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For the first time in 6 years, an expansion pack has come out and neither Kim nor I have picked it up. Does this mean we're leaving the game? We're not sure. After running the guild for over 6 years, I found the prospect of leveling, gearing, waiting, raiding, compaining, soothing ruffled feathers, and the like, well, daunting. I think it mught be time to admit that there's no place in this game anymore for relics like me. I've always said that I raided because I "wanted to see the content", but I now realize what I was really saying is that I raided because I wanted to beat the content. I wanted that feeling of exclusivity (however fleeting) that came with accomplishing something that not everyone could. Raid finder has effectively taken that out of the game.
It's been a long journey, with more ups and downs than I can count. Am I, personally, ready to leave the game? I just don't know. What I do know is that Nightsong Moon, if it is to be a raiding guild, will need someone to step in and take over scheduling and coordinating teams. Neither Kim nor I have the energy, motivation, or time to do it anymore.
The people I've met playing this game I count among some of my closest friends, and for that reason alone I haven't cancelled my account. And who knows? We both still may pick up MoP and see what's new in the world (of Warcraft). But I don't want to leave anyone hanging. If you feel like you need to leave NSM to go to another raiding guild, there will be no hard feelings. Besides, I know where to find most of you anyway. :) If you feel like you want to stay and try your hand at setting up, coordinating, and running raid teams, all officers are hereby empowered to do so. Regardless of any decision made by any of you, it's been an honor and a pleasure gaming with you over the past few years. This isn't goodbye, just more of a "see you later".
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To contribute to our Ventrilo server, use this link:
https://cp.light-speed.com/group-pay.php?SID=MDAwMTMwNzU6MDAwMTM2Njk=
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Today we announce the demise of Pit Lord Argaloth who was this evening killed at the hands of Team WTF.
He put up a struggle but eventually proved overwhelmed as the team, stole his posessions and wandered off back to Stormwind.
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Here's the Daily Blink from March 5th of last year. Completely still relevant, and funny.
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As part of a little administrative clean-up, I'm adjusting guild ranks today. For non-officers, this means:
1. Anyone not max level will have the rank of Seeker. This is how our ranks are set up in the first place, so it shouldn't be much of a suprise.
2. Any toon that has not logged in for more than 2 months will be set to Dreamer (officer alts are, for better or worse, excluded from this).
3. All max level toons will be set to Protector (this means level 85), with the exception of those that are confirmed on one of our raid rosters. If you are on a raid roster but are not yet 85, you will still be Seeker!
4. Only toons that are on a raid roster will have the rank of Sentinel, and this includes alts(alts will not be set to sentinal). Protector and Sentinel are for all intents and purposes equal ranks. We only differentiate between raiders and non-raiders to simplify calendar invites.
If you have any questions, please speak with me in-game or via PM.
Thanks,
~Mike
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Lore (from TankSpot.com) sums up a ton of things I've been saying for years, plus some things I hadn't thought of to cover. If you want to raid, this is good information!
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Thought we needed a new bit of news, well the guild has just earnt the achievement :-
Giving us currently 320 Achievement points in total, Thanks tonight to Andanas, Frankiemoore, Bilana, Gizur and Gardroy for all taking time out
and joining me for these runs tonight.
I am hoping that next we will be able to do
Over the next week weeks
Thanks all
Iain / Orici
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It seems that there is some confusion about my suggestion to have raid teams keep their raid nights set aside to run instances and group quests together. I'm not saying you can't level your main on the other nights of the week by any means, just that on your normal raid nights, group up for an hour or two and go run one of the new instances. Start re-learning CC and chain pulls and all the other wonderful things we're going to need to know in order to raid.
In fact, by leveling your main before your normal raid nights, your raid team will be ready to raid that much faster. Anyway, hope that clears some things up.
~Mike
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Warning: this is long. For the TL;DR version, scroll to the last couple of paragraphs.
