Archived from groups: alt.games.everquest (More info?)
My guild had gotten into a rut. A strange kind of rut.
We can obliterate Tacvi. We can kill all the DoN dragons in less than two
hours, including Vish. Anguish is laughably easy. We hardly ever, ever
wipe. We've totally dominated all raid events in EverQuest-
-except for Overlord Mata Marum.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, we've butted heads
against him. We wipe over and over and over again.
It's a frustrating event. Not only do you have a hard-hitting mob that
requires one of the few CH rotations we still use. Not only does he
periodically spawn adds that swarm the raid. Not only does he cast *every*
AE that can be cast in Anguish. But he also periodically focuses his gaze
on one member of the raid, killing them and buffing his own attacks, which
inevitably eats the Main Tank, the clerics, and then the rest of the raid.
That gaze focus is also his weakness. See, all the trash mobs in Anguish
commonly drop Mirrored Masks. These masks, when worn and clicked, will cast
Reflective Skin on you, whose sole benefit is to reflect OMM's gaze back oh
himself. This stuns and blurs him for a moment.
When we first started doing OMM, everyone in the raid had a mask. It
required you to pay extra close attention to what was happening. First
warning would be the message that announces the adds - called lashers - are
incoming. Then you get the message that OMM is focusing his gaze on someone
in the raid. If you were that someone, you'd get an additional message that
OMM was focusing his gaze on *you*. You had a few seconds to click your
mask. Then the whole raid would see a message on the specific person OMM
was focusing on. If you clicked in time, he'd stagger. If you missed it,
the raid would usually wipe.
Think on it. This required that all fifty-four people in the raid be paying
strict attention all the time. And you could count on twenty or so
repetitions of this during the fight. The law of averages was very much
against us. Someone would surely be looking away at the wrong moment, or
click the wrong button, or something. A monk thought that being FD would
keep him from being selected. Wrong.
If you can get OMM to 30%, the whole raid gets teleported out of the room
and you have to fight your way back, then resume the fight. You could take
the opportunity to med up, but you couldn't take forever - OMM slowly
regenerates his health. In all of this mass clicking, we managed to get him
below 30% twice, but always wiped. I myself was a perfect five-for-five in
clicking my mask successfully when OMM focused his gaze on me; I was
somewhat proud of that.
Then, information began trickling in on how other guilds were beating him.
See, there's lore - something about twelve people being able to beat OMM.
And then, we discovered that OMM doesn't select random people from the raid
to focus his gaze on - he selects *people with masks*. If you didn't have a
mask, you'd never be selected, so long as at least twelve people *did* have
masks.
So me and my fellow clerics were ordered to destroy our masks. So were most
of the rest of the guild. Only a very few people kept their masks. And
suddenly our attempts on OMM were a lot more successful. On a day I wasn't
able to raid, my guild finally beat OMM. And there was much rejoicing.
For two days. Then SOE snuck in a stealth nerf to OMM. It seems that some
guilds had twelve people with masks sitting at the zone line, their sole
function being to click when selected. With everyone actively involved in
the fight freed from worrying about clicks, OMM was relatively easy to kill.
So SOE required that the people with masks *be on OMM's hate list*. This
completely destroyed our strategy. Our mask-clickers weren't zone-line
squatters; they were in the room and actively involved, but they also
weren't directly attacking OMM - dealing with the lashers was itself a
full-time job, and those were the people we had chosen to be mask-clickers.
And remember, OMM gets blurred by every reflected gaze, so you can't just
shoot him with an arrow at the beginning of the fight and then forget about
him.
Back to the drawing board. People directly involved with OMM - like our
tanks - were told to loot masks again. Now it was the job of everyone with
a mask to quickly get on OMM's hate list after every blur - another thing to
worry about amidst the myriad other problems we were dealing with.
For me, the problem was never mask clicks - clerics were still exempted from
carrying masks. For me, it was the stupid AE's. Two in particular: one
that causes you to fizzle nine times out of ten, and another that silences
you completely. Both were cast randomly and chose random targets. If an AE
silence managed to hit a goodly number of clerics, then you were guaranteed
a wipe. The raid leaders tried to have at least two characters with cure
abilities in each group, hoping that one or the other would be able to cure
an AE silence. It was particularly deadly for mask-clickers to get hit with
the AE silence; if they got selected by OMM, they wouldn't be able to click
their masks.
I was usually assigned to a group that was taking care of all the lashers.
