Archive for August, 2006

If you have a chip on your shoulder with the Alliance and feel the need to exort them to “respect my authoritie”, may I suggest joining the war in PVP Battlegrounds. I’m about a gnat’s fart away from earning the Exalted reputation with the Frostwolf Clan of Alterac Valley. Its rewards are great and now that Blizzard has changed the dynamic of the battlefield, it is much more frenetic. I saw events tonight I hadn’t seen before in the entire time I played in that battle ground. I’ve been in rounds where I never died (not once). I’ve seen a boss elemental summoned by the Horde to roll a frosty ball of death up for the Alliance (twice). I’ve even seen a Night Elf druid who didn’t shape-shift to get away (gasp!). All this and more awaits in the battlegrounds.

Sure, the Alliance actually won in the example I’m attaching via screenshot here, but if you get your hordey-behind up to lvl 60 and snag some sweet gear from our guild’s increasing raid schedule, you’ll be living the glorious life of battle soon enough. Check out some of the lower-level battlegrounds early on too, just to get a feel for the thrill of it all.

Greetings from your neighborhood hunk of totem-flingin’ beef, Ungulataur. I clicked on the talent preview for the expansion (I highly recommend you do the same) and discovered to my delight that everyone’s pretty much getting a shot of steroids (or in Tauren’s case: you guessed it, STEERoids).

Here’s what I mean.

Totem of Wrath: 20yd range, 20sec duration, improves friendly spell-casters’ chance to crit by 10%.

Totemic Mastery: the radius of effect on friendly targets by your totems is increased by 30yds.

Obviously, Blizzard wants shamans on BOTH sides of the faction fraction to get their shamans raiding but this is ridiculous. By the way, Enhancement shamans get DUAL WIELD. That’s right ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we clearly have a case of pre-meditated un-nerfing.

Our little guild is growing! The benefit is that spur-of-the moment loot-farming runs, bodyguarded low-level instances, and grouping is happening more and more. People are getting to know one another, work as a team, and identify roles, strengths, and weaknesses.

The drawback is that harder high-level instances now have well more than 5 people interested in attending. What with RL responsibilities and level concerns, we are not always able to man two teams for any particular run. To counter this, we all made a strong push to unlock UBRS, since it and the lower side (LBRS) can be run by 10 people at once…

So, this makes using the schedule that much more crucial, so that team composition for 5-man events, like this Friday for Scholomance, can be established prior to the actual event. If you would like to go, but feel that you may not need to attend, or that you might be a burden (low level, etc.), sign up anyway, and place yourself in the queue.

Good work play, everybody! Let’s keep it up and have a strong, powerful guild. It won’t be too much longer before we can start on the 20-man instances…

Congratulations to us all! Hellfire Club has finally gotten to a new level of instances with Necromage attaining the final part of the key for UBRS, the Gemstone of Spirestone, from Highlord Omokk in LBRS. After what seems like a half dozen or more runs in total for it, we picked it up last night and rushed to Dustwallow Marsh to beat Emberstrife into submission and Hellfire Club now has the key to Upper Blackrock Spire!

Of course, running UBRS (OO-Bers) and successfully finishing it are two different things. However, to commemorate the occasion I made sure we had a Kodak Moment (click the picture for a larger version):

Needless to say we had some challenges, primarily due to the facts that:

• We had a party of 9 vs. 10,
• About 1/3 of the party was less than level 60,
• Maanae (Shaman - 56)
• Paed (Priest - 59)
• Necromage (Mage - 60)
• Dixi (Priest - 60)
• Gorysh (Rogue - 60)
• Skykomish (Warrior - 57)
• Ungulataur (Shaman - 60)
• Jalo (Hunter - 60)
• and Bigjj (Hunter - 53)
• This was our first time in UBRS as a guild, and
• I lost power at my house right after the Rookery for about 45 minutes.

Once I got back in we had one final wipe as wave after wave of elite Dragonkin, Whelpings, and Blackrock Orcs laid siege upon us in a room with no escape; but at least no one clicked on any of the rookery eggs accidentally, inadvertantly pulling a Leeroy Jenkins! So, at around 2:30AM we decided to call it quits, but not without a sense of accomplishment.

Hellfire Club FTW!!!

Keep a sharp eye out for our new guild members. I think one was named Jalo. You will have to look for yourself and confirm this sighting.

Cheers