Agnarr Redux

Agnarr was so much fun, we did him again. This time Mallo RL. A little sloppy, but he got put down gently. Grats Giltaav for the Bow of Storms (there was other loot too, but that's the only things a ranger would care about).

Saryn Falls on First Attempt

This was a great day for GoB and shows what we can do when luck and attention factor into a raid. Luck as in the trigger was up. Thanks Tristairn for showing me how to check this mob (who wasn't up that day). I tried myself to track it myself the next day and I needed someone to help pacify some see invis mobs. No problem, Seyah just got on and was looking for a Saryn report. My answer was come pac some mobs and I will tell you. :) Unfortunately, Seyah didn't listen to instructions so well and got caught in a spider trap. I jumped in to save her and got killed, oh well. Saryn was up, BTW.

Knowing this was in the offing and our next Big Step (tm), GoB assembled quickly (for GoB). I must say that there are some pretty cool mobs in this zone and no, I don't expect to want to exp here. I won't go into the details of all the mobs of this encounter, look them up. I just want to say that everyone was on the ball, paid attention to Krushh and despite the fact that we really only had a vague idea of the details of the encounter, we put her down fast and clean.

Definately one of those you can remember as a good raid. Plenty of loot dropped to, which is nice.

Agnarr In Flames

Post Huricane we got on and found Krushh ready to raid. Despite a lot of missing East Coasters, we put together a formidible force and descended on the Bastion of Thunder for a little smack down of Agnarr. Knowing the encounter sure was handy. For instance, knowing the tower is a hot LZ meant tanks and healers in first, us more fragile types second. The first mob is a huge fire giant with a bunch of summoned adds. No problem. Despite only having two wizards available to smoke the portals, the adds weren't a problem. We did have several excellent enchanters and they had everything locked down quick. The next floor is the storm giant. Whirling rock adds, huge weapon procs, etc. The fight happens on a huge platform a lot like the PoJ Trials room. Awesome sight if we weren't so busy. Then it's on to Agnarr himself.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath Temporarily Halt PoP Progress Raids

Well, LDoN is out, and it's the coolest expansion yet. I am just blow away with VI and how each expansion seems to address a lack in the game. They are a favorite punching bag of EQ players. And, to be fair, the game is buggy and quirky. Yet, they seem to genuinely care about addressing these issues. This is exta amazing when you consider SOE has just released two huge new MMORPGs (SWG and Planetside) and there is the EQ2 project set for a Spring '04 release. Anyway, back to LDoN. It's very cool. Distracting enough that we are not really going to get a raid force together easily until people get a chance to try this stuff out a bit.

Wednesday night we got on early, we had promised Gaerett that we would do an adventure with him early in the evening before the usual raids began. We met in EC, put together a group and headed off. We had Yaskel, a GoB enchanter and Muzzic. This turned out to be a pretty powerful combination. Our mission was to break into a dungeon and kill the boss in 90 minutes. What is cool is that the dungeon is supposed to be balenced against your group's levels and skills. I pulled and brought everything I could for an hour before we located the boss. Everything in the dungeon appeared to be in the 58-62 range level wise. And we plowed through things pretty fast. The boss doesn't spawn until you kill 60% of the mobs. Once we got him to spawn, pull pull pull to him. The enchanter was awesome. Since it was an indoor zone, I couldn't Harmo and some pulls were 3 or 4. All were locked down quickly, although, I did die 3 times overall. I didn't bring the eight mob train into camp.

The Boss was level 66 and pretty mean. We clear to him, set up and pulled. He killed Gaerett pretty much right away. Just boom, dead. He killed Bi right after Gaerett, probably from heal agro. At that point it was choas. No healing was coming. The pets tanked him down while I nuked and shot as fast as I could. Yaskel and the enchanter DoTed and nuked. Eventually all the pets were dead, Yaskel FDed and I tanked (heh) him the rest of the way. Once I had agro, Yaskel stood up and Lifeburned him to death just as he killed me. Ding, 51 points.

CR is interesting. Yaskel Necro-rezzed Gaerett and he got us up. Sucky part was, no loot. Killed the rest of the guards, no loot there either. We got a +6 vs Cold Augmentation (won by Gaerett) and +6 vs Disease Augmentation (won by Bi), that's it. Well, we also got about 75% of an AA.

Overall, this was very fun. I really like the time pressure dungeon crawl. There is no mob respawn, no one else in the dungeon. This has the feel of Diablo 2 combined with the best parts of EQ. I see me doing a lot more of these. One more thought. This is Hard. It was a lot of fun, but the timer is merciless. There is no time to med up, learn to meter your mana. No bleeders on melee, you can't afford the mana. As I see it, an enchanter is a MUST. CC, clarity, NDT, SoV, all required. You are down there too long for most buffs to see you through the adventure. You also need a rezzer. So, a cleric or a paladin (or necro in a pinch, but EE are Very expensive).

Bertox Falls to GoB -- Twice

Finally, on the fifth (or sixth, I lost count) try, GoB bested Betox and his minion. Same tactics that we had been using on the last two tries, things just sort of clicked. Also, people were done wiping to him so there was very little screwing around. Almost everyone who participated had been on a prior attempt, so there was less flailing about as people learned their roles. If we can keep this kind of focus, Sol Ro will be our playground soon.

On Saturday, Mallo lead a reprise raid to 1) prove it wasn't a fluke and 2) flag some of the euros who couldn't stay up late for the first (successful) attempt. That one wasn't so clean, but they did win.

