Frostbyte blog

Frostbyte is a World of Warcraft guild on the european Bloodhoof server.

The guild was started as an offshoot of the Frostbyte Clan (which has existed through many years and games), but has since grown to be just about the largest guild on Bloodhoof. Admittedly, the size may be linked to the staggering numbers of alt characters played by some of the members.

A relaxed yet successful raiding environment, regular guild meets and an appreciation that real life can come first, make Frostbyte one of the least conventional guilds around... but in a good way!

This site is run using ClanWiki (written especially for Frostbyte) and PHPBB2.

Reporting for progress. Sir, yes, sir!
Posted by Mark on Tue Mar 2 23:06:10 2010

It's been a while, but don't think for a moment that we've been slacking. On the contrary, we've seen great progress - one 10man has recently killed Sindragosa, and sat on the Lich King's lap (just before his friends threw them off of a platform to their deaths). Another has made great progress, killing both Putricide and the Blood Princes.

Enough of that -- it's the 25-man progress I'm really here to report on. 2 well-tuned fights have been causing us issues over the last month or so - Festergut and Rotface. We've spent whole evenings on just one of these, but thanks to the Frostbyte spirit, we've not given up.

Last night, for example, all our 'farm bosses' were dead from the previous raid, which left us battling against Festergut for the majority of the night. Things looked promising when we wiped at 5% on one of the first attempts of the night, then 3%. We even saw a 0.9% wipe. A final push saw us snag a kill with 10 short seconds to the brutal enrage.

By now, it was late. We had to clear trash to get to Rotface, but we still had time for 5 or so goes. Repeatedly, we saw things getting out of control around 10%, but true to our ethos, our last attempt was to be the best. At 5%, the main tank died, and our kite tank took over. The large slime meandered around the raid, and our valiant team dextrously avoided it ... for the most part. The last 0.5% seemed to take an age to take off, but eventually, and with around 7 people left up, Rotface succumbed to our attack, giving us 2 new kills in one night, and a handy morale boost.

With luck, our skills will transfer to the next reset, and we'll be able to spend some serious time on a new boss.

Saurfang .. what a baby
Posted by Mark on Tue Feb 2 21:18:30 2010

Coo, things do happen quickly when you're otherwise distracted. On the 18th January, we assembled a crack team of commandos to take out Operative 'S' and his marauding Blood Beasts. Changing tack from the original zerg approach (never a good idea when attacking new foes) to a more measured, almost balletic attack seemed to help, and after a couple of goes, we saw him run away, not even leaving a corpse for us to mock.

Since then, we've had looks at Rotface, Festergut and the Blood Princes, which have, to date proven a little too much for our gallant heroes, but we can report a 3% wipe on Rotface, which is encouraging.

Onward and Upward ... Quite literally!
Posted by Mark on Wed Dec 23 14:47:47 2009

That Lady Deathwhisper. She dies easily, but she has friends. LOADS of friends. I'd like to put our reluctance to kill her down to the fact that killing a vicar (even a creepy vicar) seems wrong, but realistilcally, our vim and vigour for her downfall was met with adequate defence by her faithful congregation. As time progressed, though, our theological disagreements empowered us to the point where we were able to destroy her before she finished her long, repetitive sermon. Slightly disconcerted by the fact that she barely left a corpse, we moved through her vestibule (heh!), took her heavenly lift to .. an airship.

If this battle could be won solely via ostentatious use of jetpacks, we'd have won the fight before we even engaged our enemy, but that was evidently of little concern, as we easily dispatched of the Horde ship, and docked outside Saurfang's house near to sundown, leaving us just 2 attempts on this notorius fight. Our first attempt was basically a shambles, albeit a fun one, but our second worked far better, seeing him down to 20% when he hit 4 stacks of runic power, and overwhelmed us. I foresee a kill within 3 or 4 more attempts, assuming our memories don't fail us in the new year!

Wilkommen bei Icecrown
Posted by Mark on Tue Dec 15 08:30:16 2009

We thought the instance capacity issues were behind us. We thought there would be no rush to get into Icecrown on patch day. We were wrong. As everyone and their Perky Pug flocked to Icecrown on the day the gates opened, we were among the unlucky few not to make it.

Eventually, we made it into the instance, half an hour before raid-end, which gave us the opportunity to check out the trash on the way to Lord Marrowgar, but not, unfortunately, to look at the fight.

Thus we returned last night, ensuring we had an instance ID, to see what we'd missed. The trash to Marrowgar was as annoying as it was on Wednesday, but we fought our way through it valiantly, and were presented with our first look at 25-man Marrowgar (20 people managed to get past him on 10-man over the weekend). Tactics were hurried, and it was decided that it's better to live the fight rather than attempt to learn it from instructions, which turned out to be the correct choice. After 2 wipes at around 50%, our 3rd run was almost flawless (until the last 5%, when almost everyone died). Luckily, this coincided with a whirlwind, and our remaining heroes managed to take him down, despite the lack of tanks.

