Project Lore

Earth, Wind, And Fire is arguably one of the toughest achievements in the game, requiring that you kill all three Vault of Archavon bosses within 60 seconds of each other, but the 10-player version has was completed by both Premonition (first) and Mediocrity (second) this week. Thankfully, the latter recorded the whole affair so we can see just how they pulled off this monumental feat!

I'll admit that when I first heard about the achievement, I thought it would entail engaging each boss at the same time, with the raid separated into several 2-3 man groups, but it turns out that they can be pulled out of their respective rooms without resetting. This ends up being key to Mediocrity's strategy, and it allows them to make the groups a little more even. They start with the newest Vault boss, Koralon the Flame Watcher, first, and while whittling down his health, drag him all the way over to the dungeons' namesake, Archavon the Stone Watcher. At this point, it's important, even when tanking two separate bosses at once, that both of the tanks stay near each other in order to reduce the effect of Koralon's Meteor Fists attack. Presumably, a second group is staying on Emalon the Storm Watcher this entire time, who would be much harder to lead around the instance with all of his adds in tow. Sadly, we don't get to see precisely how they handle the Overcharged minions, since this video is only filmed from one perspective. Besides, I really can't imagine having to deal with all three bosses' area of effect attacks at once! It looks like we'll still have to wait a little while before anybody nails it on 25-man, but I imagine that it couldn't be significantly harder since your numbers wouldn't be spread quite so thin. The real important thing here just seems to be getting the strategy down and knowing each boss well enough to automatically respond to their individual abilities. Tough or not, I'd love to see more achievements like this thrown into the game. It reminds me a lot of the live raid they did at BlizzCon this year, where they pit the aforementioned Premonition against several different raid bosses at once, arena style. How about you, readers?

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Achievements really changed the face of the game. Many players see no point in a seemingly arbitrary measure of progress (gear and progression seem as arbitrary to me), but many players, such as myself, make it a goal to be an "overachiever".  I'm sitting on a respectable 5630 points, which puts me in the top 300 on my server. Its nothing compared to Zoltan of Aegwynn (EU), who recently topped 10,000 achievement points after earning Champion of Ulduar. He is only missing a few achievements, which may be some commentary on the rarer achievements in the game as of right now:

• The Brewfest Bunch
• 100,000 HKs
• Gladiator (though he does have Merciless Gladiator and a Brutal Nether Drake)
• A Sea Turtle
• Perma-Peddle
• A Mask for All Occasions
• He Feeds on Your Tears (10 and 25 man)
• A few other difficult Ulduar 25 achievements

I should be able to break 6k points before 3.2, but could Zoltan achieve a "full clear" of WoW? Its unlikely that he can pick up the Brewfest ones before 3.2 hits, and patch 3.2 will introduce lots of new achievements for the Argent Coliseum raids and the Thanksgiving holiday. He might be able to do it eventually, but its not happening anytime soon. Blizzard may not have any plans to come out with rewards for achievement points, but its one of the most objective ways to compare progress between players with different priorities, like arena gurus and hardcore raiders. I think it might be cool to offer some rewards for passing major landmarks, such as heirloom items or a progressively cooler pet the more achievement points you have. With Starcraft II likely to be the next game to use achievements, perhaps united under a Battle.net account, achievements have an exciting future How many achievement points do you have? Do you have the so called Doctor Dorkins beat at 2,745, me (Heartbourne) beat at 5,630, or even Juggy at 7,845? What achievements do you think are the hardest?

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Being someone who likes to keep tabs on what the major raiding guilds are doing, I must say the last several weeks have been among the most interesting I have seen in a long time. If you are not familiar with the recent news I am talking about the whole ordeal surrounding the "Heroic: Alone In The Darkness" achievement, which is the hardest of the Yogg-Saron hard modes. Killing Yogg with the help of zero keepers means giving up a lot of help. There is no one to save you should you nearly die, the tentacles are much nastier than usual, there are no sanity wells, and most importantly you cannot kill the immortal guardians in phase three. Winning this encounter is considered the peak of the current raiding content; it is more difficult than taking down Algalon himself. What is interesting to me is when people first started trying this encounter not only did they think it was hard, many thought it was impossible. That's right many theorycrafters at sites like Elitist Jerks thought it was literally and mathematically impossible. This belief was so commonly held that many top guilds, including guilds like Ensidia, seemed to give up on it, waiting for a nerf before they continued working on this encounter. It is this belief that made so many people cry foul when Exodus first got the achievement by exploiting the encounter. The point I am getting to is just how utterly impressed I am that despite all this; a few guilds, most notably Stars, continued to grind away at this night after night until they came up with a strategy that was able to beat what they are calling the most difficult encounter in the history of WoW. Being the raid leader of a guild who has spent nights wiping on much tamer hard modes, I can imagine the type of dedication and endurance that doing something like this would take. Since Stars' world first we have seen two other guilds, one EU the other US, win this fight. It is impressive all around, but I think special recognition needs to go to those that strived to do something that was deemed unobtainable. I have to hand it to Blizzard for not caving in and nerfing this before guilds like Stars could prove everyone wrong. For the rest of us, maybe it proves that nothing is impossible after all.

