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.
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...
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.
16 months and 619 raids later, UG is Time flagged!!!
Taker easy fuggeroos, I'm gonna go take a nap!
Gaeaan
As usual, we've been extremely busy since the last update. Since our Xeg kill we've managed to slap on 2 more guild firsts.
Following our Xegony flagging, we decided we better get the show on the road and start working on our remaining ele gods for Time access. So we've spent all the time since then doing nothing but Earth Rings, Water clearings, and some Coirnav attempts.
First off, the Earth Rings...
We've killed these things before, but they were never a high priority target for us. But since we decided we were going to start our Time push, we decided we were going to start working on our POEb flags. So we ran around killing all the rings and triggered Arb.
The next 30 min was the most hectic chaos ever. Rushing to get everyone into Arb's chamber to kill Arb was madness. There was no "hurry up and wait", it was just plain "hurry up". Once we were there, we didn't really have a decent strat set up, and we didn't have the time to waste trying to find one. So we winged it. And we winged it bad...
It was a sloppy raid. We finally realized what it meant to "zerg" something. What a huge cluzterphock! But in the end, we prevailed and had our first Arb kill under our belts.
So then we started working on Coirnav. This is possibly the funnest encounter we've ran to date. It's a controlled chaos. One simple little mistake from anyone can mean the difference between winning and losing.
Our first attempt, we triggered Coir and actually got him down to around 80%. Yay us. So we wait three days to try again. Same thing. Okay. We made some adjustments and came back for a 3rd attempt 3 days later. Still the same thing. More adjustments, and another attempt 3 days later. On the 4th attempt, we had to let the event fail early due to some extremely bad luck on the pulling end, but we would be able to try again the next day! 5th attempt. We managed to get Coir down to 6%. We cried. We screamed. We cussed. So we go make a few more adjustments and try again 3 days later.
6th attempt. We go in with the last change to our strat that we can think of. The result? Practically flawless. We had 2-3 deaths the entire event (with the exception of Coir himself), and we had Coir dead with almost a full 3 minutes to spare. Everyone in the guild let out a collective sigh of relief. This was the first mob that had kept us stumped for any length of time. But everyone did exactly as we had planned, and the result was a ton of UG members getting their new shields, and a few members finishing up their Time keys.
Now for some random pics. Not the best quality since Water's so dark, and they're all just pics from after the raid (during the event, we were too focussed to think about taking screenshots). There's no witty banter, cuz it's friggin 3am! So suck it up and just enjoy what ya got!
Dead squid crab guy!
Dead squid crab guy again!
Dead squid crab guy yet again!
And another pic of dead squid crab guy!
Shields!!!
Shields from another angle!!!
And even more shields!!!
With Coir out of the way, we're down to just needing Rathe Council for Time farming goodness. We'll be doing one more Arb kill in the very near future to make sure we have more than enough POEb flagged, and after that look for us to be living in POEb until we beat RC.
Here's all the loot since the last update. It's really not too bad of a list when you consider how much time we wasted in Water on Coir.
Til next update, taker easy fuggeroos
Gaeaan
