Thoroughly Thrall is the guild newsletter blog for Disciples of Thrall on the Moon Guard server. If your not a member, this nonsense will bore you to tears.
Herro Disciples!!! It's been a long time coming but Disciples of Thrall are back in the swing of things...ish.
The issue we had before was burn-out guild wide. We were raiding with these key issues:
We had an uneven raid comp because we wanted our social friends to be in the core raid group.
We had attendance problems because we wanted our social friends to be in the core raid group and there was no schedule that could work for everyone.
The overarching theme here is that we were using our greatest strength against ourselves.... We liked each other too much. It's an easy solution: Disciples of Thrall is raid free. That's not to say you can't put together a raid in DoT, but we won't schedule a raid night. I've put my main on another guild that I plan to raid with, but I will be keeping all my other toons on DoT because I love my guildies and I love my guild. I still want everyone to hang out with one another and still be able to call DoT home, but I don't ever want it to be a job.
In closing this post on the grand-reopening of DoT, (confuse much?) I wanted to mention that ranks have been changed on purpose to make sure some asshole can't make a power play and steal the guild again. DoT is yours... FOR-EV-ER (sandlot style).
It's time guys. The Disciples of Thrall made it almost 2 years as a guild, but our time has drawn to a close. Very soon I will be disbanding the guild, and for good reasons. "WHAT? WTF! WHY DISBAND?!?" I can understand why you might take issue with this decision, but I have thought it out and it is the only option.
Guild membership has dwindled, and during hiatus more members left and we were unable to bring new ones to the forefront.
I could pass leadership on to someone else, but of those I trust to lead the guild no one has wanted the responsibility (and I can't blame them for that).
I don't want to see our guild languish in the way I've seen other guilds languish. It's depressing, and it strikes a contrast to why we made the guild in the first place, to play and enjoy the game as a close knit group.
Have you ever had to break up with someone? Sometimes its not easy. You think, "Ive been at this with him/her for years, and now all that time is wasted." The reality is that even though you aren't going to stay with that person you got a lot of life experience and memories along the way, and when you know it's time, it's time. Here is your DoT end of days faq:
Q.) What about the guild bank?
A.) Over the next few days I will be liquidating guild assets into gold as much as possible. Those that have a claim to that gold and have contributed need only send me an email, but with people logging on so sparatically there is no way for me to be diplomatic about it.
Q.) Where the fuck are you going? Where am I supposed to go?
A.) In the short term I don't know. I may server hop a bit, but I honestly don't have alot of interest in playing WoW at the moment. I will certainly give SWTOR a shot when it comes out, and would love to join a guild with you guys (Sith side of course) but my days of guild leadership are behind me. Nothing saying I won't come back to wow if I find it calling me, or if the next xpac is the shit. But, you never know.
Q.) What about the vent server?
A.) I will probably maintain the vent server until the end of the year, and I will post a paypal link for anyone that would like to contribute to it continuing. Its pretty cheap, like 45 bucks a year or something like that.
Final thoughts from Thall's Hand,
Im going to miss all of you guys, Sezmra, Marty, Darkie-poo, Rumblerz, Jimbo, Glenda, Cimmers, Bhoardy-Bhoard, Moo, Graal, and yes even Kyle (Please don;t be upset if I forgot anyone, theres too fucking many of you. You guys made it worth it, and it's with you in mind that I end it. Stay in touch, stay sweet, and Lok'Tar!
Just wanted to let everyone know that we started a sister guild on Rift. Alot of us either bought the game or are on trial accounts and are currently on shard Faeblight (shards are the same things as realms on wow, cute right?). We rolled Defiance, between the two factions Defiance isn't necessarily "Hordish", but the Guardian faction is 100% "Alliancy". The guild name is <Remnants of the Horde> and of course all current guildies are welcome to join. At this point Rift is more of a pleasant distraction from WoW than a replacement. I encourage everyone to give it a try and see how they like it. We will still be raiding on Tuesdays wowside and I expect interest to flip back over to WoW when 4.2 drops. As for Rift? Dark made a Warrior named Darkranos, I made a Hunter named Kaylith, and Lauri made a healer named Sezmra. The more it changes the more it remains the same, lol.
