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Stars wins August's Guild of the Month contest
It's almost the end of September, but we're finally ready to announce the winner of August's Guild of the Month contest. As you probably saw in the title of this post, August's winner is a guild that has become something of a household name for WoW players, being one of the longest standing, most accomplished raiding guilds in the world (of Warcraft). Rather than me telling you about who Stars is, I'll leave that up to Leonking, a member of Stars currently living right here in the United States. You can find what he wrote behind the cut below.Stars was August's winner, but remember that September's Guild of the Month contest is still ongoing! We had a lot of great entries for August, and we would all love if everyone who entered last month gave it another try this time around. We're absolutely eager to her from new entrants, too! This is your chance to not only win a $100 gift certificate from Swagdog for some custom guild apparel, but also be featured right here on WoW.com. Good luck, and we can't wait to hear from you!
Premonition grabs US-First Alone in the Darkness
Yogg-Saron's woes continue, as the Guild Premonition of the US Sen'jin server, Alliance side, becomes the first US guild and the third guild in the world to get the Alone in the Darkness Achievement, thereby also earning the Death's Demise title. Alone in the Darkness requires you to defeat Yogg Saron without the help of any Keepers, thereby eschewing the requisite buffs they give. They're hot on the heels of Paragon, which got the EU first kill, and Stars, which got the world first (and by extension, Taiwan first) kill.This is definitely a difficult achievement, and, some argue, possibly even harder than killing Algalon himself. Congratulations, Premonition!
Stars discuss their Yogg+0 kill
You've probably heard that the Chinese guild Stars has pulled off the world-first Alone in the Darkness, killing Yogg-Saron with no watchers helping. You may have seen the video they posted of their winning strategy. But here's something even more interesting, for me: a Q&A with the guild about their strategy and their experience with the fight. It was originally in Chinese, but a poster on the MMO-Champion forums did a translation. It's a really interesting read. For one thing, Affliction Warlocks turned out to be the most valuable class, since DPS have to turn away periodically in phase 3 to avoid Lunatic Gaze and a heavy DoT-based class doesn't lose as much doing this.
Stars' Alone in the Darkness videos
Taiwanese/Chinese guild Stars made a splash recently by nabbing the legitimate world-first kill of Yogg-Saron with no Watchers assisting them, granting them the elusive Alone in the Darkness achievement. Many sites and theorycrafters, including seminal calculus-required favorites ElitistJerks, said the fight was simply impossible at current gear levels and fight tuning, and Stars admits that their kill was based more on raid stacking and good luck than anything, but it's still an enormous accomplishment after the fiasco that was Exodus' kill. Stars was kind enough to provide videos of their killshot, which we've embedded for you below. See how exactly you kill a god without any help! Part 2 is after the cut.
European first of Heroic: Alone in the Darkness
Word has suddenly started flooding in that the EU-first kill of Heroic Yogg-Saron with no Keepers, a.k.a. Heroic: Alone in the Darkness, has been scored today by... no, not Ensidia. Paragon of Lightning's Blade EU has managed to steal the EU first (and world second) achievement. Hopefully this one will actually stick, unlike Exodus's kill.Paragon is no slouch of a raid, but this still comes as something of a surprise. Prior to this kill, GuildOx listed Paragon as the 10th top raid in the world. Top ten material, but when it comes to firsts, rarely do you even look that low on the charts. It's pretty much the top two or three that dominate across the board. All eyes were on Ensidia and Method, maybe Premonition, Inner Sanctum or Wraith if you were generous, but probably not Paragon. We can probably consider them the underdogs when it comes to this kill.Congratulations, Paragon. If you guys get banned for 'sploits and make me look silly twice in as many weeks, I will be most upset!Update: I've also just been sent a screenshot that proves it, if the Armory wasn't enough.
Stars snag world-first legitimate Alone in the Darkness
World-first Heroic: Alone in the Darkness? "Didn't Exodus already get that?" you may ask. Well, they did get the achievement, but they used an exploit, and were slapped on the wrist to the tune of a 72 hour suspension. Which means: the stage was open for a legitimate world-first! In a break from the tradition of European guilds getting major world-first accomplishments, Chinese guild Stars (playing on the Taiwanese servers) has apparently completed the achievement legitimately. They got that nifty Mimiron's Head mount, too. In case you're scratching your head wondering what this is all about, during the Yogg-Saron fight (the last boss of Ulduar), the four Keepers of Ulduar (Freya, Thorim, Hodir, and Mimiron) help you out. You can choose how many of the Keepers you want to activate for the fight, and if you use fewer than all of them, it's hard-mode. "Alone in the Darkness" is Yogg-Saron with zero keepers: as hard as it gets. Congratulations to Stars on a truly impressive feat.
World first of "Alone in the Darkness" a possible exploit
We reported last week that a guild named Exodus on the US realm of Ysondre had come out of nowhere to topple the world first of the Heroic: Alone in the Darkness achievement, which requires that you bring down the biggest bad currently in the game, Yogg-Saron, with no help from any of the Keepers in Ulduar. But not so fast, says Serennia over at WoWRiot -- over on their forums Ensidia is claiming that Exodus used an exploit, and that their kill doesn't count at all. Apparently, having Thorim help on the fight keeps the "Immortal Guardians" in the last phase of the fight from being a problem, and without Thorim, you have to not only do the fight without his extra 10% damage bonus (each Keeper ups your DPS that much), but you have to deal with the Guardians messing up your melee classes, and oh yeah: they both heal and get healed by Yogg. Not that it's impossible to do it, but it's definitely not easy, and Ensidia claims that Exodus found a known exploit that allows you to evade the Guardians out completely, thus turning the last phase into a straight tank-and-spank, obviously much easier.After that, it gets into some guild back and forth (Ensidia apparently did something that might have been an exploit on Hodir, and when people call them out on that, they say that the exploits were different -- Ensidia's tactic was just an interesting use of game mechanics, while the exploit Exodus is suspected of using is more of a cheat), but the fact remains that Exodus is clearly not a guild that anyone expected to clear what might be the toughest raiding achievement in the game before anyone else, and yet that's exactly what they did. Ensidia says they won't be killing Yogg for the achievement using the exploit, and that they've reported the Exodus kill to the devs, so we'll have to see if the devs decide that Exodus did cheat, or if they let Exodus keep their achievements and mounts. We're not sure how much it all matters, with world first kills not being all that important any more (and that's exactly what the devs might say as well), but Ensidia is claiming that an exploit took place -- we'll have to see if that turns out to be true.Thanks, Nimrod!
Exodus scores world first Heroic: Alone in the Darkness
News is flooding in that Exodus of Ysondre-US has just scored the world first 25-man Yogg-Saron with 0 Keepers, a.k.a. Heroic: Alone in the Darkness. A quick look at their site proves it to be true, complete with screenshots.This achievement, when Ulduar was first launched, was largely considered to be mathematically impossible. One or two nerfs to Yogg-Saron more or less proved that to be true. The recent nerf to the spawnrate of the Guardians of Yogg-Saron wasn't aimed at the encounter with 4 Keepers up. It was aimed at the encounter with few (or zero) Keepers up. Without the buffs those Keepers provide, the encounter gets more and more difficult. As someone who has only killed Yogg-Saron with all 4 Keepers in the last few weeks, I fear seeing the fight with zero. Major, major props to Exodus.They were rewarded for their efforts with Bowser's Flying Machine Mimiron's Head. I guess he didn't need it anymore. Congratulations, Exodus!
