I'm sure that you'll all be well aware that with the new patch there will be a new raid instance. The Ruby Sanctum. This encounter is going to be very similar in size to the Obsidian Sanctum although presumably with quite different mechanics.

Although I won't be able to attend this evening we have scheduled an event to take a look at this encounter in place of our normal ToC run. I think this will make a nice change and as the event has been cleared in the US already on heroic I'm hoping we will be able to get this cleared, although I would expect a few wipes while getting used to the encounter.

This week has been on the whole another fairly weak one for raiding. Having said that we did manage to get closer to downing putricide then ever previously. For those of you that don't really follow the forums there are perhaps two things that you maybe particularly interested in looking at.

Firstly there has been a request to alter are current raiding days. If this is important to you please reinforce your point of view on the forums and do not rely on one individual to petition on your behalf. It's unfair on them and will be most likely rejected. I'm aware of two individuals who can't raid on Monday's, one who won't raid Friday's, Saturday's and Wednesday's are currently being reserved for future plans and that doesn't leave a lot of room for alternatives. If you do want a change instead of asking one guild member, express your own views clearly on the forums, as numbers do count and the more people that express their own point of view the better. Heresay will always be ignored.

Secondly we have had a couple of people expressing an interest in raid leading which in contradiction to the above may well lead to an oppertunity to expand or alter the number of days over which Icecrown is attempted. Ultimately we do want to present as many oppertunities to all guild members as possible but without overstretching ourselves and ruining the oppertunities already available.

So that in no way leads us onto our next topic of priests in cataclysm.

If we start with shadow priests I think two major changes will be no more worrying about dot clipping and no more misery. New dots when cast will just be added to the end of any current dot on the target. I assume if you cast twice while the dot is up the cast will overwrite the already qued dot. Misery is being removed along with a number of other plus hit buffs to try and standerdise the amount of hit a character needs. At the minute get a shadow priest or balance druid in your party and as a caster you can throw out a large portion of your hit gear. To prevent this sort of thing you could either give the buff to more classes or take it away. They shared the wealth with mages getting heroism, they're taking away hit buffs such as misery.

Shadow priests will also be losing a lot of the passive bonuses from their shadow talent tree and I'd be interested to see what the new talent tree looks like. I'm not sure if this will be a positive or negative thing, I suppose it depends vey much on whether blizz get the balance right. I'm sure some players will love the change and some will hate it either way though. The new mind spike spell looks like it might be nice although if trash packs don't get smaller then it seems pretty redundant as mind sear will presumably still be the best choice and if they do get smaller they will presumably also get tougher meaning priests will have time to build up a full rotation? So in either case the spell might not be that helpful an introduction.

For healing priests their seems to have been quite a bit of thought gone into how to make them both effective and how to keep the specs quite different. The new heal spell which is available seems to me like it will be a core spell of both the specs while supported by various shields from the discipline priest (including an anti magic zone style shield which protects those within from all sources of damage) and the usual cascade of heals from the holy priest. In fact the one talent that grabs my attention the most has got to be the chakra talent which is designed to trigger an effect after three consecutive spell casts, possibly even triggering off of smite. This is an attempt to make holy priests more versatile as the talents effect will relate to the spell which triggered it.

The last thing I think I saw which grabbed my interest was the leap of faith spell. This spell is essentially death grip for friendly targets. I wonder how many guild members would see themselves being ripped from the fire by Taken and the likes?

This week has been a little slow in terms of raids, or at least that's how it feels to me. I think there was quite a good run in Icecrown and we did clear ToC last week but since the weekend all planned runs have failed and it seems to have caused a touch of unrest in the ranks.

Certainly I think a lot of this is down to a number of our members being unavailable at the minute and as most of them are only on short term leave I don't think this is going to be a major set back. In the mean time I would ask that guild members don't take out their frustrations on other guild members just because they really want to be raiding.

Having said that with this break it is an ideal oppertunity to reflect on how things are and what can be done to improve matters. Certainly there has been a lot put forward in the forums that I believe it would be valuable for everyone to give their thoughts on so we can get a feel for what it is the guild members want and expect from the guild.

Other than that we've seen a couple more new members join our ranks and a welcome to them. I do think things in the guild are fairly positive at the minute and steps are being taken to try and provide as much to our members as we are reasonably able to do.

This week it's the turn of the Paladin in our brief overviews of Cataclysm changes. I think the two biggest changes I've noticed are firstly the possible need for holy paladins to wear spirit items and the idea that retribution paladins will have more decision making involved in their rotation. To be honest looking at the former if everything else remains the same it seems likely to me that instead of spirit becoming an important stat it'll simply be that the meditation mastery will be redundant, but I'll guess we'll need to see how that works once things are live etc.

The second change I think retribution paladins will welcome. Having said that I find it a little odd that divine storm is being changed to be less effective for single target but to be more effective on large mob packs? Was single target dps for retribution paladins especially overpowered? Were they struggling with aoe on large trash packs? Seems almost a little backwards.

Paladin tanks maybe coming out of the whole thing pretty well also. The vengeance mastery all tanks will be getting is going to really give them some very enviable dps if there isn't quite a revamp in the way some of the talents work for them I feel. I mean lets face it, a number of our dps struggle to keep up with Whatadina and Kiray as things stand!

It's been another pretty good week for the sparks this week. We stumbled a bit on Rotface in our second half of Icecrown Citadel but we got him out the way in the end. We cleared ToC again without any trouble and we also saw a return to Ulduar. We are going to soon see a change in the raid schedules but info about this will be posted in the forums.

Hopefully it won't be too long until we see the last new raid content of this expansion in the form of the ruby sanctum. To be honest if the format is similar to the obsidian sanctum, which it appears to be, then it's not really my favourite layout for a raid. Having said that new things = good! Simple formula but I like it.

In the mean time it's good to see Tsuji back and Sutekidane also. Having said this I believe have a couple of our officers as well as a couple of other guildies off on their hols soon, so enjoy and remember to bring back pics =]

That brings us upto the next class in our brief one by one overviews of the upcoming cataclysm changes. Mages, or 'PewPewBoom!' as they prefer to call themselves.

Well for anyone who's been away this last week we saw a number of events over the period to celebrate the guilds fourth anniversary. We had some great events with a lot of enthsiastic participation so thanks to all those who came along to any of the events and thanks to all those who helped make these a reality. For more details and screen shots from the events you can visit Kiray's thread on the subjet.

In the mean time there has recently been quite a lot more info released on the details of the upcoming expansion and it's contents. This includes the details on the Halls of Origination. Yep, we finally get a glimpse at what's inside Uldum. A number of details have also been released regarding professions in Cataclysm and it looks like the Ruby Sanctum is now available on the PTR or will soon be on them at any rate.

As for guild raid news, despite the very tight schedule we've had over the last week with all the guild events we still managed to clear ToC 10 with two groups (although not concurrently) and got as far as killing Festergut in Icecrown Citadel. Ulduar was not able to be scheduled and some progress we had hoped for in ICC at the start of the week went slightly awry but otherwise not a bad week at all.