I remember it well. I was talking to Jas (on his quintessential Paladin Beromalann) in whispers about the bad guild experiences I'd had. We posed the question as to whether or not we really thought we could do better than those guilds, whose names and members I've long since forgotten. My answer was "I don't know, but maybe we should give it a shot". And so it was that a level 40-ish Hunter and Paladin met in Stormwind, pooled our meager resources, and purchased a guild charter using a name that I'd come up with off the top of my head. 8 signatures later, Nightsong Moon was born on February 6th, 2006.
Back then, on the Kirin Tor realm, guilds spent hours recruiting in Ironforge and Stormwind, spamming /trade with recruiting messages. Jas and I didn't know much about guilds, or raiding, or even the finer points of the game in those days, but we did our homework. Hours and hours spent discussing what we wanted to do, browsing the guild relations forums on WorldOfWarcraft.com, searching blogs, and forming an idea in our heads of how we wanted the guild to operate and who we wanted in it. Man, were we ever naive back then.
Out of this nascent Nightsong Moon guild, we formed the basis of our guild charter (relatively un-changed to this day), our officer ranks, and thought mainly about raiding. In Vanilla WoW, there existed a raiding paradox that was almost impossible for late-comers, like us, to overcome. At the time, 40-man raids were the end-all-be-all of raiding but in order to get in to a 40-man raid or 40-man raid guild, you needed epic gear. Nowadays, that doesn't seem like much, but until Burning Crusade came along, very few epics dropped outside of raid instances. Blue gear was par for the non-raiding course and if you wanted epics outside of raids, you had to jump through countless hoops to upgrade your dungeon set.
What we noticed most about the raid culture back then was the notion that gear was equal to skill. The idea being, if you had the gear, then you were obviously a skilled player since you had to raid to get said gear. That just didn't sit right with us because although we knew that we were nowhere near the best players out there, we felt strongly that all we needed was the chance to prove we could go toe-to-toe with the top raiders and hold our own. Not one guild at the time offered even the chance to prove that you had skill unless you had the gear to go with it, and so the focus of Nightsong Moon changed.
We decided that the current raiding elite were wrong, and were missing out on some fantastically skilled and dedicated players simply because they used gear as the yardstick for determining raid eligibility. Again, it's amazing how naive we were back then, but sometimes great things come from not knowing what the hell you're doing, or why it shouldn't work. So we worked at recruiting, determined how we would run raids if we ever got there, and continued to swell our ranks to an impressive (at least we thought so at the time) 70 members.
However, the cold hard reality of organizing, recruiting, and scheduling 40-man raids soon hit us like an overweight ogre wearing nothing but a loin cloth and a chef's hat. We stagnated, stuck where so many other guilds were at the base of the proverbial 40-man wall. Until we were introduced to a guild called Original Sin that was attempting to solve the 40-man problem by creating an alliance of smaller guilds that, together, could field a raid team. After many conversations on Vent, Nightsong Moon because one of 3 founding guilds of the Kirin Tor Alliance, or KTA. Along with Original Sin and another guild that I can't remember we put together a 20-man raid team and stepped in to Zul'Gurub, our first true raiding experience. And after some failed attempts, blame-storms, and other drama, it somehow fell to me to lead the raids. I had no more experience than anyone else in KTA, and in fact had less than some of the other guild leadership, but nonetheless was expected to lead the raids and take on the responsibility of KTA progress. It was in all senses of the phrase a school of hard knocks. Disparate personalities, different leadership styles within the other guilds, and the fact that outside raids I had no authority over the other raiders made life difficult to say the least. But through it all, I learned invaluable lessons. Lessons that stick with me to this day, and that I consistently try to apply to our guild raids.