As loot was distributed, we considered how best to approach Lady Deathwhisper's trash, deciding on the safe tactic of LOADS OF CC. This worked perfectly, and we hardly lost anyone to the groups of trash.

Lady Deathwhisper, on the other hand, provided too much for our valiant group on this night, and after 5 wipes, we called it, having just made it to her second phase. with luck, Wednesday will see us motor through Marrowgar, and Deathwhisper, and allow us to see the epic gunship battle.

Changes, changes, changes
Posted by Mark on Fri Nov 20 13:11:47 2009

Better late than never, they say, and my feeble excuses are outlined below, but we'd like to welcome members of The Forbidden Council, who have elected to join us en masse to allow them to see more 25-man content. This is an arrangement which suits both guilds, as Frostbyte itself has recently been through a period of time when it's been hard to form a raid! This means that Frostbyte is now represented by people from even more countries, including Greece and Slovenia. The prospects for future Guild meets improve daily!! A huge welcome to everyone, and we hope you find Frostbyte as welcoming and inclusive as the Forbidden Council were!

In other news, we've recently migrated the Web and Teamspeak server to a new machine, in a new location - the process wasn't without its difficulties, and existing Forum members will have to recreate their passwords, but we now believe that the site is fully functioning, and we've even added new functionality!! If anything looks or behaves oddly, let us know!

It's not all 25-man
Posted by Mark on Fri Nov 20 13:11:28 2009

You wouldn't know it to read our news, but there's more to Frostbyte than just 25-man raiding. While our primary focus is currently on the 25-man content, we encourage smaller groups to practice on the 10-man raids, and on certain days, have fielded 3 10-man teams at once!

We've seen achievement runs to Naxxrammas, heroic mode Ulduar, Sarth+3 and various other raids, and various raiders can now claim The Undying, Glory of the Ulduar Raider, Champion of Ulduar, and now A Tribute to Insanity. If you see Aurr or Hellscyte riding their Swift Alliance Steeds, be sure to wave!

ToC 25 Cleared! Posted by Mark on Fri Nov 6 14:40:26 2009
That is all.

Horde suxx, valkyr twins do too.
Posted by Mark on Fri Nov 6 14:39:59 2009

Last week's Trial of the Crusader was but a minor blip on our progression through this new instance, as the Champions of the Horde proved a little too much for our interpid team. With 2 10-man teams having seen them off since then, we re-entered the Coliseum with experience on our side.

After one-shotting the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxas, we once again faced up to the Faction Champions, but this time, with a definite plan - a plan to actually try to stop the healers healing. Amazing, huh?

Anyway, our new approach worked well, and thanks to 341 dispels, 62 interrupts and a battle res, we dispatched them almost trivially with only 3 deaths to their 9!

A more technical 'gadget' fight followed on the Twin Valkyr followed with one attempt to learn the fight, one to fine tune, and a final go which, again, thanks to our announcer, Pooky, saw them fail to heal, and go down fairly quickly in under 6 minutes.

Oh, is that all?
Posted by Mark on Fri Nov 6 14:39:20 2009

Our final return to Ulduar saw us with a clear path to our first sighting of General Vezax. As a significant proportion of the raid had already killed him on 10-man, we were slightly cocky, and wiped when we realised he's a lot more keen on casting his AoE than in 10-man. Fortunately for us, our guild robot, Pooky, stepped up, and for 5 minutes repeated the interrupt sequence "Aurr, Gortek, Soulscard, Pooky", securing us a fairly simple kill. Extra thanks go to Calyx and our other herbalists who farmed Winterspring and Azshara to allow our casters a bit more intellect via an old-school Flask of Distilled Wisdom

Finally able to visit Yogg-Saron, and still fairly early in the night, we embarked upon the long, often frustrating, but ultimately rewarding path to learning this fight. Sadly we didn't manage to get past phase 1, but progress was made. We ended the night with a quick kill of Ignis.

A great couple of weeks of raiding, we're looking forward to starting it all over again on Wednesday!!

Slutty Servers and New Kills
Posted by Mark on Fri Nov 6 14:38:34 2009

Well after Bloodhoof going down like a cheap whore and interrupting our Jaraxxus progress on Wednesday, we picked straight up where we left off on Thursday and killed him with little fuss.

Following that, we took advantage of an extended lockin to allow us to continue our attempts on Thorim, who proved a pushover and a 1-shot. Quick kills of Freya and Mimiron gave us Monday to go see the General and I'd also like to think Yogg too.

All in all a great reset so far despite the slutty server - well done all!