Legendary Raids 3: Sendai the Hive Queen

[Hhrolf]

My most memorable nights raiding in EQ started with my making the following request in guildchat: ' I know we are getting close to the end of the raid window but I want you all to give me ONE MORE HOUR please'.

It was 3.20am GMT on a weds night in early June. Our raid window normally closed at 4am and I normally raided until between 2am and 3am but I was on day off the next day and was willing to raid until later than usual. ( Little did I know at the time how late I was going to end up raiding to on this night. )
At the time we had a team of 5 or 6 raid-leaders and we shared a channel and helped each other out. I was on raid leader duty, the war machine was plowing thru things quickly that night so we had finished all the planned events early and I had a new strategy I wanted to try.

Sendai, the Hive Queen.
Depths of Darkhollow expansion
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=3217
This event was very tough and blocked any further content in the expansion.
Locked behind this raid were events such as Hatchet, Redfang, Tris Wallow, The Performer, and the Wailing Sisters ( this pic was taken on one of our wailing sisters runs http://circleoflegends.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9720813&gid=292959) .

At the time we had never got past 15 minutes into the 3rd wave of this event.
My one hour calculation was based on 15 to 20 mins to setup, 15 to 20 mins for the first two waves, 15 mins to wipe in the 3rd wave / try out the new strat to see if it got us past that magic 15 min mark and then rezzing time.

Some painful background:
This event had become our nemesis.
We had first tried this event back in the previous December - and stalled at that 15 min mark in the 3rd wave. No matter what we tried for weeks and weeks we stalled at around that point. It blocked us from further content, so getting past this event was major.
The third wave meant we had to split into balanced groups and OT mobs that hit hard ( 2.8k), did an AE on death ( 6k ) and split into 3 new mobs that then needed locking down. Gradually enough tanks would die that mobs got loose and we would wipe.
Then we had a huge crisis caused by stalling on this mob. Township Rebellion lured our top tank ( and then several others ) to Luclin, Club Fu lured some of our key members away, the vultures circled, morale plummeted causing a lot of retirements and we ended up having to go through a major rebuilding phase.
During this period I went from 52nd on our dkp list to 10th !! (and it turned out that three of the people above me had quietly retired and never logged back in again)

Recruiting was also hampered as the word on the server was that CoL was finished!! Dying! Dead! Don't go there you are wasting your time!

We then spent months gearing new members up but for every 3 steps forward we made we would take one back as some people used us as a stepping stone.
We also regularly heard that we were not as good as we had been!!
I really really wanted to ram those words back down people's throats. We needed to get that monkey off our back. It was psychological baggage.

In April we tried this event again and wiped on the first wave. We had to beef our newer tanks up more.
In late May we tried it again and got to wave 3 twice and wiped at the 15 minute mark - again!!
Stalled at the same point as the 'old' guild!!! We needed to get past it or we would never progress any further. Another crisis loomed if we didn't.

So the scene is set, back to ONE MORE HOUR.

The thing that was killing us was the Queen's AE in the 3rd wave. These days an 11k ae is easy to survive but back in the those days the HP range was from about 10k to 16k.
Similar effect to something like an 80k ae these days.
The Queen would move to wherever the highest concentration of people was in the zone ( it was a big zone ) and then stop and cast her AE. Her AE only had a 50 foot range but if half your group died the mobs would get free and rampage through the rest of the raid.
Even the tanks and off-tanks were suffering as the adds hit hard and cast a 6k AE when they died. The two combined was deadly.
People were dying so often on this event that we were using a rez and rebuff team but that often meant that her AE was hitting people that had just been rezzed. The rebuffers and newly rezzed functioned as a magnet for her as it was often our biggest concentration of people. We had scattered the rest of the groups around the room to OT their mobs.

My new strat idea was to focus on her movements.

Everyone set up a new audio trigger for MOVE MOVE MOVE. One of the other raid leaders, Strap, was FD in the centre of the room and his job was just to watch the Queen. When she started to move he spammed the hotkey and when it went off you had to stop whatever you were doing, look at where the queen was heading towards and run to where the Queens old position was as that was the new safe spot. If you were tanking a mob, drag it with you. If you were just rezzed and busy looting your corpse, stop, drag it with you and finish looting it when safe.

IT WORKED!!!

We had found the key to beating this phase.
Strap did his job perfectly and as he was in the centre of the room he was safe from the ae most of the time. On the few occasions that he did die one of the other RL's would take over calling duties until he was rezzed back in.

Eventually we got phase three down to 20 mins but that first time was a long long phase. On a couple of occasions I accepted a rez and then she decided to move whilst I was zoning. Zoning back in to being hit with the ae was painful and quite common but we would just joke about it and take another rez.
If you wanted a bio break ( and a lot of people did as we were at the keyboard for so long ) you would autofollow a group member and hope you didn't die but a lot of people did. If you had died you checked with the group if it was safe before taking the rez. The attitude everyone showed was awesome.

We eventually got to phase 4 to a huge number of woots. It really felt like a win!!

It had been so long since we had even considered getting to phase 4 that we had to re-check the strats on the fly. We had been stuck on this event for 7 months!! All our focus had been on getting past phase 3, no point even thinking about phase 4 until we found the way past it. The tanks and heal teams held her at 98% whilst our raid team quickly checked what happened next.
At 75% she splits into four and you have to kill the correct version. We took several attempts to find the right version of the Queen but eventually we got past that section too.
At 25% there are a huge number of adds spawn and we wiped to them.

I checked the time as I waited on my final rez - 6.15am!! My 'give me one more hour' had turned into nearly 3 hours and everyone had stayed. Absolutely Legendary.
We finally had the monkey off our back. We hadn't won, but we had got much further than the 'old' guild ever had, and it felt like 'next time' would be the win. ( in the event it took us 3 more attempts to get the first kill as she had one last trick up her sleeve).
CoL was back and progressing again at last!! All those people writing us off could now officially go f*ck themselves.
Over the next several days we took some off-nights to do guild groups to get everyone their xp back. I got off lightly with about 20 deaths, others had many more.
I went to bed that morning a very happy man and it was nearly 9am before I fell asleep as I was so hyper.
Yes that's right my best nights raiding wasn't even a win!

Edited after in game questions to help people understand the event mechanics better

[Etuinka]

OMG....the bane our existence for what seemed like FOREVER! When the DoDh expansion first came out, CoL was one of the first guilds to move in and start working on individual/group progression. We began tackling raids early on, with quick successes. Then....we met the Hive Queen.

Here are the cleric notes from this event (which, as Hh pointed, was a 1.5 to 3 hour event).

-Watch emotes and "whispers"
-Mobs you can't target will probably do damage to you; watch your own health
-OT's need designated healers

-Wave 3 = Healing buddy system time!! (The buddy system meant when MOVE MOVE MOVE was called you effing move your butt with your group as we'd have some healers standing in one spot and trying to heal the event from there. Their "buddy" became their tank. If the tank moved, healers moved with him/her)

-Once the Queen is active, CH chain to 75% (7 clerics, pause 7 or 8 clerics, pause 8)

-At 75-50%, shift to FFA heals (4 Tanks; one assigned to the Queen and her 3 "copies" with 3-4 clerics and 2 druids assigned to each of those tanks)

-At 50% fake Queen despawns and CH chain resumes from 50-0%. Non-chain healers spot heal as needed.

-At 25% a million (not really, but it did seem like it at the time!) adds spawn - start MGB CR's at 26% (and pray we burn her down fast!)