It's been a while since we last updated so brace yourself...

Firstly we had some issues regarding filling 25 man raids in the early part of the year, as such we decided to switch the guilds raiding focus to 10 mans aiming to run 2 separate groups each week, one as progress, the other as a more relaxed environment. Ultimately our progress increased greatly and we've met and subsequently defeated Arthas in 10 man normal as well as allowing the progress group to move on to hard modes (currently 8/12 there, yay us!)
The normal group is making steady progress through ICC and currently sits at 11/12 with just Arthas standing in the way of another round of spiffy new titles and stuff.

In April we decided to give 25 mans a go again and struck up a working relationship with the guild Elysium. The alliance has allowed both guilds to make steady 25 man progress up until now, but with the upcoming summer (aka beer and barbeque season), some slow down has occured.

Earlier this month some of our members took it upon themselves to arrange weekly PUG 25 man runs through ICC with a good level of success, good job to those involved.

That's all for now, let's hope we don't forget where the Post button is again.

Unless you are a vending machine. The Elders at Play however, are not vending machines, and that means we do change on occasion. This is one of those occasions. It has become time for EaP to say auf wiedersehen to some of our dear friends and at the same time welcome new people to the positions of officer and guild master.

Our eminent guild master Celsius has decided to take some time to satisfy his hunger for hard-core raiding, and hand the torch of GM-ness over to our own papa bear, Celysse. To help Celysse out with the administration of the guild, new officers have been promoted, and we welcome Ananchel, Czejny, Kelmaru, Anastacie and the artist formally known as Mudhole to their new positions. Fresh blood was needed, as many of our old and faithful officers have had a spell of the ol' RL.

As sad as we are to see Elvissa, Klors, Lief and Atuin go, we are truly happy to have had the opportunity of playing with you. We're all thankful of all the time and devotion you've dedicated to this guild. If we didn't think you'd stick around anyway, we'd probably be crying now. But since we are manly elves, we don't. Instead we /salute you and wish you luck in all your endeavors! BBL, rite?

Well, we finally did it! After a few (ok, several) wipes on Faction Champions this week we made it to Anub'arak with 40+ attempts and an hour of raid time left. Our first attempt saw Element kite for a little longer than was strictly necessary and we wiped, but not before showing that we most definitely had the DPS to take him down with just the one burrow phase.

A couple of attempts later and we had him to P3 before we all slowly dropped dead. It felt "doable" though. Then disaster struck. Element had to leave early and only had time for the world famous One Last Try! Strangely, a kind of Zen state of calm descended on the raid and everything went perfectly. Everyone was alive for P3,we popped Heroism and nuked the bejesus out of him. 20%... 10%... 5%... OH GOD WHY IS EVERYONE DYING WHO DO I HEAL?? HALP!!!!!

Kill him we did though and it was the most satisfying kill since Wrath for me personally. Lots of shouting on TS ensued and I'm sure that at least 10 of us will be in a great mood going into Icecrown (hopefully) on Wednesday!

Time for a news update.

Nothing much has changed in the 25 man world. We're farming ToC and waiting for Blizzard to put us out of our misery and let us go raid Icecrown much like the other 99% of our server are.

To try and not die from boredom we sent a 10 man team back to Ulduar to see if we could get ourselves some hardmode achievements (and some drakes of course!) before the next patch. Despite a pretty unbalanced group (not our mental state, although that's up for debate) we really had no problems at all. We had a few wipes on Orbituary as some of us hadn't done it before but quickly got that one in the bag. Iron Dwarf Medium Rare and Furnacemaster were both one-shotted.

There was some concerns at the start that two healers wouldn't be enough for Heartbreaker, however Heltzer and myself laughed at these claims as we oneshotted it with only one death (Ananchel, and it was probably his fault). Iron Council next and once again the brute force of our melee section was just too much (7.5k dps Shinrae, was that really necessary?) and Kervik bagged himself the quest item. Guess who'll be there on our first Algalon raid ;)

Disarmed and Crazy Cat Lady were next, both of which are stupidly easy with our current gear levels, although it could be argued that they were easy enough anyway. We never really tried them back in 3.1 to be honest!

Next up, Lose Your Illusion which we...yes you get the idea. It was one-shotted.

Hodir was a chance for our melee to once again /flex and I think we had a minute to spare on the timer for I Would Say This Cache Is Rare.

Next week we'll be doing Firefighter, Whatever Freya's hard mode is called, I love the Smell of Saronite. We'll also be attempting not just our guilds first Yogg+1 kill, but if we succeed it'll be our first Yogg kill period. Like I said, not a very blanced group ;)

It's been a busy time for us lately. Now that it's getting a bit cold outside people have flocked back to their PCs and we're back to raiding rather a lot.

After a pretty nippy 10 man ToC clear last week we decided to have a stab at the Heroic version and it went rather well. We one shot the Beasts and then surprised ourselves by doing the same to Jaraxus. There was talk of [Tribute to That One Where You Have 50 Attempts Left] but thankfully the Faction Champions slapped us around a bit and brought us back down to earth. We had our revenge though and went on to kill the Valkyr's as well before discovering that Hard Mode Anub'Arak is Hard.

In 25 man news we've been clearing ToC with ease and have decided to go back and finish Ulduar before trying ToGC 25. We got Vezax down easily enough but spent a full night wiping on Yogg. We'll get him though. Oh yes.