With a lack of 25 man options on Tuesday night we decided against running Ulduar 25 harmodes or TotGC 25 and went for seven out of the 10 members from my Saturday night crew to go back in to ICC 10 with three unsaved folks to have a crack at the Blood Queen. The idea was to see what we could learn for when we start our 25 man Blood Queen attempts.

We still had seven out of ten tries left to burn and within four attempts we had ourselves a kill. First try was sub 50%, 2nd was sub 25%, we followed this up with a fail try then burned her down with ease on the go after that.

It looks like a fun fight - especially for the dps - with a fairly tight dps requirement. Raid healers are going to have a field day with this one as tank damage seems simple enough but raid damage is an increase on 30-40% on any other fight we've encounter so far. We've learned it's a kind of cross between Lord Jaraxxus from ToC and Teron Gorefiend from BT but in no way as terrifying as the constructs from back in the day.

With Professor Putricide 25 down to 47% and 2:45 left on the enrage before we had eight or nine raid members get blown up by a Gas Cloud on Monday night a kill on him seems very close then it's over to this bitch with as many attempts left as we can muster. If people start off on Prof.P next time by playing like they finished on Monday it should be an exciting week ahead for Altruism.

New news from Altruism HQ and we are proud to annouce that Blood Council 10 and 25 are both down!

We went in on our usual Saturday night 10 man ICC run and cleared all the farm bosses and four shot Prof.P with two agonising wipes, one on 4% and one on 3%. We then had a fail attempt where we wiped in phase two but quickly followed that by a flawless attempt.

With the Professor down we headed over to the Blood Council and tried a few goes but kept losing our Lock tank which forced us to re-think our strategy. We decided to try the mad Prot Pala tanks all strat which worked a charm and only took two goes using this method.

A totally mental fight for myself and Cromi, with him on Kinetic Bombs and me running around like a headless chicken picking up Dark Nuceli while tanking Taldaram and Keleseth. A lot of fun and I've not had a good challenge like that in a long time!

On Sunday night the 25 man crew went in to scope out these guys and see if we could further our 73% from Thursday (just two attempts that night) and within four attempts they were toast!

I can't really comment on how the night went other than that as I wasn't there myself but the guys and gals have done me proud upping us to 7th on server and gaining only the 4th first Guild kill that I've missed in our history.

With 10 attempts remaining on Prof.P and the Blood Queen this week in 25s and seven remaining in 10 man I'm hoping for at least one more fresh kill in either format before this reset is up.

So grats to all looters and well done to all on another fine week for Altruism!

I was originally planning to do this reported at the end of the first reset, I'm a few days late but anyway, here we have the latest news on the new wing in ICC.

First up grats to one of our 10 man teams for downing Festergut in 10 man in the first week followed by a second team downing him too then following it up with a Rotface kill.

Unfortunately we didn't have time to go back in to try out Professor Putricide on 10 man before the reset but we made up for that by 3 shotting him just last night in an epic kill. All people alive with not an inch of room to spare. Well there was a fair bit of space by his desk but we were well cut off from it by that point!

In 25 man news we downed Festergut and Rotface in the first week as well. We enjoyed (read endured) a really insanely epic Rotface 25 kill. It was on of those BURN BURN BURN fights, the first of that type we've had in Altruism. Six people left standing, people shouting "NUKE! NUKE!" "COME ON! GO ON!" down vent and praying to the heavens. We had bubble tanking, Mage tanking and all sorts of other madess going on toward the end, I think Cuggles' smiling at him finally made him give up and give us the loot. This being said we rolfstomped him this week with only one dead in a pretty much flawless kill!

With both of these guys down we attempted Prof.P and got him down to several 70% wipes the best being just under at 69% before our 10 tries were up. With a lot of new things learned in our 10 man kill this week and all 25 man bosses downed with ease, up to the mad Professor that is, we have all 10 attempts remaining and are all really looking forward to seeing how far we can push him down this week in 25 man on Sunday.

