Holy hell it's been a long time.

Yep, I am a slacker. I haven't posted in a long time... So I'm going to give cliff-notes..

• I hit 90 the first day of Sentinal's Fate.
• Had my upgraded mythical with in 3 days.
• We killed almost everything with in a month of the expansions release.
• We cleared Icy Keep the first night of its release, apparently only 8 minutes behind first.
• Raiding really kinda sucks this expansion.
• Dracos Argent is dead, due to one of the leaders was blinded by love, DA disbanded and reformed as Dracos Reborn, the guild reformed and we are stronger. That link leads to EQ2Flames, so you shouldn't read it if you are easily offended.
• Did I mention raiding really sucks this expansion?

Sentinel's Fate - Raid Kills Update!

I know it has been a while since I have posted anything on this blog! Sentinel's Fate has been out for almost two weeks and our guild Dracos Argent has progressed quite well through content.

• We killed Waansu for a world wide #7th kill. (Hard Mode)
• Roehn Theer was killed for a World wide #3 kill (Easy Mode)
• Toxxulia Server first kill! (Hard Mode)
• Oxdaxius Server First Kill! (Easy Mode)
• Perah'Celcius World Wide #4 kill!

You can see Butcherblock's raid progression thread on EQ2 Flames to see all of our kills!

Come on Death Proof, I thought you guys were going to"own" us this expansion! :)

Dracos Argent has been having fun thrashing peeps from other servers in Battle Grounds. SOE's new cross server PVP arena. Members from the EQ2 Flames community have nicknamed us Dracos Von Guild.

Flawless...

We (finally!) gained our flawless charms last night!

To gain these charms your guild must kill 19 of The Shadow Odyssey Raid bosses with out dying. Our final mob was Ykesha, and after several attempts, we killed him to get our flawless charms!

Feldon has a blog post of the Flawless Charms here, you can see the stats.

Grats to everyone in DA who worked hard to pull off these flawless kills!

Munzok's loot!

I was so excited about the Munzok kill last night, I forgot to post our winnings! I was showing off the Shadow Robe in the dressing room and Onra FD'd me as I was taking the screen shot!

Munzok Down! The Shadow Odyssey Cleared!

Dracos Argent Killed Munzok the Corrupter tonight! The Shadow Odyssey has been cleared!
Just over 21 minutes of fighting I dropped the hammer down for the kill shot!


Post #150!

I don't care what you say...

Pullin' Agro!

So this may be my final post as a hardcore raider, maybe as an EQ2 player. I would hate to say it, as much love as I have for this game, it might be over.

If you've read my twitter posts lately, you may have noticed my anger at SOE due to the upcoming nerfs to Avatar gear. I am not really happy at all and the hardcore raiding community is in pretty much agreement, I have yet to find a hardcore raider say that these changes are even close to acceptable. You can find these raider rants on the official boards and on flames, I don't feel like linking the 50+ page posts because they would just put me in a worse off mood. Maybe later.

Why am I so angry? Avatar gear on test has been nerfed, some of it by 75%! This gear is earned by defeating Avatars, which are aspects of some of the most powerful beings (gods) in Norrath. These fights are generally the hardest, most scripted and take the most concentration to win.

The community mod lady, Kiara seems to think that the gear is still the best gear in the game, as she said to me via Twitter, she's either ignorant or just misinformed. I would hope that she is just misinformed, because there is no way anyone can be this retarded.

To give you an idea how bad this nerf is, I will be replacing some of my current TSO Avatar gear with pieces form past expansions. 2 pieces from ROK and 1 peice from EOF, it's quite sad that I am going as far back as two years and a half years to get items that will get somewhat near the same qulity of what I have now. I am glad I am kind of a pack rat. One item will be replaced by a collection quest another by a drop from a heroic instance. And this is just my "healing" stance set. This does not include my dps sets and variations! That's only if I decide to stay, but I wouldn't be surprised if you end up seeing my toons up on The Bazaar after GU #53 goes live.

What a joke, if you wanted to push your most dedicated raiders away from the game, this is the best way, if you wanted to turn EQ2 in to a causal raiding game, this will probably do it.

Honestly, right now in this part of the expansion, how does our Avatar gear hurt the game? I could understand if this was the beginning of a new expansion, where gear simply gets degraded because new gear comes out. Also there is degradation system in the works for the next expansion. These items will probably will be worth jack at 90 anyway if I understand it, but to gut them right now seems idiotic...

Oh Yeah, we killed Avatar of Valor and Flames last night. There was no excitement in the bids as there usually is when it comes to our Avatar kills, Items were going to almost minimum bids except for one item simply because the nerfs on it will be unknown.

