Calling out to all my Portland, OR peeps. Looking to move out there sometime in October (hard date coming soon(tm)). If you know of anyone that is looking to hire a new employee please let me know. I have 4 years of basic computer repair, diagnostics and trouble shooting from my time working at USF and I have a college degree in US history. Please be on the look out if you can and let me know.

Note: No car or license yet. That is something I plan on working on not long after I am out there. I'll be using my bike, the max and public busing at least until I have a car and license.

Just putting this up where it'll stick around for a little while longer.

Allikat and I have set up shop on the Greybriar server (PvE) on Rift.  It's free-to-play, and honestly it's got one of the best set-ups for free-to-play I've seen as far as not forcing you to actually BUY anything.

Come hang out and kill some shit with us.  Find me as Shihli, Guardian, on Greybriar.

FELLOW DOWNFALL GUILDIES!

The Siege of Orgrimmar Raid Guides are now complete in the DF Handbook!

Please go check them out and get prepared for the upcoming raid encounters!!

Ok yeah that's a badass picture from WoWJuju for the next patch and I couldn't resist to have it top my blog for this! This is my notes on 5.4 and what you should know for Downfall and for Raiding!

Time

Time is a wonderful thing, especially when you know how much you have to work on shit before all the new stuff goes live. From a recent tweet by one of the blizz guys the pvp season will end on August 27th. Now with this came a ton of speculation of past patches. What I can say without a doubt is this, 5.4 will happen on or after the 27th of August. Some say that day, some say the next week, but either way that gives you a minimum time frame to consider what you will need to be prepared for 5.4!

Wrathion and my damned legendary cloak

For those of us fortunate enough with RNG luck we've been pushing the legendary quest line fairly smoothly and quickly, for those who are less fortunate it's been a grind of 1 "coin" a week, and I'm sorry. In 5.4 those beautiful ilvl 600 cloaks we got will get a new color and a proc added to them (just do a google search for Legendary cloak wow and I'm sure you can find what yours will do for your spec) But to get this lovely shade of orange you must do Wrathion a couple of favors (god this guy asks a lot of us!) This time around he wants Timeless coins and for us to defeat the celstial guardians of pandaria in group combat.

Sadly I can't get exact for you here but he will either want, 50, 100, 2500, or 5000 Timeless coins to continue. (wow head quest says 5000 but it was 2500 on PTR and a couple of data mines put it at either 50 or 100 so who the fuck really knows right now) Good thing you get like 200 from the first two quests on the isle, and you can get a ton from killing things and exploring.

Killing the celestials will take a group but it will be faction tagged as well, so as long as a group is killing one of them you should definately tag it and try to help them (or join forming groups etc etc) Each celestial can only be faught individually, below I have some notes from a commenter on what the abilities are like.

Yu'lon (Dragon)

Frontal fire breath with a stacking +5% fire damage taken

random fire zones spawned on the raid, these can overlap meaning that will kill the person standing them in ~2s

Sartharion style wave that covers the entire area with the exception of a single gap

Chi-Ji (Crane)

Fire tornados around the arena

Will place a yellow circle and begin to AoE blast, anyone not in the circle will die

spawn allot of little cranes that slowly move away from the boss doing a mini aoe blast to anyone in melee range

Xuen (Tiger)

Tank stacking(?) -10% armor debuff

He'll trow balls at the raid damaging anyone in the impact area (probably dodgable)

[Unavoidable lightning AoE on the raid]

Niuzao (Ox) (can't say I fully understood this one)

Strong Hellfire like AoE

Stacking buff to stamina (maybe just on tank spec people) which might indicate a gatekeeper like mecanic

Will run around wile doing it's Hellfire like AoE"

All in all it's reported that getting the upgrade takes 1-2 hours on the isle. Which leads to the 5th raid boss on the isle... Have 500 Valor ready for this cloak it may or may not keep your 2/2 upgrade but it WILL be upgradable

Ordos Fire God! (Requires legendary cloak!)

This is our new Nalak, But there's a twist! To fight him EVERYONE NEEDS THEIR LEGENDARY CLOAKS. It's a "gating" mechanism. So you need to do the above questing from wrathion to proceed. I'm not posting a strat here (partially because I've yet to look at one) But we can expect him to be difficult at the start until we work out our shit.

*EDIT* Aeolyn has commented that the legendary cloak is only required on one of your characters, there is an account flag that will allow you to cross to his zone.

 First 4 Bosses of SoO

I'm not going to embed the videos but I will link here the first four bosses in preview form from IcyVeins. Over the next week we will be having the likes of Mehguy, Lumi, Jobs, Turth, and Myself compiling full blown strats for these bosses. Please watch these so you get a basic idea of what we face.

Addition: Mehguy has started compiling the SoO in The Downfall Raid Guides and the first 4 bosses will be up very shortly (as of writing this he's working on Sha of Pride) 

Immerseus

Fallen Protectors

Norushen

Sha of Pride

Please remember these videos are simply early looks on the PTR and not represenative of how we will handle things. Keep an eye on the Tracker over the next week to see the strats go up as we get them!

Boss Mods!

