It was a titanic battle that took place 2 months late, but the sweet taste of victory was pleasant nonetheless. Tonight, the thunderous hammer of Valhall clashed against the volcanic hammer of Ragnaros - and in the end, the hammer of Valhall had struck harder. What an encounter it was, words can't describe the adrenaline rush you get while fighting a foe as intimidating looking as Ragnaros (best boss model ever, period.) In the most epic 7 mins of Valhall's WoW history, we perfectly executed a new Sons strategy and finally extinguised the angry flames of the Fire God.

Just 1 month ago, we had come out of a raid slumber as you may already know, I had originally set a target of 6 weeks to conquer Molten Core as I had wanted us to find our footing slowly (what can I say, I'm a conservative man). In just the first week of raiding, we had already cleared all of Molten Core to spawn Ragnaros for the first time (read previous update), this was when I realised it can be done much earlier than expected. Leading up to our Ragnaros kill tonight, we spent the entire 2nd week to get our Fire Resist up to par for this encounter starting from 0 fire resist gear, zilch, nada. We got off our asses and farmed Dark Iron Ore by the thousands in the span of one week to get a Smith to Revered thorium faction for Dark Iron Armor, we rallied everyone and farmed for librams and burning essences every single night, while our Alchemists churned out Fire resist potions by the dozens. By the 3rd week, we were fully geared up in Dark Iron Gear and various FR equipment and ready to give Ragnaros a real try. This simply would not have been possible if not for the dedication and ambition of our members, this is the very reason why our Valhall members wear our guildtag with pride. I am glad to have all the new members with us, and I am even more glad the old Valhall corp is as dedicated as ever, you ladies are the best.

On to the Ragnaros encounter. I'm not sure what to say that you haven't already read on other sites, but my advice would be to start working on Fire resist gear right now and not when you are actually there, don't do it last minute or you are looking at sky high Libram prices.
Phase 1 (Ragnaros) is somewhat like a modified version of Onyxia, slightly more predictable de-aggro spikes on the Tank but with more annoying AEs all around (f*ck By Fire be Purged). It has a slightly steeper learning curve than Onyxia encounter I guess, but in due practice you probably won't even lose more than a few people in this phase if any at all. Phase 2 (Sons of Flame) is all about making a chaotic situation as un-chaotic as possible, everyone needs to be alert and everyone has a role to play in crowd control and minimising mana/health attrition.
There are definately more than one ways to deal with Sons, but the bottomline is treat this phase seriously like an art instead of blowing through with brute force, and when you can control Phase 2 without deaths and minimal mana drain you aren't far from beating Ragnaros. The thing you need to note is that Sons of Flames are hardly as 'chaotic' as you they may seem initially, but if you have been following all the 'omfgwepwned ragnaros' videos posted on the net then you are probably doing it in an extremely messy manner - which might actually still work if you have enough brute dps to burn Ragnaros down. Phase 3 and 4 are repeats of 1 and 2, so as the fight wears on attrition will definately set in and make things much more challenging, this is why most guilds try to beat Ragnaros before the 2nd Sons wave. When we first started we reguarly got beyond the 2nd Sons phase, but by then attrition was a bit too much for us to finish him off. Tonight we tried an all new approach to the Sons, and the efficiency of which surprised even myself, as we took him to 48% pre-Sons and finishing him off after just one Sons wave.

One thing I can tell you for sure though, and that is beating Ragnaros will definately fill you with a real sense of accomplishment like nothing you have experienced so far. The drops we got from Ragnaros were dismal to say the least, but none of us are complaining - yet.

Stay tuned for our next update, - Enter Blackwing Lair -.

Hello there once again. Some of you might be wondering why this homepage has not been updated for 2 months, well, the reason is simply because we have been inactive for 2 months. Just a while ago we were at the top of our game, taking down Magmadar and Onyxia in some server firsts - and then I fell ill and had to take an extended break for 2 months. This resulted in Valhall falling into slumber, some people left us for more active guilds while some new ones joined, but the majority of Valhall stayed loyal and stuck through during this rough patch. And for this, I thank you ladies for staying true to your roots.