Anyhoo, please pass any questions along to my secretary, or send a carrier pigeon into the air when the DoT leer jet is flying overhead. Speaking of lightsabers:
1 year, 7 months. Thats how long the mighty DoT has been in existence. DoT has always been a casual guild and we have always valued friendship over progression. I don't want to see that change. We lost Bhoard recently to burn-out. He may come back, he might not. I hold no blame against Bhoard and neither should any of you. We play this game to have fun. Shit, we pay monthly for the privilege. If the game becomes more of a responsibility or a chore rather than fun, why play?
I feel some of this is my fault. We have been progression raiding for a while now. This is fine as long as people have fun doing it, however, I think we have been pushing ourselves too hard. As I said in raid last night, DoT is moving to raids 1 night a week. We had a fairly crappy run last night, multiple wipes, random shit that we couldn't predict. We also had fun. Jimbo was back, we got to raid with Tom after a long absence, Marty was in rare form. I had fun, I had laughs.
I love you guys and this guild, and I don't ever want anyone to feel like they have to show up, even though they don't want to play. Im making you guys the following promises:
I will never scold you or hound you for not playing or quiting wow. I really do like all of you guys and I want you to be doing what you want to be doing with your time.
We will raid as often as general consensus warrants it. We will be on 1 night a week for a while, when 4.2 comes out that may change, it may not. No pressure.
If someone comes into the guild and sows conflict they will be removed. I don't care if they can tank in cloth gear or heal an entire raid while chilling in Org. If conflict arises and I don't know about it you can always come to me and it can be confidential if you wish.
Last Note from Thrall's Hand
If you guys have comments or questions on the above, let me know. I just don't want anyone to turn up like this guy:
So tonight is the first run on Nefarian, I thought it would be nice to have a visual aid as we go. We will probably change up the strategy several times, but this should serve as a good starting point. I'm not explaining the whole fight here, its mostly just placement.
Phase 1A:
The fight will start with Darktholumew grabbing Ony "X" by the face and bringing her to the point and the position shown here. Betholoumew will be tanking Nef "Skull" on the opposite side. I will be kiting adds "Stars" until they die, at which point I will join the dps group.
Phase 1B:
When Ony doesLightning Disharge Dark will move her so the tail points at the dps group. At these intervals the sides of Ony are bad places to be. How we deal with this positioning may change from what I made here, but the idea remains the same. Sides of Ony = Bad. The main idea is to get Ony to about 5-10% and then switch to Nef and drop his health to 80% before killing her.
Phase 2:
As soon as Ony dies the fight turns into a bad Indianna Jones rip off. The floor fills with hot molten magma. Each of us will retreat to our special pillar which will be painted with purple, blue, or yellow. (We will assign teams later.) There will be "Chromatic Prototypes" at each pillar. We will have to interrupt each cast of "Fire Nova". We can continue to dps Nef during this time, but only if the healers can handle it. Also, we need to make sure the Prototypes die at the same time (or thereabouts) so we don't have them running around in phase 3. When Ony is close to dying in phase 1, be moving to your pillar if you can.
Phase 3:
Same as phase 1, with the following changes:
Dark will be kiting the adds.
Rumbler is all time Nef, and her main responsibility is making sure to keep Nef's breath away from adds, and coordinating with Dark to make sure he has enough room to kite them.
Dps is going to be FUCKING BURNING! Cooldowns, Bloodlust, dogs and cats having sex! Also, DPS and healers are responsible to stay out of the way of breath and tail lash.
Graal's "sigh" intervals will be increased.
I hope this helps us tonight. Making these maps was time consuming, but i'll be glad to do it again if it helps us down a boss. Lemme know if you think this was helpful.
So the mighty mighty DoT had quite the week for progression. Makes me wish we had a 3rd day to raid. Atramedes and Chimaeron are regarded as some of the harder fights in Cataclysm as a whole and I feel like we got our learn on fairly quickly with each of them. Chimaeron in particular was most impressive to me. 90% of the team had not seen the fight and we learned it, applied it, and killed it in just shy of an hour. Will Nefarian be so easy to beat? Most likely not. However I feel that we have grown well as a group and have become much more capable since our "Sindragosa wipefest" days.
So here's my thought, I would like to get Nefarian and his bitch ass robot sister down and I would like to devote 1 night a week to doing so. I realize that there is gear to be had for everyone on the prior 5 bosses, but we will never be able to say "Ah, we got everything we need from these guys," like we did in ICC. Different game now, for us anyway. There are still a lot of guilds where we were a few months ago. They go in, beat up magmaw, wipe 10 times on Omni-Tron, take their maelstrom crystals and call it a night. That's not us anymore, and I don't want it to be that way again.