My primary concern was keeping all of the AE's cured and my group healed and
occasionally throwing spam heals out at the main tank. It was no small
task; there was a lot to keep track of.
So we tried. Day after day, week after week, month after month. We'd do
OMM for two or three days straight, wiping time and time again. Over and
over and over and over. It was quite wearying.
Surprisingly, the guild didn't get overly discouraged. Oh sure, people
would occasionally vent their frustration or adopt a fatalistic attitude.
But the guild was full of dedicated people who wanted to beat this event. I
was quite pleased by this. Other high-end guilds on Povar were beginning to
fade away. The other guild I wanted to join, the one with a lot of my
former Drinal guildmates, the one that wouldn't admit me unless I got my
signets? It was slowly eating itself. Most of my former guildmates stopped
playing altogether, and we were getting quite a few new applicants from that
guild and other guilds. The people truly interested in still playing EQ and
still doing full-time high-end raiding were joining our guild. That
attitude was a big help in keeping us from giving up on OMM.
We also kept each other entertained in guildchat. Topics of conversation
could vary widely. I found a surprising number of people near my age, and
one night we talked a lot about cartoons from the 80's. I won many brownie
points for knowing what phrase Princess Adora used to transform into She-Ra.
We talked about comic books and movies and poker and all sorts of things.
Anything to amuse us as we died over and over again.
Last night I log in as we attempt yet another variation on OMM. This time,
when the Main Tank's defensive disciplines run out, we'll wait for the next
blur and then switch tanks. Also, a beastlord will be given the one and
only role of curing the fizzle and silence AE's on the clerics in the CH
rotation. The rest will be as usual - mask-clickers click, damage dealers
deal damage, add killers kill adds.
We begin. As usual, things go well up to a point. Then an AE silence hits
two of the CHC clerics. A mask-clickers misses a click. We attempt to back
off when OMM blurs, hoping he'll reset and allow us a chance to recover.
But the charmed adds still mindless beat on OMM, re-aggroing him. We wipe.
Another example of the many, many things that can go wrong with this fight.
It seems to me - yet again - that winning this fight will be the equivalent
of rolling ten straight double-sixes with a pair of six-sided dice.
We go again, and this time - for the first time in ages and ages - we get
OMM down to 30%. Some of our new applicants have never seen us get this far
and ask us what happens next. We get ported, I and a bunch of other people
say. And indeed, out we go, to immediately get jumped on by a bunch of
trash mobs in a corridor elsewhere in Anguish. We beat them off easily and
make our way back up, killing the trash mobs as we go. We're rebuffing and
conserving mana as much as possible while still trying to be quick. OMM is
still in his low 30's when we begin again.
So far no one in my group has died, and I've had good luck avoiding the AE
silence. I'm lucky that I have the orb with right-click Remove Greater
Curse from the Plane of Fire; if I get the fizzle AE, I can cure myself, and
I have been regularly. So I feel we've rolled seven double-sixes so far;
all we need is the last three.
We wade in yet again. OMM's health begins to go down. I'm actively
watching clicks, seeing if we miss any. Amazingly, we don't. When OMM gets
his gaze reflected with his health at 8%, I say into the cleric channel,
"We're gonna win." The immediate replies are "Shh", "Don't jinx us", and,
from the raid leader who also happens to be a cleric, "Monual has been
removed from your guild." The latter was just typed into the channel, not
an actual guildremoval, and it makes me laugh.
OMM dies. It's an impressive death; the ground shakes, and a server-wide
emote goes out, letting everyone know OMM is dead. We explode into
cheering, the most remonstrative display of emotion I've ever seen out of
this guild. You have to understand, we've been wiping to this guy for
months. I've easily died a hundred times or more to OMM. To finally beat
him, after the stealth nerf - it's a profound relief. And well-timed; we
can now say we beat this expansion before DoD came out. (nevermind that DoN
came out in the meantime)
The cheering goes on unabated. The loot is an anti-climax; someone mentions
that his loot table is bugged, but no one really cares - we beat OMM! After
a fifteen-minute feel-good fest, I log, feeling might pleased.
After a lot of effort, we beat OMM. I'm not certain that we've got him down
to farm status - I still feel that it was as much a roll of the dice as
anything else. We'll see, though. We're certainly doing everything we can
to weigh the dice in our favor, and perhaps it will pay off next time we
fight him, too.
