You heard it here first!

Finally blizz have fulfilled my dream to play a gnome priest! Whether i actually have the patience to level another character is yet to be seen, but i will try!

Do blizz read my site? Hell No, but none the less, my dreams have finally come true!

~Cav~

Where are we now?

Its been almost 3 months since I last posted, but given my track record with this blog you shouldn’t be too surprised at that. I don’t do farewell posts, simply because they would contribute to over 50% of my post count.

Anyway, I just thought it was about time I did a bit of an update of where we are since May.

So as you may remember the situation was that Ulduar had just landed and it was causing major problems for our guild. We’ve never been a "large" guild and our lack of numbers was halting our raid progression. A number, I estimate around 3 of our regular raiders left the guild for pastures new, and this rocked the guild. There was a snowball effect, which resulted in around 8-10 members moving on.

It took until the end of June for everything to really sink in and get back to "normal" In the meantime, I, along with another long standing member of the guild were promoted to officers and went about the task of rebuilding the guild.

We are now at a point where we are progressing through Ulduar nicely on 10man, and have started doing joint 25man runs with a guild in a similar position to ours. Whilst these are going sloooowwwwllly, we are progressing and learning each others personalities and abilities along the way.

But the most important, and in fact noticeable thing over the last 3 months is the spirit! Since June everyone has been amazing. I think we are now at a place where we have again, a like-minded set of people who have similar goals in wow. There is no doubting that we all want to progress and see new content, but we’re doing it at our pace. Those that don’t raid are not being talked about (which has happened in the past) and everyone is left to get on with there own thing. In fact the guild is pretty self sufficient now, so much so that I don’t really do anything in my role as officer!

Where do we go from here?

Who knows! The current bug where XT is stuck in hard-mode has really affected our plans for this week. The aim was to extended the raid lock-out and clear ulduar over the next two weeks, with a view to starting the new content the following week.

I would still really like to clear ulduar, but we need to consider what the rest of the guild would like, although tbh there are still a number of people in the guild that would like to raid, but cant get their gear levels up to the required levels, mainly because we don’t run naxx anymore.

So there we are. Valerius is fighting fit, and long may they continue. If I was a betting man, I wouldn’t bet against Valerius getting back on the 25man radar before Christmas!!!

~Cav~

The 3 P's

Practice! Practice! Practice!

Most of my wow time consists of completing dailies and raiding, that’s essentially all I have the time or patience for at the moment. However this weekend I took the opportunity to do a few heroics for some rep and shards.

What I came to realise is that ive become a really lazy healer, whether its because you have that extra support in raids, or just because mana isn’t generally an issue when raiding, but I found heroics, whilst not earth shatteringly impossible, sufficiently challenging.

With Misty getting closer to 80 Im going to make it a target of mine that we do more heroics together, which will also give me the opportunity to stay sharp, either with healing hands or the dps stick “pew pew”.

What doesnt kill you, can only make you stronger

This was put best by our new/current GM. Essentially we have shaken the tree and some stuff has fallen out.

At the moment valerius is struggling as a guild, the spirit and core of the guild remains, but we are leaking raiders each day. This was a result of the increasing frequency of cancelled raids, which as frustrated and upset people.

Firstly, I do not blame those people that have left, nor those in the guild that simply don’t raid. We are not a “hardcore” guild and I believe that individuals are free to play the game in whichever way suits them.

It is important for the guild that people who are not happy and not achieving personal goals, should reflect upon their role in the guild. If they do not see the guild progressing at the same speed they want, it is better they leave than resent those they have come to call friends.

I am a true believer that sometimes it is necessary to take a step back in order to take two forward, and that is certainly true here. For whatever reason valerius has hit a wall, but it is only (imo) temporary and we will break through that wall.

A solid raid group does not come easily and we have been fortunate that many of those that raid with valarius have been doing so for a number of years. It is reasonable that with recruitment drive comes inconsistency.

For valerius, now is a time to regroup, and rebuild, make new friends and understand our strengths and weaknesses as a collective. With time we will becoming a force again and I strongly believe we will come out of this a bigger, stronger, and happier guild than before.

commenting problems

It has just been brought to my attention by Tobold that embedded comments do not seem to be working... Ive tested a number of work arounds, but for some reason it just doesnt want to work.

For now i have revereted back to the pop-up comments page, so please feel free to comment as you see fit.

p.s. i am going to continue to delude myself that the problem with blogger is why i have not received a comment in over a month!

~Cav~