Big Trouble in Little Ulduar

Well this was rather a surprising evening. We knew Ulduar had been 'tuned', but this much? We one-shotted Razorscale with 9 men, surprising given our narrow but satisfying victory last week. The raid then moved to Ignis the Furnace Master, a boss we were convinced we would kill. So we did.


The spoils?
Gloves of Smoldering Touch to Jutranjo
Drape of Fuming Anger for Choppermad

A win for us. That was our goal for the night, dead. He had been nerfed pretty hard, but it was a nice reward for Tuesday night's effort. Ok, so what next - have a pop at constructor? Why not!



Vest of the Glowing Crescent for Beastly
Chestplate of Vicious Potency to Darkdesign

Ok, that was pretty easy. Bit shakey on the bot killing for a few tries, but seemed ok. Now we were really in deep - Antechamber time. We dealth with the trash and just kept running, not pausing to check our maps. Hmm, a broken bridge...

Spark of Hope was snapped up by Beastly
Pendant of the Piercing Glare went to Therzoth

Kologarn didn't put up too much of a fight. He caused some issues in the tanking department, but we sorted that out pretty fast.

So, 3 new boss kills in 1 night. Many nice items for us. Iron Assembly next. We shall get them. Grats to all participants. You can see then in the screenshots (yes, only nine players in our first Kologarn kill)

If you want to see the loot drops from leviathan and razorscale, hit up loot tab on the DKP widget to the right.

Ignis Hotfixed

So after a great raid last night, we ended with Ignis the Furnace Master on 13%.Yes, that is a very small amount of health and, if the trash hadn't respawned, I'm confident that we would have smoked him. However, from today, Ignis the Furnance Master has been hotfixed with the following changes.

• The Ignis the Furnace Master encounter has received the following changes: The interrupt effect and duration of the damage from Flame Jets has been reduced, the damage from the Slag pot has been reduced, the number of Heat stacks needed to transform an Iron Construct into a Molten state has been reduced, the base melee damage done by Ignis has been reduced, and the damage bonus Ignis receives from Strength of the Creator has been slightly increase

So, nerfs all around for the encounter then. I must say, I hate when encounters get nerfed. Yes, it was necessary to hotfix Ignis post 3.1 because he was broken but this? He is not a hard fight, it just requires tanks and healers to be precise in ways that make life easier from everyone - mainly positioning. I don't understand why the nerf was needed. Perhaps further into Ulduar the encounters are a little easier and this just needed tuning - who knows.

Full list of changes here.

Razorscale is now grounded. Permanently.

Razorscale is dead. Yup, that's right. After several good solid wipes she bit the bullet. Or harpoon.

Congratulations to the loot winners:
Eye of the Broodmother to Therzoth
Treads of the Invader to Beastly

Giant hugs to our Initiate this raid Dethraven - who performed great, and to the whole DPS team, who cranked it up a notch when we needed it. Awesome work folks.

Kill Setup:
Beastly
Choppermad
Cicatrix
Dethraven
Keravnos
Norgaar
Ruphus
Therzoth
Wingzero
Vixxion

Ignis the Furnace Master. Hope you've made your peace buddy.

Small Gods are recruiting!

With the release of Ulduar, Small gods are recruiting the following for the roles:

Healers
Priest
Shaman
Paladin
Gear Requirements: 1900+ Spell Damage, 18,000+ health.

Ranged DPS
Mage
Warlock
Shaman
Gear Requirements: 1900+ Spell Damage, 18,000+ health.

Tank
Paladin
Warrior
Gear Requirements: 540+ Defense, 35%+ Avoidance, 27,000+ Health unbuffed.

We will largely be raiding 10 man content, 2 times per week. You will expected to attend both of those raids. We are very fond of member interaction. Succesful members will show interest in written content both here and on our forums, and communicate with the guild on a social and progress orientated level. You will also have completed The Fall of Naxxramas. Heroic: The Fall of Naxxramas and The SpellWeaver's Downfall are a plus.

Above all, the priority is fun. Raids don't have to be a chore. A successful raid is a smiling raid! Spots per role are limited, so apply for your place now!

Realms down for further maintenance

The following post hit up WoW EU Realm Status page this afternoon.

On 17/04 there will be a scheduled maintenance. Please note that all realms will be offline from 14:30 until 15:30, Paris time (CEST).

