Saturday was a miserable day to be a homeowner with 2.5" of rain melting 28" of snow. I spent all day vainly trying to keep the basement from flooding. After that was done, the kids asleep and Bi at work, I fired up a the computer for a little EQ before crashing.

Well, Krushh wanted to kill the Manaetic Prototypes in the PoI Factory, in like 10 minutes. Well, now I don't have to worry about finding group or anything... There are 3 of these guys, Type IX, X, and XI and the number cooresponds to their hardness, all are level 66 mobs with an 800 HP unresistable AoE called Steam Blast and an AoE snare called Oil Spray. They also occasionally banish the person highest on their hate list to another room. If you do them in reverse order, you can easily get back to the raid if summoned on either of the last two fights. The IX banishes you to the room with the X and the X banishes you to the room with the XI. I am not sure where the XI banishes you, but I think it is to a couple of clockwork golems.

They drop decent caster loot and are on a couple day random spawn, so off we go.

I don't know what happened between what Fin typed and when I get home, but when I come over to the computer, he is naked at his bind point. I log Bianca in as fast as I can and hightail it over to POI. Nothing interesting happened after that. We killed all 3 of the prototypes. Lucman got the thing I *thought* I wanted, a head-slot item with Healing Efficiency IV. But I got this shoulder item: Cog Encrusted Epaulets with beneficial spell haste. They rock! All my good spells, like healing, porting, sowing- they not cast faste. It took 4 seconds off my PoK, slowest-spell-ever cast. O, and Lucman gave Finavar his old head item: Linked Metal Crown. Finavar was happy, I was happy, all good.

What happened was a total party wipe. We were fighting the model XI and had hit pinned in the corner. When he hit 3% health, we warped to his spawn point and was suddenly back to 100% health! We fought him down again, same tactics and same result. The following attempt caused the wipe as the casters went out of mana and too many tanks had been banished.