The Christmas holidays are an absurdly inconvenient time to be struck by a network outage.

"We'll have to measure your line. Could take 2 working days"
oh sure.

"Looks like something's broken. We'll send you a replacement modem, it should arrive in two working days"
oh sure.

Bottom line, we've been without internet for about two weeks.

But now we're back! Hosted from a proper hosting company instead of the dusty pile of iron under my desk, unaffected by my service providers' failures (and silly administrators who shut down the switch while they go on holidays!) Major thanks to Horinor and Wrug who kindly provided the service!

Slightly belated news but from the 25th October. we aimed higher than our previous 10M Hardmode Clear!

We breezed through the first three bosses, and almost had an immortal shot till a pesky legion flame gnawed on a melee near the end. With no deaths on faction champs and 50 tries remaining, we were pretty confident we could walk away with 50 attempts remaining. We ran into a slight problem at twins, which cost us one wipe (oh no!). However, with some being new to hardmode plus our lack of voice comm (sever picked a bad day to crash), it seemed a bit inevitable. However, we beat the twins no problem after that slight mishap, and then the Lich King came along and threw us into the depths of the old Nerubian kingdom, where once again we were face to face with a giant beetle. The remainder of our wipes were just unlucky healing moments in p3 during the Anub encounter, as running with two healers can be a tight squeeze. But in the end, we came out on top with Anub defeated, and a chest of goodies and the remainder the Traitor King being reduced to two bits of arctic leather.

Grats to all those involved! Next up, A Tribute to Insanity!

Unfortunately the slackers in the raid failed to capture the epic moment of glory. Lets just use our imagination...

Well done to all the hard work involved in taking him down!

Actual picture to follow...!

Our resident HAXXORS, Marweinicus and Grazzy, obviously have too much time on their hands. Not content with Haxx'ing Magister's Terrace and Sunwell Plateau, our intrepid duo have visited the mystical Caverns of Time.

How they do it nobody knows... but lets just hope Blizzard never find out!

With all our focus for 25 man raiding, we usually lack time to work on 10 man heroic content. Recently, we decided to schedule one night a week for Serious Progression (tm) on 10 man hardmodes. We had already bested the Northrend Threesome the day before, and we were full of confidence we would be able to take on the Trifling Gnome and his Demon buddy.

It did not take us long to realize that the absolute priority was on demolishing the volcano's and portals, and our DPS team really did a stellar job on this. We only struggled with healing -- as it turns out, 2 holy paladins are not an ideal setup, even if they are supported (carried!) by a fearsome tree! (/signed!). And so, we made Aelfaelfa go spec back into ret, brought in an alt-discpriest, and went on to kill him on the next go.

Special mention goes to Bigbadorugly who went like "YEAARCHAAA!" and managed to tank the boss, all the maidens, as well as all the infernals all by himself, as Marweinicus saw fit to disconnect for a while.

Then, we thought, "Hey, lets see how much we'll get imbawtfpwnt by those Faction Champions". It turned out the answer to that question was "Not at all". While we proceeded to kill the Champions one by one, cautious comments on mumble (our voice comms) were suggesting that they would perhaps spawn back after killed, that they had to be killed all within 15 seconds of eachother, or that they would mass-ressurect after they were all downed. It turned out they didnt. To this moment, I still wonder what the 'hardmode' in this encouter is, and I'm sure others are wondering the same.

Ahh, sweet progress. We went on and had a go at the twin valkyrs as well. It turned out that it wasnt so much different than the normal mode, except that people had to switch colors a lot more. Well, moving around a bit and clicking portals is someting we learned a while back, so it didnt take us long to master the encounter (about 2 tries to be exact!). Special thanks to Nattut and Keljin for a superb job of coordinating things on our voice comms!

So there, we set foot in a heroic 10man Trial of the Crusader, and killed 4 out of 5 hardmodes in 2 days. Anub'arak, here we come!

Overall a quite enjoyable fight. Lots of moving around, however the tactics involved aren't all that difficult. Hence in only a handfull of tries we had one big dead bug.

The last couple of weeks we have succesfully used the new raid lockout extension feature to get us those extra tries on Vezax and Yogg Saron, before we were only able to clear the rest of Ulduar within a raid lockout leaving us with only sporadic tries on Vezax.

But now we were back with a vengeance, having cleared (nearly) all of Ulduar except Yogg Saron we prepared for a night of learning this new fight. Only a handful of our raid group had already done Yogg on 10 man, so we were expecting to have a tough time. However getting through phase 1 perfectly was achieved pretty quickly (damn pesky clouds!).

It then became the challenge to streamline the brain phases, and with some yelling on Mumble (our voice com) our dps time on the brain skyrocketed, meaning we entered phase 3 fairly easily. Getting phase 3 to go well needed only a minor adjustment of where the adds were tanked. And after effectively only 1 night on Yogg Saron he was down! Congrats to all those involved.

Meanwhile we were also doing Colloseum 1 night a week, the early bosses in colloseum give us a lot less trouble than the later Ulduar ones though. Hence we are currently also at 3/5 in Colloseum.

Today we had our first look at Trial of the Crusader (10man), fighting off the Northrend Beasts. We quickly got the hang of Gormok on phase one, but phase two proved to be somewhat harder, since there were not one, but two Jormungar! After a while we learned how to deal with them too, and found ourselves facing Icehowl in phase three. Here the progress slowed down, but we kept the spirit high despite alot of wiping, and after some hour we found ourselves standing next to a dead yeti!

I must say that I'm not very impressed by the graphical design of the new raid, but on the other hand, the encounters seems to be well-designed and challenging (the healing was intense to say the least). Looking forward to when they unlock the next boss!

On a sidenote, we are now recruiting for tier 9 content, we're looking for:
A healing priest
A dps warrior
A hunter
A druid or two (feral/balance)
And an enhancement shaman.
check out our application page to learn more!

I'd also like to take the opportunity to congratulate Bigbadorugly, Boop and Indië on their promotions to officer rank, welcome aboard!

Despite the lack of website updates or killshots, we have made some nice progress over the last few weeks. In fact, we have killed all the watchers, and we're progressing nicely on General Vezax!

After a few nights of practice, 10 of our raiders managed to kill Yog-Saron! Congratulations to everyone involved! Special thanks to Kresh for his excellent raidleading!

Also, looks can be deceiving, but we apparently 4 manned him. Or perhaps we brought 4 rogues and 2 druids who are stealthing on this screenshot. Or perhaps people ran off right after the kill, to go brag in Dalaran, I don't know.