SPG: Raiding is gud.

Yes. That’s right. No more Naxx, Maly, or Sarth, and thank whatever spirit monsters your religion worships, because while I had never subscribed to the theory that Hell is repetition, boy howdy was I converted in T7.

So we’ve been dicking around in our new playground up thar in Storm Peaks, and I, at least, have been impressed with it. Fun vehicle-play, really unique encounters (every one of them!), stimulating visuals, annoying voice acting- it’s got everything I could ask for in a raid instance. Well, besides DPS plate. Honestly, I could gush a little about every encounter in there, though I won’t. Suffice it to say that it’s good to be having fun raiding again, and the encounters so far have been challenging, but not cock-blocky, which is just poifect.

Also, we’ve killed the first 11 bosses, yadda yadda, here’s the killshot(s):

Before you say anything, yes it’s real, I just compress my screenshots to memory-friendly MSPaint format to save hard drive space. Yes, actually that does make sense. Besides, if it wasn’t the actual killshot, would it say actual killshot? No. No, it would not. Suh-nap.

So one thing that bothered me in T7, particularly with Sarth, was the question, “who is this man, why are we attacking this man, and why does no one stop us from attacking this man?” Flimsy stories I can live with, but am I really to believe that there was enough development time to create a race of fucking Walrus-people but not enough to provide, at the least, an npc outside the instance that would say, “Oh hey, by the way, the reason you’re going through this portal to kill a dragon is blabbada yabbada etc.”? Really? Just not any story?

In Ulduar, on the other hand, the story goes thusly:

Beats Sarth, beats Sarth.

So with 11 down and 2+1 to go (because 1 hour per week means I’m counting Algalon, slightly), I may or may not update before Yogg dies. Most likely I’ll take the “yeah, I’ll write something after the next boss” tactic that worked so well for Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, Ignis, Deconstructor, Iron Council, Kologarn, Auriyaya, Hodir, Thorim, and Freya, and apply that to the upcoming Vezax situation as well. Some damn me and others praise me, but this is who I am.

Want to apply to SPG? If you’re an idiot, please don’t! Should there be a story here? I feel like there should be. However, there is not. There is only the earnest entreaty to any moron who happens to read these words, please don’t apply to our guild! I am sick of you. Thanks bunches.

I am out of things to say. Please accept a bunch of quotes that only people in the guild will really enjoy as consolation.

Rugud? Wergud. Mmmhmm. So, until Yogg dies, remember to brush your teeth, use protection, and dot the bot lul. If you won’t do it for you, please, do it for me.

Puh-eece!

Finally, something to write a real news post about! After several months of kills which can be best compared to successfully landing the drunk girl sitting alone at the hotel bar at close, SPG has finally done something we don’t try desperately to forget the morning after. Sartharion and his three innocent friends on their very first spring break have been… conquered, which puts SPG in a position in which it has never before been: 25 Man Raid Content Clear, and nothing to do until Ulduar but gear up, train, and farm.

Normally we wait until the end of our raid week to knock on Sarth’s door, but after tearing him down with such judicious brutality on Monday, we told ourselves if you can’t do it twice you can’t do it at all, and made it our first priority at the start of our week on Wednesday to wreck him just as completely. Satisfying, rich and creamy success ensued.

As I mentioned, we’ve never been here before. Whenever new content was released in the past, which began with the release of AQ40 shortly after the beginning of our raiding career, we’ve never cleared all available raid content before new content came out. Always we’ve been a little behind the release curve, and so now having no available progression content left to work on is an entirely new experience. I always thought it sounded nice, but it is considerably less fun than I imagined. Sure farming up the guild’s gear level is good, and undermanned mandatory-drunkenness Naxx is still on the table, and never having our momentum broken by impossibly long chain of wipes is a little refreshing, but in fact the predominant experience I’m having as a result is a hunger for the new stuff, the new challenges we haven’t beaten yet. That, or an intelligent adaptive AI controlling monstarz.

So we look forward. Ulduar comes out whothefuckknowswhen, and we use the time we have to gear, train, stockpile consumables and fish feasts and repair money, and keeping sharpening ourselves against the artificial challenge of achievements, ensuring our utter preparedness when the new monstarz finally appear on the scene. Additionally, there are those of us who use our preparation time to browse pictures of lolcats for hours upon hours and play Frets of Fire. We all have our own ways of psyching up.

