Summation

Hard modes cleared, too.  This would've been done last week, but unexpected maintenance always manages to fall on a raid day for us.

Keep in mind that's still not 36 players; just 36 characters.  And our Declared Alts are basically geared as well as any other mains on the server. 

Summation's going to keep steamrolling all the content you could ask for.  If you'd like to fill your lockout window too, reach out to Bapt, Candae, or Disil to see where you'd fit in.

Crystallos was good to us. Lots of weapons and gear going to people's third alts. Won't miss the platinum sink, but overall it was enjoyable.

We were told that Seeds of Destruction would be a pretty easy expansion overall. To help keep the content challenging, we came up with a more interesting strategy for clearing it:

Raid Leader's personal notes in green.

Regardless of our strategies going in, the events were beaten. Tier 1 was a joke, as expected.

Oceangreen is looking real nice with these graphics.

Field of Scale was cool I guess (idk, I'm not a Kunark fanboy). Council fight is a chore and always will be.

I'm pretty sure the dragons were bigger there...

Korafax was okay except for that whole "only six keys" per clear. We worked around that by splitting raids and beating them twice over every lockout. Pretty impressive for a team of twenty-five players.

Wait a sec... these are just some fucking vacation pics, aren't they?

With a collection of 42 40 39 keys, we made our way up the Tower of Incredibly Forgiving Discord and beat Brekt, Rider of Candyloot Mountain. (Mata Muram was much more thrilling to fight; just saying.)

Fuck your vacation pics! Don't think you can just add random shit to them to hide it!

Other than determining how many splits to do and hardmode vs. normal difficulty, here are our scheduled flavors for the next twelve weeks (spolier alert):

For an expansion about fighting time-traveling bad guys and restoring the timeline, I thought it'd have a more climatic ending. But maybe we'll get to see that Alabaster Tower and Thing's Eye sometime soon, right?

... right?

Recruitment Talk

Let's be real about this expansion. There's a ton of content and loot available between the regular raids, hardmode raids, and OMM "raids". It's also stupid easy to split the most rewarding content and run normal and hardmodes with half of our raiding crew.

If you're interested in playing with a team of people that smashes content and basically hands loot to new mains, you can reach out to Bapt, Candae, or Disil. Get in now so that you have plenty of toys to decorate your house with in House of Thule.

Bonus Edit!

Grats Kainne for winning at Stupid Shit Kainne Does and beating Vishimtar with only his box crew.  Send him tells or something if you need to copy his strats.

I only said I "might" edit the news post, but it's cool to show off our guildmates anyways.

Let's recap:

Solteris splits resulted in exactly one Ball of Sunlight. Our monks were sad. Gear was still plentiful otherwise.

Our planning committee came up with an ambitious goal to crush Secrets of Faydwer, but Guild Union Contracts dictated we could NOT break the "casual" part of our "casual, yet competent" playstyle. Raiding outside of standard days was nixed, so we followed the schedule while trying to find a loophole. We succeeded in abusing our raid core's trust maximizing guild benefit by splitting our runs of Meldrath for extra flags.

"Work harder, pixel slaves!" - Raid Overlords

We collected the oily leavings from Meldrath's box (lol) and made our way into Crystallos... just in time for the Coronavirus to make every normal strategy of "stack here and hit boss" defunct.

Fuck you, COVID-19! My raid, my rights!

Social distancing is tough to figure out when Vyskudra murders you for that, too. Despite our best efforts to adapt, we all realized what had to be done to secure a win.

The risk was worth it. *cough* Please don't tell the Cyber CDC on us.

With the end boss of the expansion defeated, we celebrated by rushing to the store because we heard that a shipment of toilet paper had just come in.  Forgot all about the news article that would come with an expansion clear.  A few weeks later we actually brought a ranger to raids and found out that there were two other dragons under a trap door for some reason. No screenshots, but I did get an artist's rendition of the last fight:

Player positioning in this isn't right at all; the humper was further up the head.

With the expansion finally (finally) over, we settle into our farming routine until we all inevitably end up on ventilators from our reckless desires for loot.

Drama Minute!

A transparent guild is a trustworthy guild. Even the strongest bonds have acetone poured over them sometimes.

One of our members quit the guild (for, like, his fourth or fifth time) due to a personality conflict that resulted in a line being crossed by the newly ex-member. We take these matters seriously and had our Human Resources team complete his offboarding process accordingly.

In addition, Summation has taken a preventative measure that will help raise awareness and promote guild harmony moving forward.

"A Scarlet Letter reference would be too subtle; gimp mask and cropped tee it is." - Summation HR

Recruitment Talk

We have plenty of tanks, and cannot reasonably accommodate/gear more of them at this time. We'll let you know if this changes.

