This year has been a real roller coaster ride for me in Warcraft and to be honest I got to admit that what looked real scary at the beginning ended really well and I'm really looking forward to the next ride although I must admit I'm hoping for a more gentle run this time around. That said, I have doubled my wow friends list and have had the honour of being in 2 awesome guild with a load of awesome people and really I couldn't wish for being surrounded by better people.

So with a new year almost upon us (or probably here by the time you're reading this I thought I'd take you all on a whirlwind tour of MY 2012.

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After 3 years and 4 months I have finally gotten my legendary mace, Val'anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings and I appreciate that it is an expansion too late but my first fragment was gained on April 15th 2009 (the day Ulduar was introduced in Patch 3.1) thanks to one of my healing crew passing up the chance for the fragment, thanks Spicefang! 

Finally last week I hit the magic 30 fragments on our Leviathan kill, which meant all I needed to do was grab myself a Yogg'Saron kill with 1 keeper missing and throwing the Shattered Fragments of Val'anyr at Yogg. But we were a small group and many had never seen the Yogg fight and there was a lot of tired people failing miserably so my planned night of victory failed at the very final hurdle.

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A few weeks back I made a tough decision, I love the guys and girls at Saturday Knight Fever, they rock they really do. But sometimes you have to be selfish and after a lot of  soul searching and attempts to prevent it happening I decided that I had to leave them behind. The options were limited, I love WoW for 2 reasons, the friendships I have built and the challenge of raiding and losing 50% of the reason I play simply means I don't enjoy playing the game and that meant leaving WoW or leaving SKF. Having tried out SWTOR and not feeling  that it was along term WoW beater yet I decided to change guilds. 

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Christmas is the season for giving and today I have decided to give a little to my beloved guildies in return for a little bit of effort on their part.

Their task is simple reply to a post on our guild forums before the Lunar Festival starts on January 21st 2012, their reward will be a Mekgineer's Chopper. So if you'e a Saturday Knight Fever member, or would like to join us on Shadowsong EU and win this little beastie please visit the our forums. more »

Real life can be a harsh mistress at times. Family life and work place demands on us all and can cause us to change our habits.

For the past 6 years, I have managed to fit raiding in around family life and fortunately found guilds that started at 20:00 my time (21:00 server) and when my son grew older and that restriction was removed I was able to join friends and raid with them at 19:00 (20:00 server) despite this being a tight squeeze as the I like spending time with the wife to eat meals and stuff before she settles in to watch the plethora of soaps she pollute her mind with.

But recent events have caused me much pain and suffering. Firstly, I went through hell in my job, I'll not bore you with the details here but long story short I suffered broken promises, no pay rises, no hope of promotion and no professional development over 3 years before I had to quit or get signed off with depression. Neither option was good but the medical route wasn't really compatible with getting a new job so I quit and took a 2 month summer break to look for a new job. After hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews I landed myself a nice job with a 8 day shift pattern. 

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Raiding is a serious side of Warcraft, in fact any MMORPG you are part of a team and your 9-39 collegues are depending on you not to waste their time. We expect, nay demand that people show up on time, come prepared by having food, potions, elixirs, and any other buffs. We expect people to have their best gear equipped, enchanted, gemmed and fully repaired. We all hope that others have learned the strategies before seeing the boss encounters "live". 

We all play our game for fun, relaxation and a break from the realities of life but sometimes we forget this fact and tempers flare when people make silly mistakes and occasionally this leads to a bit of drama when we should be having a laugh about it and use them as tension breaker during stressful periods in game.

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Yes finally I have had a chance to experience the nerfed content that is the Firelands raids a few times and hell they  have nerfed it hard.

Prior to the recent nerfs my beloved guild, Saturday Knight Fever, were 3 of 7 in the Firelands with Shannox, Beth'tilac and Lord Rhyiolith soundly beaten. We worked hard for them kills and learned a lot about the fights as we perfected the strategies to our groups style.. 

The day the nerf came the guys killed 3 new bosses, Alysrazor, Baleroc and Majordomo Staghelm on the first night. They breezed through the content with people that hadn't even stepped foot into Firelands until that night and we're now stuck fighting Ragnaros.