I've only just returned last Sunday, where we did a 'warm-up' raid to test the new people and to get our raid feel back, and apparently we haven't lost much of it, taking her down yet again. Bolstered by our success, we were determined to pick up the pieces where we left off 2 months back - Molten Core. I'm not sure what to say here really, other than this very Molten Core update is 2 months overdue. In the span of 1 short week of raiding once again, we tore through the entire zone and spawned Ragnaros for the first time by disposing of Majorhomo Executus on our 2nd attempt. Of course, we are not at all prepared for the Ragnaros encounter since I didn't exactly predict us to reach him this fast, but rest assured he will go down soon enough. Frankly speaking, I do not really mind who kills Ragnaros first. Coming out of a 2 months slumber means we have a ton of catching up to do, but I have been more than happy with our progress and that is all I can ask for. For this, I will make damn sure to duly reward each and every member of Valhall.

Lastly, I leave you with some low quality screenshots provided by Macatamy, who for some obscure reason prefers to take pics of trash clearing instead of boss fights.

Make no mistake - The Sleeper has awakened.

We have reached a new milestone tonight, the Black Lady and Azuregos has fallen in rapid succession to the might of the Hammer of Valhall. Fresh off our success in Molten Core last week, I decided to focus on individual encounters this week to see how well we would do with our new found confidence. I would've liked to carry on learning the rest of the Molten Core zone but figured it would be a more significant milestone to conquer individual encounters first instead of 'just another boss' in Molten Core.

First on the list was Onyxia, The Black Lady. I really love this encounter, and it really isn't hard for anyone who has tried it to see why. Minimal trash clearing, interesting lore (lots of pre-quests), brilliantly scripted encounter, excellent risk vs rewards - the list goes on. I sincerely hope the bulk of future end-game content will be molded Onyxia-style (sans excessive keying), though I am not neccesarily dissatisfied with Molten Core. We spent last Sunday feeling the encounter out with 29 at first and got her to 52%, with our best attempt at 25% later on as a few more people logged on. Needless to say we knew we had her, we made some tweaks and gave it another go tonight, and it proved to be the key of the encounter as we mastered Phase 1 and 2 almost flawlessly. Phase 3 was crazy fun, but amidst the chaos we lost a portion of the raid force, but by then it was a done deal as she keeled over and became another of Valhall's war trophies. High on adrenaline after hanging Onyxia's head in Stormwind, we decided it was payback time for another dragon - Azuregos.

Interestingly enough, Azuregos is in principle a souped up version of the Onyxia Phase 1 encounter, it's all about aggro, attrition and endurance. If you can control her aggro and minimise attrition, this fight will be easy because her damage output is pathetic, but be prepared for an endurance test if you lose dps early on. A special holler goes out to Mongol the Orc who was using Distracting shot (I think!) to mess up our plan throughout the fight, but at least he was acting in character compared to the Alliance cretin who came over to belittle us in general chat last time heh.

So anyways, I forgot to take screenies of the fights as I was busy yelling all night, but once I get my hands on some from our members I will post them up here. As for loots, I guess we got some of the better drops from their loot tables, no Cloaks at least. Lastly, I want to thank our ladies once again for stepping up and raising the bar yet again this week, I am sure now we will score more success over the next few weeks with our wonderful crew of gnomes and gnome-haters.

The pictures says it all, Valhall has finally started on the raid-game, and we're off to a pretty good start. We started off with Azuregos last week as our very first raid target, but several of our members were still inexperienced with large scale raiding so we didn't do as well as I would've hoped, however we did get her down to 25% which wasn't too shabby with a 34 man force. The Azuregos raid was good fun overall, although we had some rude guests with too much time on their hands that came over to taunt us, but thank god for /ignore. I do hope Blizzard stops adding outdoor raid bosses in the future and more Onyxia type encounters instead, instanced with minimal trash clearing - perfect.

