Voodoo Guild

So it has been an eventful past few days. As you may or may not have heard by now, we have recently decided to cease being a competitive raiding guild. The reasons were numerous but in the end it simply comes down to failing to live up to our own expectations. While we experienced a moderate amount of success in Ulduar, probably more than what most guilds even hope to achieve, the overall lack of motivation to practice hard modes was enough to reconsider our purpose as a guild. Voodoo originally set out with the goals of competing on a national and world level, and while something like that isn't expected to happen overnight, when the vast majority of your player base is content merely farming normal modes one night a week like they're the gravy train that was Naxx, you realize a decision has to be made. Do we settle as being just another guild with low ambitions but plenty of purples, or do we cut the cord? Well, we decided not to just settle.

Though I must also say I personally cannot blame any of our members. I do, however, blame Naxxramas for ruining the competitive raid mentality needed from people. It obviously didn't have the same effect on every guild, but when a new guild, like ours, is born under those kind of conditions it is difficult to evaluate the true worth and dedication of your members or to train and prepare new ones until it is too late. I also blame Blizzard's new idea of "hard mode" progression for killing off the last bit of motivation from our old school raiders. Average DPS would kill this encounter in 5 minutes? Okay, kill it in 2. People are living too easily through 15k AoE raid damage? Okay, well double it. Might as well just put a 1 minute enrage timer on Patchwerk and have him drop Frostmourne next patch, by their logic I guess you couldn't argue that it wouldn't be hard. Who knows, maybe next they'll be putting some huge button you can press to just increase the damage/health of a boss and add an enrage timer to it! Oh, and fire! Lots of fire!

But all guild drama aside, it hasn't stopped us from continuing to have some fun in 10 mans. Despite the previous jab at hard mode Mimiron it is actually a very fun encounter. It was the first hard mode we really had to spend more than one night on but when you're doing it with people that actually want to be there it makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience.

We also went on to down hard mode Yogg within a few attempts, it does wonders when you consider leaving Thorim up instead of Freya ("of course you can still kill the adds!").

And after receiving the final sigil needed to unlock Algalon we got to be one of the first US guilds to spend an hour on this bad boy.

I won't try to say it's cock blocked just yet, but damn.

And on a slightly different note, a few of our members are looking forward to the upcoming MMO Aion. The entire guild won't be switching over, but enough of the core membership to maintain the overall guild atmosphere will be. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.