Avatars killed & Lazy Grump

I am feeling kinda lazy today... So I am copying and pasting my last few days of twitter posts. :)

8/16/09 - Killed C:Anashti & won her charm Charm of Anashti. Cleared YIS, Killed Zarrakon. Then did the DD. Cleared Kurns, and EA! 8 shards!

8/14/09 - Killed Avatar of Mischief and the rest of DA killed Avatar of Growth while I was at work. , I hate SOLO leveling alts, 77 Pali LFG. Ding 198 AA on Grump last night!

8/12/09 Avatar of War down ~3:30. PotAO, cleared start to end ~45 mins! Zarrakon dead. Finished Raids in record time! YiS, MMB open tomorrow.

Avatar of Disease, Avatar of Justice Dead.

We killed Avatar of Disease Saturday night. I won the Charm of Bertoxxulous, I took it mainly for the reuse and cast speed along with the 3% trigger chance bonus for my gear.

Last night, we cleared Palace of The Ancient One, Zarrakon's Abysal Chamber, cleared up to Munzok in Munzok's Material Bastion (Apparently, Munzok is still unkillable, months after the zone has been released, wtf is up with that?) and finished the night off with Avatar of Justice.

My alt Grouser won the Hoop of Vampiric Celerity off Zarrakon, puting him steps closer to being the best equiped Templar alt on the server. :)

I posted on twitter a while back asking if anyone knew the lore on Zarrakon and his Abysal chamber, which is by far one of my favorite zones. Who is Zarrakon?

Avatars D.E.D. DEAD!

We killed Valor, War, Mischief this past week. We also killed Ykesha and Anashti in PoA!

We got our monthly plat split, thanks DA and Butcherblock for the 840pp!

And Boom goes the raid!

So tonight we killed Avatar of Health, Flame and Hate. On Health we had a comical kill! At 2% of Grummus's health I cast Verdict an Inquisitor spell, which an Epic mob down to 1hp, Grummus died and at the same time, the faliure effect triggered and killed most of the raid. We also cleared Ykesha's Inner Stronghold, killed Zarrakon and killed half of Palace of the Ancient One, which we will finish tommorow. At this pace we'll have a couple days off this week!

Avatar Kills!

The summer has made me lazy! We've killed a bunch of Avatars since my last update.
We killed; Anashti, Mischief, Fear, Valor, Justice and Tranquility.

Did I spew that? I mean spawn that?

Shenanigans!

So Friday, July 10th was my birthday, I turned 30, ugh. We had a party at my house that involved lots of vodka, Redbull and beer (pong), and then hit last call at two bars (Not quite sure how that happened!). It was a black out drunk that night, and even a week after, I am still hearing stories of that night...

EQ2 Stuff

Since my last post, we've killed Avatar of War, Disease, Flame and Growth.

Contested Anashti Sul down! ToMC, Munzok's Material Bastion

First we headed to Tomb of the Mad Crusader and wrecked it pretty quickly, not much to say there.

It felt good!

Contested Anashti became a struggle after the proc changes, we spent an hour on her last night and failed taking her down before the end of raid time. Today we changed our strat just a tiny bit and wrecked her on our first pull.

Worst zone ever!

After that, we ventured in to MMB, a zone which I am starting to hate less and less... We killed up to Gozak, and made a couple of attempts on Munzok. Onra won a helm, it's quite shiny, you'll need to check the link out in game to see the apperance!

Avatar of Growth and Mischief down!

Avatar of Growth dropped me a shiny new Symbol of the Faydark! Avatar of Mischief died and dropped a bow for Cylock.

Then we went to palace and cleared instance with a bugged Anashti, re-set the zone and cleared the zone again, two Anashti kills in one night and both dropped the same loot.

Off to Zarrakon for the final raid of the night and smashed his face pretty quickly.

Health, Disease and Flame down, Ykesha drops loot!

Last night we killed Avatars of Health, Disease and Flame! We then cleared YIS, the Crazzel won the Band of Mreeptahp's Fury off Ykesha, with his massive dkp and 100% attendance. Seven people bid max on it, I don't think I will be seeing this ring for a while. :)


Alts:
I wanted to experiment, I used a chunk of my plat split to power level my new alt Pali, Grumbly with collections, from 27, to 57. With a little bit of adventuring I got him to 62 and 35aa last night and bought a full set of master crafted armor and jewelry. I had probably spent over 500plat , buying roughly 150 collections and the armor. I have not bought spells or ca's yet.
I was a little upset that it the power level expiriment didn't level him higher, but I guess I can deal, now I just need to figure out how to play the character, casting order and all that wonderful stuff. :P

One interesting thing I found out about paladins is they have about as many heals as my Inquisitor, save emergancy heals, I could be wrong, but it seems that if you make a gear set more in the line of a traditional healers set, they could fill in as a back up healer.