Anyways, this week I decided to give Molten Core a try despite us not being able to field a full raid yet, just to get a 'feel' of the zone. But as you can see, we went a lot more than just experiencing the zone, taking down Lucifron and Magmadar on separate days. It was a fresh experience raiding a zone that actually presents some sort of a challenge, but I'll admit they could've done with less HPs on the trash, it's gonna get old really quick having to clear 10s of millions of hitpoints worth of trash mobs. As for Lucifron and Magmadar, I'll admit that these 2 bosses are the easiest encounters in the entire zone, but for how inexperienced we were at high-end raids I think we did fine, and it certainly was a valuable learning experience that will surely boost the guild to further heights in the near future. What loots did they drop you ask? Well, I'm not gonna announce and regurgitate every single piece of loot that drops each raid like so many other sites, who the hell cares when you have Thottbot really. All I care about, is the effort and focus that our members put in to make our maiden raids such a success, so I thank you ladies of Valhall.

Lastly, our recruitment is still open for select classes listed on the right, minimum lvl requirement is lv55, contact one of our officers if you are interested. With that I shall leave you with some screenshots of our MC and Azuregos raid, hope to bring you more soon ;).

Normally I don't bother updating the News page unless we have accomplished something news-worthy, but since we are still a month or so away from beating the 'real' raid dungeons, I thought an update on our progress would be better than nothing. And just f.y.i, the banner pic is taken before one of our UBRS raids.

First of all, notice the topic above reads "From 15 to 40". No, it does not mean we went from 15 to 40 members, but rather it symbolises our guilds current progress from 15-man raids to 40-man raids. We are not quite there yet, but with a few more key classes to round up our raid-roster we should be quite ready to give Molten Core a whirl. Curse Blizzard for not implementing transitional raid content between 15-man and 40-man raid limits.

Recruiting for a guild that wants to tackle end-game content independantly is lot tougher than most people realise, more so on our low-population server, just take a look at the following link - Why some Rogues and Hunters can't find a group or raid at lv60. Yes, wowcensus.com isn't 100% accurate, but the stark contrast between the amount of Priests vs. the DPS classes should tell you a lot. Given that all major raids revolves around having a healthy amount of Priests and Healers, you can see how hard it is to build a raiding guild from such a small pool of Healers. If you happen to belong to a guild that can field 7-10 Priests reliably every night, congratulations, you are enjoying a luxury 95% of this server will never see. To the new players reading this, please for the love of gnomes roll a Priest or Druid instead of Hunter #1102, that's if you want to improve your chances of joining a raid in the future.

Many people and even some of our newer members have asked me why Valhall doesn't raid with other guilds, the reason is simple really. As said before in our previous update, Valhall has always been an independant guild, we will either do it as a guild or not at all. It doesn't matter how long we get there, but we want to get there on our own. I have no doubt that by co-raiding we can probably beat Onyxia or a majority of Molten Core this very moment, but that really takes a lot of the sense of accomplishment away for us. It really doesn't matter to me that we don't beat whatever encounter first, our focus is on building our foundations slowly but surely to achieve a full and proper raiding-roster for expansions to come - afterall, Rome wasn't built in a day. So, please do not think we are aloof, for our gnomes are very friendly (except for Puffi).

I have also discovered a rather amusing, albeit disturbing, rumour about Valhall. It seems that certain individuals has been spreading the rumour of Valhall not allowing members to group or raid outside the guild, that members must raid whenever they are online and that Valhall controls your eat and sleep patterns. Ok that last bit was an exaggeration, but you get the idea. I mean seriously people, with rules like that we'd be losing people a lot faster than we are gaining them, don't ya think? We have abut 60ish total active and happy members, throw any of them a whisper and find out for yourself what's it really like in Valhall. Why be a victim of nonsense propaganda when you can so easily let -basic- common sense prevail?

Rants out of the way, we are still recruiting selectively, mainly the classes listed on the column to the right. In addition to that, you need to be be no less than lv50. Take note that you are NOT required to raid whenever you are online (just ask any of our members), but you must have the interest in large-scale guild raids. Exceptions will be made on a case by case basis. If you are interested in joining us, visit our Forums and check out he Recruitment section for more information.

Anyways, here are some random screenshots taken from our numerous UBRS runs to get the blood from General Drakkisath. It definately gets boring after a while, but the rewards are very decent considering each run takes no more than 1hr 45mins or so.