Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eleven

Monday 18.03.2008
I made it to the Sunday raid in good time and after the success they had last week in getting Wavebreaker to 10% I figured this was going to be a push over. The great post GU4 patch gods had something else to say about it. I wont go into too much detail other than to say, don't schedule raids less than 2 days after a major patch. We got hit with every glitch and problem you could think of, from the lag monster beating us repeatedly, to the log off and all the buffs you cast disappear to the I cant attack bug etc etc.

After last weeks hardware fiasco I am all raided up and good to go well before 7:45pm on Monday Night. There seemed to be a lot more tanks than usual tonight. Normally its Me and Garbar, or Me and Nymeria. Tonight we have both of them AND a Pally. Filthy do-gooding interloper be off!. So after the traditional "Good a pally to sac, it will be a great loot night!" jokes, we head into the Cartheon Wing and we are progressing pretty well to start. We power into the early stages of the tunnels looking for Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. We only had one small glitch in an other wise smooth ride when Garbar got hit with an knock back while facing the wrong way. He looked great as he sailed up and over the balcony and down into the water below, like a little Dwarvish falling star. Zel actually managed to get smacked over the edge as well, I'm not sure how Zel went over, but we had to wait for both to die before they could be rescued. Its easier to pull a tombstone up a level than it is to use /rope apparently.

As well as rescuing Zel and Garbar from their watery deaths, we also managed to kill Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. We decided to bypass the first side room in the cages and head straight for the second side room so we could set up for the Librarian. As we passed through the second cage room things started to get exciting. We managed to pull 2 mobs as we moved and were working on taking those out. As they were going down we picked up another roamer, then another, then another!. At one point we had at least 5 mobs in camp 2 of which were unmezzable, the tanks picked up the unmezzables fast, the healing never dropped, the crowd control was beautiful and the DPS never pulled a mob away from a tank. It was one of those fights that when you finish, take a deep breath and realise everything had just gone perfectly, in what could have been a very nasty CR. Unfortunately for us, after such a great fight the Librarian wasn't up. This is actually the second time we have come through and he hasn't been roaming the corridors. Either he is on some weird timer we don't know about, or he is bugged, you choose.

So we clear through the cages, drop down the lift and lay some smack on Varimurus the Subjugator. I like Varimurus, he is a fun fight, short sharp and just a little bit sweet!.

We cleared through the multi pulls on the way to Palnepipes room like they just weren't there and very quickly we were set up for Palnepipe. We had all roamers down, just him and his bodyguards waiting to die.

So its INC!, we split em and have them nicely positioned. The raid leaders have decided that we will kill each body guard slowly first, then take on Palnepipe. It was all going beautifully at first, Palnepipe was in place with Garbar holding him, we whittled down the first body guard and headed over to the second. He was about half way dead when we lost control of Palnepipe. We didn't realise at the time that Palnepipe has a nice long stun, as soon as Garbar was swaying in place the swine ran over and started to smack the healers around. Wipe.

So we set up and get ready again. At this point we are under a bit of time pressure as we really aren't sure of when the first re pops will begin. The split happens and we are good to go. This time we decide to change the order the body guards die in, we form up on the first bodyguard and start to cream him. He has an annoying knock back but seems to do a lot less damage than the other one who seems to have a hell of a lot more HP. He is about 50% down when Nymeria succumbs to the beating of the other bodyguard and its a wipe.

Third run, This time I stayed with Garb on Palnepipe so that we could try and get a tank transition happening. Its all going really well, Garb got stunned I picked up the named and we kept at it. We were just working on the first bodyguard when Nym died again, wipe. I don't know why Nym went down, he had good healers and he has more HP than me, maybe there is a damage spike in these bodyguards that we don't know about.

One thing we did learn. There is no safe spot in this room. As we were rezzing back in, the re pops began to appear. Repeated attempts to re-break the room failed and in the end we were forced to give up. The raid ended around 1145 and it was beddy bye time.

Thursday 21.03.08

Bad lag issues, bad post patch issues, No librarian, hows that for a summary. Actually there was a little more to it than that or this would be a damn short blog. We headed into Cartheon Wing and dropped Izemgeli the Lorekeeper.

