Immersion, already deep in turmoil and struggling to rebuild hit the bottom of the pit of despair this morning when our GM got hacked.

Fortunately, 2 of his real life friends saw him online outside of his normal hours, got no reply from their /whispers saw him doing odd things and reported it to a GM as they were on the phone to him. Blizzard acted quickly but not before the guild was disbanded presumably after emptying the vast amounts of gold and items from the guild bank. The process is being reversed but I'm not sure we'll ever know what was lost and especially as the por fellow had our pre-guild bank, guild banker on his account also that was still used for auctioning stuff off for the guild.
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Aargh! Is all I can say. Still not sure if the feeling I have is joy or annoyance. But sometimes lady luck can be a cruel mistress.

On Evlyxx, I have farmed Stratholme for a chance of getting the Baron's Mount lots, since achievements have been around I know the actual figure is a rather lowly 18 , I know people that got lucky on their first run, 1 guy I even had to tell him how to activate the Baron as he'd cleared the trash to the Slaughter House but couldn't get in to access Baron Rivendare. /sigh

I also know one poor fellow who has farmed Strat for the mount like his life depended on it, At 70 it was on his paladin and since Wrath of the Lich King it has been on his deathknight. The mount is rare, read the comments on wowhead and you hear stories from both extremes.

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Well for me Wrath of the Lich King is finally conquered I have succesfully defeated Arthas, the Lich King  on 10 and 25 man modes, no heroic version but I really never anticipated that happening. Its been a long journey, I started attempts on Lich King 10 way back in February when I joined Immersion, missed the run where the 10 man group killed him and that meant progression moved directly onto the hard/heroic modes and that meant no more attempts on Arthas

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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.
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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.
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Guild drama, been pretty free of it since I joined Immersion, we did have a small hiccup a few months ago when the GM and an officer (friends in the real world too) decided that as we had killed the Lich King they had finished WotLK, which is their decision and its not a bad one if your circumstances demand more out of game than you can commit with the game as a hobby.

Anyway I digress, the issue I believe started back a few weeks ago when our Shadowmourne bearer finally got his first Lich King kill and therefore his box of goodies. Fair play to him he agreed at somepoint that as the guild had helped him get it that the guild should get the goodies out of the box, the system devised was complicated and was a combination of  raid attendance, DKP and a dice roll but it gave everyone a chance of winning one of these uber rare in game items. Long story short the winner of the 1st choice was an officer who hadn't actually raided for months but was always on standby therefore earning DKP and attendance. A small debate ensued and the officer in question actually declined to choose and the items were all handed out.

The GM was upset by the attitude of the guild and said as much to us, but as a rank and file member nothing more happened. On its own this type of event would be unremarkable and whilst the person affected would have a right to feel bad would not cause major guild drama, then the officer left stating the reason as the guild no longer felt like the guild of old, a bit dramatic but I can empathise with the feeling having been there before.

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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.
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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.

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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.
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Another day, another round of sifting through the emails.

Is it me or does everyone get 10 spam emails for every 1 genuine one? Of course the fact that I stupidly put my main email address onto the web back in 2001 didn't help my cause. Anyways, with all those lucky people getting beta invites I live in hope of one day finding out that I too have been awarded an invite.

Recently my hopes have been dashed more frequently by hoax e-mails from Bilzzard.com and any other variant of the words Blizzard, cataclysm, beta and battle.net you wish to imagine all claiming that I had been "chosed" for the beta.
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With the saga of ISP issues now behind me, I am back raiding with Immersion, my 25 man raiding guild. In the 5 weeks I've been out of it, the guys and gals have added 2 more hard modes as they have now defeated Blood Princes and Valithria Dreamwalker. Also, Halion was worked on lots and finally defeated and I have yet to have my first tries on this as a healer.

The other big change in the guild was a huge number of new guildies to keep us raiding through the summer, which is usually a period of inactivity, so I'm really happy that this won't be the case for us, so /salute to the officer team. My only concern, is quite selfish as the bulk of the new guys are healers meaning more rotation for the non-officer healers, which is a pain as 2 of the regulars are officers, but I do have the option of dusting down the old shadow skills as the off-set I have built up is plenty good enough, even if I'm not!!

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This weekend my 10 man raid guild decided that the summer was too good to miss and with Cataclysm just around the corner a break was needed for us all to charge our batteries and be fresh for the next wave of challenged.

I must admit I wasn't ready for this myself and the announcement came out of nowhere, but as enough of the group had asked for the break to our raid leader he did exactly as I would have so /salute to Posie for doing that. At the end of the day most of the guys and gals of All about Beer are not hard core progression raider types, their attitude to raiding is very casual and focused on having fun although their drive is first class and that is what made raiding with them worthwhile.

It all started in June 2009 when I got dragged kicking and screaming on an alt into Naxx, I was focusing on my mage as the primary alt at the time and I took my bad DPS into Naxx with a group that was completely unknown to me except for Posie (on his priest), Aphra (who I knew as a mage, Xabinkinniel) and Stabbster (an alt of a guidie, Wollo). The rest where in fresh faced raiders ready to learn their craft in Naxx. It turned out that there were 3 married couples in the team and we had a riot. OK progress was made half the team as we downed Kel'Thuzad and went on to slay Sartharion (with all drakes dead). A top night was had but, I had low expectations about things lasting long. How wrong I was to be!

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Still suffering from Internet issues (good game TalkTalk) I have been unable to raid now for over 4 weeks. My gold making project is going well enough but nothing that really was worth mentioning here. So I decided to go exploring and discovering a few interesting places people rarely visit in-game because they don't know it exists, has no real purpose or is not really meant to serve as anything more than eye-candy on flight paths.

The list is not really long but over the next few weeks I'll be making a post on each of them. Today the location is  Stormwind. Yeah I know what you're thinking EVERYBODY goes to Stormwind, big place, capital city of the humans. Well I shall reveal a tiny part of Stormwind that took me 5 years to find and I thought I'd share with you as it hidden in plain sight!
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I am loving the RealID system. It allows me to to stay in touch with the people I have become friends with online regardless of where they are in WoW. However, the reign of it being the best thing in WoW since the Dungeon Finder  is about to come to a very abrupt end after a very short time.

With the announcement (source) yesterday, that in future forum posts on Blizzard sites will display our full name rather than that of our on screen alter ego, Blizzard seem to have taken the golden egg, covered it in grease and thrown it to Robert Green.

I personally don't want everyone I may encounter to be able to Google me and see what my thoughts on a video game are, sure some people I couldn't careless about them knowing but the guy that in 10 years will want to hire me as a big shot in his multi-million pound enterprise certainly doesn't need access to such ramblings. Therefore, I am now forced into a corner about posting on the forums either I keep quiet and preserve my anonymity or I have my say and risk the whole world finding out my views. Sadly, I'll be choosing the keep quiet option, at least on the Blizzard forums.

Anyways my piece has been said, feel free to post comments below as I'd like to know if I'm being over sensitive or not. more »