We have a shot at downing all twelve bosses before the next content patch, and I think thats a great goal for us. The 4.1 patch is in release status on the PTR right now. That means we will see it drop the Tuesday after next (Thats my best educated guess). 4.1 will not have any raid content, but the new Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman 5 man's will have a shit ton of purple "almost tier" gear available for us to fill holes in our sets. If 4.1 drops say, on the 26th, we won't see Firelands for at least a month and a half. This gives us a solid 2 months to beat Nefarian, Ascendant Council, Cho Gall, and floaty turban wearing guy.
How do we do it? It actually won't be all that tough. On Tuesdays we go in on a fresh run of Bastion of Twilight. I figure including a Baradin Hold run we can get up to Ascendant Council and have a good amount of time on them as well. On Wednesday we go and punch Nefarian in the face. Ideally we beat Nefarian, and then we reset BWD each week for gear on Tuesday while making BoT the raid lockout night.
There is something I need from you guys to do this: Attendance. I know a lot of you are great at getting to every raid, and I appreciate it. I really really do. The issue with doing top end game bosses is that we can't explain the fight every week because our composition changed. I know people have real life shit, and work and the like, but I need people who want to raid to sign up. Tentative is not acceptable. We need to have a yes or no so we know what we are doing. Nothing sucks worse than waiting till after we are supposed to start because so-and-so might show up.
Last Note From Thrall's Hand:
Thank you all for reading my bitch list. Love you guys. Everyone is doing really really well. Except Bhoard. (He can't read so don't feel bad for him.)
-Kay
Ps, the video for this weeks post was requested by Lyrra:
Damn.... If you want to get the taste of that out of your mouth:
Disciples! I hope I find you all well. Perhaps you are reading this while running on a treadmill, or more likely while smoking cigarettes and eating cheetos. Progression goes well as we have downed Valonia and her Bro in Bastion, and we will likely add 2 more next week (Maloriak and Four Winds). As we grow deeper into this tier of content and gear becomes more readily available, we have more and more people wanting to raid in ten mans. Its going to be a while before we get a second team up and running, so I wanted some input on possible short term solutions to the problem. Here are a couple ideas I've been kicking around:
Have people who have no need of gear on early bosses rotate out on that content in favor of someone who might be able to get a drop and could use the experience. When the first "farm bosses" are down the "new" person would rotate out with the original person. Now the team is back to full force, and has members that have been working on progression content together week after week.
Dark has been kicking the idea around of making a second ten man group consisting of alts and people that have scheduling conflicts during normal raiding times. Time for this TBD.
There has also been talk from Bhoard, Graal, Dark, and myself about setting up a night during the week for rated bg's. It's not raiding, but it involves the same level of skill. Please let me know what times would work for you guys on this. Right now it would only be 1 night a week for an hour or two.
We need to figure something out here, because while we have 10+ people that want to raid, its obvious to me that having the same people running week after week has huge benefits as well. It's a tough balancing act, and as guild leader it's really hard to make sure everyone is happy. That brings me to my final point....
Last Note From Thrall's Hand:
We all like raiding, and bg's, and achievements, but that's not why Disciples of Thrall was formed. In the olden days I would hop from guild to guild. Some of them would raid (all horribly I might add.) some of them would just putz around. It was ok. It was like vanilla ice cream. If it's there I'll eat it.
Turns out you can get plenty sick of vanilla ice cream and the only thing you can do is set out to make your own flavor. And that's what we did. At the time there were only four of us, but we knew we enjoyed playing together and that made all the difference.
As we slowly added members, there would be shitty ones, but we would keep finding diamonds in the rough. A new tank named Rumbler in Zul Drak, or a pugtastic hunter named Grim- no Doom- hell it's just Marty. Jimbo and Glen and Bhoard helped make DoT what it is today, even though they had their own guild. There are too many to count, too many stories to tell... What it all boils down to is what makes DoT great, and that's the friendship, the family of it all. I'd take a virtual bullet for any of you bastards. WoW is about 18 times more enjoyable when you have cool people to enjoy it with. To prove my point, and to indulge in some nostalgia, I have made this little guy for you,