Then came the first WoW expansion, the Burning Crusade. The Kirin Tor realm was overpopulated even before the expansion, with consistent queues to log in (anyone else remember having to start logging in an hour before raid just to make sure you could get online 15 minutes prior to raid start?). Blizzard decided to offer free transfers to a new realm, Farstriders, to anyone and everyone on Kirin Tor, Cenarion Cirlce, and a couple other realms. The caveat was that if not enough people transferred voluntarily, entire guilds would be forced to transfer. This caused a bit of drama within KTA and the proposed solution was to have everyone join Original Sin so that we could all stay together regardless of which server we wound up on.
Due to some growing tension between myself and the other guild leaders in KTA over my raid leadership style (specifically the lack of yelling and screaming and blaming and such), and the fact that Jas and I felt very strongly about maintaining Nightsong Moon's autonomy, most of the guild elected to transfer voluntarily and take the unknowns out of the equation. Well, when I say "most" of the guild, I mean Jas, Kim, Luis, Vic and I (along with a few others that I can't remember) decided to make the move.
Exactly 1 year after the guild was founded (by pure coincidence), we transferred to Farstriders, got the guild charter up and signed (with a new blue-on-white tabard instead of the original white-on-blue) and Nightsong Moon was re-born on Farstriders. We hovered at a grand total of 17 members for a very, very long time, leveled through outlands, and started to think about raiding once again. There was absolutely no way with our membership levels at that time and the fact that Farstriders was (and still is) and under populated server that we'd be able to recruit enough to form our own 10-man team, let alone a 25-man team, so those of us still playing at that time just focused on heroics.
Since back in those days on Farstriders, there was a very small group of raiders and those that wanted to raid, our late night heroic runs tended to be with the same groups of players, one of those in particular being a hunter/priest team by the names of Serinious and Shybound from the guild Nightstar Legacy. Kim and I got to know them pretty well and through them were introduced to Dellena, the GM of Nightstar Legacy, and the de-facto leader of the Farstriders Raiding Syndicate (FRS), yet another small-guild raiding alliance. Since we were not currently able to raid as a guild, Kim and I both joined up with FRS along with Luis and Vic (although they both had a much different, much less positive experience with FRS than Kim and I). Through Kara, Mags, Gruul, and TK we went with FRS, but even as we were doing this, things were about to change. In a very good way.
While we were raiding with FRS, we'd picked up some old friends from Kirin Tor that had transferred over and through our being relatively active in the raiding community, started to make some new friends. Bottom line, the guild started to grow. Slowly, organically, but still it kept on growing. We absorbed a couple of smaller guilds and all of a sudden we were over 100 members. Even though most of us were happy raiding with FRS, the guild decided that we should be raiding as a guild, and sometime in September of 2007, Nightsong Moon launched our first ever guild-only raid in Karazhan. And since then, we haven't looked back.
Now sure, we've had our setbacks and our drama, but by and large, we've had a fairly smooth ride through BC and Wrath. And I am honestly humbled by the success of our guild, which is frankly nothing to do with me at all, but instead has everything to do with the quality, dedication, and conduct of our members. We have, for the first time in our history, cleared all raid content before the release of the next expansion and stand ready to be on the front lines of raiding in Cataclysm. Our guild isn't where it is because of anything that I did, but because of the hard work and dedication of all of our members (that's you, by the way).
With the impending release of the third expansion, and as I look back on the roads we've taken to get to this point, I've nothing but pride in our guild, in our achievements, in our members. As an interesting aside, approximately 80% of those that leave Nightsong Moon for greener pastures eventually come back, stating that things just aren't the same elsewhere. What I'm trying to say is that we've got a good thing here, and it's going to be up to each and every one of us to keep that good thing going through Cataclysm and beyond.
And how, exactly, are we going to do that you ask? That's a very good question and despite literally months of thinking about it, I'm not really sure. I am, however, sure that as a guild we're stronger now than we've ever been and we'll stay strong, level fast both individually and as a guild. We'll stay flexible and adaptable and tackle each new challenge as it comes up, just like we've always done. But at our core, we of Nightsong Moon will always remain who we are. Just a bunch of gamer nerds, family men and women, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends, raiders, non-raiders, and above all members of the best damn little-big guild on Farstriders.
