The past few weeks the folks at Exhumed and I have been going back and doing the meta, Glory of the Firelands Raider. We had all the required heroic kills and lacked only the Do a Barrel Roll achievement because we had always managed to hit a tornado. So our mission was simple get in there and kill her without getting hit by tornados. Easy!

Well it would have been had we not been plagued by a series of random DCs, people getting hit by brushfire (one of our group had that to get as well) and after 2 hours of wiping we decided to not calling a wipe for the brushfire, and then promptly went ahead and avoided ALL 4 obstacles at once, go figure.

A few of the team (aka the slackers) still need a few achievements and I'm sure we can go get them soon as the hardest ones are all done anyway.

I’d like to thank Sophina for being the pain in the ass wanting to start this achievement, Baniza for making it happen and all the other players that came along at various points to join the core of 8 that got the meta last night.

Top work folks, you made an old man very happy,

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Diablo 3, summer, end of expansion blues and more are affecting the WoW community right now. Many guilds are struggling to keep their members active in the game but here on Shadowsong EU, my guild, Exhumed, are thriving. All because of Firelands, yes I kid you not!

For the past few weeks we have been scheduling Firelands raids once per week to go and grab some achievements, heroic kills and a bit of fun to break up the monotony of nothing to do except maybe another alt run through Dragon Soul. A few people claimed they had been there, done that and got the T-shirt and weren’t interested. A few had never been and wanted to go get some easy HC kills via ye olde zerg method of beating old content. Warnings were given to say it wouldn’t be that way, the warnings were laughed at and we set off for doing normal kills with achievements.

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Cataclysm at launch had 3 raids in Tier 11, Blackwing Descent had 6 bosses, Bastion of Twilight had 4 and Throne of the Four Winds 2 bosses all had solid content that was hard enough for organised raiding groups and well formed pugs, but go in under-geared and without strategy and you didn't get far. We had variety, we had a change of scenery if we chose to do so. We even had the loot pinata in Baradin Hold. best of all we had the promise that we would get more smaller raids in more frequent patches. 4.1 would give us the Abyssal Maw, 4.2  Firelands  and 4.3 Dragon Soul.

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I've been struggling with my passion for raids for a while now. A lot of this was because my new job meant I couldn't raid as much as I wanted to and that didn't help me feeling detached from the latter half of the Firelands content. This was because my friends in Saturday Knight Fever weren't raiding at the cutting edge and as Firelands was great content and I was happy with that as we were progressing through at our pace.

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Wiping on bosses has been a way of life for me over the past 5 years. I started raiding in the summer of 20065 and while my first steps were being boosted by a top guild that didn't last long and I was soon wiping on early bosses in Blackwing Lair. We wiped for many weeks on Vaelastrasz (boss no2) and then many weeks on the 4th boss, Firemaw. No one complained as all 40 members knew what to do we just needed the practice to get the fight down.

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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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