Saturday I log on and ask what's going on. Nothing so far, so I fool around
in the bazaar, as always looking for Blue Diamonds and Essences of Sunlight
for my Heraldic combines. While there I get a tell from someone who's heard
I am a GM smith and wanting to buy some Fierce Heraldic. She wants a visor
and a pauldron. I quote her the price of 30K and she accepts. I tell her
that, with luck, I'll get her the order today.
Almost as soon as that happens, the call goes out: get to the Crypt of Decay
for Carpin ring. I head on out to CoD. I zone in and am immediately the
center of dubious attention. See, just two days ago I had gone on a binge
and made a bunch of Salubrious Heraldic armor for myself. In some instances
it was a minor upgrade, in some instances it was an even trade, and in the
case of my leggings, I probably made a slight downgrade - more AC, but less
HP and no more mana-free heals. I don't consider losing the mana-free heal
to be a big deal; I seldom used it. Fifteen-second cast for a 100 HP heal?
With my FT 12, I do better to sit and med up for some high-power healing.
Anyway, I now have Salubrious Heraldic arms, gauntlets, helm, belt, bracer,
and leggings which I am proudly wearing. Alas, Salubrious Heraldic armor
is, er, pink. Or "pale rose" as I like to call it. Either way, it looks
rather flesh-like. Lots of people make creative analogies, which I won't
repeat here in polite company. Suffice to say that I was expecting it, and
endured it with good humor.
We group up, and the monk puller clears the way, then grabs Carpin. He's
easy and goes down in a hurry. We move up to his room while the monk clears
the way again. At one point he says, "OK, move up to next room." Then he
says, "Wait, don't move up yet." Of course, I don't hear the second thing.
I move up and see a Feign Death'd monk and a bunch of mobs staring at me. I
run back to the raid, trailing the mobs after me. We bear down and kill
them, and once again I have to endure some good-natured ribbing. "Nice
pull, Mon."
We move up to the next mob, who procs a nasty lifetap. We kill him and move
to the next mob. His particular charm is that if anyone dies while fighting
him, four skeletons spawn. We are told not to die. No pets, whose own
deaths could trigger mobs. We get ready and begin. At first it goes well.
Then, towards the end, a mage dies. Then a cleric dies, and it's an
avalanche of mobs that begins mowing through us. I am attacked by at least
twenty skeletons as I die. The good news: we do manage to kill the mob,
triggering the next mob in the ring before we wipe out.
Alas, some people tried to zone out when the skeleton army spawned. So
about thirty skeletons are camping the zone-in. I run from my bind point in
the Plane of Tranquility to the tunnel that leads to CoD. I cast Improved
Invisibility to Undead on myself and zone in. I back into the corner and
watch the skeletons, peering as best as my human eyes can in the gloom of
the zone. After a few minutes, the whole swarm of them marches off. I tell
people it's safe to zone in. As they do, I then notice the foul puslings
that are still parked around the sides of the zone-in that I hadn't been
able to distinguish in the darkness. They begin killing everyone who zones
in. Hastily I camp out, wait a couple of minutes, then camp back in. I
apologize profusely, and no one makes an issue of it, for which I was
grateful. I felt stupid enough as it is.
Corpses begin popping in the graveyard and I loot my corpse and begin
rezzing. After a few minutes we begin to clear our way back. We kill the
Bishop, who's easy but whose death spawns a couple of nasty nuking mobs. We
fall back from the room where the Bishop spawns and the monks manage to
split the nasty mobs. We take them down one by one with very few deaths,
then move back in and consider the High Priest. The raid leaders repeat a
few times: killing the High Priest will trigger a Planar Projection. That
PP will only flag 36 people before despawning, so don't hail it after the HP
dies. My guild leader asks for the names of everyone who's been in the raid
since the beginning, and I send him a tell. We set up and attack the High
Priest. He's relatively easy, and dies quickly. The Planar Projection
spawns. Immediately three people hail him, including a cleric who hails him
twice. She's mortified; the instinct to target and hail new mobs was just
too strong. I target the PP myself but refrain from hailing him. After
about a minute, one of the raid leaders says, "Everyone hail the PP." I
immediately hit my H key, along with a few dozen other people. I get my
flag, and the PP quickly despawns. Some people are unhappy about the
randomness of the flagging, and are assured that 36 people are not enough
for Bertoxx, so we'll be doing the ring at least one more time to get more
people flagged. For fun, I click on the chair at the zone-in and look
around the lower crypt. I see one red mob in the distance and a bunch of
empty corridors. I refrain from exploring too much.
