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