Now that the holidays are over, we've returned to our regular raiding schedule. To celebrate, we figured we'd return to Naxxramas and load up on some loot prior to working on Malygos and multi-drake Sartharion later in the week.

We also decided to spice things up and knock out a couple achievements while we were there. We focused on 5 of them:

Just Can't Get Enough - Kill 18 Abominations during KZ
Arachnophobia - Kill Maexxna within 20 minutes of Anub'Rekhan dying
Momma Said Knock You Out - Kill Faerlina without dispelling Frenzy
The Hundred Club - Defeat Sapphiron without anyone having over 100 FR
Shocking! - Defeat Thaddius without crossing charges

Well, 4 out of 5 isn't bad in a single night clear (which we also hadn't done before). Thaddius and the Shocking! achievement gave us a bit of trouble when we had to switch up tactics to avoid any charge crossing (although we recovered and still pulled off the one-shot).

Here's looking forward to finally getting some decent time on Malyos and starting our work on multi-drake Sartharion! Keep watching this space for an announcement in the next couple days regarding Vortex recruitment!

Once we'd cleared Naxxramas, we decided to focus on the remaining WotLK raid content, which we had previously left untouched. That took us to the Obsidian Sanctum, home of Sartharion of the Black Dragonflight.

A couple of us had fought him before in PuG 25-man raids and reported back that he was incredibly easy, and as a guild, we can confirm that this was right. There were only 8 of us available for a raid, so we decided to kill all the drakes before engaging him. Trivial doesn't even to describe it, as we promptly one-shot him and distributed his loot as off-spec pieces.

Unfortunately, this killpic is not from the first kill, but from the second kill, which had only 7 players (1 healer). On the first kill, we discovered he was secretly a bear in disguise!!

...okay, we had actually left the instance after our first kill of Sartharion and were half of us to Coldarra before we realized that we'd forgotten to take a screenshot. So, until we could get a picture of him dead, we offered the above picture of a "slain" bear. Or, if you're picky about including a corpse, Kae offered this alternate kill pic:

This only leaves Malygos as the potential redeeming factor of the WotLK 10-man raiding environment available at launch and we've already taken him to Phase 2 with 8 people. C'mon Blizzard, give us a challenge!

Within just two raid lockouts, we finished clearing Naxxramas with a two-shot defeat of Kel'thuzad this past Saturday.

We worked really hard in preparing for Naxxramas. Most of us knew it as the pinnacle of raiding in the original WoW, and treated it with the appropriate respect. We ran heroics constantly and farmed ridiculous amounts of consumables. We worked hard to give ourselves every advantage because that's how we go about raiding.

It turns out that we were (way) overprepared. We spent two days in Naxxramas in our first week and cleared all 4 wings. The vast majority of bosses were dead in either one or two attempts and none of them gave us any real challenge.

Since we had such an easy time during our first week, we decided that we'd repeat the experience the following week while we farmed for frost resistance gear for Sapphiron, who we figured we would focus on in our 3rd week in Naxxramas.

Week 2: Thursday saw us with an impromptu Archavon kill, followed with a quick clear of the Arachnid Quarter. That left us with Saturday and Monday planned to clear the rest of the quarters and work on Sapphiron. On Saturday night, we headed back into Naxxramas and the carnage promptly ensued. We cleared the remaining quarters and found ourselves on Sapphiron's doorstep with a modest amount of frost resistance gear since we had planned to work on her the following week. Still, since we're suckers for punishment, we decided to give her a couple of learning attempts.

Roughly 45 minutes later, she hit the floor and we wandered off to take a look at Kel'thuzad. For a fight with such an challenging reputation from the original WoW, he was sadly disappointing as we banished him in an easy two-shot.

Here's hoping that Malygos and Sartheron are more challenging!

After thoroughly gearing ourselves up in heroics to the point that we were successfully 4-manning them at times, we decided it was past time to take a peek into 10-man Naxxramas. We picked up a couple friends to fill out some raid slots and walked in with 8 players, ready to take on Spider Wing! Within a week, we had Kel'Thuzad down and were wandering around Sapphiron's Lair trying to figure out how to leave the instance without a mage or hearthing

(other pics still in development... bad Kae, hurry up!)

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If there's one thing our members are known for, it is our near-masochistic love of challenges. "Hey, let's short-bus the Vault in Wintergrasp!" Rough translation: propel ourselves headlong into the battle for Wintergrasp, and then 7-man the boss with only one healer. In spite of short-manning ourselves, Vortex and friends had a flawless victory against the giant.

We'd also like to welcome Arimae and Pustule into our guild; for some reason they accepted an invite into the insanity.

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