The Lords of Nordrassil

Our Guild Master is Moonfire and our team of Officers are Tarn, Winter, Besti, Throttle, Espe and  Raduah and we will shortly be announcing 3 more Officers to compliment our team as we head towards The Mists of Pandaria.

The Lords of Nordrassil dinged guild level 25 this week, joining the small number of Nordrassil guilds in this elite group. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who contributed to the guild levelling and helped us to reach top level! Special shout-out to Zaryá who was 1st *and* 2nd best contributor – great work.

As well as having access to all the perks, Lords members can get the extra bonus of easy access to the perks via their UI, as guild officer Turalagon has created an addon for guild perk access (available using our guild forum).

Let’s start with a hearty welcome to all the new guildies joining us through the Cata recruitment system. It is great that so many wish to join The Lords of Nordrassil.

Secondly, in guild news, the co-GM position has been cancelled as Durathor is busy with RL commitments and has requested to return to being an officer. Arvariena has remained as GM. The officer corps now consists of Winterfold, Tarn, Turalagon, Bestiarius, Angeya and Durathor, as Railor and Revver have left the guild.

Looking forward to seeing you all in game.

Love
Arv

A warm welcome to all the recently joined guild members. We aim to be a friendly, social guild first and foremost and hopefully you’ll find it a welcoming place to be.

The ‘about us‘ and ‘conduct‘ pages should give you an idea of the kind of rules and behaviour that is expected within the guild to help maintain the friendly atmosphere.

I’d also like to point you to the forum, where you can join in the discussion. Once you register, I’ll promote you to have access to the rest of the forum as soon as I can. In particular please say hello in the ‘introduce yourself thread’

Enjoy your stay
Durathor

It’s a new year (it’s still January, so that counts, right?), so it seemed like an appropriate time to have a new look for the Lords of Nordrassil website too. The change includes an upgrade to the forum too, so you may need to update your bookmarks. Everything should still be there in the forum, now on the latest version, so some things might work a little differently.

Any comments on the design, or problems encountered, please let me know in the comments.

A couple of months have passed and with the Winter’s Veil incoming this seems like a good time to stop and take a look at how the achievements have been progressing.

No changes at the top of the table, but some movement in the mid ranks.

The achievements were taken on Sunday afternoon and there’s some interesting latest entries there. Quite a few from the newly release Icecrown instances and from the recent Pilgrim festival. A few people are clearing out ‘classic’ instances, while others seem to have spotted a festival I missed and got a Children’s week prize.

A final honourable mention goes to Besti for two reasons – firstly he’s the only non-level 80 in the list, beating quite a few of his top level rivals – and secondly as it looks like he snagged a trip to Blizzcon 2009, or at the very least managed to beg, borrow, buy or steal ‘Grunty’ the Murloc pet from someone who did!

Patch 3.3 is here at last and we have now begun to run the new Icecrown Citadel instances and to confront the Lich King. However I for one had missed the trailer that sets the scene until I spotted it in an article commending the story-telling in Wrath of the Lich King on Gamers With Jobs

The Fall of the Lich King trailer is an epic introduction to the new Icecrown Citadel instances, featuring the Lich King, Frostmourne and the army of heroes gathering outside the Citadel seeking justice.

The trailer is available on youtube (and can be switched into HD mode), or for download from the official World of Warcraft website.

As chasing achievements is key part of the WoW experience these days, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the guild stats on the armory to see who our top 20 achievers are.

The results are below – I’ve also included the latest achievement to see what we’re all working on – hover over the latest achievement to see the details.

There’s lots of brewfest, as expected, but a fair mix of other things too, across PVP. instances, exploring, questing, collecting etc – including some pretty cool achievements. Also no-one in the list has the same latest achievement, which works out a lot more interesting than if we had 20 Brewmasters

I might revisit this list in a few months to see how the standings have changed…

The Lords became an explorer’s guild earlier in the month with an off the map trip to an island south of Tanaris. Many thanks to Mia for organising the tour and keeping us pointing in the right direction. Click the pictures below for full sized versions.

This weekend is Blizzcon, hotbed of major announcements. And as expected, the big news this year is the announcement of the next WoW expansion – The Cataclysm.

The latest details are on the new Cataclysm website, although I’ve taken the liberty of reposting some of the highlights below:

• Two New Playable Races: Adventure as one of two new races–the cursed worgen with the Alliance or the resourceful goblins with the Horde.
• Level Cap Increased to 85: Earn new abilities, tap into new talents, and progress through the path system, a new way for players to improve characters.
• Classic Zones Remade: Familiar zones across the original continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms have been altered forever and updated with new content, from the devastated Badlands to the broken Barrens, which has been sundered in two.
• New High-Level Zones: Explore newly opened parts of the world, including Uldum, Grim Batol, and the great Sunken City of Vashj’ir beneath the sea.
• More Raid Content than Ever Before: Enjoy more high-level raid content than previous expansions, with optional more challenging versions of all encounters.
• New Race and Class Combinations: Explore Azeroth as a gnome priest, blood elf warrior, or one of the other never-before-available race and class combinations.
• Guild Advancement: Progress as a guild to earn guild levels and guild achievements.
• New PvP Zone & Rated Battlegrounds: Take on PvP objectives and daily quests on Tol Barad Island, a new Wintergrasp-like zone, and wage war in all-new rated Battlegrounds.
• Archaeology: Master a new secondary profession to unearth valuable artifacts and earn unique rewards.
• Flying Mounts in Azeroth: Explore Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms like never before.

Sounds pretty good to me – the idea of changes to Azeroth and visiting old questing areas sounds like a lot of fun and a nice change from the ‘new continent’ rountine. Only having 5 new levels seems like a plan too – maybe it will help them to get the next expansion out a bit quicker?

The new guild advancement feature sounds interesting too – I’m looking forward to hearing more about how that’s going to work.