With that said, I am going to officially announce a few minor changes. First off, NSM will be primarily a 10-man raid guild. This is not to say we won't ever do 25-man, but our focus will be on 10-man teams. The reasons behind this are many, but mainly it's the best way to ensure that as many people as possible that would like to see end-game content get to. Team rosters will, for the most part, not change until we've got a nice stable of level 85 raiders at which time each team will take a look at where they stand and fill in as necessary. I encourage teams to keep their raid nights and use those nights to run instances together, knock out group quests, or whatever the teams want to do as a team. If you're not currently on a 10-man team, please contact Kim ASAP. Don't wait until you're 85 and don't accept any substitutions. Kim is in charge of coordinating raid teams and is the only person that can ensure you get on a team.
In order to adapt to the new raid group mechanics and to help keep us feeling like a guild instead of a collection of 10-man teams, officer responsibilities will be changing as will the requirements to be a raid lead. I've spent a huge amount of time talking to raiders, raid leads, and officers over the past few months about raiding in general (and if I didn't talk to you and you have something you need to say, don't hesitate to send me a tell) and I've taken all the feedback and come up with a few things. I'll discuss the raid lead changes with raid leaders and we'll have an officer meeting shortly to go over the changed officer responsibilities.
~Mike -
I have today added a new section to the forum which is for the upcoming guild achievements :-
This is a complete list of them :-
The achievements seem to range quite well for exampleAs a guild getting 1 of every class to level 85
Complete 15,000 daily quests
Create 25,000 Cataclysm Flasks
Gather 100,000 Herbs
It is worth remembering that for example every Cataclysm Flask you make will add to the guilds total, like wise with the herbs and bandages
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Everyone read! We're all spoiled and lazy due to Wrath and we're going to need to whip ourselves back in to shape, lest our collective butts get kicked back to Vanilla!
What Wrath players need to know to not suck at Cata
Thanks to Steve for finding this little gem!
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Had a small issue whereby the launcher wasnt detecting that there was a patch. If this happens simply log into game as normal and you will be given a patch notification, with a restart button. Click the restart and hopefully the launcher will come out of its spaz attack and download the 27mb patch (assuming you've already downloaded the rest of it)
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Zarhym has confirmed this evening that the beta testing for cataclysm has been concluded and that the servers are now down :-
We’re just about two weeks out from the official global launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm! And with that, the time has come to conclude the beta test. We will be shutting down our beta realms momentarily. We want to sincerely thank all of you for your dedication to testing, providing feedback, reporting bugs, and everything else you’ve done to help us make this expansion the best World of Warcraft title to date.
Stay tuned to our new community site (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/) for the latest news and updates as we get closer to release. We’ll see you in Cataclysm!
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Just a small reminder that tonight is your last chance for some items :-
Swift Zulian Tiger
Zul'Gurub is changing from a raid to a leveling zone in 4.0.3, and this mount will no longer be obtainable.
Swift Razzashi Raptor
This mount will also no longer be obtainable after the change to Zul'Gurub.
Razzashi Hatchling
With the change to Zul'Gurub this non-combat pet will no longer be obtainable. (Update - The Razzashi Hatchling is still obtainable in Patch 4.0.3a)
Tome of Polymorph: Turtle
Mage
This tome will continue to be available through other means.
Crusader's White/Black Warhorse and Swift Alliance Steed/Swift Horde Wolf
As the attempt-based tribute system is being removed from Heroic Trial of the Crusader, the Argent Crusade Tribute Chest will no longer spawn, and these mounts will no longer be obtainable
Reins of the Blue Drake
This mount will once again be available from defeating 10-player Malygos without needing to use the Dungeon Finder. The Reins of the Azure Drake will only be available on 25-player Malygos.