I use my Faithstone of Life to gate to Qeynos. I still have a few Infused
High Quality Rings left over from my own Herladic attempts, and I still had
quite a few Imbued Jades because Fierce Heraldic is my most frequent requst,
so I set up for the Fierce Heraldic Visor and Pauldron. I succeed on the
first attempts for both, *and* get a skill-up, bringing my raw skill to 216
and my adjusted skill to 248. I'm fairly pleased. I send a tell to the
person telling them their order is ready, but the person who placed the
order was a bazaar mule and I don't get a response.
In the meantime, we get a new directive: head to the Plane of Torment for
Saryrn. I don't know much about this mob, only that it's one of the
prerequisites for Rallos Zek. I gate back to PoTranquility and zone into
Torment. Again we group up. In my old guild, we made a big effort of
making sure all groups were balanced with cleric, chanters, and tanks. This
took a long time, of course. In this guild, people just group up with
whomever when it comes to raid time. I've been in all-tank and all-caster
groups, and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. The only thing we
try to avoid is having two clerics in one group.
We move up to the castle. We begin clearing mobs, which are easy but
tedious. I notice my groupmates are taking miniscule amounts of damage. I
think nothing of it, until someone comments into the raid channel that these
mobs have a nasty damage shield. I reply, "Why didn't you tell the
clerics?" One of our clerics immediately begins casting Mark of Kings on
the mobs, which overwrites their nasty damage shield with a beneficial
damage shield. People tend to forget that clerics have this ability to deal
with mobs' damage shields.
We move up to the first boss mob and take him down. It's not hard, just
time-consuming... there's a lot of mobs with a fair number of hitpoints we
have to clear. It's tedious work, and eventually we move up to the next
floor. The next boss mob is Ta'Grusch the Abomination. One of our rangers
has what he calls "l33t b3t4 1nf0", which seems to consist of checking with
his friend on another server. Evidently Ta'Grusch will hit for 3500. I've
heard those kind of numbers bandied about in this newsgroup and other
forums, and frankly they worry me. I have no idea how we're supposed to
deal with mobs that hit that hard. I consult with the other clerics in the
raid - should we have dual CH chains going, with the help of the druids?
Nah, just call heals in the cleric channel. One of the clerics will be
chain-casting quick heals while the rest of us cast Complete Heals. I have
my reservations about this strategy, but one of the reasons we're here is to
learn how to deal with these mobs.
The Main Tank heads on in. Despite the fast heals, he's dead in less then
five seconds. I switch over to the secondary Main Tank, and as soon as I
target him, he dies. I get that familiar sinking feeling that a raid wipe
is imminent. I switch to the Tertiary Main Tank, and by this time a slow
has managed to land and he's still alive after ten seconds. Then Ta'Grusch
goes on a rampage, and I get hit for 1143 and 3486 in less than a second.
Down I go, and as I wait for my bind point to load I can't help but reflect
that maybe there's something to what James is saying about clerics who use
equipment and buffs to increase their hit points rather than their mana.
I pop back in the Plane of Tranquility and watch guild chat, waiting for
everyone else to die. However, I see two comments: "This guy doesn't have
a lot of hit points," followed soon by "Win." I am quite amazed - I've
never been part of a boss fight that succeeded when the first two main tanks
died in the first ten seconds. Evidently Ta'Grusch has very few hit points,
and it's simply a race to see if the raid can kill him before he kills the
raid.
I get rezzed and up we go, slowly clearing our way through the mass of mobs
above us. Eventually we come to a room with a human male in robes in one
corner - "Ragefire Part II", as someone calls him. I target him and hit H -
"Hail, Maareq the Prophet". We're told we're going to ignore this mob and
move on up to Saryrn. We edge around the walls and move up the stairs.
Finally, we've reached the top of the tower. Their are four big windows on
each side of the room looking out at a red mist. There's a cage hanging
from the ceiling, a bed made out of spikes, and a tall woman wearing a mask.
In front of her there's a large, untargetable raven. It's quite an
impressive setup, and I spend a minute admiring the scenery.
In the meantime, our ranger has consulted his "b3t4 1nf0" again and says
that if we want to get flagged, we need to go back down and kill the
Prophet. So back down we go. The "beta info" is consulted again, and our
raid leaders are also checking in various serverwide channels. Evidently a
bunch of mobs will spawn when you attack the Prophet. Fortunately they are
easy to deal with: our chanters load up Area of Effect Stuns.
We position ourselves. I notice that there's an untargetable woman lying in
one of the cages. No one knows what she's for. The attack is called.
Indeed, a bunch of ugly-looking mobs spawn around us, but the chanters begin
chain-stunning them and they represent no threat. We beat on the Prophet
and it takes a while - we miss the chanters' DPS. But he goes down, and the
other mobs despawn.
