ryssa's first raid

Tuesday, April 08, 2003 10:46 AM


inspired by richard's posts about Monual, here's a little story
about ryssa.

i went on my first raid last night.

having recently beggared myself buying the components for an earring
of the solstice, i thought i'd do some charm soloing in east wastes.
but i also have /lfg on just in case. sure enough, i get a tell
inviting me to group in justice. cool, ive never been there, so i
accepted.

after hunting there for a while, someone makes the inevitable comment
that there's a "much better" room we should be camping. someone else
in the group says no way we could take that room, we should stay right
where we are. they get huffy about it, and our only healer leaves.
predictably, pulls slow to a crawl.

from out of nowhere, two high-level magicians appear and are
immediately invited to join the group. their pets and nukes make quite
a contribution to our damage output, and we start making some decent
xp. after a bit of this, one of the magicians says he knows of a raid
that a friend is starting up, and wonders if we want to join. the
target is some sort of named spider in the plane of disease. sure,
why not.

so we wind up in tranquility, at the disease portal. it's a sewer pipe
gushing with yucky brown sludge. appropriate. the other members of
the raid start showing up, and i begin to understand that i am going to
be a very junior member of this raid. i'm 52, and the next lowest
level chars are at least 55. the rest are all red to me. i realize i
have no chance at loot from this escapade. hopefully i'll get some
exp, and learn a bit about how /raid works. the raid leader is an
enchanter also and tells me that we can both be on mez duty, and would
i rather buff haste or c3? umm, i'll take haste, please. :-)

eventually we zone in to disease. yay, two new planes in one night!
we wait some more for more folks to show up. i begin to see that a big
part of raids is waiting around. we start running across the
landscape, and we come to the spider cave. there are a few random
spiders lurking around the entrance, and we kill them.

and then we encounter the bubbonians. these guys look like rat-men
with huge heads. and they are moose. they hit really hard, and have a
ton of hps. and of course they are impervious to my weak mez. at
least i can nuke them. kind of.

we proceed deeper into the cave, killing spiders and ratmen as we go.
we get to a point where there are three bubbonians all in a group, and
we have no way of splitting them. the main tank tries to pull, and
gets snuffed out almost immediately. like i said, these ratmen hit
hard. after that, things kind of go downhill. the group gets aggroed,
the cleric dies, and we evac out.

regroup at the disease zonein. wait for corpses to appear. some
people have to leave, arrangements are made for others to join. more
waiting. eventually we're ready to go, with a monk this time. back to
the spider cave. after killing lots more spiders and bubbonians, the
ranger declares that the the named spider is nowhere to be found on
track. but there is a named rat, so we decide to take him out.

a bit further in the cave, and we come to a pair of huge spiders that
are untargettable and spam-cast an AoE snare. the snare isn't so bad,
at least for a caster like myself, but all the messages from each
member of the raid being continually snared really clog up my chat
window and make it hard to see what everyone else is saying. i really
should learn how to make multiple chat windows for the various kinds of
messages. the magicians' pets don't take kindly to the snare and start
attacking the spiders. we try several tricks to target them, inclusing
/assisting the pets, but none of it works. they appear to be
perma-rooted, so we end up simply walking past them. they never hit
me. maybe they were busy with the pets.

ahh, the named rat. he has several bubbonian buddies, and they make
trouble for us. the main tank and the cleric die. a druid starts
chain-casting chloroblast on the secondary tank, desperately trying to
keep him alive. i help out by doing the only thing i can think of,
spamming rune3 on the tank. phew, he lives.

loot is a nice melee earring and the named rat's head. i was secretly
hoping that some item would drop that none of these ubers would want,
but no such luck. oh well, i had a good time and saw new things, and
got a few blues of exp in the bargain. good enough.

ryssa
52 illusionist
morrell-thule



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!
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