A word about the state of the guild

Since so many people have been asking if we managed to get into the MoP:Beta already I figured a blog post about it would be helpful to avoid having to repeat myself ingame. With the announcement of the annual pass guaranteeing beta access and a free Diablo III copy we didn't really have to suggest our raiders to sign up for this. Asides a great way to prepare for MoP having a roster with people signed for another year of wow will bring somewhat extra stability to the roster too. The guild has been really stable over the whole expansion however, with most of the roster shaping itself during T11. Strengthening up even more during T12 and then now rounding up an extremely good roster in the preparations of the new expansion. In total we saw less then 3 raiders leave us for different guilds, most retired as raiders and play with us today in different games or just part of the community SB hosts and it's several alt raiding groups during farm. Most of our recruitment has been done however we will closely consider any brilliant raider that we feel would be a great addition to our team. ScrubBusters is more then a raider team though, it's an actual community with people logging our teamspeak 3 server every day (and the 50 slot server actually gets full at times like raids!). The vast majority of ScrubBusters comes from West-european countries mainly the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries. It's come to the point were we decided to rent a big ass villa for the guild this summer for everyone to have a one hell of a week off the computer! Let's hope MoP doesn't release when half the roster is drunk! 

Mists of Pandaria: Beta

As mentioned above we managed to get our entire raiding team signed up for the beta, however the question will be when and how Blizzard will be able to get over 1.000.000 players into their beta. The current state of the beta is however fairly incomplete and we are mostly eager to get going when the raids open up in X months. It would be nice to get in right away to fuck about though I guess! Moop ran a script to check through the armory to see who has the annual pass attached to the account of their main character. If you are curious about who these people are have a look here! You can see a minority isn't confirmed to have the pass due reasons of the account not being eligible, the country not allowing the annual pass or whatever other reasons people might have! Through the guild resources we however were able to get all these people on the list for a beta invite anyway, and us actually having some spare ones just incase! A thank you to the people involved making sure our whole team will be hopefully getting into the beta. As you probably know there is quite some uproar about blizzard promising instant access to end up promising access in waves of invites. As mentioned earlier, as long as they get us all in by the time the raids open we don't really mind that much.

Some other guild news

Wednesday our mains are clearing 8/8 25 HC DS in less then 3 hours. Thursdays our alts are clearing 7/8 25 HC DS and are currently working on Madness of Deathwing 25 Heroic. Another 10 man alt group by Tilko is on 8/8 Heroic. Then the rest of the week Sales manager Luun puts together several T11/T12/T13 sale runs for a few hundred thousand gold to be split between the raiders boosting helping them to get their wallets filled for the upcoming expansion. The guild back is being pumped with millions of gold too through T13 25 man heroic boosts too. (If you are interested in a run have a look here!). To give you an example what this gold is spend on: During T13 progression the guildbank alone spend over 3.000.000 gold on buying out all essences of destruction and epic gems to deck out our main raid as well as possible. All this extra effort proved to be paying of as our raid DPS significantly went up, wich was mostly noticable on Ultraxion 25 Heroic. We plan to do the same in Mists of Pandaria. If anyone is interested in providing us with materials and getting a buy out price higher then the Auction house will ever provide simply whisper an officer to get a deal going.

ScrubBusters Version 2 is on the horizon!

Mosphet has been working hard behind the scenes on designing and coding an entire new community website for ScrubBusters with vast improvements. Much work still remains however but we can tell you it's going to be fanastic! It will offer everything the current website provides plus several additions and making everything more user friendly (and more awesome looking!) Since it's all pretty secret still I'm not able to share more with you for now, so patience friends!

That's it for this week, stay tuned for new entries from Grondath and Hennyxo however! 

Hyperia, actually made himself useful on the bench by recording this gem. 

Tonight our 10 man alt raid achieved 8/8 Heroic Dragon Soul!

We've been playing 1 night a week (sometimes none at all) and we're pretty happy to have completed the content in a reasonable amount of time on our secondary characters with a relatively small buff percentage!

Our journey has been great fun playing in our spare time with a light-hearted atmosphere (except if we're naughty and Tilko tells us off!) and it's been brilliant to experience the bosses from a different perspective (for some of us!).

We had many funny experiences along the way (mostly trolling Tilko - sorry mate!) including the classic "Are we pulling on this timer?" on Ultraxion, solo soaking on warmaster or killing the mana void on Yor'sahj at the wrong time leaving Tilko with no mana! Hmm perhaps some of that wasn't so funny...