The woman in the cage becomes targetable. People begin hailing her, but I
know she's not a flag mob - I can hear her responses to other people's
hails. Nevertheless, I hail her myself - better safe than sorry. I get no
flag, and wonder if we need to hail her after Saryrn dies. No one is sure.
We move back up to Saryrn. Our sources are consulted again. Evidently
there are two major problems with fighting Saryrn: for every ten percent
that her health drops, four mobs will spawn and attack. And the bird in
front of her will begin to path around the room after she's attacked. It
casts an AE silence, which will prevent casters from casting. It will
continue to path and silence until Saryrn drops to 25%, then it will become
targetable. We're told there's a place on the left side of the room where
we're safe from the pathing. I decide to try the window.
Strategy discussions are held, and our raid leaders decide that the Main
Tank will stay on Saryrn the entire fight, but that everyone else will
attack the adds as they spawn throughout the fight. The casters are told to
watch the bird and stay out of its way until it can be targeted and killed.
I sigh and think just how annoying it will be to wipe on this mob. It's
taken us hours and hours just to get to this point. The thought of doing it
over and over until we get the fight right is will-draining.
When everyone's clear on the strategy, we begin. I have the Main Tank
targeted, and get off one Complete Heal before I discover that the window is
actually not safe from the bird's AE silence. I watch helplessly as the
MT's health plummets. At 1%, a Complete Heal hits him. My silence quickly
wears off, and from the other side of the room I cast a CH. Again the MT's
health is plummeting. My CH hits him at 0%, and the MT is laughing in the
raid channel, having a good time flirting with death.
I get hit with the AE silence again. I run back to the other side of the
room and find another place, closer to Saryrn and away from any windows. I
keep up the Complete Heals, and never get hit with an AE silence. This must
be the safe point our "beta info" had told us about. The other clerics also
find the spot - whether by trial and error, like I did, or by noticing that
other clerics had congregated at that spot, I'm not certain.
The fight is going slowly. Four mobs keep spawning every ten percent, as
promised. Our raid is busy killing them while we clerics keep the Main
Tank alive. I'm beginning to despair a bit; I'm not sure my mana will be
sufficient. I'm doing my best to preserve mana - ducking out of heals when
it seems like it won't do the most benefit. I can't afford to throw heals
at the other people in my group as they fight the never-ending adds, and it
falls on the pally in my group to keep everyone else up.
Saryrn drops to 50%, then 40%. Other clerics in the raid are also beginning
to warn about low mana. I'm doing the best I can, but it's looking grim.
30%, 25% - the raven is now targetable. They set up a tank to attack it,
and I'm watching my mana fall into the last bubble. 20%, 15% - then I
finally get the message, "Insufficient Mana to cast". I say "OOM" into the
raid channel - then realize I still have a mod rod. I quickly click it,
watch my mana surge up a bit, and began casting another CH.
10% - Saryrn rages. Oh, and four more mobs spawn. The pally in my group is
dead. I have no idea how we're doing against the raven. My entire focus
is on my mana pool and making sure my CH's land effectively. After every
CH, I /assist the Main Tank to see how far Saryrn's fallen, then /assist her
to get back to the MT. 8%, 5%, 2%... dangit, die already! I'm desperately
looking for the messages that indicate she's dead. 1%, 0%... then, to my
tremendous relief, she falls. I sigh and look around - the adds are dead,
and the raven was killed about twenty seconds before Saryrn fell. I am
nearly out of mana, and I reflect that being a mana cleric instead of a hit
point cleric has its benefits, too.
A Planar Projection spawns, and we hail the heck out of it. I get flagged -
one-third of the way to Rallos Zek, woot. Loot is announced - a nice mage
item, a tank cloak. I am just astonished that we managed this on our first
try, and I say so into the channel. There is general good feeling all
around - it's nice when hours of effort are rewarded.
I'm still wondering about the woman in the cage downstairs. I walk over to
the stairs and proceed down them. Oops - a respawn at the bottom of the
stairs. I run back up, but too late - it's after me. I run back to the
raid, which quickly dispatches it. Dang. This has not been a good day for
me; this is the third time I've sicced mobs on the raid. And I still don't
know what purpose the woman in the cage serves.
We gate out. I send a tell to the person who wanted the heraldic armor, and
she responds this time. We meet in the bazaar and I hand her the armor and
she hands me 30K, so that went well, too. I log, feeling pleased with the
day's events overall.
I don't even feel embarrassed about my pink armor any more. Rallos Zek,
here we come!
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
High Priest of Rodcet Nife
Winter's Light
Drinal server
This page is Copyright by Skaarak; Everquest (TM) is property of Sony Online Entertainment
All stories and art work are Copyright@ by the origial owner/writer.
Most, if not all stories, were taken from newsgroup alt.games.everquest (AGE), I recommend that anyone who gets a chance to read it should!