I’m one of those people who thinks it’s fun to farm old artifacts from outdated content. My fellow guild leader Anubelle is another. We’ve been farming stuff like the Zul’Gurub mounts and the bindings in Molten Core for a while now.

Between us we have both a tiger (Anubelle) and a raptor (Jomotei), but we haven’t had much luck with mounts since that magical reset all those weeks ago when those two dropped in the same run. However, in order to increase our odds, and given our jump from level 70 to 80, we’ve recently expanded our expeditions to include Sethekk Halls for the Raven Lord mount and Magister’s Terrace for the big white chicken.

Well, given that I’m now writing a blog post, you’re probably suspecting that something dropped. It’s either that or a whine about an unmatched streak of frustration. You know what, maybe it can be both! Yes, I will start off with a whine.

We started tonight’s mount runs with a trip to Zul’Gurub. No tigers or raptors dropped. In fact, the only thing that dropped was me when I stopped by the Gurubashi arena while Anubelle was getting some coffee to wake up. I managed to kill some alliance death knight trying to make off with the chest only to be immediately ambushed myself by a horde rogue, a friend of the guild, who had been lurking in the shadows. Grr, fucking Gunir.

So there I am a short while later, arriving at Auchindoun, slightly peeved but ready to fight my way deep inside Sethekk Halls for another chance at that pretty raven mount. But what’s this? Anubelle has become bored while waiting for me to move both my hunter and my druid alt here (more on that later) and has tabbed out to watch YouTube videos of nerdraging WoW players.

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Yeah baby, yeah.

Now we can honestly say we’ve cleared all 25-men content. Once again though, we accomplish significant PvE progress with less than 25 people in the raid – what’s up with that?

Anyway, getting this done is really satisfying. We’ve heard time and time again people saying that this is the raiding activity they truly enjoy nowadays, what with everything else being pretty much on farm for quite a while, at least if hard non-kill achievements aren’t considered.

Having accomplished this a day after a guild group managed to get the 10-men Undying achievement is quite satisfying as well, and marks the end of a great raiding week.

On a personal note, I’m really proud to see our guildies walking around with these titles. We’ve accomplished great things so far as a community and a raiding guild and I’m sure we’ll only keep getting better as we go forward.

So we gathered around some fine folks on an offday and went to see how well we’d perform. 3 hours, 1 skill check and 0 deaths later we’ve got a new flashy title and some more confidence in our guild members’ ability to execute things at a high level of performance and flawlessness.

These kinds of achievements mark the biggest difference between WotLK and pre-WotLK raiding, in my opinion. The idea that you can leave an instance with the same amount and quality of items but with very different goals achieved requires some adjusting to, and I’m quite certain a good number of people haven’t gone through that adjustment.

Part of the reason most people raid is for the challenge involved, and whether the challenge results in a purple, a title or just the warming knowledge you accomplished something hard shouldn’t make a difference.

We’ve added a section to the website where you can see see our roster of raiders.

The list can be sorted according to either class, raid role or guild rank. It can be accessed by clicking on the ‘Members’ link at the top of every page.

If you spot any omissions or wrong information do tell.

No new kills to report, but then we’ve already killed all the creatures that are out there to be killed. The only thing that remains is to kill a bunch of them at the same time (Sartharion with all 3 drakes up) and I’m confident that will come as soon as we can field a balanced raid with tanks that don’t disconnect every 10 seconds.

*cough*

Still, we’re steadily progressing in terms of performance, and during tonight’s raid we set some new guild benchmarks. First of all, we cleared both (heroic) Naxxramas and (heroic) Malygos in one night, putting together a very smooth run. We did have one wipe but only because a certain maintank started having hot flashes or something and decided to submit to Thaddius because people were failing the Heroic: Shocking! achievement. That elf will not go quietly into the night.

Another benchmark was set on Patchwerk as we killed him in 2 minutes 35 seconds, which ranks as a top 500 performance on Wow Web Stats (455/42705). It was a very nice improvement, especially considering we did not use haste pots or similar consumables or had stacked the raid with dps.

The Malygos kill to round off the night was a fast one as well and set a new benchmark for us as he died in 7 minutes 31 seconds. There’s still some distance to the Heroic: You Don’t Have An Eternity achievement, but still a very nice effort considering we were just clearing farm content and not going for any speed records.

The night was capped off in style as Alexstrasza left behind an Azure drake for us, which I think has only happened once before on our fair realm. Molgon was able to haxx a roll of 99, so congratulations to him. And just for the record; the next time you meet him, no, he’s not just happy to see you, that’s his newfound giant e-peen making that bulge in his robe.

All in all, a very enjoyable evening, and it’s nice to see our recruitment efforts paying off. We’ve come a long way already and come the next major content patch we look forward to proving in Ulduar that we’re one of the best guilds on the server. We certainly have the most bloodthirsty mages. And the hottest elves. And the furriest beartanks. And the shamans most likely to be ganked by zombies.