Well, we finally got there.

The Lich King is no more.

Huge thanks to Resjudicator for leading our raid program up to ICC, to Alpha, Farmerdan, Lannister, and Meekrob for leading us through most of ICC, and to Lorathon for leading the final charge that brought down the King. We tend to take this work for granted, but it's very deserving of our appreciation.

Above all, thanks to all of you who have stuck with our raid program and invested countless hours over the past months learning fights and teaching them to others. This has been one giant team effort, and I, for one, had a lot of fun along the along the way!

Now, it's on to the Ruby Sanctum, to ICC hard-modes, and to our Reins of the Rusted Proto-Drakes!

WAAAAAGH!!!

-Hiero

Stormwind. Probably one of the nicest places to look at in World of Warcraft gets a visual boost in Cataclysm. Perhaps most importantly, is that it will actually be there if you look at it top down. The layout remains entirely the same; of course, there are some details worth mentioning.

Stormwind Castle looks like a castle! And of course, what castle is complete without a gigantor statue of yourself in front of it? That’s right, Varian Wrynn’s narcissism as reached new heights. But hey, if I had a castle, I would probably do it too. The park is gone. If you take a good look at the towers overlooking the “Valley of Heroes”, you’ll see some nasty looking claw marks. This leads me to believe that it was Deathwing’s doing. Apparently he doesn’t like trees…or Moonwells…or anything to do with Night Elves. There is a nice little lake behind Stormwind now, which can be overlooked from the new graveyard. SI:7 has a new building, which resembles the Ravenholdt hideout in Hillsbrad Foothills.

Overall, Stormwind looks quite impressive. A capital the Alliance is proud to call their own. There are many other changes I could have mentioned, but why ruin all the fun? Besides, I’m sure that a good few of you got to see all of the screens that MMO-Champion posted a short while ago like I did.

This is one picture I did manage to grab from MMO-Champion before it locked up the vaults. Behold!

“Who said names had to make sense?”

-Rahnir

We get it already. Anub’arak is dead.

So what gives? Does United Defense DO anything anymore? Why do we have the same boring, old front page? We certainly aren’t some boring, old guild.

Things happen here, and it’s about time that the world knows it. That’s where I come in. While I can’t promise daily updates, I can promise that we wont be staring at the same thing for six months. That said, my initial plans have been de-railed slightly. I was going to give you guys lots of awesome screenshots of things to come in Cataclysm. Unfortunately, because Blizzard controls the Internet these days, reliable sources of good quality shots like MMO-Champion have up and removed them from under my nose. I did ONE good picture that ill share with you on my next news post.

Until then, you all get to look at everyones favourite raid boss.....Mr.X-T!

“It don’t bend that way, fool!”

-Rahnir

The past several days have been extremely productive ones for United Defense. Last Thursday we cleared all of Trial of the Crusader, ending with our first guild kill of Anub’arak-25.

After finishing up in ToC, we moved on to Icecrown Citadel, where we defeated Lady Deathwhisper and won the Gunship Battle, both for the first time. This victory was especially sweet because it came at the hands of the first all-UD 25-man raid we’ve fielded in many months. Yes, that’s right, 25 UD-ers, ON A BOAT.

Last week also saw significant success for one of our 10-man groups: they fine tuned our Festergut strategy and were able to down that boss for the first time.

This week is of to a great start. Our Tuesday 25-man cleared the entire first wing of Icecrown Citadel, finishing with our first kill of Deathbringer Saurfang. This is not a trivial achievement for any guild, let alone one that has only been raiding 25-man content for a little over two weeks. We’re building a strong raiding team, and it’s beginning to show. Special thanks to Alphalaxer, Lannister, Resjudicator, Riley, and Farmerdan for the work you’ve put into leading raids and developing the strategies that work well for our guild. Even more importantly, thanks to all of you UD Members who have taken the time to run heroics, farm badgers, attend ToC gear grinds (I know the place grinds many of our gears), work with target dummies, pour over spreadsheets, fine-tune your UI’s, read technical forum posts, and invest all the hard work it takes to develop your characters and your skills as individual players. Without all that effort, there’s no way we could have accomplished what we have.

Here’s looking forward to the coming weeks—to Professor Putricide and beyond; to further reaping the fruits of our labors; and to having fun along the way!

-Hieronymous

The opening of the second gate of ICC coincided with a tremendous transition for our guild. We were able to successfully down guild first kills in ICC and TOC 25 man. So, the unofficial is now official. We are once again going to be scheduling 25 man raid nights for Tuesdays and Thursdays. For now - we will run ICC on Tuesday and TOC or TOGC on Thursday.

We've been able to reach this point through the efforts of our officers, members and new recruits, but the hard work is far from over. We need to continue to recruit applicants with solid potential to fit into the United Defense culture. We need to continue to work on our boss knowledge, gear levels, wonky internet connections and faulty computer parts.

It is each member's responsibility to gear themselves up and prepare themselves fully for each raid. To know the boss strategy. To know their class and spec completely. To be online, on-time, and consistently ready to go.

ICC 25 man is tuned for guilds in ilvl 245 gear. For this purpose we will continue to run TOC and TOGC as we can to improve our hopes of progress in ICC. Further, In order to ensure continued progress in ICC we are going to institute a moving minimum gearscore* requirement for our Tuesday raids. This requirement will start out fairly low - easily accessible through heroics and badge gear. As we continue to progress we will raise the requirement. The purpose is not to leave members on the sidelines in favor of well geared pugs - the purpose is to ensure that each guild member is putting in the time and effort to improve their character and aid in the progress of the guild. To paraphrase, ask not what your guild can do for you, ask what you can do for your guild. Help us all out.

Additionally we will be instituting the UD Loot Policy (link in top nav) once we reach 90% United Defense participation in the 25 man raid. So - be prepared for the pirate loot master Resj's triumphant return.

What does this mean for our 10 man raids? We often progresses more rapidly and enjoy ourselves tremendously in 10 mans. The ilvl 251 gear is also excellent. We will continue to run and schedule 10's. We cleared the first four bosses in ICC 4 times last week and 3 times this week. As new content opens we want to be certain that we put our best feet forward in 10 man - meaning our best geared and most skilled players will attempt to clear first. After we have bosses on farm status we will split up into farming groups. If you have interest in running 10 man ICC - there will be groups forming regularly -sign up and jump in. Non-ICC 10-mans will not be officially scheduled.

*We realize that gearscore is only one measure of a character's capability - we reserve the right to disregard it completely in some cases.