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I don't know about you guys but even though I am a far cry from the hardcore raiding base, I still live through them vicariously.  I follow the MMO-Champion's Hall of Fame, I check up on all the "top guild" websites here and there, and I even report about the major events in the top echelon of raiding.  Instead of freaking out over the conditions surrounding the King of Pop's death this weekend, I was busy reading into the death of an Old God.  None other then Yogg-Saron+0, the last undefeated Ulduar encounter, bit the dust a few days ago.  Like Jackson, as soon as The Beast with a Thousand Maws uttered his last whisper claims of a mysterious death were uttered. Turns out that the cries of shenanigans against Exodus were just, as the guild openly admits to using a newly discovered, by them, exploit after getting banned from the game.  The banhammer notice, details of the exploit and trash talking are all included in the guild's official statement.

In our many attempts at trying to figure out a way to defeat Yogg zero watcher, we found a way to use bugged game mechanics to make phase 3 easier in zero watcher then one watcher. The bug is when someone is left inside the brain room of Yogg-Saron, they can still get aggro on the adds that spawn in phase 3. That means if you have someone getting healing aggro in the brain room, they will get aggro on the adds, which cause them to evade in place and allows for all of your raids dps to be focused on Yogg. We discovered this mechanic on a wipe, and decided to see if we could actually get it to work. The first attempt after that wipe, we realized it worked, and went with it and killed it on that attempt. We also filed a formal bug report on Blizzard's website.

Blizzard's EULA clearly states that using an exploit to gain an unfair advantage is against the rules.  Exodus doesn't deny that they exploited, or complain about the temporary ban, at least not directly.  Nope, Exodus cries foul of favoritism by Blizzard amongst the hardcore raiding guilds.  The team alleges that Ensidia and Nihilum have used "clever game mechanics" before, even citing a few Ulduar examples, but haven't been meet by the same backlash from other hardcore guilds, or, and more importantly, Blizzard.  At the moment the team is riding out a 72 hour ban and it makes me wonder who at Blizzard makes these decisions.  It's obvious that the issues are handled case by case, so does that mean there is a higher up who oversees the GMs?  Or is it at the discretion of a server's lead GM?  Any readers have that much insight? The guild mud slinging really brings me back though.  In the vanilla days of World of Warcraft, whenever a new first kill was announced on Magtheridon (US) everyone would respond that "Feared killed Onyxia first."  The quip was due to a long standing debate between who killed the dastardly dragon first, Horde or Alliance.  I don't see it anymore so it must have died during The Burning Crusade's heyday, as that is when the old guild disappeared. Slap on the wrist and name calling aside, claiming that you have the right to exploit because the fight is unbeatable is an incredibly lame justification.  In case you are wondering, the exploit has already been hotfixed. What's more interesting to you, the temp ban or the possibility of unequal treatment?

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When Ulduar first hit I made a post asking when we all thought Algalon the Observer (the true final boss of Ulduar) would go down. Well it appears that Ensidia has answered my questions, well, at least for 10 mans.

The super guild announced on their web site that one of their 10-man teams had finally downed him (and also buried a note that another had completed world first Alone In The Darkness).

While I know it will be quite a while before I get to wear the Starcaller title, it is very exciting to hear their impressions of the fight. They of course comment on the added challenge of the one hour timer, but they also claim it is “not quite as hard as Blizzard made it out to be.” I’m taking that with a grain of salt because I imagine their idea of difficult is quite a bit different than mine!

For those that are interested they also provide a link for the loot they obtained as well as some screenshots of the quest chain. They promise video is on the way in short order.

It is encouraging to me to see it took them as long as it did, because in Ensidia time, this took a while! After all they certainly didn’t waste anytime getting world first Yogg, or any other world first for that matter!

