Been a long while, since I posted a "Backstory", in fact just looking at the last one and its been almost 6 months, man I have been slacking more than I realised. So I guess it's time to make amends for my erroneous ways.

So just a brief recap of where I left the story, a few months into The Burning Crusade myself and a few friends set up our own raiding guild, Deadwood. We had high hopes and put a team of suitably skilled raiders together and battled through Karazhan and eventually we got 25 people and went and killed Gruul.

Read more »

To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
Read more »

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
Read more »

After more than 5 years of having this in my quest log, I am very happy to have finally completed the Sceptre of the Shifting Sands questline. It all started with a loot drop from Broodlord Lashlayer in Blackwing Lair back in early 2006 and progressed very slowly as I gained rep to hit neutral rep , you start at hated, with the Brood of Nozdormu, which this took me until until late 2008 to achieve, as trying to do the rep grind by completing Hand of the Righteous was just plain dull and the easy way of killing stuff in the Ahn'Qiraj raid instances was difficult as during Vanilla my guilds were struggling to make progress and during TBC nobody wanted to raid them for no reward.

Read more »

Wrath of the Lich King and raiding ICC had become a bit of a chore for me lately, I found myself logging in for raids and do the occasional thing here and there, but my time in game has dropped dramatically because of this boredom/frustration and the guild drama a few weeks ago made things tougher.

The time that I spent in game outside of raiding was spent with some old guild mate and I have realised that the mad paced progression game is no longer the style of play for me. With Cataclysm incoming in the next few weeks I have decided that now is the best time to say goodbye to Immersion and join my friends in Saturday Knight Fever, a guild who is focused on the more social aspects of WoW rather than solely on raiding. Cataclysm will be fun and I know that Immersion will be there biting on the heals of the truly hardcore guilds and I know that I'll be jealous of their progress and thinking what if, but I just cannot commit to the time cost of that progression over my fun in game, sadly it does not add up anymore.

more »

No, not my total days played, but rather the number of days it took me to clear all raid content in WotLK. Sure I had defeated all bosses before over all of my characters but the Halion kill was on an alt and Evlyxx still needed that kill for me to consider him, and the rest of the WotLK raid content beaten. Sure I still have to kill a few bosses on hard mode (10 and 25) and of course there is the small matter of a 10 man Artard kill, but overall if Cataclysm was launched tomorrow I would have no regrets like I did at the end of vanilla and the Burning Crusade where I was a step away from entering the last raid tier each time.

My self induced progression stress is all now gone, its now fun all the way to Cataclysm, and thats not to say it hasn't been fun to get here! The surprise for me was not the fact that I had finally gotten to the end of the raid content in an expansion, that was my goal this time around all along, but rather the fact that I have got so close not on one alt but 4, Strigimaga my lock is closest with just a Lich King kill eluding the lil gnome, closely followed by the Mikmaq, my shaman, who mises only Lich King and Halion and then comes the mage (Valdaran) and the evil Evlyxx who both need Sindragosa, Lich King and Halion. I'm not going to repeat content from my previous posts about the State of Raiding  but the content wasn't as hard or maybe I just got better and/or surrounded myself with better players.

Read more »

In vanilla/classic WoW raiders were hard core players and the game was like a ladder you had to climb step-by-step to get to the top. Getting to 60 was a really epic journey and that took time and people learned their class and how to play the game generally. Once at 60 you farmed the 60 dungeons including Upper Blackrock Spire a 15 (and later 10) man raid zone that had no reset (ie it was like a normal 5 man dungeon) for blue gear that was capable of getting you into Molten Core and not getting your ass handed to you on a plate. There were armor sets for each class too. Once you started raiding there was a clearly defined progress path that really could not be fast tracked. 

The loot was relatively closely itemised so while upgrades for all were available in the latest and greatest there was also upgrades for people in the next tier down. This meant that there was variety in what you were doing each raid and if you had a new recruit who needed gear you were running content that would get them their raid gear.

Read more »