Epic Progression Mod 6 - 9 (Apr 2015 - Dec 2017)

[Phelaia]

I will start posting our screenshots of victory to NOR's Facebook page. Can't let the Star Wars people get all the attention.

[Tundrra]

I will start posting our screenshots of victory to NOR's Facebook page. Can't let the Star Wars people get all the attention.

/chuckle

[Tyrandil]

Who: Tyrandil (GF), Nors (GWF), Kermit (OP), Hector (GWF), and Gina (DC)
What: Cleared Kessell's Retreat Epic Skirmish
When: Friday, May 22, 2015
Where: Kessell's Retreat
Why: For the Motherland!!!

We cleared the Epic Kessell's Retreat skirmish tonight, and with this group it was pretty easy! Some observations:
(1) Things hit in there like a ton of bricks. Knight's Valor can easily kill the GF if her shield isn't up. One-shots are common.
(2) There's lots of Rank 5 enchantments and black ice to be had!
(3) Alliance belts, rings, and necklaces drop at the end! This is a great place to pick those items up!

P.S. A shout-out to Nors, Hector, Quewana, and Hrothnor for completing VT today (with a PUG CW as the fifth person)! As far as I know, this is only the second time a NOR group has completed VT in Mod 6 so far!

[Kermit]

Also.. Kessel does drop Elemental Seal, and completion of the skirmish is a lot faster than regular dungeon...
From a OP point of view.. gotta keep up with the group! Staying together makes it alot easier to manage aggro.

I ran Banishment, which stunned adds for 4 seconds, allowing us to pick apart targets.. and yeah Tyr... as a non-gf class, I need to "unlearn" staying in the red circle of GF-KV-Death!!!!

[Kermit]

eLoL was very frustrating, lots of random death, but we managed in the end!

[Phelaia]

Dungeon: Malabog's Castle
Date: 5/24/2015
Team: Thorgrim (CW), Gina (DC), Tyrandil (GF), Nors (HR), Phelaia (TR)
Total run time: about 45 minutes to 1 hour

This was Thorgrim's idea. Thorgrim told Tyrandil how we should try it this very night, and Tyrandil said, "Let's form the group and go!" Everyone potioned up, and off we went. The ridiculous lag was also not there--maybe we were lucky tonight. This group had very well-coordinated crowd control, and ordinary mobs melted like popsicles on a hot summer's day. Gina's healing and debuffing were nothing short of miraculous.

First boss was not a problem. We skipped the Competing Adventuring Party, because Phel's newborn baby was close to getting hungry, and Phel might have to take a break to feed him.

The fight with King of Malabog got a little strange. The boss himself went down slowly but surely. However, at about 5%, the room was filled with adds for no reason. We wiped, and they disappeared, and it was reminiscent of Frozen Heart several mods ago.

At last, dragon time. We were all familiar with the mechanics of this fight. The hard part was spotting Val when she comes down from the hill. At one point, Val chose a spot to descend that was rather hard for the party to see, but no, Phel happened to be near by. So Phel turned around and nailed her in one Lashing Blade. It seems like while the devs have made the dragon harder to kill, but they haven't increased the temporary HP of Val when she comes down. Throughout the fight, no one got choked to death, and no wights spawned from portals--we got to Val fast enough that there were no portals. No one went down more often than it was expected with this new level of difficulty. Overall, it was a really smooth run, and as soon as we were done, the ridiculous lag returned.

[Phelaia]

Dungeon: Temple of the Spider
Date: 6/9/2015
Team: Bammer (CW), Tyrandil (GF), Hrothnor (GWF), Phelaia (TR), Kermit (OP)

Tyr and Phel were just going to level their paladins this night, but Hroth threw it out in guild chat, "My ToS sense is tingling...anyone want to try?" Before you could make a cup of coffee, the team was assembled.

