The Ardent Guard

Good morning everyone. I hope you had a good weekend.

We start this week off using the new raid system we set out last week. The first few events are posted, and more are to come. Keep your eyes peeled to the calendar, and sign up if you can make it out to the raids.

Our Friday 25-man raid event is posted, along with a backup plan in case Gruul's Lair is a no-go. While I researched what to plan, I realized that there are four dungeons in Azeroth that still require attunement. We have been eluding to accomplishing these; however, now is the time.

The scavenger hunt after our guild meeting was a great success. We had 5 teams of 3, and several teams were able to obtain some of the more rare items. The final results were close! Here are the items and the results of the hunt.

Item list

Cat Carrier (Siamese) = 88 pts
Electromagnetic Gigaflux Reactivator = 92 pts
Torturing Poker = 95 pts
Chanting Blade = 186 pts

I apologize to those of you that have been trying to access the site over the last 24 hours. My account was disabled for exceeded a CPU load on the web server. Fortunately, they were able to pin-point the problem and it's been resolved.

What was the problem? Well, our chat block is gone. I'm not sure why it was created a problem, but it did. My only guess is that the message queue had risen to a level that the scripts could not parse in a timely manner. Regardless, I've been forced to remove it and it will not be reinstalled.

This week marks the first attempt on a dungeon beyond Karazhan. On Friday, May 9th, we will make our first attempts in Zul'Aman or Gruul's Lair. The event is posted, and all raiders should start reading the sites listed to have a good idea of where to stand once we're ready on raid night.

Attunement is not required for Zul'Aman or Gruul's Lair. Since the officers and I have yet to iron out gear, or performance, requirements for either raid: ALL LEVEL 70 PLAYERS ARE WELCOME. This could be good news or bad news.

Karazhan - April 21

This was The Ardent Guard's first attempt(s) at taking on Netherspite. I think we can all agree, this dragon was huge! In fact, this is probably the largest boss that we have fought to date. However impressive this dragon appeared to be, he paled in comparison to the impressive effort that The Ardent Guard put forth in taking him down.

No it was not easy. There was a fair amount of trash to clear, and we had an incredibly complicated strategy to learn. It took a number of attempts, but each time we did better. 1st to 70%...then to 50%...then to ~38%.

Good morning everyone. I've been speaking with a few members over the last week that need help getting key fragments for their [Master's Key], are trying to complete quests in dungeons, or just need help leveling in general. However, most of the 70s are tied up raiding, or preparing for raiding. We want to help, but potions/food/enchants don't grow on trees....

yet.

So!, I've decided to take a short break from Karazhan next week. Instead of the four days we normally have planned, we're going to cut back to one; and it will be a special case. We're going to still schedule times during our normal raid schedule, but it'll be locked into accomplishing fragment retrieval or quest completion.

Read on to see how you can get in on the action. This is open to all.

I've made a couple changes to the web site's functionality that I think you will all benefit from.

BBCode

For those of you familiar with the BBCode formatting tags, they're now installed into the default Input Format. The available tags can be found here.

Basically, I needed something to do this, and didn't want to write a custom CSS style sheet. It's also been requested in the past, and now that I'm getting better at managing this system; well, here it is.