So now the only question is how long until we see Algalon-25 go down? Or how about some of the Algalon hard modes? It pretty clear Blizzard intends to keep us all busy for a while.

If you want to keep track of the world first Algalon-25 progress for yourself I recommend you keep an eye on Ensidia’s site… I have a feeling that the news will break there!

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With Yogg Saron having already been downed many times all over the world, there remain a few challenges from Patch 3.1 that have yet to be overcome. Wraith, an EU guild has managed to unlock the 10-man version of Algalon the Observer, the "True" final boss encounter of Ulduar by defeating the Assembly of Iron, Hodir, Thorim, Freya, and Mimiron, all on their hard modes. MMO-Champion has a multitude of screen shots courtesy of Wraith, along very few details about the fight, but it is being speculated that each raid has only one hour per day to attempt to defeat the boss. I've heard rumors that failing to defeat Algalon results in the destruction of Azeroth, though I can't help but feel that might be a bad move on Blizzard's part. I guess we could all escape to the Outland, though. Check out MMO-Champion's post for all of the crazy screen-shots, and leave your predictions on how long it might be until we see a world first Algalon kill.

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I’ve been trying to keep a healthy perspective on this thing. Sure, I called in sick on Friday, and sure I logged more hours this weekend than I probably did the past 3 weeks combined, but I’m having fun and fully expected to invest a lot of time during these initial few days. With everyone racing to level cap, it is very interesting to see how far various members of my guild are approaching it. There are some that are playing about the same as they did before, there are actually some that are playing less (waiting for things to settle down) but what I am noticing most is those that are playing more, much more. There is the guy I know who went 40 hours without sleeping, there is the one that did 3 levels in one sitting (and hasn’t logged since), and even the guy that took 2 weeks vacation to dedicate all day everyday to getting up to the cap. Now I’m not here to judge, like I said I have logged more than my fair share of hours over the last few days, but sometimes I just have to wonder. Where is the line for all of this? I hear people calling each other noobs for not leveling fast enough, or on the other side calling them nerds for playing too much. I cannot say what the proper balance is, but it is certain that there are strong opinions all around. What does it take to be the world first 80, or be the first to clear all the PVE content? Are we so competitive that we push our selves to the brink to beat that other guild, the others of your class, or even your friends? I know that this will all be very short term, and soon all will be back to normal, but in the mean time it’s a great time to learn a little about your friends and guildies. What about you? Are you feeling the pressure to level like a madman, or are you appalled by what you see going on around you? I wish I had a way to wrap this all up into a moral or a strong opinion either way… let’s just say I have found the last few days very interesting. Now back to leveling.