Now my issue here is that despite killing these 3 bosses for the past 3 weeks I'm not convinced that anyone has really learned the fights (myself included) as some there have been certain team combinations that have failed to kill one of the bosses therefore it seems that we're just zerging our way through and while it's good for team morale the die hard raider in me weeps tears of sadness as I am getting no personal sense of accomplishment.

As things stand now Blizzard should just place a chest full of loot and rep in by the portal and send us straight to Ragnaros, which is thankfully providing the team with a challenge, which hopefully will be beaten as soon as we can field a solid team with 2 main spec tanks.

Now I seriously hope that 4.3 is very close because if not we're going to be faced with farming Firelands on 2 nights a week and using our other raid night to gear up alts. So overall my opinion is summed up by the irelord himself, Too Soon Exectus! Lets hope that with the coming of a 3rd level of raid difficulty the nerf bat  will stay away from our raids until they are no longer current content.

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Back in April 2010, Blizzard announced the single raid lockout for 10 and 25 man raids. They also announcede that the loot in Cataclysm raids would be the same iLevel for 10 and 25 man raids. It is now 10 months since Cata launched and I have had time to assess the impact this policy has had on raiding, guilds and the game in general.  I finished Wrath in a 25 man raid team that was in turmoil due to internal guild drama and decided that in Cata I would stop being a progression type raider and "go casual" with a group of guys that I had raided with during TBC and early Wrath, we like to consider it a retirement home for ex-casual hardcore raider. During this time,we have only done 10 man raids, so my viewpoint may be somewhat blinkered or one sided but I still think it is valuable in assessing the impact of the policy that is in place.
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A week ago today 4.2 launched and the Firelands raid was thrust upon us. I was happy that we managed to kill Cho'Gall pre-nerf but a little sad that we failed to get Nefarian and Al'Akir down and having seen the Tier 11 content post nerf I'm a little bit more miffed than I was this time last week. Anyhow, I am sure you, my loyal readers don't want to know that, you want the low-down on the Firelands!

Day one saw almost the entire server head there and start farming rep like men (and women) possessed, I fell into this trap in Icecrown Citadel and regretted it because all it did was make me bored of the trash upto Marrowgar even quicker than the rest of the place and despite being a complete rep whore I'm not prepared to suffer that again. The reports in /2 of exotic epics and masses of rep kept flooding in but I resisted the temptation. I did have a quick 30 minutes on my lock as some guildies were missing a DPS but I kept resisting the temptation on Evlyxx.
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Finally after what seemed like hundreds of deaths to Cho'Gall (I'm sure the number was a lot less to be honest) the guys of Saturday Knight Fever (sadly there were no real life gals in the raid) killed Cho'Gall.

Last week I had experimented with a 4 man ranged team that simply obliterated the adds but left too little DPS on the big fella himself and meant we lost a lot of time switching and caused people to make minor mistakes which in turn led to too much corruption which really hurt us in the final phase. This week we went with 3 ranged and 2 melee and on the very first pull of the night down he went.

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Just a quick post to advertise a need my guild, Saturday Knight Fever, have right now. We are looking for tanks and ranged DPS to fill some raid needs we have.

As you'll see from the WoWProgress info, we're not cutting edge we're casual and if you're looking for progresion raiding we're not for you. We like to consider ourselves as a casual guild that raids rather than a raiding guild. That said, when we raid we still respect the content and prepare just like a proper raiding guild would expecting people to use flasks, food buffs, gems and enchants.

Still interested? You want more information?

• We are EU based; 
• We are on the Shadowsong realm; 
• We raid 3 times a week on Thursday, Monday and Tuesday;
• We raid between the hours of 20:00 and 23:00 CET (thats 19:00 to 22:00 GMT); 
• We have fun while raiding; 
• We are a mature guild (21+); 
• We are a long established guild (6 years old in February); 
• We have fun when not raiding; 
• If you don't want to raid but still are interested you can join too!

If you're still interested in joining Saturday Knight Fever, click here to visit our website.

