We've spent the last couple weeks doing some catchup flags for slackers coming out of retirement and new recruits, as well as spending some time in Air

and Water

But instead of showing you items and dead critters that you've doubtless seen before, today's update is devoted to our slightly glorious, often adequate, sometimes caring, recalcitrance inspiring, Bacardi-imbibing, and (so we're told) reasonably well endowed, psuedo-leader...

Yes, never in the field of Everquest combat has someone so dead given so much to so few. It is a rare sight indeed to find Andaas's Corpse without the "'s Corpse". And when it does happen, the once and future corpse is invariably looting his present corpse. Ah, the circle of life.

Now, why is Hoss as successful as it is? Yes, I know many of you cannot sleep at night because this question is swimming through your head. Well, all shall be revealed.

The first problem to be combated is the guild's high rate of narcolepsy. Unfortunately nobody has (yet) told Andaas that in order to read the screen, one must already be awake.

Once we're all awake (or at least asleep, and on /follow), the pulls begin. Now, Andaas is a druid. The popular theory is that he can't tell leather classes apart, and is fully convinced that he's a monk. Nobody has yet been brave enough to tell him otherwise. So, as a monk, he pulls. Or helps pull. Or botches pulls.

This class confusion does, as you can imagine, cause the aforementioned mortality problem. When he's not pulling, he's giving instructions. Since most of are asleep, or just not paying attention, we need to be reminded of what to do, or what not to do

Sometimes we're so groggy, we even need to be reminded of what our role is.

As the evenings drag on, Andy has been known to hit the Bacardi.

When that happens, the raid instructions start to get a little strange.

Despite our collective best efforts, we do win most of the time. Or, half the time. Ok, some of the time. Lately we've taken to using the famous Ghostbusters strategy, "GET HER!" This is easily adapted to "GET HIM!" or "GET IT!", depending on (when applicable) boss gender. Unfortunately, a bit of butterfingers can create a monster

After execution of the GER, Andy provides us with insightful postmortems.

And then, after a hard night of raiding, our energies spent, Andy goes off to the comfort of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Now, I'd like to end this update with a couple of brief gripes.

EQIM. You will never find a more wretched collection of bloated and buggy code.

Nuff said.

Elemental molds. This has been covered well elsewhere, but I just wanted to add some numbers. The armor-type attendance at our elemental plane raids breaks down thusly: 25% Cloth, 11% Leather, 23% Chain, and 42% Plate. Yup, almost half the players at any given raid wear plate armor. Almost twice as many as cloth and chain, and four times as many as Leather. Out of the 13 elemental pieces we've had drop, one has been plate. One.