Why I love my guild

I love my guild, I really do. It is full of awesome people, that care about each other and about the guild, and if you need help with something, usually asking in guild helps. We have all types of people in the guild, tho we are on the "mature side" (that's what we call old ;P) Most of the guildies are 30+ but we have a few younger as well -and older :) And it is a nice mix of progress-raiders, casual raiders and purely social members.

Many of us have been playing since the game came out in 2005, and some of us even raided together in the "old days" (Vanilla/tBC) before splitting ways pursuing different goals in the game. The later years we have found together again in this guild we had as our first raiding home (for me at least it was), because times change, life change, and priority's change. Whenever we get new members we do our best to make them feel as part of the "flock" -tho it helps if they are social creatures that are not afraid to hit /g.

Many have got family obligations and do not have time to raid 4-5 nights a week anymore, so the light raiding-schedule we have of 2 raid-nights per week fits perfect. That means we have less time to dick around (pardon my French^^), and when we are raiding we try to get the most out of it, while having fun in the process. I think we achieve that quiet well.

We do enjoy doing things together, like doing X amount of Headless Horseman runs to get the people in the group their rings. Or jump on mumble and talk rubbish while doing achievement runs in old instances. Or doing PvP together, while trolling /bg chat (Yes, im looking at you Shadrea! ;-)) and having fun. :D During this expansion we have had 3 guild-groups running Gold Challenge Modes, those have been really fun to do together! The biggest challenge there was to find a time that fitted all 5 in the group! 

    Second round of CM for me. :)

In addition to having 2 raidteams, we also have been running flex-runs (now called NORMALS ;P) on tuesdays, that are open to all guildies plus they have been cross-realm-raids with friends from Twitter. The bosses of these runs have been Shadrea and Rel (@iamchris and @reliqEU on twitter). We have a few regulars that come every week, and some that drop by from time to time, and its all fine. The giggle factor on Mumble is high, and the jokes so bad! :D

    Flexrun at Klaxxi -this is one of the earlier raids we did :)

At work I sometimes have twitch-stream from former runs going in the background while working, and GOSH we laugh a lot. Specially me, or maybe that is because my voice sounds extremely loud compared to the others, since I'm the one streaming (+ I am loud :P). But we have so much fun in raids, and we kill bosses at the same time. If things get too serious, there is always inappropriate jokes to be found. 

Like when we were working on HC Paragons, and the names Iyyokuk and Korven came up. Me and our Swedish lock (Erik) started giggling uncontrollably, when the others asked why, we had to explain that Korven means "the Sossage" in Swedish, and kuk means dick in Norwegian. So YoKuk (thats who they say it) suddenly became very awkward to say to another dude and Jade and Rel (our tanks) giggled whenever they tank-swapped "Can you taunt ... eh.. YoKuk? *trying to keep serious voice and failing*" :D

Funny (random) quotes/comments from a typical raid night with the progress team:

Patro: "its time to bring the A-game!" 

Patro: "I'M A PALADIN!!!!" 

 Erik: "Can someone please rez me, even if I don't look dead?"

Erik: "Don't kill the adds before Nazgrim!! Its a huuuge dps loss for me!!" /cries

Jade: "we got a mass-rez inc. dont release. Erik, I am looking at you!" 

Sipollo: "Anyone need food? I have 150 noodle-wagons left, and mats to make 80 more!" 

Sipollo: "Remember to eat one noodle and then fill up so you have 5 in your bags!" 

Class/everyone in raid: "That's what she said!" To ANYTHING that could be slightly interpreted as an sexual innuendo. 

A every-raid-conversation between Jade and Erik: 

Jade: "Erik, please get well fed" 

 Erik: "yes yes I will, you keep forgetting that warlocks are high maintenance! We need to pull out our pets, and then kill them, and then place portals and summon cookies!" 

Jade: "Ye ye just eat" 

Hunter-talk about belt on Siegecrafter hc:

Gymer: "Its not fair I died, I was virtually inside Demandred!"
Demandred: "WTF dude!?"

 Other convos that happen during raid:

Patro: "I laid hands on Erik"

Erik: "You did whaaaat??" 

Jade: "Anyone got Jeeves?"