Also, my ex-boss runs a Horde raiding guild that was somewhat competitive with us in terms of progression in TBC. Complaining to him that I don’t know whether to wear The Undying or Twilight Vanquisher while he seethes and tries to hold his dying guild together helps to pass the time. I am not a nice man.

/stopcasting Wall of Text. Here’s the shit you actually came to look at, you tasteless grubby-handed plebian intellectual serf.

Fuck you. Get the hell off my lawn.

Ciao til Ulduar!

So the expansion’s been out for close to a month and a half now, and while I’ve fully intended to write something new for the frontpage here, I guess I just kept waiting for any single accomplishment to feel as though it warranted an update. However, as everything short of Hard Mode Sarth dies repeatedly and the people around me urge with decreasing gentleness and increasing threat of violence to UPDATE THE DAMNED FRONTPAGE YOU LAZY ASS I’ve begun to realize that perhaps it’s time to quit waiting and just vomit my brain at the interweb.

So what’s new? Well close followers of SPG news will recall that we trimmed our roster near the end of TBC so we could shift focus to 10 man’s in WotLK. It turned out that 10-manning was not nearly as satisfying a challenge as we anticipated, with Naxx clear after our first two nights poking around in there, Sarth dead after a handful of attempts, and Malygos dead the second raid in there. Here we were expecting to really have a chance to hone and show our skills as a small team, and we just asploded it all with the first handful of people to hit 80.

Not unreasonably, we decided to go ahead and do 25’s after all. So we recleared 10’s and started killing Sarth with different drakes up while everyone else got to 80, picked up a couple of old faces from back in the day, and scheduled our first 25 raids. Disappointingly, Naxx cleared in two nights, Sarth died after a handful of attempts, and Malygos was dead the second raid in there.

So here we are with all the current raid instances clear, having to cancel raids with an already short 3-day raid week because everything dies too quickly, with only Hard Mode Sarth to hold our interest, and even that promises to be taken care of without an overabundance of pomp. All the reps available are laughably easy to get exalted with quickly, the Heroic achievements (with the exception of Gotta Go!, hello gatekeeper achievement) require very little work, and emblems of Heroism and, to a certain extent, Valor, are quickly becoming little more than alternate currency for Season 5 gear.

This is not to say there’s nothing to do! Wintergrasp has breathed some real life back into pvp and, in particular, community-oriented pvp that many of us remember and pine for from back before cross-server BG’s. The 5-man’s are really fun and well-designed, far more so than anything we saw in TBC- I am, in fact, reminded of my first time through the Blackrock instances. Delicious scripting, fun and extremely varied encounters, a wide array of formats and formulae that keep even sprees of Heroics from feeling repetitive. Those emblems might not be worth a whole lot anymore, but the dungeons themselves remain a blast. Perhaps more importantly, the story behind the quests and dungeons and dailies and raids here in Northrend are so much more developed, so much more intelligently presented than in TBC, that even going to unfinished zones to finish up quests feels like an epic adventure. When I myself went and did the entirety of Storm Peaks at 80, I was so wrapped up in the various stories playing out and questions being answered that I didn’t even notice how many quests I had done until the achievement for the zone popped up.

Wrath is really fun, and remains fun. By this time in TBC I was bored (not to mention spending most of my time dealing with Karazhan-related drama), and that just isn’t happening this time around. But alas, we are a raiding guild, and raiding is really what we love to do. The ease and speed with which we’ve cleared the instances available leaves us hungry for a challenge, and even Hard Mode Sarth at this point is just practice and execution. It’s satisfying that for the first time in our raiding career we’re clearing all available content in two raids, making even our 3-day raiding schedule excessively liberal, but it’s nothing compared to the satisfaction of meeting and mastering new encounters.

[SPG]: WTB 3.1 and real raiding, PST.

For now we’ll keep clearing raids and racking up raid achievements, start getting those red proto-drakes pretty soon here, take out Sarth+3, and just keep on being undermanned and overpowered whenever an opportunity presents itself.

Before you get all mad in the pants, I just spent the last three weeks on a laptop and don’t have a bunch of screenshots with quotes. If you have some you want on here, then ffs get off your ass and give them to me, you lazy fucks. I do, however, have one gem that I think we can all enjoy.

Also, we’re still willing to be persuaded to recruit people who are gudatvideogames. In the event that that’s you, that forums link at the top of the page will take you somewhere where you can find our recruitment forum, in which you’ll find our app. Best of luck, don’t be an idiot.

In fact, that’s as good a closer as any. Let’s keep it!

Best of luck, don’t be an idiot -

Love, SPG.