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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Deathy is dead! 
(screenshot courtesy of Exhumed)

I'm glad to report that on February 9th, 2012 myself and 9 friends from Exhumed successfully slaughtered Deathwing and therefore saved the citizens of Azeroth from their impending doom. But seriously, I was honoured to be part of the guild's first kill and as much as my ego would like to think they couldn't have done it without me they most definitely could have although I'm glad they did let me tag along despite my lowly trialist rank in the guild.

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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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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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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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A real quick post to plug my current best friend type addon, GTFO.

Put in the authors own words, GTFO is:

GTFO provides an audible alert when you're standing in something you're not supposed to be standing in. In some cases, you'll be warned before you start taking damage. This mod improves your situational awareness and is recommended for dungeon divers and raiders of all skill levels as even the most seasoned veteran sometimes needs a reminder to GTFO.

Its something that allows you to have your tunnel vision, healing blinkers or whatever is distracting your attention from the fire beneath your feet, a simple "beep" type noise alerts you to potential danger. Its really simple works straight out of the box and really I don't know why anyone should be without it.

If you're certain that you avoid 100% of such damage, I challenge you to download it use it for a month and prove to yourself how awesome you are. If you've managed to not trigger this addon for a month please leave a comment below, uninstall the addon and apply to join Saturday Knight Fever on the Shadowsong EU realm. more »

Well what a chaotic time it has been. Been busy at work these past few weeks and been enjoying my WoW time a bit too much and have neglected a couple of updates and certainly forgotten to keep the ol' blog upated with my most recent exploits.

Since hitting the That's A Lot Of Bait guild achievement and eating many Seafood Magnifique Feasts me and the guys and gals of SKF have been having a blast. We've added 2 more boss kills to the list first was Maloriak and that was soon followed by Valiona and Theralion.

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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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Heroics, love them or hate them they are without doubt the big topic of the moment. There is very little middle ground and it is the cause of lots of emotional outbursts in the SKF /g channel.

What I have noticed though is that the 2 camps are adamant that their view is correct and their belief is based on one thing. My take on this magic factor is unlike most theories I have seen paraded around the WoW blogosphere it is not dependant on the skill of the player, the class they play or indeed how hardcore or casual they are.
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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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Duane has decided he hates Cataclysm.

Back in Wrath Duane loved Warcraft and has always been a bit of an instance junkie. He did change his main from the DPS God class of the week to the OP pally tank. Now to be fair, Duane was a really good mage and like myself just got bored of raiding on a mage because the rotation as arcane was the old 1,1,1,2 that you could macro so you could watch TV and raid, another guildie did this one ICC raid and let his 4 year old play while he was on the phone one a Lady Deathwhisper kill and still out DPS'd 6 others. He wasn't so good on his paladin at first but with practice and some gear he became a reasonable, if occassionally reckless tank who did specialise in chain pulling and actively encouraged the AoEing down of vast numbers of mobsvast numbers.

When Cataclysm launched, Duane levelled his paladin furiously capped mining and blacksmithing real quick and was 85 before most of us. We finally caught him up and went instancing and had a few teething troubles on the normal mode 85 dungeons because Duane didn't like CC as it slowed us down and refused to accept that slow steady progress was actually quicker than recovering from a chaotic pull.
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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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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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Patches are time for change in Warcraft be the tiny ones or behemoths like 4.0.1 which we have just received. Blizzard document the major changes that they make but behind the scenes they also make tweeks and major overhauls that go completely undocumented outside Blizz HQ.

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