If you would like to main basically any other class in raids, what are you even doing on a non-truebox server we would love to have you join and will treat you with all the shittalking you open yourself up to right. You can reach out to Bapt, Candae, or Disil for more information.

Stay safe, and good health to you all.

If you spent your evening on Ragefire tonight, you might have seen some yellow text about Two Gods getting their asses kicked more times than you'd expect.

Wait, those guys are in the same guild!

Summation has successfully defeated Mayong and Solusek with one raid, then REPEATED the process with another raid.  To date, we are the ONLY guild on the server that's split this fight, but it's a return to form for many of us.

So what does it mean?  Here's a shitty meme to help explain:

2,000 more Phosphenes per week
Four more Two Gods loots per week
We get DRENCHED in gear, weapons and click effects

Vince knows a thing or two about drenching.

Basically, it means we end up primed to thrash MMM and Crystallos when Secrets of Faydwer launches (even if we still can't get a Ball of Sunlight to drop).

Loot Corner

Let's talk weapons briefly, because after having a drought for several expansions, we've managed to collect more than 20 weapons for our raiders in January alone.  About half of them have gone to mains, with the rest making their way to alts.  Even more of them will go to alts if we don't get more mains, which leads us to...

Recruitment Talk

It's just been three weeks, and I'm proud to report that we have negative attrition totals for the expansion.  While there hasn't been a huge influx of people from Ragefire or otherwise, we have had more players come back to the game to play with us than we've lost. 

Even so, there's still room for new, attentive players who know their class(es).  With five weeks before the next expansion, that's just enough time to make sure you're a good fit and get you geared.  Once we're grinding down Faydwer's content, there will be less time to worry about recruiting until we've reached our goals and you'll have missed out on a ton of DKP and experience.

Talk to Bapt, Candae, or Disil for your chance at hanging with the best.

"Look at this sorry excuse for a News page.  People probably don't even know we still exist.  Someone should post something..."
"Good idea, Disil!  It's your job now."
"... wait, fuck."

Hi there.  I bet you're wondering what we've been up to, so let's fill you in:

1. We got DKP up and running on the new site.  Nothing else mattered to literally everyone.
   
   

   "I got my raid ticks, we're good." - Literally Everyone

2. We trashed Ashengate and Frostcrypt weekly, and got about four weapons total in the TSS period of our raiding.  Most of them were Bale and Brimstone.  A single Arcekor, the Instigator dropped and went to a tank who promptly went to the store for cigarettes.  (We're still waiting for you, Stardad.)
   
   

   Life sucks and then you get eleven shoulders.

3. We still cleared everything each week regardless.  We don't take group photos because our therapists say they trigger repressed something-or-others.
4. Kainne declared a planned absence.  Everyone was sad because "Stupid Shit Kainne Does" is the highlight of our off hours.
5. The Buried Sea launched but this jerk enchanter had to go and disappear for two weeks.  Word is he had something to do with impeachment hearings in the House, but that's all hearsay.
   
   

   He hasn't denied the hearsay, though.

6. Solteris tried its best to keep us from making progress by giving us events that need eight tanks.  Unfortunately for Commodus and Balreth, our alt tanks are almost as high quality as our main 3 tanks.
7. More weapons dropped in one week in Solteris than the game dropped in twelve events for fourteen weeks prior.
8. Krin realized that beating the Two Gods event would already be considered cool, and went on to create something to play before it can get cool.
9. Solusek and Mayong were outed as the easiest event in the entire expansion.  We don't take group photos (see #3).  They should have made it a raid hide-and-seek like in the Solteris flagging chain.
   
   

   Even by Sony Online's standards, that's a stupid idea.

And then we farmed Solteris some more.  Welcome to the present.

Our raid team got a nice break for the Christmas and New Years holidays.  It's a scientific fact that absence makes the heart grow fonder and we've had some time to celebrate, open presents, and get a solid dose of family to the point where we can't stand being around our relatives that are disappointed that all I do is play that dumb game instead of doing something with my life like aspiring to be a docto...

... our raids start back up this evening.

RECRUITMENT TALK

We're awesome at clearing raid content; it's what we do.  We run efficiently with our numbers, but it would be nice to have some new people to keep things fresh.  There's no shortage of good loot that just goes to alts, and more quality raiders means faster clears, more clears, and even more loot. 

Recruitment is open for all individuals.  It doesn't matter if you solo or have a small crew as long as you can play them competently in a raiding situation.  Check our About Us page for an idea of how we operate, and reach out to Bapt, Candae, or Disil to find out how you can be a part of this.

Awaiting the Official Launch of TSS which is scheduled July 22nd. Always looking for More to join our ranks.