The librarian isn't up again, so its straight through to Varimurus the Subjugator.

We are ready to rock in Palnepipes room by 9:40pm. We are all happy with this as it means we have all night to plug away at him. Its only an hour and forty minutes from entering the zone to his room. We form up and get the split happening. This time we decide to attack Palnepipe the Mastermind directly instead of his bodyguards. Garbar tanks him to start and I am picking up the rotation when he stuns, we easily get him down to 50% when Nym goes down again. More than likely caused by the nasty server lag we had been experiencing all evening. We wipe. Just as we are rezzing in to get ready for a second run at him, a server restart is announced. We hung on for about 40 minutes but the server didn't come up and there was no message on when it would come up. So the raid was called. I don't mind losing to a mob, I really don't, I HATE losing to lag, server glitches, restarts etc.


The Southern Armada logo, has for years been a crest of a sailing ship against a background of stars. We have used it on web pages, in custom Sigs, hell I even tried to get it onto a T-shirt. I lost a lot of images, including my complete collection of every custom sig I ever made when I came over to Sydney. Unfortunately this means that I don't have a copy of the old SA logo to work with. However as we were passing through APW we found the image below repeated all over the place. I am going to play with it and do my best to create it as a new logo.

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Now playing: El Barto & Liam B - Don't dance
Now playing: Lobsterdust - Marley Maiden (from Exodus to Revelations)

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Ten

Monday 10.03.08
Why, you ask am I late in posting this? The short answer for those of limited attention span who want to skip any non raiding content, is that I didn't actually get to go on a Raid last week.

The much longer, and if you are technically minded, slightly more interesting answer, goes back to when I came to Sydney from New Zealand. Before we found out we were moving to Sydney I had begun the process of building a new PC. I was researching every part, ensuring that I wasn't buying a dud and that I was getting the best price as I bought it. It took me months but I finally assembled all the pieces that I needed to build my Dream PC. Then we found out we were moving and in a very short period of time. I packed all my PC bits up carefully and consigned them to the not so gentle hands of a shipping company.

The day we had worked hard towards finally arrived, we jumped on a plane and we were in Sydney in 2.5 hours. Our possessions took slightly longer and arrived about 2.5 weeks later. The first thing I did when all my stuff arrived in Sydney was start building my new PC. Unfortunately after many hours and quite a bit of blood ( Custom PC cases are sharp!) the bloody thing wouldn't boot up. I couldn't even get it to POST, thats Power On Self Test for the non technical, thats what happens before all the text that scrolls up your screen, before the Windows screen. Basically a PC that won't POST, is very broken. So after a week of struggling with it, I ended up taking it to the local PC hardware guy to have a look at. 1000$ later I got back a working PC. Yay, sort of.

So some months go by, occasionally I have problems with boots, it hangs in BIOS load, sometimes Windows hangs, and freezes, I get little pop up error messages etc. Lots of niggling little problems, but no one thing I could pin a problem on. Then we get to last weekend, I fire up the PC, its Sunday and its raid night!, I'm getting pre-positioned for the raid, I'm halfway across Qualia when the PC freezes. Oh well, reboot and continue. Only there is no continuing. It hangs at boot, reboot, does it again, reboot get it into Windows, check the event viewer, the event viewer is solid red with disk errors, I get a pop up message about a disk error and being unable to flush to cache, disk hangs again.

This goes on for hours, I manage to get into the game briefly to tell everybody I wont be able to make the raid and go back to checking cables, I check the seating of Drives and Drive cables into the motherboard, running hardware level tests against the drives, heat tests against the CPU, RAM tests etc. In fact this goes on for days.

I talk about this with people at work trying to get some inspiration as to what may be causing this. I read constantly on drive faults, cache faults, anything about drives, I update all my drivers for graphics card, motherboard chip sets, sound card, BIOS, hard drive firmware, Direct X, in fact anything I can update, I do update. I am turning hardware caching on and off, moving page files, setting page file dynamic vs static, checking and replacing cables, changing power management profiles, anything I can think of or is recommended to me. At the end of it all I come to the conclusion that the motherboard is about to fail and I am going to have to take it back to the local hardware guy. I no longer have the space, the tools or the inclination to do this sort of work myself anymore.