Haelden "Yeah me. Its coming in the back"

The Raid: "#ThatsWhatHeSaid!!"

Haelden: "oh YOU GUYS!"

The raid: Laughing

Other things happening while waiting in raids: 

Shadrea chasing Blexis around yelling "Pat the Willy! Pat the Willy!" (the pet, Willy, I have to add ;-))

Making pink-pirate trains walking around the boss-room while waiting for everyone to be ready/back from break. 

Also needs mentioning is that there is no raid without someone making fat jokes to/about Blexis (male draenei shaman, and he loooves cake). And if we don't, he do it himself! 

A typical example of this is when we are killing Galakras:

Jade: "Blex you can jump down from the tower now"
Blexis: "Earthquake inc!"

Needless to say, Blexis is very fond of Sipollo, since he is a "sure thing" for getting food!


The very same Blexis /whispered me this when we were doing trash before Garrosh HC:
"Go search for "Bird is the word" on Youtube! Do it do it!"
Result: 

He still randomly /w me "Bird is the word!!" and that always make me giggle :D

Lately we have had some friends join our raids for Mythic together with some from OpenRaid, since we have some folks on holidays and on break before WoD. Here is a cut of a friend of a guildy singing:

   

       Good morning, good moooorning!

And when we raid, we are quite serious when the fight have started (bringing our A-game and all ;-)). Here is a link to our killvideo of Heroic Garrosh:

When we were working on Iron Juggernaut (or Iron Juggs as I pref. to call him^^) Blexis said that if we kill him within that raidweek, he would wear pink transmog gear for a whole raid! That was all the motivation we needed, and the boss went down that very same week^^ He refused to farm a pink set tho, so I spent some time at the Auction House to find some pretty&pink mail pieces for him! Unfortunately, I was not there the raid where he used it but Shadrea took a nice little screenshot for me :D 

LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS! :D :D

All in all we have a lot of fun, but also can put on the serious face and kill bad-ass bosses, one do not exclude the other. 

I am feeling very talkative these days, in general about the game, so I decided to make a blogpost about my guild, to show them how much they mean to me. When I mentioned it in our ClassBox (our shoutbox is named after me, cos I'm ms. spam-a-lot^^) everyone got very excited and on Mumble tonight when I talked about things I have mentioned here, they were all bubbling over with suggestions to other things I should mention -so this feel like it is a guild project^^

At the end now, and I want to mention that if you are on the EU-servers, think you got Mythic raiding in you and are looking for a guild that kill bosses while having fun, you really should check us out, our webpage is The Phoenix Reborn . #ShamelessSelfPromo!^^ 

If you want to spy on our raids to see that I am in fact NOT LYING when I say we are Teh Awesome, you could check out my stream here: Class on Twitch.tv
#MoreShamelessSelfpromo :D

And as usual, thank you for reading! <3

Patch 6.0 and ramblings about disc priests

So, patch 6.0 have arrived, with lot of changes to ... everything tbh. Characters, stats, gear, quests... (And I see that I need to update my blog with new picture of "Class 6.0": bad-ass draenei with T6-transmog!^^)

I have (as usual) not been reading up about all the (beta) changes because things change so quickly that something I read one day, is invalid the next. So I usually wait till things go live and then I read some and /poke friends and guildies (a special hello to Sipollo and Stilgar <3 ;-)) "what was this again?" and "where do I find that now?" :D Probably horribly annoying for them, but easy for me :P (yes, I am a bad person lol!) Tho, I do pay it forward, so whenever someone asks about help or have questions about things I try to help them too, so I think my Karma is intact all in all ;-)

I have some screenshots of the different versions of UI. One is from before 6.0 and one is right after stripping and one is how it looks atm. 

First a RIP old disc-setup:

Second is how it looked when I logged on when 6.0 had hit:

    Yay, no addons and default blizzard UI (holds up sarcasm sign ;-))

And this is how my UI currently looks, after moving stuff around:

   Soooo many empty spots :( On the plus side: hurray: I got silence-spell! :D And I see that I have some spells twice! That's not how it was intended :D

I tested out holy and disc a bit on early beta, and it made me want to cry back then. Disc had lost A LOT of talents/spells, while holy was pretty much intact (more or less). We did a dungeon and as disc I felt it was an impossible task, and swapping to holy made it a lot more bearable, even if I have not played holy for .. well a year or so? 