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A little while back, you saw the interview that Nihilum did with Project Lore on their website. Recently, we had the chance to chat with one of Nihilum’s earliest members, Marilyn, who has been in Nihilum since the guild was formed on Burning Legion. He’s been around since it all began and has held both officer and class leader positions in the guild. Currently, he’s a “regular” hardcore progression raiding member, so he knows all about Nihilum and how they have risen to become one of the top gaming organizations in the world. We chatted about a few different topics, like what it takes to be a top progression raider, the upcoming expansion, and PvP. Now, here is the full interview: Nihilum is one of the most well known and fastest progressing guilds in the world. What drives you to become part of one of the top guilds in the world? I am extremely competitive in everything I do. It all started really early, playing soccer, hockey or just playing chess back in my childhood, I just had to be the best and I'm definitely a sore loser. If someone beats me I will play him/her until I win. And the fact that so many people are playing this game and watching our progress, when we kill a boss world first the attention we get is pretty insane, and fun :D Your guild has a number of world first kills, not to mention server firsts. Which one was the most satisfying? Hm, Kel'thuzad, by far, for me. The amount of hours and energy we all put into that fight is something we haven't done again after that. What happened was we had two 1% wipes on Tuesday night. The server would reset for Europeans later that night, so in order to win against the Americans who had their reset 1 day earlier we knew that we had to beat him on that day to claim the world first. But since we failed to kill him that day, we thought the race was lost. But we woke up early the day after and I skipped school, we started raiding at 01:00 pm and we kept going til 05:00 am. By then the whole instance was cleared except Kel'thuzad. On Thursday we started at 02:00 pm, we buffed up and killed him. After so many hours on a boss and so much effort it felt unbelievable to claim him world first and become "the champions". Best World of Warcraft moment for sure :) Your raid team has seen every boss currently in the game. So far, what is your favorite boss encounter in the game? Hm... hard to pick, I've got many favorite bosses. But I have to say Heigan from Naxx 40. You could beat him with 10 people, and usually everyone just died and you had 10 good players standing :) What does your raid schedule look like during progression? It's a lot of hours. Lately it's been a lot more than it usually was. The reason for that is the competition. More guilds want to be the best and therefore more hours are required to succeed. I'd say from 12:00 to 02:00 is expected of us if they release new content. Of course, this is only something that lasts during one week or a few days. We all have real lives that need our attention :) How many times do you wipe before you kill a boss for the first time? Do you have any interesting ways to alleviate some of the frustration that must come with learning a boss with no input from anyone other than your guild? It all depends on the structure of the fight. Generally speaking, I would say at least 2-3 hours before you have the strategy nailed down, then another few hours to make it perfect. That makes it a total of 8-10 hours to know how a boss fight works. Twin Emperors in Sunwell took several days to figure out, so it varies a lot. To answer your second question I must say that keeping people calm is the only way. Take breaks of 10-15 minutes to let people breathe some air and get their mind on something else. Doing something for XX hours straight without a break is never good, no matter what you do. Many guilds have broken up due to drama between members over a variety of issues. How does Nihilum handle these things when they come up? Drama has always been around, it is almost impossible to get up to 40 people to get along. There are different ways to handle it. The reason we are still here is that we've been among the top (if not THE top) guilds out there, always. People in the guild are more serious in their gaming than most others, and with that thought in mind you can expect that people will act professionally. If people get upset or mad about something we just tell everyone to take a breather and we come back rejuvenated and calm, then discuss the matter. But, of course, I can't deny that drama has almost caused collapses within the guild, even for Nihilum. With Wrath of the Lich King right around the corner, how are you as a guild planning to level up? Questing, instancing, grinding mobs? Well, we haven't played much beta, any of us. Some have played it a lot and some haven't. What we did for TBC was just pure instance grinding. It was the fastest and best way to get to lvl 70. With blizzard stating that they don't want people to level that way, I think we will focus more on doing quests and doing random instances for fun! As long as it goes fast :) How will you become the first to clear the new Naxx? Do you play on the beta to get a feel for the encounters or simply hone your skills on the current content and get ready for anything? Nihilum have played Naxx on Beta, and by the looks of it, it will be easy. Also doing Sunwell every Wednesday keeps us in top shape :) Naxx will be cleared by the US guilds before any of the Europeans. Everything is cleared on beta and I predict that we will see a fully cleared Naxxramas 25 man instance within 8-9 days of the release of WotLK, including leveling. The reason for this is, even though they have changed some of the fights, it will still be the same. People know what to do and what to bring. Switching gears to PvP, congratulations to the Nihilum Plasma team that won Blizzard's 3v3 tournament at BlizzCon 2008. SK Gaming recently split their PvE and PvP teams. How much interaction does your raid team have with the arena teams? Is there any cross over between members? Is it difficult for players to be the best in the world at both PvE and PvP content or do both take similar skills? I reckon that most of the people of Nihilum PvE could be the best in the world at PvP if they chose that path. And same goes for PvP players if they decided to go PvE. This game is all about dedication, if you have the right conditions and the will, you will become the best. I'm not in any way trying to undermine our dear PvP players' achievement, they are awesome. But what I'm saying is that everything about Nihilum is professional. We are striving to be the best in the world, both at PvE and PvP. But being the best at PvP and PvE at the same time, I think is not possible. Both areas take a whole lot of time. And time is something that is limited for us all :) To answer the question if the PvP team and PvE team are connected in any way, I have to say that daily chats over mIRC client is all we do atm. They are doing their thing on another server and we on ours. But yes, we all know each other. Do you have any advice for players hoping start an elite guild like Nihilum? To start a guild like Nihilum at this point is hard. What you need is a group of people, 5-10 on the same server with incredible dedication and desire to be the best. You need to be willing to put a lot of time and effort into the matter. When I think about how much time I've spent on this game and the guild Nihilum, it's insane. Never give up on what you want, even when times are rough you have to think back to what you had as the original goal. And strive for it. And try to have a good base of hardcore people, those who do not stop for anything! Finally, what are your impressions of Project Lore? Great looking website, absolutely smashing :) We need more of these types of websites and communities. They all help to grow the game to another level :)

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