Exping in Hate

We finally got everything lined up to venture into Hate. My first trip since the revamp made it an exp zone. Still images of horrible wipes played in our heads as we zoned in and looked cautiously around. I have an excellent map of Hate created by Rangers coming to look for the Shattered Emerald of Corruption to complete their epic. I had the spawns I wanted to pull, the spawns that will add, the pull routes and the camp all mapped out. And all the info was perfectly on. We had abolutely no trouble dispatching many of Inny's minions. Sadly, we only got one mini on my list to pop and she didn't drop the gem. I didn't figure I would be that lucky. Since I had the boys, we only stayed about 2 hours. However, they were 2 good hours. We got 10% real, level 65, exp. Plus, I split about 1500pp among the group. Everything drops cash. Plus there are some nice (non-epic) quests to be done there. Also, since it costs 62.5pp per group to port in, there was no one else in the zone.

Pathing, though 'fixed', is still odd at best. And everything there HTs or casts or otherwise abuses the puller. Well, that is what heals are for :) We will be going back. In fact, at least until I get my SEoC, it will me my prefered exp spot (if a wizzie is handy).

We Are Uber Now >> DING 65 <<

We got to exping on Sunday night. Seems like we ran out of targets after a weekend of raids. No problem for us, we were playing around and then got invited to exp a bit with Sparkes and Fayeth. We really like them, they are nice, they exp efficiently without stressing and pressing. And we manage to amass a good bit of loot as well. There are few people who understand the game as well as Sparkes. He was telling me about this different version of Tactics that gets loaded sometimes. The spawn rates and times are different. Wow. As the puller, this is the sort of stuff he would learn. I have probably as deep a knowledge of the Desert in PoS, where we go when nothing is open, but he is a really great player as well.

You may notice that enchanter, cleric, druid, ranger, no tank. With Sparky, tanks need not apply. He will charm something, haste it, maybe even give it weapons if he is feeling bold. The baddest trash mob in the pit of Tactics is the War Boar and that is what he uses. I estimate that it is doing about 500 DPS (i.e., about 6x my melee DPS, 2.5 times my TS archery DPS). Exping with them is more dangerous, probably a lot more dangerous, but more fun. There are also Young War Boars. They are low enough a level that Bianca can charm one. So Sparkes will bring her a present, Tash it and then let her charm it. She then shrinks it so it's really small. Very cute. She walks around with this little baby boar, that is good for 100 DPS, maybe 150. My job in all this is to snare the pets when charm breaks. Gives them a chance to get far enough away to let Sparkes reTash it and Charm it or stun lock it while Bi charms it. A setup like this gets us about 10-15% exp an hour.

All was going well and then Ripert showed up. Ripert is a necro, and I don't know a whole lot about high end necros, but I have seen them in action and they are awesome. There must be a downside somewhere, but not that I have seen. He quickly added a Tortured Soul (undead) to our arsenal of pets. That was good for 250 or more DPS. After that, we were killing boars and wraiths on the "crunch it, they'll make more" plan. They lasted about 1 minute each.

So, before we knew it we were close to Dinging. I was about 5% behind Bi thanks to the 5 death TZ raid, so she had to go AA for a bit so I could catch up. Then we Dinged, for last time, one mob apart. Very cool. The group, though tired, stayed on another 20 minutes to pad our level and finish up the AA Fayeth was working on. All in all, after shutting all things down and checking on the boys, I got to bed at 3am. Ugh.

Tallon Zek Sneers At GoB from the Grave

Sunday am checked Balinvar and noticed Mallo running a TZ raid. I knew one was likely and it was the reason I was keeping an eye on things while getting stuff done around the house. Bi was just emerging from her coccon and I got us into the raid as late adds, running on in. There were 5 rangers in the raid, so I felt it was a lock that the bow would drop today. Last two raids were just me and Luniel. The TZ takedown went fine, but slow. I remarked to Bi during the fight that this was taking too long.

"Why do you say that?"
"Trueshot just expired (i.e., 2 minutes had gone by after I found my spot and tested the range)"
"What's TZ at?"
"60%"
"Oh, is that bad?"
"Should be dead or close by now"
"Oh"

Overall, it took 5 minutes to get him. Not bad, except that the room is on an 8 or 10 min timer. A Gliden Deathblade added from the stairs area right after TZ fell. It was one of those annoying splitters. Note that the stair area is the healer area, so many of them were dead too. One ore two tanks, we did the best we could, but too many were down and we couldn't lock it down. Total wipe. Well, don't that just suck. Dead TZ with loot and a 30 minute timer running and 12 level 68 trash mobs between our naked GoB party and him.

Mallo and some others made a dash through and while they all eventually died, Mallo did manage to check the corpse. He got the spells off and linked the bow, it was there. "Rangers, get SoW and follow me. First one to make it to the corpse gets the bow." I had SoW, but it was old, I zoned out refreshed and ran back in. Mallo and the others had gone, it's OK, I found their corpses part of the way in and added mine to them. Actually, I added 3 more to that one. My last run in, Tristairn and myself made it to TZ's room w/o agro, but the body had poofed about a minute before. /cry The most amazing sight was the carpet of bodies from the ZI to TZ's room. All the rangers left at least 4 or 5 corpses each in there. Plus a number of others who tried to help out.

Mallo remarked that he hadn't died like that since Hate CR days. My hat is off to all those who tried to get one of us in there. And to TZ, "I'll be back."