--
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
Prelate of Rodcet Nife
Triton
Povar server
My guild had gotten into a rut. A strange kind of rut.
We can obliterate Tacvi. We can kill all the DoN dragons in less than two
hours, including Vish. Anguish is laughably easy. We hardly ever, ever
wipe. We've totally dominated all raid events in EverQuest-
-except for Overlord Mata Marum.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, we've butted heads
against him. We wipe over and over and over again.
It's a frustrating event. Not only do you have a hard-hitting mob that
requires one of the few CH rotations we still use. Not only does he
periodically spawn adds that swarm the raid. Not only does he cast *every*
AE that can be cast in Anguish. But he also periodically focuses his gaze
on one member of the raid, killing them and buffing his own attacks, which
inevitably eats the Main Tank, the clerics, and then the rest of the raid.
That gaze focus is also his weakness. See, all the trash mobs in Anguish
commonly drop Mirrored Masks. These masks, when worn and clicked, will cast
Reflective Skin on you, whose sole benefit is to reflect OMM's gaze back oh
himself. This stuns and blurs him for a moment.
When we first started doing OMM, everyone in the raid had a mask. It
required you to pay extra close attention to what was happening. First
warning would be the message that announces the adds - called lashers - are
incoming. Then you get the message that OMM is focusing his gaze on someone
in the raid. If you were that someone, you'd get an additional message that
OMM was focusing his gaze on *you*. You had a few seconds to click your
mask. Then the whole raid would see a message on the specific person OMM
was focusing on. If you clicked in time, he'd stagger. If you missed it,
the raid would usually wipe.
Think on it. This required that all fifty-four people in the raid be paying
strict attention all the time. And you could count on twenty or so
repetitions of this during the fight. The law of averages was very much
against us. Someone would surely be looking away at the wrong moment, or
click the wrong button, or something. A monk thought that being FD would
keep him from being selected. Wrong.
If you can get OMM to 30%, the whole raid gets teleported out of the room
and you have to fight your way back, then resume the fight. You could take
the opportunity to med up, but you couldn't take forever - OMM slowly
regenerates his health. In all of this mass clicking, we managed to get him
below 30% twice, but always wiped. I myself was a perfect five-for-five in
clicking my mask successfully when OMM focused his gaze on me; I was
somewhat proud of that.
Then, information began trickling in on how other guilds were beating him.
See, there's lore - something about twelve people being able to beat OMM.
And then, we discovered that OMM doesn't select random people from the raid
to focus his gaze on - he selects *people with masks*. If you didn't have a
mask, you'd never be selected, so long as at least twelve people *did* have
masks.
So me and my fellow clerics were ordered to destroy our masks. So were most
of the rest of the guild. Only a very few people kept their masks. And
suddenly our attempts on OMM were a lot more successful. On a day I wasn't
able to raid, my guild finally beat OMM. And there was much rejoicing.
For two days. Then SOE snuck in a stealth nerf to OMM. It seems that some
guilds had twelve people with masks sitting at the zone line, their sole
function being to click when selected. With everyone actively involved in
the fight freed from worrying about clicks, OMM was relatively easy to kill.
So SOE required that the people with masks *be on OMM's hate list*. This
completely destroyed our strategy. Our mask-clickers weren't zone-line
squatters; they were in the room and actively involved, but they also
weren't directly attacking OMM - dealing with the lashers was itself a
full-time job, and those were the people we had chosen to be mask-clickers.
And remember, OMM gets blurred by every reflected gaze, so you can't just
shoot him with an arrow at the beginning of the fight and then forget about
him.
Back to the drawing board. People directly involved with OMM - like our
tanks - were told to loot masks again. Now it was the job of everyone with
a mask to quickly get on OMM's hate list after every blur - another thing to
worry about amidst the myriad other problems we were dealing with.
For me, the problem was never mask clicks - clerics were still exempted from
carrying masks. For me, it was the stupid AE's. Two in particular: one
that causes you to fizzle nine times out of ten, and another that silences
you completely. Both were cast randomly and chose random targets. If an AE
silence managed to hit a goodly number of clerics, then you were guaranteed
a wipe. The raid leaders tried to have at least two characters with cure
abilities in each group, hoping that one or the other would be able to cure
an AE silence. It was particularly deadly for mask-clickers to get hit with
the AE silence; if they got selected by OMM, they wouldn't be able to click
their masks.
I was usually assigned to a group that was taking care of all the lashers.
