server, a great group of Officers, an awesome pull team and heal team, a heal team leader second to none and a skilled membership willing to put aside personal bullshit and work together for a common goal 2 days a week. All this in a "casual" guild.
Southern Armada Rocks.
We also have a Guild Leader who can be evil when he feels like it, or an extremely gullible Necromancer *cough* Kestakhan *cough*, you choose after reading the following.
During
my travels throughout OOW I have run into this wee puppy on a
number of occasions. Normally I dont mind, but on this particular
occasion he got a little too close for comfort.
Ulaa
has also had a few upgrades
recently. On top of her new robe and shield she also completed
her 1.5 Epic. I lot of people have bagged the new epics but I
had always wanted to do the Epic Quests (both 1.0 and 1.5) so
I was determined to complete the quest. So here are a few shots
with the new Toy.
I love it, I think its very cool and I am deeply grateful to all of the people who helped me out along the way with kills and other things.
I love it, I think its very cool and I am deeply grateful to all of the people who helped me out along the way with kills and other things.
Oh
and by the way guys. When Epic 2.0 is fixed (The Necro one is
currently bugged) I want to be doing that as well !.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)