World 23rd, US 9th. A bit of an improvement from Putricide 101st . I'd have taken a world top 50 kill in a heartbeat if you offered me it after we killed Putricide.

We got it on our 2nd attempt of the week, we really should have had it last week but could only manage 10.6% on a promising attempt that got ugly in our final spirit room. It was disappointing to discover later that the boss pushes over at 10.5%

This has been a really rough progression tier for us, with the server being unplayable for 3 1/2 out of our 5 scheduled raid hours per night all the way through progression until we got up to working on Lich King hard mode, meaning we couldn't even use many of our limited attempts. Pulling a boss only to encounter lag a minute or so into an attempt is so extremely frustrating, it had the effect of burning players out and causing everybody to become very demoralized. Not exactly the makings of a successful raiding environment.

The week after killing Putricide, we suffered a "major blow" losing some "key raiders" and had a major guild discussion about whether to continue going forward as a guild. I think we dramatically misunderstood the situation at that time, because the guild has gone from strength to strength ever since. I'll say no more about this, the results truly do speak for themselves.

I'm very proud of all the guys for sticking this out and pulling it off, I know everyone was very disappointed that we missed out at the end of the week, but instead of dwelling on it everybody lifted their games another level and got the job done quickly this week. The challenges we faced this progression tier went beyond the server, having a guild constantly trying to poach our top players by coming onto our vent server and with recruiting mail promising the world was a hassle I'd rather have done without. But throughout all that people showed their true colors, not being quitters and taking the easy way out but instead sticking out the tough times and enjoying the good times at the end. We truly worked ourselves out of a difficult situation and ended up with an extremely respectable world rank, you couldn't ask for much better given the situation we were in.

There is no way this is accomplished without our Officers putting the tremendous amount of time and effort in that they have in order for us just to have a raid in the first place, let alone sorting strategy and all the other roles that come with the territory. Just 10 out of the 25 people in our Lich King kill were present in our Tribute to Insanity kill on October 15, and 7 of the players present joined during our Lich King progression. To be where we are now given that shows the phenomenal effort everybody put in.

Top effort guys, now time for some nice short, laid back raid weeks and looking forward to Cataclym.

I would also like to congratulate Adept for their Oceanic first kill last week, you guys did a solid job steadily throughout the progression cycle. We did our best to reel you in at the end there but came up a little bit short.

15/10/09 - On our 4th kill of Anub'arak hard mode we've completed A Tribute to Insanity! We should have pulled it off just days after our first kill, but a heartbreaking 2% wipe on October 1st prevented that effort.



I wish I could talk about what a fantastic instance it was, how interesting the content was and what a great job blizzard did with this instance. That is not the case. "Luckily" for us, this content was made interesting and challenging by the fact that Blizzard did such a poor job of implementing it, and various unforeseeable difficulties we as a guild found ourselves in.

After all the changes we faced with this instance I couldn't have imagined we'd do this well. And in so few attempts, too... I'm talking of course about Frostmourne being so unplayable the first 2 weeks that we couldn't use our attempts up...

We had a few personnel problems along the way, so there are many core raiding spots available in this guild going into Icecrown. We like to keep our roster to about 35~ raiders maximum and nobody sits on the bench. Interested? Submit a private app!

Will try to update this post shortly with more details about the "joy" that was the Crusader's Colliseum.

No where near as exciting as Algalon, but on our second attempt of the nerfed Yogg0 we came away with the kill. The first attempt hardly counts, we tried to use an alt Ret paladin to get our raid started a bit earlier and abandoned that idea after wiping in phase 2. We were very surprised to be the first Oceanic guild to do it - At least one oceanic guild had 35 people online and was straight into Ulduar when the servers went up, and we felt that with the nerfs it would take a couple of phase 3 attempts at max. Many of our raid for Yogg0 had work/uni commitments until around 6pm server time, so in the early afternoon we started undermaning Ulduar with whoever we had on.

The world of logs for our raid day/evening for anybody interested:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/qsGN ... Hk/fights/

While we're happy to have Yogg progression behind us now, we really wanted another week on this without the nerf. Our progression on this in the last week had been extremely encouraging - particularly Monday night, with many sub 10% attempts. The nerf turns the damage check into a complete joke, not only because of the 20% HP reduction but because 3 beacons gives the raid so much more damage time with less people being required to move them and takes the strain away from AOE. In hindsight we could have been in a better position for a pre-nerf kill if we had pushed harder earlier on rather than ending raid nights early/skipping raids. After killing Algalon the feeling was that 3.1 was done and motivation wasn't there initially to get stuck into yogg0.

The kill was definitely not one of our best attempts on the boss, with a mage being disconnected in phase 1 and ending up insane for the entire encounter as a result - we were contemplating calling a wipe but kept going to warm everybody up. A healer DCed in the middle of phase 3 and a few of us accidentally ended up insane towards the end, but a kills a kill!

Lastly to any exceptional players out there - we are always on the look out for you! We are a guild that values quality over quantity. We are looking for vocal, observant people that can take criticism, are willing to get involved in strategy discussion and communicate any questions, problems or mistakes they have or make. As a guild we spend a lot of time joking around so a sense of humor comes highly recommended as well. We raid 7pm-12pm Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday and Monday. Once or twice per progression cycle we will occasionally have a Friday raid if we are extremely close to killing a boss and the right raid composition can attend the raid - this happened just once in Ulduar. We raid the same number of hours or fewer than other Oceanic guilds, but we have very high standards and expectations of our raiders. If this is you, please get in touch with us - with the new faction transfer featuring coming we are looking for promising horde players looking to make the switch as well. We always have core raiding spots available for players that meet these standards, exceptional players are never bench players.

Edit - video for anyone bored:
http://www.filefront.com/14208199/TsuvsYogg0.wmv