We thank you for your patience and understanding and apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

I can only assume this is to hotfix 3.1, which as we all know is fairly broken. They are a multitude of issues, the worst of which is Ignis the Furnace Master being totally broken.

So yes, realms are down. Don't put too much money on them being back up again in good time.

Posting Guidelines

This isn't the standard issue forum that we are all used to. I know, It will take some getting used to, but hopefully we can get a little more interaction from the members with some dynamic content.

The reason for shifting to this blog format is to take advantage of some of the features that I think are important. The DKP widget for instance, and the Important Links section, giving full visibility to things that you will need on a regular basis. Additionally, if you link to anything on WoWHead, you will get a nice shiney tooltip - Black Ice for example (this works on the forums too). An interesting side effect is that we get a nice news ticker out of the deal. One that can be tracked using an RSS reader such as Google Reader.

Obviously, we want you guys to be able to post content too, so how do you do that? Well first of all, you are going to need to register with blogspot, preferably, with your Character's name. Those who are already registered, sticking a note in you profile saying who you are would really help us out.

After you have registered, you need to ping me by email or ingame to give you Contributor rights. This will let you add new posts to the blog. You do not need contribution rights in order to comment! Anyone can do that.

So, you have your Contributor rights, and you have a written a new post? Where should it go? You will notice that there are no sub forums here, so we are going to hack that a bit. Blogs have a feature called 'Labels' that are used to sort your posts by catagory. The Labels that we will use are as follows:

• Achievements - for boss kills, events and developments
• Guild Information - for static, unchanging, important information that members should know and read.
• Recruitment - for those wishing to join. This label should rarely be used.
• Fun Stuff - anything you want to share with the guild. Comics, Videos, Animations...cosplay?
  
• Raids - information about past and future raids.
• Boss Guides - any tips or links to help defeat bosses.
• News - World of Warcraft news.
  

If you don't follow these, expect Labels to be moderated to conform. The advantage of using the labels is that space is saved in unused areas. You will notice on the sidebar there is a 'Catagories' section. This is where the labels will appear. If there are no posts under a label, not only does it not exist, but it won't take up space in the sidebar.

Recruitment

So, you want to join Small Gods? Awesome! We would be happy to have you. There is just one hurdle that you need to jump. An application! You can find the template and details here.

Small God's Blog is go!

Welcome to the Small Gods community blog, where players from Small Gods on Tarren Mill EU come together to share their drama!

You can find important links at the top of the blog, and past posts to the right.

If want to comment, simply register with blogspot and post away. See me (Norgaar) ingame for contribution rights. An email probably works too!

DKP Information

You heard it here first. Jutranjo approached me earlier, saying we needed DKP and he had the perfect system. After work, we debated it at length and we believe that, bar a few variables that we have no control over, it is pretty close to ideal.

We are using a Zero Sum DKP, which negates inflation by never injecting points into the system. Here is how it works.

Tomorrow, in Ulduar, everyone will start with 50 dkp.
Every new character in our Ulduar raids will be automagically given a one time only starting allowance of 50 dkp. Think of it like buying your way into a game of poker. You put a fifty in the pot.

Upon an item dropping, a bidding round will start. We will hold one single round of public bidding in raid chat. To bid, type !bid .

At the end of the bidding round, the item will be awarded to the highest bidder. That player will immediately lose the dkp they bid. Those points are then divided by the number of players in the group, and that amount is allocated to every member of the raid. For example:

The raid is a 10man group.
Diokhan wins Death's Bite with a bid of 70.
Diokhan loses 70 dkp.
Everyone in the raid then recieves 7 dkp

DUAL SPECS
Obviously, with tomorrows introduction of dual specification, we will need to enforce this a little better to make sure the loot goes to the right people.

You Role is defined by the role you were invited for with the only exception being if you are 'forced' (asked) by the raid leader to fulfill a roll in the raid: for instance, if I want to DPS, but am required to tank, my 'role' will still be dps. In this sense, we are fairly flexible and rely on member's taking loot for their spec of choice - something that dkp will hopefully enforce.

ALTS
This has not been discussed at length so for now, assume that alts will not be allowed into dkp raids, excluding special circumstances. Due to the zero sum dkp system, managing alts could prove difficult.

Potentially, Alts will spend dkp as usual, but be limited by their dkp being zero to start with. Any dkp gains from them will be added to the corresponding main character after the raid. Not sure if this covers priority or not. This is not concrete yet.