First random encounter, Tyr's GF was one-shotted by some random trash mob. Whoa. This is good to know. We got more careful after that. While the geography of the dungeon has been simplified, the mobs came fewer in number, but they all hit like a truck. Our first wipe happened not too far from the front door, in an open arena with a drider and three waves of adds.

First boss took 3 tries. At least the previous campfire was not too far from him.

Second boss took 4 tries. Specifically, Hroth had tried to pull the second boss down to the staircase, but we'd pulled too far, and she'd reset at about half way down the stairs.

By this point, even Hroth held back from charging ahead and let Tyr do the pulling and taunting. Not far after second boss, there's another arena with *four* phase spiders. Upon Hroth's suggestion, Tyr managed to trick two of the spiders into falling off the cliff outright.

At last, we were at the door of the Spider Queen. According to Hroth, Blademasters and all other adds must die first. The queen also has an AoE attack that's similar to the one-shot attack used by the last boss of Shores of Tuern. Also, she's got the laser eyes like Lostmauth. Armed with this info, we went in. Phel was not expecting much. We gave it 3 honest tries, and our best was getting her to 88%.

One thing to note, most of the team had an item level of 2200 to 2400, while Hroth's item level was 4000+. If the rest of the team can gear up some more, we might have a shot at this.

[Kermit]

Nice summary... you conveniently skipped the "Tyr wanted to see what was down the abyss... took 1 too many step and fell straight like a candle down to his demise"

Other tricks: use the dungeon layout, i.e. 3rd boss was pulled to the far right of the columns, which prevented waves of add appearing to AoE right off the bat, they had to walk around and allowed us to AoE them.

Finally we had no healing... doubt this would be feasible without dedicated healer... not even sure if Healadin or Templock would be enough

[Phelaia]

Dungeon: Epic Temple of the Spider (lvl 70)
Date: 7/31/2015
Team: Kermit (OP), Tyrandil (GF), Phelaia (CW), Nors (HR), Shava (DC)

So, Tyr's been itching to beat Shores of Tuern, because said skirmish has not been beaten by NOR. In fact, we've been kind of avoiding Tuern because of all the B.S. in there. Now, not only did this team beat Tuern, we kind of steamrolled it. So Kermit said, "How about ToS? I think we can do ToS." Phel switched out her TR for her Renegade CW, and off we went.

Most of the time, how quickly we complete the first encounter is indicative of whether we can beat the end boss. The last time we were here, we did not have a healer. This time, not only did we have a healer, we have a great healer. Between Shava's healing, Tyr casting Knight's Valor, and Kermit keeping up Divine Protector (The Bubble) more or less constantly, no one fell too many times. The first two bosses were nothing to sneeze at, but they were far from giving us trouble. In fact, we did not wipe once on the way to the Spider Queen.

Kermit gave us some advice before we went in: zone in, make a hard left to dodge the first one-shot. We did as we were told, and since we had pretty darn good DPS in this group, we got the queen to transform on our first attempt (she transforms into drider at 50%), and even got her drider form down to 79% before Kermit went down because some silly attack went straight through his Soulforged. This is also when the blue and red copies of the queen showed up, and we were caught without knowing what to do at that point. We wiped, because really, there was no way we can 4-man this. Second attempt worked a lot better, and the old trick of surrounding her actually worked better than trying to run away from the adds. Kermit went down at 2%, and we burned her down as quickly as possible. When she died, someone set off some fireworks. The rewards were pretty awesome too--Shava made out like a bandit!

[Ginabean]

Who: Tyrandil (GF), Phelaia (TR), Hrothnor (GWF), Nors (HR), Gina (DC)
What: Slaying of Lostmauth
When: Tuesday, April 28th, 2015
Where: Epic Lair of Lostmauth
Why: Because He Was There

Gina's healing - especially her emergency healing as a Faithful DC - was instrumental and saved many of us from premature death.

WHOOT! You all know what.. we all make a good team! Thank you Tyr for the kind words though!