Keep tuned and hopefully we'll have a kill real soon!

A new patch has finally opened and this post is an update on our first week inside the new ICC instance.

As is usual with patch days we had a 45 minute wait to get inside on Wednesday, plus a ton of lag in places and the usual server shutdowns to contend with, this being said I feel this patch landed a lot smoother than Ulduar did.

We started to work through the trash packs and up to Lord Marrowgar and then stood in front of him for 20 minutes for people to reboot due to vent lag which I'm sure was caused by the new patch. With that settled we pulled and wiped once due to losing two tanks via server lag. After picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off he hit the dirt on the next attempt.

We then had enough time to get in a few goes on Lady Deathwhisper and got a general feel for the fight then called it a night at 2330. Overall I think we lost about one and a half to two hours on the opening night, but we did kill the first boss so it's alll good.

The Thursday night was much smoother and we refined our Lady Deathwhisper tactics and got her down to 25% or so before calling the run. Friday night we decided to try and get in on Lady Deathwhisper once more as an extra optional raid and at the end of reset I'm glad we did.

We continued to work on the strat laid down the previous evening and honed it closer and closer to a kill, with some really close wipes. In the end it was around 2200 server time when she hit the deck to whoops and hollas over vent by all. I think Lady D is the most challenging fight in the instance so far in terms of everyone has a certain job to do at certains times and raid co-ordination has to be relatively high to pull this one off, also a good class balance is required too.

Speaking of challenging boss encounters the next one is the Gunship Battle, which although a lot of fun (gogo Jetpacks!) is one giant loot pinata. We lost two or three melee in the opening seconds when they lept over to the Horde ship too early without a tank to protect them and we still easily one shot it.

This boss is bugged at the moment so people who were on on the Horde Gunship when it went down died and had to res and run in, they were all ported up to Saurfang, including our master looter who couldn't get to the chest so we had to ticket everything over to it's owners. Also the ship doesn't dock at Deathbringer's Rise so everyone on the ship had to do their very best lemming impersonations to join up with us.

The rest of the night and the rest of the raid lockout we spent of Deathbringer Saurfang, which is effectively the gear check boss of the instance thus far. High dps is needed, as is top notch healing and healing co-ordination. On top of this people need to kite well and stay spread out as much as they can.

There are quite a few methods and tricks we used that resulted in our kill which are probably different to what some other Guilds may use on this fight but eventually it worked for us - after heruclean effort and I don't know how many sub 10% wipes - on Tuesday evening at around 2200 server time.

All in all it's been a very good week, we've done what we set out to do and that was clear the first wing before the reset. Yes I would have liked it to be a little speedier, but job done all the same. The effort shown by all was passable, but the effort on Lady D and Saurfang was very good in the end. Rest assured I will be expecting greater things for my raid crew in the coming weeks and months.

Also to note one of our 10 Man crews knocked down the first wing on Saturday night with the Realm First on "I'm on a Boat!" so a big grats to those who were in on that. Below are the screen shots of the kills I was party to and able to get a shot of.

Now time to farm til Janurary and the new wing!

Some more news from Altruism HQ is that of 22/11/09 we now have TotGC Faction Champions down!

We rocked up to the Crusader instance on Sunday night with two new kills fresh in our system and Hc Beasts already dispatched for the second time in a week.

We firmly set our sights on getting down Lord Jarraxus killed and entering the Champions scrap with more tries left than we had the previous week. After Lord J was down we were staring down FC with 28 attempts left on the board.

After a lot of hard work and dedication from all we took down the best the Horde had to offer with 23 tries remaining. They had a challenging set up for us to deal with in the form of: Priest, Paladin, Shaman healers. Rogue, Warrior, Death Knight, Hunter, Lock, Boomkin and Mage dps.