At this point I have now missed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday raids. I have been off line for seven whole days, I'm beginning to feel bugs crawling under my skin.

About a week later I am deep into a Google search about the following error:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D."

This is the error that has is being generated every 30 seconds in my logs. This is the error that precedes every hang/crash. About 6 pages into the Google search I find this set of errors as part of a knowledge base article on Microsoft.com. What do you know!, this describes, exactly, all of the errors I have been having for the last 12 months. So I sign up, download and install the patch.

I haven't had a crash, hang or an error generated in any of my logs since. If I had upgraded my hardware I may have ended up with exactly the same error as the original fault was extremely rare and Windows related to start with. I make my living from computers, have done for a lot of years now and some days I just fucking hate them.

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Now playing: DJ Le Clown - In Da Black (AC/DC vs. 50 Cent vs. Scissor Sisters)
Now playing: DJ Payroll - Daft Prayer (Bon Jovi vs. Daft Punk)

The First Dungeon Master

E.Gary.Gygax left us today to join the great gaming table in the sky. The creator of Dungeons and Dragons has died. I cannot say where my life would be today without him and the genre he created. His influence on my life has been massive.

May you roll the dice forever mate.
/mourn

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Nine

Monday 04.03.08
A short night this one. After last weeks fiasco we decided to go the other way round this time and approach the entrance wing from the rear. We have never done this before and figured it would present us with some challenges. We headed in and handled Akym the Assassin quickly.

Past Akym and straight down to Archon Travix. Perfect kill.

If I can give anyone any advice about General Vicus at all, its approach him from the other side. Its painful to grind through to him, but he is a hell of a lot easier to handle.

We formed up, figured out a strat for the slightly changed conditions and pulled him. The big issue with where we were fighting, was a very limited floor space with which to work. The first time we engaged it seemed that someone was breaking the mezzes and we wiped. The mezz rules were very carefully explained and we formed up and went again. However it appears that we aren't the only people experiencing unexpected mezz breaking.

One of Vicus little tricks is a forward punt of the main tank. He pushes the tank hard, in the direction the tank is facing. So if you don't hit the forward surface dead on, you ricochet and can literally end up anywhere. The first couple of punts I was fine, ended up in exactly the right position against the wall, ran back and kept at it. Then the first adds appeared and just as they were being handled, he punts me, I ricochet and end up inside the little tunnel where the slimes live. I don't have time or options, I run back and re-engage him. Of course the little slime comes with me, peels off and starts to beat the shite out of the healers. Now I should say we are trying to do this with only two tanks, me MT and Nym off tanking, so there wasn't anyone available to pick up the slime in time. Wipe.

The third time we were getting very very close to repop time. We pulled and had him under control, he was slowly dropping when we lost control of an add. Wipe and now its so late there really isn't a chance for another shot at him. Like I said, take him from the other side so that you have space to work with him, pulling him into the slime filled tunnel is definitely painful.

Thursday 05.03.08
So weeks are just weird, last week we couldn't kill Enraged, he just would not stay stuck on the Tanks. This week we breezed through the Cartheon wing with no problems. Only place we got stuck was in the cages with the rapid re-spawn. First to die of course was Izemgeli the Lawkeeper. He is quite a fun fight, of course you always want to fight him in a tunnel...

Initially I think we were going to blitz straight through the Cages and on to the Librarian. However it was decided that we would clear to the first safe room, drop the BookKeeper and use that room to fight the Librarian. Of course then the Librarian decided not to path past us and we had to fight through to the second room. This is the longest part of the dungeon so far, it took us about 45 minutes stuck in room one, before we made it to room two.

We dropped the Lorekeeper and prepped for the Librarian. I like the Lorekeeper fight, flying through the air! weeeeee...! These models are really cool!.


