Back to Work

It's been 15 months since we had an update. Largely this was because we end up being officers and then guild leader of EE. That was a ton of work and a lot of writing emails and posts. That left little time or energy to chronicle our adventures here. Things are a little calmer now and I am looking to get back in the practice of writing. Also, there are a few folks who might like to keep in touch with our doings in Norath even though they have moved on to other games.

I am going to start with Saturday night and move forward as I get time. I am also going to encourage Bianca to jump in when she can.

Saturday is usually a night off in Triune. We raid pretty much every other night, so that is a much looked for break to get back some exp and work on quests and other projects. Unfortunately, it was our turn in the rotation for PoTime. We had to raid or skip our turn, and give up Quarm. Generally, PoTime takes 2 nights to clear. We do phase1 - phase 4 one night and on our next turn, we have to redo p1 to unlock it and then got to phase 5 and phase 6 to finish up. This turn should be p5-p6, i.e., the good loot.

However, there was a huge server patch this week. Usually, SoE only resets Time if that zone itself is patched. So, after clearing p1, it became clear that the instance had reset and we had a full spawn, not just the last 2 phases. Well, it was early and even though the turn out was a bit light, Grish, our raid leader, decided we would aim for a full clear in order to keep us on schedule. And he offered a 5 point bonus for anyone who could tough it out to the end. Well, the good loot only drops at the end, and 5 points, while not a lot, was just enough to entice this greedy bastard to stay.

It wasn't the smoothest clear ever. As I noted, the turnout was a bit light and it lacked some of our A-Team. We had a hellish start to p4 that involved at least 2 partial wipes. But, we managed to pull it together and get the Zek brothers down plus Saryrn and Terris Thule. Then on to p5. This was where I expected us to hit the wall. RZ, Bert, Inny and CT. We were healer heavy, which is good for these big hitters, but low on the DPS, which is bad. However, each of these guys went down gently with only minimal casualties.

Now, it was late. Really late. Jess went to bed halfway through p5, we zoned up to Quarm at about 2am. And summarily beat him down with only 41 folks and less then a handful of deaths. Then it was time to do loot and TL home. Time, 2:30am, 20 points in the bag.

All in all, that was a silly thing to do, but the leadership wants to back off from the 4 clears of PoTime a month to 2 and needed to get back on schedule. Even though I am relatively new to high end raiding, I completely agree. Considering the loot that we are getting from Inktu'ta and Qvic, this place just isn't worth a lot of time. It's great to gear up apps, lord knows I got a lot here on my first few runs. All at the minimum bid of 10 points. But, other than a few flavor items, there is nothing here that I want. Certainly nothing I would pay more then 30 ro 50 points for. The high-end Quarm loot is still going for 100-150 points, depending on what drops. But, of the 30-40 drops we get on a full clear, most of p1 and p2 rots and nothing goes for more than 20 or 30 until p5.

Lots of folks are saddened by this and describe PoTime as a "fun" raid. When I question them on this, I get the sense that the real reason that they like it is that 30-40 items drop and you are likely to get something if you are interested. With nothing really here for me (except maybe the mythical Timespinner), I grudgingly do it for the new folks and am happy we are scaling this back. At least with the new flagging system we don't have to do even lamer content in order to do an app farm zone.

I didn't even bid on anything tonight. There were a couple of rings that were nice, but the bidding went over my personal limit before I could even jump in. Bianca got a nice ring (Ring of Evasion) for 10+ (she had picked up a 90 mana aug in Qvic earlier that afternoon(Glyph of Souls) which was gonna rot; this is the subject of a semi-rant to follow).