So what? (October 6, 2008)

With the release of WoW 3.0 and WOTLK right around the corner, Hoss was hard at work. A few weeks of raiding, they say? So what. What's the point, they say, the loot will go to waste in a month. So what?

Hoss decided to dedicate our raid force to knocking off Archimonde, the only thing left in Hyjal. Like a reincarnation of Gandalf the Grey, Archimonde screamed “You shall not pass!”

For a while, we thought he might be right. Throughout the whole week, it wasn't always clear whether forward progress had actually been made or perhaps just some very lucky streaks with fire and airbursts. However, the entirety of Monday evening quieted the non-believers.

Consistent 60% and sub 60% attempts were made throughout the night. Even our “bad” attempts were ending in the very low 70s or very high 60s. Surely progress was headed in the right direction. But alas, the night continued to wear on.

After some darn close attempts (32%, 32%, 27%), it was getting late. East coasters were getting droopy eyed and the night was taking its toll. A valiant “LAST ATTEMPT!” was called and the troops responded.

Hoss charged in, guns blazing, determined to show this boss that it would die in the near future, even if it wasn't tonight. A bit of a rocky road throughout the duration of the boss did nothing to hold back the furious Hoss masses, and before we knew it, Archimonde lay dead in a heap under our feet.

Here, Hoss stood triumphantly, proving that we'll keep on rolling through hard times, doubters, and the threat of new content.

And it is there that we stand now, eagerly awaiting the next challenges. Look out, Illidan. We're coming for you. Don't be fooled by this expansion nonsense. We're here, and we're here for blood.

Oh, and Phae wasn't there! :P

Doma out!

About Fixing That Web Server... (August 16, 2008)

I never really got around to getting something new set up to handle the news for the website, so, after months of seeing the same old update, and having killed something new recently; the guild nagged me enough to finally get something new posted.

May turned out to be a pretty good month for us.. June and July ended up not delivering so much as you never know if/when people are going to log on during the summer months - but things seem to be winding back up now, so hopefully we'll get more kills and updates coming in the weeks ahead. So anyway, here's what we've been up to since the last update in May when the website died (I'll start with the most recent and work backwards).

We finally took down the Reliquary of Souls.. what I think many of us thought was going to be a quick boss to work through ended up taking quite a bit of time due to working through the summer attendance rollercoaster. We finally got him/her/(it?) killed this week, so now we're looking towards Bloodboil. Here's the kill pic from Monday night:

Prior to RoS was Azgalor, who we first killed on June 2... but nobody posted a screen of that - so you can probably picture it similar to the shot of Kaz'rogal below (but with a Pit Lord in place of the demon).

Before that was Gorefiend.. and lots of playing a silly flash game that only barely prepares you for the actual act of killing constructs. In the end, we found constructs simply too hard to kill; as the only person able to actually kill them is no longer in the guild - so we just learned to kill Gorefiend while constructs beat on us - problem solved! (Yes, I'm joking.) Here is a shot of one of many Gorefiend kills behind us:

And finally, the day before Gorefiend died, we took out Kaz'rogal in Mount Hyjal. I don't remember much about the first kill (or if I was even there.. I probably missed it); but he died, we looted, and he's been dying more or less every week since then. Group shot below for your enjoyment:

Web-Server Go BOOM! (May 7, 2008)

So, sometime in the last few days, something went wrong on the server here. I haven't lost any data, but the CMS I was using basically just died on me. So I've posted up our last updated, and here's a few notes from the last couple of weeks:

Anetheron died a couple of times now, and Vashj died today (May 7), yay!

Ok, good enough for now, I'll do a real update once I get the website working again.

Some Wacky News Title That I Lost

It''s been awhile since our last update. I''ll see if I can remember everything over the last couple of months since FLK died.

Pretty sure we dropped Al''ar shortly after FLK; we also spent some quality time with Lady Vashj, but never quite got the wrinkles worked out of the fight. Then came patch 2.4, breaking all of our addons in the process; and leading us into the worst week of raiding that I can remember. We wiped to trash, we wiped to bosses, we wiped to repair bots, I think we even wiped on the elevator in SSC.

Somehow, amidst all of this death and painful repair bills, we managed to kill Rage Winterchill (yeah, we struggled clearing to bosses in SSC; but had no problems getting our shit together for our first kill in the newly unlocked Battle for Mount Hyjal).

Aside from the massive amount of trash drops we picked up, our first kill also resulted in:
Kripdiggler - Furious Shackles
Gukaistar - Howling Wind Bracers

Then we wiped for an hour or so on Anetheron... he''s actually our next target now (as of this writing.. but we did a bit more damage before coming back to him). So, we spent the 2nd week after the patch making sure we still remembered how to raid SSC (and I think we proved that point; still a bit sloppy, but at least shit died in short order). And "farmed" Rage again, messed with Anetheron some more, and called it a week.

As the third week post-patch was coming to a close, we finally decided to have a look inside the Black Temple. We had heard that Najentus was a bit of a road block.. but after a couple of hours, I think something clicked...

...and suddenly we found ourselves "doing" Black Temple too. Go figure.

Najentus dropped:
Mudderford - Rising Tide
Maelbane - Tide-stomper''s Greaves

Ok.. so Najentus is dead, we figure now we have to go walk behind Supremus and get our free bag-o-loot. It didn''t happen the first night, with only time for a few attempts after Najentus. We returned on our next raid day, took out Najentus again, and then got Supremus down.

Since I couldn''t get any pics of the kill... Constance was nice enough to provide an artists rendering of the fight. :)

The bag-o-loot contained:
Kripdiggler - Pauldrons of Abyssal Fury
Lonskils - Waistwrap of Infinity

After all this excitement, we couldn''t pass up a chance to get Akama too. So the next day we ventured back into the Black Temple to face off with the Shade of Akama. So far, this was probably the easiest fight we''ve seen in the zone; and after a few attempts, we were standing among the Draenei of the temple.

The shade dropped:
Gukaistar - Spiritwalker Gauntlets
Puet - Shadow-walker''s Cord

Well.. hopefully we''ll have a few more kills to report in the coming weeks. It''s been fun to see some new stuff, and good to have a fairly stable raid force once again (until next week, right?). Ok, so I should probably cut this off now, since I doubt many will actually read this far; more updates coming soon!

Fir out.