Finally after much cajoling by Zarthaz, the SA pull team, he was inbound. Vahsren the Librarian gets stuck on everything, if there is the smallest obstacle he gets stuck and heads back on his long walk, the best way to pull him is to wait for him to path past the room and then kill him. The problem of course is that he is on such a long path, that waiting for him is very boring if you get the timing wrong. Not really a lot for me to do in this fight, life tap occasionally, if I'm feeling daring I will drop a dot on him, that's about it. I am hoping that with the new spells coming in GU4 I will have a few more tricks to throw at him.

Vhasren gets boinked first time and we move on down the elevator to the lower levels. Its starting to get harder down here with the mobs mitigating better and hitting harder. We ganked Varimurus the Subjugator and headed west towards Palnepipe the Mastermind.

I really don't see why Varimurus is classed as a major named, he is one of the easiest kills we have had so far in APW. We headed towards Palnepipe and after some trials and travails (The splitting of Mobs gets fairly interesting in places) we made it to his room, but without time to engage him. We had a look around his room and it definitely looks like he is going to be an interesting fight.!

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eight

Monday 25.02.08
We have visitors!. I received a very pleasant note the other day from Jelaza Binjali a Ranger of the Nova guild on Seradon. Apparently she has been following the adventures of Southern Armada for quite some time and stopped by to say she enjoyed the blog. Thank you very much Jelaza, its always nice to know that someone's actually reading this thing!.

This screen shot was taken on the way to the Jagund the Wavebreaker raid. It was one of those moments that occasionally happen in Vanguard when you round a corner or come over a hill and the view is just breathtaking. One of the great things about this game is that anything you can see you can reach. Everything in one of your views is an object you can travel to, its not one of those nasty backdrops that hints but doesn't deliver. I've said it before and I will say it again, this is definitely one of the best looking games on the market today and easily the prettiest MMO.

We have decided to do an extra raid a week. So for those who are interested we are going to start tackling the overland bosses of Vanguard. Its not for loot nor glory as they have all been killed before and the loot isn't that fantastic, its just for the sheer fun of killing something new and interesting. We were quite short of people for the Wavebreaker encounter and knew sod all about it, so we pulled him the first time with no expectations of actually killing him. I think we got him down to about 90% before he popped adds that we weren't ready for and we wiped. Over the course of the next few hours we pulled him repeatedly and wiped repeatedly. I'm not going to go into too much detail for the sake of those who haven't tried him out yet, suffice it to say we were a tank, a healer and some DPS short. Everyone had a blast and I'm really looking forward to go back and giving him another shot. I don't think he is a tough fight, we just need the right mix of people.

For those who haven't tried them, I can highly recommend the overland raid mobs for a bit of fun. They don't require the investment of time that APW does and they can be knocked over in fun couple of hours in an evening. Pulling Jagund is an adventure in itself!.



Formed up into APW and headed into the Cartheon wing again. Someone cast a Kobold illusion on me which I thought was really cool!. So here I am as Ulaa, the kobold Dread Knight!.

We headed in the same way as last time and quickly met and dealt with Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. As we were moving towards the cages we ran into a new named. Now this new Boss wasn't up the last time we came through so we have no idea where he came from. We engaged Vahsren the Librarian at the entrance to the cages. I think he went down to about 86% before we wiped against him. Once we were back in and ready we tried again and wiped again. However after the second reform he didn't roam back to us. We didn't know where he had gone and Zarthaz couldn't see him anywhere. So we shrugged, said "Welcome to Vanguard" and moved deeper in.
The cages are an interesting space, obviously someone in the Vanguard design team really doesn't like the 'sit, pull, kill' method of raiding so there isn't a lot of places in APW where you can do that. The cages take things a step further again, its a space where the spawn time is so fast you have to keep moving through. Everyone needs to be on the ball and everyone needs to do their job. Mobs are coming at you thick and fast here and you really cant stop and hang around. The first safe spot is occupied by the Cartheon Bookkeeper. He isn't a tough fight and drops nothing, so we aren't entirely sure of his purpose. When you engage him he seems to be reading a book and chanting, we think there is a possibility that killing him weakens something further in, but we don't really know.