My primary concern was keeping all of the AE's cured and my group healed and
occasionally throwing spam heals out at the main tank. It was no small
task; there was a lot to keep track of.
So we tried. Day after day, week after week, month after month. We'd do
OMM for two or three days straight, wiping time and time again. Over and
over and over and over. It was quite wearying.
Surprisingly, the guild didn't get overly discouraged. Oh sure, people
would occasionally vent their frustration or adopt a fatalistic attitude.
But the guild was full of dedicated people who wanted to beat this event. I
was quite pleased by this. Other high-end guilds on Povar were beginning to
fade away. The other guild I wanted to join, the one with a lot of my
former Drinal guildmates, the one that wouldn't admit me unless I got my
signets? It was slowly eating itself. Most of my former guildmates stopped
playing altogether, and we were getting quite a few new applicants from that
guild and other guilds. The people truly interested in still playing EQ and
still doing full-time high-end raiding were joining our guild. That
attitude was a big help in keeping us from giving up on OMM.
We also kept each other entertained in guildchat. Topics of conversation
could vary widely. I found a surprising number of people near my age, and
one night we talked a lot about cartoons from the 80's. I won many brownie
points for knowing what phrase Princess Adora used to transform into She-Ra.
We talked about comic books and movies and poker and all sorts of things.
Anything to amuse us as we died over and over again.
Last night I log in as we attempt yet another variation on OMM. This time,
when the Main Tank's defensive disciplines run out, we'll wait for the next
blur and then switch tanks. Also, a beastlord will be given the one and
only role of curing the fizzle and silence AE's on the clerics in the CH
rotation. The rest will be as usual - mask-clickers click, damage dealers
deal damage, add killers kill adds.
We begin. As usual, things go well up to a point. Then an AE silence hits
two of the CHC clerics. A mask-clickers misses a click. We attempt to back
off when OMM blurs, hoping he'll reset and allow us a chance to recover.
But the charmed adds still mindless beat on OMM, re-aggroing him. We wipe.
Another example of the many, many things that can go wrong with this fight.
It seems to me - yet again - that winning this fight will be the equivalent
of rolling ten straight double-sixes with a pair of six-sided dice.
We go again, and this time - for the first time in ages and ages - we get
OMM down to 30%. Some of our new applicants have never seen us get this far
and ask us what happens next. We get ported, I and a bunch of other people
say. And indeed, out we go, to immediately get jumped on by a bunch of
trash mobs in a corridor elsewhere in Anguish. We beat them off easily and
make our way back up, killing the trash mobs as we go. We're rebuffing and
conserving mana as much as possible while still trying to be quick. OMM is
still in his low 30's when we begin again.
So far no one in my group has died, and I've had good luck avoiding the AE
silence. I'm lucky that I have the orb with right-click Remove Greater
Curse from the Plane of Fire; if I get the fizzle AE, I can cure myself, and
I have been regularly. So I feel we've rolled seven double-sixes so far;
all we need is the last three.
We wade in yet again. OMM's health begins to go down. I'm actively
watching clicks, seeing if we miss any. Amazingly, we don't. When OMM gets
his gaze reflected with his health at 8%, I say into the cleric channel,
"We're gonna win." The immediate replies are "Shh", "Don't jinx us", and,
from the raid leader who also happens to be a cleric, "Monual has been
removed from your guild." The latter was just typed into the channel, not
an actual guildremoval, and it makes me laugh.
OMM dies. It's an impressive death; the ground shakes, and a server-wide
emote goes out, letting everyone know OMM is dead. We explode into
cheering, the most remonstrative display of emotion I've ever seen out of
this guild. You have to understand, we've been wiping to this guy for
months. I've easily died a hundred times or more to OMM. To finally beat
him, after the stealth nerf - it's a profound relief. And well-timed; we
can now say we beat this expansion before DoD came out. (nevermind that DoN
came out in the meantime)
The cheering goes on unabated. The loot is an anti-climax; someone mentions
that his loot table is bugged, but no one really cares - we beat OMM! After
a fifteen-minute feel-good fest, I log, feeling might pleased.
After a lot of effort, we beat OMM. I'm not certain that we've got him down
to farm status - I still feel that it was as much a roll of the dice as
anything else. We'll see, though. We're certainly doing everything we can
to weigh the dice in our favor, and perhaps it will pay off next time we
fight him, too.
--
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
Prelate of Rodcet Nife
Triton
Povar server
Oh, and congratulations!
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