Mimiron's Head
This mount will change to be a very low drop chance when defeating 25-player Yogg'Saron with no Keepers assisting you
Invincible
This mount will change to be a very low drop chance when defeating Heroic 25-player Lich King
Although we have no current plans to introduce new ways to obtain the Zul'Gurub mounts, pets, and the tribute mounts, they may return should we find a place where they fit in the future. -
We will be performing scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, November 23rd. Maintenance will begin at 3:00 AM PST and conclude at approximately 11:00 AM PST. During this time, all realms and many web services will be unavailable.
Thank you for your patience. -
Thats right MMO are confirming that 4.03A - Better Known as The Shattering is Hitting our Servers THIS WEEK.
That gives you time tonight to go and say good bye to your favourite zones, friends and families.
What is not in:
* Creating worgen/goblin characters
* Worgen/Goblin start zones
* Archeology
* Professions past 450 (Illustrious Grand Master)
* Guild leveling
* Guild achievements
* Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor flight
* New Zones (80+)What is in:
* Portals in Dalaran/Shattrath Removed
* Class trainers in Dalaran where portals once were
* New race-class combinations (excluding worgen/goblin)
* New Gnome/Troll starting areas
* Changes to existing zones
* New cata load screens
* New cata intro cinematic
* New cata login screen
* New music
* City Quartermasters, with rep tabards
* Bug fixes
* Class balancing
* Druids, paladins, priests, and shaman will have their talent trees reset
* Experience required to gain levels 71 through 80 is being reduced by 20%
* New tamable hunter pets (Monkey, fox, dog, and beetle, as well as new skins for existing pet classes.) -
Well,
Next week see's a big event in the history of World Of Warcraft. Our favourite holiday destination turns 6 years old. Those who havent been living under a rock for the last few months maybe aware that Azeroth is on the verge of a huge change.
Azeroth as we know it is about to be changed in a big way take for example The Barrens is now about to be divided as the screenshot shows below. World Of Warcraft turns 6 on Tuesday 23rd November. This also falls in line with a patch / maintenance day...could Blizzard be about to Destroy what they created by unleasing Deathwing on Azeroth??? Stay Tuned To Find Out
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Short and sweet here, folks: Blizzard has announced that race changes to goblins and worgen will be available immediately upon Cataclysm launch. That's 12:01 a.m. PST Dec. 7. Additionally, there will no longer be any achievements for being the first of your race to hit level 85; the achievements are now class-only. Great news for people who want to switch from their terrible male night elf druid into a dashing (literally) male worgen druid, or basically anyone who's tired of playing a troll of either gender.
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Sadly couldnt get pictures from Goblin Starting areas however here are a few more changes including 1000 needles, Orgrimmar, Tanaris and The Barrens
http://nightsongmoon.wowstead.com/gallery/event-screenshots
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Aside from content, also included in the upcoming patch are several class balance changes and bug fixes. Due to several talent revisions for select classes, druids, paladins, priests, and shaman will have their talent trees reset.
Experience required to gain levels 71 through 80 is being reduced by 20%.
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Well I today took a trip into the future and I've come back with nice screenshots from how our world is going to look in probably a weeks time the new screenshots are all in our Events Folder
http://nightsongmoon.wowstead.com/gallery/event-screenshots
However those wondering what the new water is going to look like will not be disappointed here is a preview of Booty Bay :- New Booty Bay Water
If anyone wants to see anything in particular just let me know and i'll travel there and grab a screenshot
Iain
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Deathwing returns on the public test realm as patch 4.0.3a, "The Shattering" that will change Azeroth forever, is live on the PTR and labeled as "release." With great knowledge such as this comes great speculation -- when will The Shattering arrive? It is entirely possible that The Shattering could take place next Tuesday the 23rd, as Blizzard has said that the time between events and phases in the elemental invasion are progressing at a faster pace. Another option is that The Shattering will take place one week before Cataclysm's launch, on the 30th, giving players one full week to experience the new content, race/class combos, and new world.