Move through the cages a bit further and you run into the Cartheon Bookkeepers twin, the Carthon Lorekeeper. He has a huge knock back and is a pain in the ass as a tank. I actually enjoy the fight tho, there is something about flying through the air that makes me think of kids and swings. Once we had the Lorekeeper cleared we decided to use his room to try and pull Vahsren the Librarian who seemed to be roaming in the area. It didn't take long to have him inc and Nymeria the little pink tank, soon had him engaged. I can't remember how many shots we had at him, it may have been 2 or 3 before he died. Again not a spectacularly tough fight but with the usual APW twist. I don't want to spoil it for anybody so I will just say, there isn't a lot for the melee classes to do in this one.


So we moved down the cages and made it to the down lift. I remembered my mistake from last week and managed not to wipe out the entire raid again. We formed up and cleared forward from the lift entrance. There seemed to be a quest NPC to the north of us and there was a named ahead so it was Onward we go!. Zarthaz had Varimurus the Subjugator inbound very quickly and he died very quickly. Again not a spectacularly tough fight. It's not the Bosses that take so long for us to conquer in APW, it's all the trash clearing. To be honest that's fine with me, you have to wade through a lot of dross to get diamonds. The boss fights are generally so good, such a great balance between difficulty and frustration that the trash clearing isn't quite so painful. Its not like in EQ in the Planes of Power expansion where you literally (in some cases) had hours and hours of trash clearing to do before you go to the boss encounter.


Thursday 28.02.08
You aren't going to believe this. To break up our week it was decided that we would go back through the entrance wing. We had a couple of APW newbies who were going to need some arms and there are a couple of other things in the entrance wing that people still want. So we formed up at the entrance lift, buffed up and headed down. The plan was to clear the whole wing in one night and at first it was looking damn good for it. I am seriously looking forward to the day we can just breeze through the entire entry wing without pausing. The usual suspects died fast and clean. Malfunctioning X77, Guardian R5, were smacked like they deserve to be. Then we got to Enraged X83. Not a problem I hear you say, you have already killed him repeatedly, he died on your second ever shot at him. Well tonight wasn't our night.

Malfunctioning X77 hanging about waiting to die

Guardian R5 giving up more Rot Loot

We wiped against this guy repeatedly. Initially I was getting quite angry with the rest of the raid. The tanks were doing their level best, we were throwing every aggro tool we had at him, everything including the kitchen sink was being used. The first time he left the tanks at the transition and went to smack the raid, I figured it was just someone being enthusiastic with the DPS. The third time it happened I was getting pissed off, why couldn't these people pay attention and just do their damn jobs?!. By the 5th time we were realizing something was wrong. He was aggro-ing on people who were FD and had never actually engaged him. No damage, no healing, no spells, no nothing, yet that person managed to pull him off the tanks during the change. By about the 8th wipe we began to figure out we just weren't going to beat him that night. It was beginning to get seriously depressing.

The 10th wipe?...

Now we know we can kill this guy, almost every kill has been flawless, until tonight. SOE is stealth patching some of the upcoming changes for Game Update 4. This means that on the actual day of release there is a lot less for you to download and a lot less load on their servers. However we have already seen a number of accidental releases of test code onto the live servers and I believe that this is an ongoing problem. As proof I have a buff in my tool bar which isn't supposed to be live yet, but the icon and tool tip were patched for Dread Knights several months ago, replacing an already existing ability. I am beginning to think that some of the "test" code is ending up live, so we are in a position where some abilities, some mobs, some game functionality is being changed, however not all of it. So a change may be on test which is supposed to affect ability A, or a mob has been buffed up to be tougher, or a spell function has changed to counter a new Mob ability. So they stealth patch the ability code and files in, and somehow several of the changes are somehow going live. I cant prove any of this, but I've been noticing changes in some of my abilities and I have noticed changes in the abilities of some other classes. Things that once were rock solid, that haven't changed since beta, are no longer behaving in quite the same way.

Like I said no proof but there is no way we were unable to control aggro on Enraged X83, unless some functionality somewhere had changed.