I should have spent that plat on buying the remaining collections needed for Grump, since he's only a few AA from being from cap and Grouser could use a couple masters. Oh well, 8 more plat splits to go, before the next expansion. :)

Grouser, got his mythical! I know I said in the past that buying updates was cheesy, but since DA will never go back to the hell hole, piece of shit that is Veshan's Peak, ever, ever again. I snagged an update for cheap from a guild that is still progressing from VP.

Sigh.

Avatar of Growth, Crap loot!

It's Friday and I feel like I havn't done anything, EQ2 wise, I have only seen a little bit of the new content for GU52, which was a hanfull of the Kylong Plains quests and one named mob in Kurn's Tower x2 ding 193 AA & server 1st kill shot on Sir Roland. I guess I am going to have to do some reading in lore to find out how or why "Knights" ended up in the Void and are now gaurding Kurn's Tower.

Last night We killed Avatar of Growth with 3x groups, and she dropped some horrid forearms, the rest of the night was "off" even though I did join in on a couple of raids to help Cylock's and Crazzel's alt work on Mythical updates.

The night before we did Palace of the Ancient One up to Anashti, which completly bugged out on us, spawning multiple Void Annihilators and causing us to whipe. Then the encounter never reset! We are waiting for a server reset to put the encounter back to the way it is supposed to be. As soon as some one would revive handfulls of broken encounter adds would rain down and kill them.

I had plans to do an oppinion post of GU52, before the RL issues crept up on me, since I have not had a lot of time to expirment with the changes.

Things I do like so far;

• GPU Shadows! I can now fully take advantage of my video cards in my system! The game looks totally diffrent! It looks like a diffrent game! Even our lower end machines at the store can display GPU shadows and customers have shown interested in the game, because it looks nice.
  
  
• Research Assistants! With Grouser my alt, I can now grab the last master that needed, Unyeilding Benidiction, sure it will take a couple weeks for them to research it. In the past it was near impossible to find, and if it ever hit the market it would be scooped right up.

• TSO Instanced legendary loot on the market! Well, some. at the beginging of the xpac I was dissapointed to see that all the legendary loot from the instances were no-trade.
  
  
• The sky didn't fall with the proc changes! I was scared that these proc changes would make some of my gear completly unusable, mainly my ward gear. It didn't get raped like Overloaded heal did. While not as good as it used to be, pieces like Rune Etched Helm (lonb line for Faded Black Hood) and Hoop of Vampiric are still amazing.

Things I don't like;

• Proc changes for my "Proc DPS" set, no more 17,500+ dps parses. It was all based off "reverse damage" procs and modifying the base damage amount. While I am sure, the set is still capible of doing damage, it will be greatly reduced. I guess I will be able to tell later, when we fight an un-bugged Anashti.

Contested Anashti Down!

We killed Anashti tonight, first pull on an off night!

Wow, Dracos Argent is ranked WW #6...5....

According to Guild Progress, Dracos Argent is ranked WW#5 and of course #1 on Butcherblock!

That's pretty pimp!

Anashti, Ykesha, Avatar of Valor & Justice!

My computer hated me last night!

Right at the beginning of pulling Anashti in PoAO, my computer crashed. My UPS apparently failed and started beeping like crazy and it shut my computer down.

No record dps for last night on Anashti last night, Boo!
Right at the end of Avatar of Justice my computer decided to crash again. Fortunatly, it was right as the chest was opened so I was able to get the gold! I placed a minimum bid on and won the Charm of the Tribunal to complete my neutral charm set, which will be added to my melee and spell DPS sets.
The only two other charms I would like to get my hands on would be Rodcet Nife (Health) and Bertoxxoulus (Disease), but I am going to wait untill they go to minimum bid.

We headed to Ykesha's Innerstronghold to finish off Ykesha. With that done we headed off to Valor.

We struck down Valor easy and for near minimum bid I got the Server disco on a new BP.

Tonight!

Tonight, we reset and cleared Ykesha's Innerstronghold again, 1st pulling Ykesha!

We then went to Munzok's Material Bastion and cleared up to Umzok, we will clear the rest tommorow night and hit any Avatars that might be up and probably do Palace and Tomb of the Mad Crusader. After raids we hit up Ward of Elements with some of our alts.

Gozak down!

We killed Gozak last night for a server 1st. Munzok remains!

Grats Lilya on winning the Faded Black Hood!