Disc Beta:

Here I have not added pots and food and such to the bars, but still... many holes!

Holy Beta:

So when the patch went live last week I was feeling rather unwell tbh. Dreading to log on, and also dreading to see the nerfbat on live, having the feeling from beta fresh in my mind. And it started "well" too; could not log in, got DC'ed when the loading bar hit 90% -and it kept on like this for hours. At the time I didnt mind much, because I had a insane day at work and was really tired, so when I DID get online, I did the Blasted Lands quests and logged off. 

Sunday was the first real "test" of discipline healing, with raid and mythic and all that jazz. Found out that absorbs are still king, my dps is not the same (compared pre-patch) but the hps is still rocking. Helps ofc to have endless mana :P

I read on twitter many saying "only spam holy nova and you win", which put me off that spell already before trying it, haha. I have it on my bars obviously but only used it when it was useful, aka stacking up (so mainly Norushen, Sha of Pride and Thok). 

Personally I am not sure what I think of Holy Nova yet.(It reminds me of old-times PvP, and how to destroy snake-traps from hunters and get rogues out from hiding :P) I used it a bit, but for healing up groups I still use my normal playstyle of Prayer of Healing, shields, flash heal. Think the only boss I really used it on was Thok, towards the "instant screeches" stacks. Maybe its "wrong" to not abuse such a strong spell, but I do like to play my priest "properly" (Imo :P) with all the tools in my healing kit. That means dps till wings, use wings when big dmg is inc, use shields when it drops of tanks -or a poor sucker of the dps get a blow to the head (^^) and need an emergency absorb so he/she wont die etc. Use penance on CD, either for hps or dps, and also try to keep Holy Fire usage on max. Also I am not used to having Holy Nova, so I think I need some time to adjust to it. 

And I know as a disc I should not say this, but I miss renew. I used it whenever I was on the run (and as shadow it was my "heal when getting smacked by mobs"-heal). When I was running with the weapon on Garrosh heroic I kept it on the tank as often as I could, since it often procced DA due to my high crit at the time. And its just.... Renew is a priestspell! I know holy have it, and disc dont, which is ...odd imo. I know its an important tool for holy, but I dont see holy loosing their shields... :P (A bit sore? Yes. Does it show?! ;-))

The one thing I really hate tho, is the cast time they added on Prayer of Mending. Before patch I used it on CD, now its like "shall I spend X amount of sec to cast PoM or shall I use those sec to cast a Prayer of Healing instead? Usually PoH won, specially if it was (high) dmg going around. PoM was used when dmg was low and mainly on tanks. A real shame Imo. (Also, I love the bling! bling! bling! sound from PoM bouncing around! :D)

As talents go, I could not let go of Spirit shells, so I have that talented now. Since Twist of Fate now only is for healing, its not very interesting in the super-duper-ultra nerfed content of SoO, and knowing how to time SS -it is still king. 

Other then that I have the same talents as before, more or less. I still swap between the lvl 90 talents depending on fight, tho, I havent really used Cascade yet, it probably is more handy in 20 man then in 10 man, so I need to test it before I can say how it feels. /puts Cascade on "check-list" for next raid. Also use Angelic Bulwark on most fights (except Siegecrafter hc and Paragons hc where you want Spectral Guise to drop sawblades and aims), still use roots over MC / fear, and Mindbender and feathers...

All in all, disc did not feel as nerfed as it did first time on beta, and I will still keep disc as main spec in WoD, but probably have holy as offspec. Depends a bit on the fights there, and if absorbs are still good then. I would think it is, but you never know :) But I think things will change when Warlords go live and all, but for now I'm sure I will stay discipline -but probably have holy OS if I see that as needed for new content. But hopefully disc will still be a valid spec also in the next expantion.

A cosmetic note: They have changed the way Halo looks, I must admit I liked better the visual of the old Halo, where you could see it spread nicely. Now its more like BOOM! And its gone. It looked prettier before! :)

I have probably forgot a lot of things that I wanted to mention here, as per usual.. :) Random thoughts are random! :D