This kill has bumped us up to 10th on overall progression and 7th in 25 Player T9 content. So grats to all who've put in the work to push us this far. Here's hoping we can continue this hard work and climb further.

For the rest of the night we started work on the Twins and managed 75% before we wiped. It was disappointing that they managed to get a heal off in the process of us getting them down this far. We managed to burn down the shield but too late to nail that interrupt which could have seen us at 60%. Still 75% despite this is still impressive work for a fight we're still taking baby steps on.

The rest of the tries for this week have been used trying several methods to put us in good stead for a kill on the Twins within the next reset, so once again watch this space!

In other news we managed to get a Tribute to Insanity 10 Player on Saturday night and grats to Atair on his shinny new Swift Alliance Steed. Hoping to add a picture of him on it below very soon. Also below is the gang posing after the Faction Champions HC kill.

Two nights and two new boss kills! What more can I say?

We rocked up to TotGC 25 man tonight fresh and pumped from our Heroic Beasts kill and took eight attempts to take the Eredar Lord down to the floor!

We took another couple of goes at Faction Champions after that and got a feel for the Heroic version and we hope they'll be down very soon, so watch this space!

Go go Altruism!

Well it's been a while with any 25 man news and no we haven't stopped raiding the 25s, we've in fact been on a long hard slog to tonight's kill on TotGC 25 man Beasts of Northrend.

The first few weeks of the instance have been a tough gig to raid. Lots of DCs and latency issues due to a very unstable design from Blizzard, so GG Blizz for that.

The past two weeks we've been hitting the Beasts up at every chance we could get and did have some troubles with the phase two burrow, but over the last two raids we seemed to be breaking through that brick wall bit by bit.

Tonight we had a 2% wipe on enrage and a 4% wipe as well but we gritted our teeth and went back in again and again honing the process as much as we could until finally we nailed them.

It was pretty epic, he enraged right on a Massive Crash and the guys and girls did their job and got out of the way. From then on it was burn baby, burn! Then he hit the deck and we got our kill we so richly deserved.

It's one of those moments as GM you cherish, one of those moments that makes it all worth while. You can come away from the raid with a big fat grin on your face telling the Guild how proud you are of them.

So congratulations to all who helped on this, the 25 in the raid tonight, plus the guys who were benched as they put in a hell of a lot of effort on previous nights and didn't bitch or moan if they were left on the sidelines. As I said, I am so proud of every last one of you.

I close in saying:

Altruism FTW!

Well, it's been a little while since we had an update here on the Guild Website and we have a fair bit of news to share on what's been going on this past month.

In 25 man we've killed Onyxia and it's great to see the Broodmother back. Que many people shouting "-50 DKP!" "That's not even remotely possible!" "Dps, very slowly..." and of course the immortal "MOAR DOTS!"

A fun fight with some nice loot but not serious progression. Beasts is the main target there and we're getting very close to getting our first kill, so watch this space!

Our 10 man crew has been whipping up a storm by getting Freya Three Elders down, also the speed kill on Onyxia. We had a few tries at Firefighter 10 man and the opening signs look good. It's just finding the time to go back and finally unlock Algalon, which we will do very soon.

The big ticket news however is that we have cleared TotGC on 10 player, 2 weeks ago in fact. Since then we've been getting back in and honing our skills in there and upon this very night we are very proud to annouce that we achieved the 45 Tribute chest run!

We started off by two shotting Beasts, one shotting Lord Jaxx, two shotting Faction Champs, one shotting Twins and three shotting Anub himself. We had some imba and not so imba drops, two items DEed. We had a crapton of orbs and trophies out of the run, but the main thing is we had fun doing it! It was a fantasic run from start to finish and we had a fair audience on vent to hear us get the kill, so thanks for the support to all the girls and guys who didn't make the run. You guys are ace!

Below are screen shots of Ony's head being turned in by Timuzz after the first 25 man kill and another screen shot of the crew in front of one dead Anub after the 45 Tribute run.

Altruism ftw!