Everytime we get ourselves a new Raid patch it takes a bit of time for DBM and BigWigs to catch up fully with the timing and mechanics of each fight. We only recently got smart marking on Horridon and Tortos and SoO will be no exception to that rule! So it is BEST TO HAVE ALPHA or BETA builds to get the latest in timer updates. Now there is always some risk that the addon wont work with both of those but we will be playing it by ear and if updates are needed Kaluu and I will be on the edge of our seats reading the patch notes regarding them. But on patch day if you are raiding, Get the latest to the minute version of DBM or BigWigs (I know a couple of you use the wigs) ALPHA BUILDS ARE UPDATED AS OFTEN AS TWICE AN HOUR SO BE SURE AND UPDATE JUST BEFORE RAID

DBM's Site (on the right you will see the quick download links both release and Alpha)

BigWigs Files (it will be organised by newest first, just get the top one unless otherwise instructed for stability)

Oh and a side note, I'm not looking to debate the pros and cons of getting a alpha build of one of these. For those who think they "know better" you go ahead and do what you see fit. But in the last 4 raid releases I've been a part of I've only had ONE build of DBM alpha not work right. They fixed it in 10 minutes and everything was Kosher. Please just keep your opinions to yourself regarding this.

EPGP (a.k.a. loot points)

As you may or may not know I've been decaying points by a % every week since we first cleared MSV. This maintains the order of people but keeps the numbers to a minimum. This will continue with SoO and has worked great!

But for SoO you are not going to bring all of your points with you. I'm going to reset points back down for all raiders to 10k EP and no GP. The reasoning is this, It's a new raid, new efforts will be put towards new gear and new bosses. We need a fresh start on points for that. Don't see this as us forgetting who has been there the whole time or forgetting who has put in the most work. This will actually make it so the lucky few who have gotten all the gear they needed early wont have an unfair advantage going into the new instance. I'm excited for this as should you be.

Flex Raiding

BIG RULES

Flex raid is not a replacement for Man Hug or PMS or Galaga. You can take your character to a flex and then to a normal/heroic raid in the same week as they don't share a lockout.

DO NOT BURN YOURSELF OUT! We need you in your main raids, if this much "organised" raiding is too much for you then for fuck sake don't do it. You can get your normal LFR gear and do just fine in Normal.

THE CURRENT RAID LEADER IS YOUR LEADER! Even though it's not your main raid doesn't mean you can fuck around like in LFR or tell people off. You follow what your raid leaders say and pay attention.

Over at /node/11085 I made a blog about the weekend Flex Raid I will host, if all goes well it will serve as a way for all of us to get loot without having to suffer through LFR. Mine will be truly flexible in who we can and will bring week to week and weather or not you can bring an alt. It all depends on who we get week to week. Since I've seen very little opposition or discussion re: the time and day of the raid. The probable raid time will be

Saturday 6-9 pm and then again possible Sunday should we be in need of another day (probably afternoon but we could put it to a vote.

Alternatively Turth is putting together an Objective Flex. The idea behind this is to keep the same people week to week and make the goal getting the Meta achievement. He's talked to many of us regarding it and it sounds like a great plan. His times are 6pm server until 10 server on I think Thursday Nights to avoid conflicts with main raids. This is a HARDCORE group! If you join and raid with them remember that hardcore groups will tell you what you did wrong and often don't give a damn about your feelings. Don't come crying to an officer if this happens. We will remind you, you've been warned!

And that's all that is important regarding raids in 5.4. Head over to MMO-Champ, Wowhead, Or IcyViens for more info regarding the patch and your class, or pet tournaments or w/e it is you like to do.

TL:DR None, read the fucking thing

With 5.4 just around the corner (I hope no sooner than Sept personally) The question comes to will my LFR runs come back?

No! I hate LFR with a passion and hate that I've felt forced to run it just for gear opportunity.

Flex raids will be the new thing in 5.4 and I really feel we can replace our LFR weekly with a Flex Raid run. Not only can we get our gear, but we get to make it a guild run event that we fully control! No more will we deal with people that do not speak english or abide by our rules (i.e. Tortos kicking shells)

So I want to discuss when we will be running this flex raid of SoO. I would love to get it in on the weekend so that we can include a lot of people, Also I want to open this door to people who don't raid with the main raids, be more inclusive, that is what flex is for after all! 

So I propose saturday afternoon or evening to run our Flex SoO. Only one night (unless we decide that a sunday run is needed but I hope it isn't) I want to consider EST and CST time zones for this so that we can include our increasing eastern and central guild-mates. 

MAJOR POINT: THIS IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR 25 MAN HUG! This is a replacement for LFR runs so we can have a bit more fun and as I said above have more control over the raid environment. 

What we need are 2 tanks who can reliably be there every week and some healers (not sure on that number yet but assuming 6 like normal if we get a full 25)

My proposal (incredibly subject to change and will be updated as more information arises)

Saturday 6-9pm Server time with a possibility for Sunday afternoon (we don't want that time to interfere with Raid Galaga)

TLDR: Just read the damned thing

Mine is Drewbahr    .

Let's play sometime!