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Ours but to do & die, into the Bastion of Twilight rode the Saturday Knight Fever, dragon to right of them, dragon to left of them, dragon in front of them, volleyed & thundered; storm'd at with shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of Hell, we had fought so well, came thro' the jaws of Death, back from the mouth of Hell, all that was left of us.

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Apologies for this post but it was a rapid replacement of the one planned. Last night was one of the proudest moments of my WoW raiding life. In only our 4th real night of attempts on Magmaw, Saturday Knight Fever killed him. The only better moments I can recall were my first kills on Nefarian, Gruul and Lich King. Sure for most progression raiders we're weeks behind but the point is we're not elite raiders we're a bunch of regular folks attempting content we're not really ready for.

Let me explain, our designated MT was healing, one of our top DPS was healing and 2 of our healers were DPSing. Confused? Well we took 2 pally tanks, a retadin, 2 DPS warriors, a resto druid, a resto shammy, a disc priest (me), a mage and a warlock into the fight and the Lava Worms were never gonna die quick enough with only 2 ranged DPS on them, sometimes you have to go with what you've got and use that off spec or respec entirely.


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Happy 2011 to you all, a New Year and a new expansion (well it is less than 1 month old) and I'm full of hope for a cracking year in Warcraft and my plan is to bring you my news of what it is like playing a priest in Cataclysm on these very pages. I can't promise much in the way of theorycrafting but when anything noteworthy happens in game to Evlyxx, I'll post it here and my aim is for this to be done regularly each Wednesday and Saturday, there maybe times when I post additional "newsflash" type things in addition to the standard posts and today is one such post. I'd love your feedback so please leave a comment.

During a recent guild Heroic Blackrock Caverns run, I had an epithany moment. I was running with a group that was 2 pallies and 2 warlocks. The crowd control was good and on trash I was being under utilised as a healer and decided to help speed up the trash clearing by actually using my Atonement build (33/6/2) and smiting the main target.
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With 2010 drawing to an end I thought I'd take a look back at the year's highs and lows. From changing guilds, to killing the Lich King suffering ISP issues and more guild drama 2010 has bee a strange year. I have had great times and bad times, happy days and sad days but I've never regretted anything I have done and have become better as a person out of game as well as in game because of it.
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Tonight the boys and girls from All about Beer, the guild of friends that I house my 'lock with managed to kill the Lich King. Sure, to many this is no real achievement, but for a small group of very casual folks its a big deal and it was done in gear that would qualify us as a strict 10 man group and many people don't get to do that.

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On December 7th, we will begin the charge to kill Deathwing, but before we even think about the ultimate goal of this expansion we need to consider what smaller steps we need to take.

Firstly you should review the 10 steps I mentioned in my post Preparing For Deathwing last week as at least 9 are still relevant. Now you've done them, lets look at the task and set out the rest of our gameplan.

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In only a few short weeks, we will begin the charge to kill Deathwing, but before we even think about the ultimate goal of the next expansions we need to consider what steps we can take now to help us.

The tasks can be broken down into a few small chunks under 2 wider categories, namely things we can do before December 7th and things that can be done after December 7th. I'm going to call these Before and After just to keep it short and sweet.

Today I am going to look at the Before tasks and the After will be covered in a topic early in December.
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The Backstory Shorts will be a series of short posts about things I have experienced in Warcraft that don't warrant a full post but are too numerous to make a compilation post on.

My first subject is one that was inspired by a post from the WoW Insider, Revenge is a Dish Best Served at Level Cap. That is the mobs I love to kill out of pure, unadulterated hatred because of numerous failures to survive unexpected encounters with them in the past

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More thoughts on the changes brought to us in 401, sorry I can't be bothered with all the dots any more, lazy? I prefer to call it efficient.

A general rule in raiding has been "move out of the fire", the "fire" has ranged from the aforementioned fire to poison, void zones and acid. It has come in many shapes, many colours and many encounters from as far back as Zul'Gurub right the way through to Icecrown Citadel. Sure there have been a few examples where the "fire" has been good to stand in, the poison from the Sons of Hakkar in Zul'Gurub, the Blue Goop (as my old guild described the Bog Giants aftermath in Serpentshrine Cavern) and the protective bubbles in Malygos
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