I also found out that dpsing from a rock was a massive dps boost! Either that or it just looked cool, one of the two! Anyway, check out this awesome action shot of RockCat™ (clicky for high resolution).

Thanks to all that came along to this run, I've had a blast!

Watch this space for more news on our 25 man alt run and remember we are always recruiting!

Hi, it's that time again. Luckily I have a spare 20 mins or so to get a post in. 

20 mins? that's not a lot of time to write a post Henny.

Yeah, but luckily I've done my ground work on this one.

Response from Apathy Big Wig

After I reported that we had a 2nd 25 man HC kill on madness last week, I sent out this shot in the dark:

"Please note Rentar and Serkuss don't represent Apathy leadership. If some big wig at Apathy want to contact me for a proper interview, please PM me on the forum. :D" -Hennyxo  

1 week later, the interview has been done after a nice fellow contacted called Nien me on the forum. After panicing and coming up with some questions I sent them back and here we are: 

Hello Nien, who are you in Apathy and what is your role in the guild?
I am one of the original founders and currently an officer.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
We formed on The Maelstrom back in 2005 when Orcon and Icecoast merged and disbanded in 2006 due to internal drama shortly after AQ was released. Since then we have re-formed a couple of times on different realms but never made it last until now.

How did you feel the tier went for Apathy?
It went a lot better than expected. I am happy that we beat Hellion. I think that was our goal in DS.

What was your favourite fight in the Tier?
Probably Hagara besides it being tuned way too easy and phase one being incredibly boring. In general I think most encounters were pretty dull or not brought to their full potential.

What are you looking forward to in MoP?
Even more mounts and pets purchasable through the blizzard store.

What is your reasoning behind raiding 3 days a week?
Originally, and still, we don't have people who can or want to devote 5-7 days a week during progress to get through it quicker. 3 days is to us ideal. 2 days would mean almost no time at all to progress and 4 days would mean more than half of the week which we wouldn't be happy with.

What do you think about the 25 v 10 man debate?
Without going into the difficulty of balancing encounters equally between 25 and 10 man I can only say that I believe managing a 25-man guilds is a lot more difficult than managing a 10-man guild. I think in terms of where we, Apathy, are in progress it doesn't really matter if you're a 25 or 10-man guild, though we do take pride in being a 25-man guild and not caving into a 10-man guild when times have been rough. When it comes to world firsts I think that only 25-mans count.

As a guild, do you like UK garage sensation Craig David?
We're not really a guild that approves of islanders. The only thing worse I can think of are floorball players.

Anyone you would like to thank?
Not really. I would like to say it was a team effort but in the end it was all me. I guess myself. Nah, definitely Telas, Slashi and Thalarius for keeping the guild together when I was out for T11 and for continuing to do so since.

What a nice lad! 

A few days after that I got a reply from another Apathy guy called Cethaza. They thought I wouldn't get any volunteers "since the stress of leading us to 8/8 has probably permanently damaged their minds."

Hopefully, Cethaza will be doing some investigative journalism for me and I'll have some server news/gossip soon. I probably blew their cover now.

Til next time, 

Hennyxo

As per the title, our resident armadillo (Fleuria) returned to our raid armed with new tricks!! Read below to find out what he got up to this week!

Zon'ozz, Yor'sahj and Hagara went pretty much according to plan with no drama involved. Grats all!

I am still accepting bribes not to use combustion on Yor'sahj adds though...contact me if you'd like to offer something!

Moving onto Ultraxion and what you've all been waiting for...I present this weeks:

Warmaster felt like it had a massive nerf this week where we used a stacked ranged setup for it, similar to our first kill...Luun managed not to kill the raid with a misplaced shockwave also, which we were very happy about!

So, the next boss....spine....my favourite!!

After much discussion, we believe that Fleuria's screen during this encounter is something like the image to the left since he seems to tunnel in on the corrupted blood (and let's face it, if you're looking at that picture, where are your eyes focussed?) I am assuming this was in the name of ranks which makes this attempt to top the meters quite amusing since the log was broken! Better luck next time! (or not...).   Other than that, the kill was pretty smooth as has been the case since the fight got nerfed.

On madness this week I finally got to sit out (this definately wasn't planned so I could join an achievement run for the madness achievement later in the week...).

Grats me!

Should have some more extensive updates next week, I've had a hectic week so didn't have a lot of time to write this one. Thanks for reading!