Rathe WTFPWNTBBQ!!!

It hasn't been that long since our last update, but we have to keep this thing up to speed. Last night, Underguild went into POEb for our first ever Rathe Council attempt, and a few hours later, walked away with a win.

It's been a long, fun, and sometimes frustrating road for Underguild since we first created the guild in late Dec 03. In that period, we grew from a guild of 12 whole members that lived in Ssra into a successful raiding guild. When we started up the guild, none of us had any clue that we'd ever make it into Time. We were tiny, we were off the radar, but we were still able to kill "raid" mobs, so we were happy.

Soon after that, more players started recruiting with us. In no time at all, we had moved from killing Arch Lich to killing AHR. When we beat Luclin, we set our sites on getting elemental flagged. That was our goal. We wanted to get into eles and farm gear until the majority of our members were happy with their gear. And that's what we did. We parked in the elementals for over 3/4 of a year (our first ele kill 7/23/04), and we farmed.

During this time, we had the ups and downs that all guilds suffered. We lost members to WoW/EQ2. We had almost 2 full months of no raids due to numbers from the holidays. We had members that decided to bail on us for ubers, because they didn't have faith in what the officers kept telling em. But, we stuck it out.

We never relied on an alliance to continue our raiding. We never absorbed any other guilds to continue our raiding. We didn't try to headhunt members from other guilds to continue our raiding. And we never lowered our recruiting standards just to keep on raiding. We simply stuck it out the best that we could manage. We did our best to stop the bleeding. Slowly and surely, the members started reappearing again (just like the officers had told everyone...go go Team Doomsayers!!! /stab). By February we had dusted off all the rust, and we were back to were we had left off before the holidays.

By the first of March, we had managed to get 95% of our members KodTaz flagged (we had planned on skipping Time all together). Around that time, the officers decided that we owed it to our loyal members who had stuck behind us through the slow months, instead of running for "greener pastures", to make the push for Time instead of skipping it. Our members had worked hard to get everyone in the guild flagged for eles, and we felt that we at least owed them a "shot" at Time.

So we set up an extremely "tentative" schedule for our members on when we should have our ele gods dead for Time flags. The schedule allowed for us to be flagged for Time just following the upcoming server merger. We stressed to our members about how important it was to work on getting the flagging mobs down by that time frame, and our members more than rose to the challenge.

We knocked down Xegony fairly fast. We spent a little time on Coir due to the 3 day respawn if you blow the encounter, but even Coir eventually dropped "fast". The next thing we know, we're 3 weeks ahead of our schedule. So everyone decided it was time to bust some ass and get Rathe Council down.

We cleared POEb Monday night to set up camp for our first Rathe attempt on Tuesday. We discussed the strats until we were blue in the face. Tuesday night came around, and we were as ready as we could possibly be for our first attempt.

The pullers started up the event for us, and we had very little problems locking down the 6 mezzables. So we moved to the nonmezzables and start pulling those. A few mistakes happened along the way, but they were nothing major and easily covered. Before long, we had 5 of the OT mobs locked down. That's when everyone started getting antsy.

The officers kept everyone focused on their jobs at hand, and before long the 6th OT mob was being killed. As soon as it was dead, we mowed through the remaining 11 mobs and were now ready for Avatar of Earth.

Kahzid kited AoE around for us while we took care of rezzes and rebuffing. When we were all ready, I told the little pink bardboy to bring in the mob. When AoE got to camp, he didn't stand a chance. The guild had waited all night long for this one moment, and they ripped into him like Greyherst on 4/20 on a bag of Doritos. Within a minute, AoE was dead at our feet, and our members were finally able to complete their Time flags.

A special thanks goes out to Jizma and Kahzid for spending all of Monday night and Tuesday afternoon in POEb learning how to pull the encounter. Their hard work made the raid go a lot faster than what it could have been.

I can't say enough how proud I am of our members and officers. They've stuck behind me through thick and thin. Despite my constant yelling/bitching/reprimanding, they kept their focus on the tasks we put before em, and they're about to reap the rewards of all their hard work.

Now for the pics!!! I'm posting the pics of our Rathe event as links this time. The members sent me a TON of images, and I told em that I'd use every single one of em. So here they are...enjoy.

The Council Prepull

The Pulls

The Mezzables Locked Down

The Avatar of Earth

Tiki Shields!!!

This next pic link just cracks me up for some reason. After the Rathe raid, Zoltaan had everyone go meet him in Tranq to use the container for the Time key combines...

Take A Number

Dunno why that makes me laugh so much, prolly the lack of sleep catchin up to me...

And here's the loot pics. It's kinda small considering we only got in a week's worth of raids since the last update.

LEWTZ!!!

16 months and 619 raids later, UG is Time flagged!!!

Taker easy fuggeroos, I'm gonna go take a nap!

Gaeaan

Posted by Gaeaan at April 27, 2005 03:28 PM