Helloes everyone! TFRComic.com will be hosting a mirror of the old homepage of The Order of the Flaming Ruby until there's a new one up on TheFlamingRuby.net.

      - Maximilian

There's a litterary trick called in medias res, which involves throwing the reader straight into the chaos and action at the very start of a story to get them in the right mood, and I think I'll give that a try this week.

Right. Perhaps not as effectful as I had hoped for.

Anyway, a week or two ago, we endured the awesomeness that is Hyjal trash, and killed this ugly dude.

Kaz'Rogal

As with most of the stuff in Hyjal, the boss was easier than the trash leading up to it. Expect Az'galor (haha, seriously, whoever thought up this name?) to die as soon as Ardante's computer *cough* penis *cough* decides to cooperate.

We also experienced good ol' Serpentshrine Cavern

which was fun.

Back in the African American Temple (AAT from now on), we played around a bit with Gurtogg Bloodboil. He died the moment I decided to forget to actually equip my healing set. Go figure.

Now, I usually try to weaves quotes and stuff into this front page tapestry, but some things are pretty much unweavable, and at the same time, so incredible that it would be a crime against humanity to not include them. So, BANG! IN JOO FACE!

 

Until next time, stay frosty!

-- Timtoo

Do excuse the morbid title, but that pretty much sums up the last three weeks for us Rubies.

After the work put into Kael, Blizzard thought it only fair to reward us with a handful of bosses that more or less just fall over when you look at them. And the loots, oh em gee, don't get me started on the loots! (Loot is actually pretty damn sweet, and I'm not just writing this to annoy a certain person, hihi).

You want killshots? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE KILLSHOTS!

Mt Hyjal

Reginald Winterchill

It was kinda hard getting a good screenshot on this dude. Everyone was occupied with walking around, looking at stuff, RPing, dicussing if this in fact was a good WC3 map (if I remember correctly, the verdict was "lolol no barracks, but omg, 25 heroes!" I think that's good)

 

Anetheron

Poor guy died on the first pull.

 

The Black Temple

Hi, Warlord Naj'entus

Hmm, cool fight, and it was fun seeing how creative people got with their spine macros, hehe.

 

'Supremus (I saw wut u did thar!)

Brissa's instructions on our second attempt were pretty clear "Ok guys, let's do that again, but with more awesome, and less suck!". And lo and behold, the big dude died.

Yeah, screenshot sucks, but, uhm, srsly, the corpse is a big chunk of rock.

 

Shade of Akama (not even close to wiping!)

 

Teron Gorefiend

Very much forces everyone in the raid to have their shit together, and I'm happy to say that after a couple of tries, our feces was in one place (lol wut?).

Oh yeah, the skellies in the shot belong to some other group of nubs who were there wiping before we arrived *nods*.

More dead dudes coming to a screen near you, real soon!

-- Timtoo

One weeks planned raid break turned into two, three weeks of summer chaos, but I think it's safe to say that we made it through, and came back stronger than ever before.

And what have we been up to the last week or so? Hmm, yes, what have we been doing..

Oh, that's right. "Welcome... to the future" over and over and over again.

It was an awesome performance by everyone involved in both the kill, and the countless attempts leading up to it, and it made me happy inside knowing that we have the potential to beat encounters like this.

Now it's just a matter of getting a couple more members attuned (19 people was a little too few for Hyjal, hehe), and it's time to check out some new content. Tres cool, indeed.

Anyways, enough rambling from a senile space monkey, here's the money shot. Enjoy!

-- Timtoo

Just one more day of the hell that is our one week raid break, and we can hopefully pick up where we left off before.

It's easy to forget how much you miss the little things about raiding.

The ritual sacrificing of our rogues,

Brode, the king of misstells,

The delicate social interaction with other members of our server,

Uhm, playing bingo with grid!

 

Instead, we've been forced into fierce combat with the horde

and I fear that if we don't get back to raiding soon, it might have long lasting effects on our members..

 

-- Timtoo

 

So, having finally suckered the leaders into giving away the TFR homepage account details, it's time for a little update!

Lady Vashj dead!

"Lady Vashj was born more than ten thousand years ago in the city of Zin-Azshari, capital of the night elves. Today, Vashj resides in the Serpentshrine Cavern." Ha har, wrong, because we killed her!

A raidwide l2p check, and after a couple of nights we actually learned how to play! The kill happened on the first pull of the night, and it was just unbelievably smooth. When the first naga was dead, I checked my timer, and thought "shit, we're already 30 seconds behind", only to realize that we were 10 seconds ahead of time. Everything was just dying insanely fast, despite us running with 1 more healer than the day before.

Awesome work everyone!

High Astromancer Solarian!

Dress up two tanks in 500+ arcane resist, and, uhm, win? The hardest part was convincing Borodin that there really was no plate armour with high arcane resist, so it was imperative that he wore a dress.

Al'ar!

15 minute endurance fight. Pretty fun, but I wouldn't mind him dropping my axe..

Just Kael'thas Sunstrider left between us and the big boys now. Damn nice progress, boys and girls!

Timtoo - space monkey behind the trigger!

As our killing spree continues we might have accidentally killed a poor blind man yesterday. \o/
Leotheras the Blind

Amazing work on Leotheras, and seeing it was my first proper raid in some weeks, I was delighted to see how much we've grown as a raiding group. We didn't spend much time at all learning and executing the poor blind bastard. Hands down, awesome work. And here's a screenshot of our new best friend, say hello to Mr Loot Reaver. He passed away earlier this week.


PS. Promised to give our very own bare some kudos for spending over 100 heroic badges on fire resistance leather! ^^

      - Kinx

Four down two to go!


Morogrim Tidewalker

Fathom-Lord Karathress

Hydross the Unstable

Yes! They all died! I would have written heaploads more if mother nature hadn't decided to go berserk at all my organs. Allergies for the win!

Big kudos to everyone who participated in the kills!

      - Kinx

And so The Lurker Below joins the ranks of the dead in intarweb hell.

Notice how Mr. Photographer Ardante has his target on the half naked Inudian. Anything going on here? Keep your paws off of our raiders damnit!

      - Maximilian

Ok, so the title sucked balls, but not much else to expect from me.. Either way, after having banged our heads hard on something that at times reminded more of a hard rock than a boss encounter, we finally prevailed and did so in the very last attempt of the day. Countless of cubic misunderstandings, and some pretty crappy tries the day before, we actually pulled through and made a close to flawless kill, going from 5 tries where we had cube fuckups at 50-60% to a kill.
What made it all so much more brilliant, not to mention pretty intense was the fact that we had about 30 seconds until we got respawns in our asses. So thanks for all who contributed. Oh, and CURSE YOU PHILOSTRATE!!!! :p You're bloody sitting exactly so that I'm not shown at all on the screenshot. Yeah, I know where you live. This will cost you.

      - Kinx

Gruul the Dragonslayer died yesterday evening! Congrats everyone!

      - Maximilian

Just a little update today, sorry for being a tad slow. Since last update we've gotten rlp and singups for the raiders up and running, Prince Malchezaar has died and Maulgar went down the 18th (server first, omg! \o/).


      - Maximilian

Finally the Burning Crusade hit WoW! Most of us have been racing like mad to 70, and we've learned to cherish the TBC-beard (can't..shave..must...level). Personally, I think a military exercise has alot of the characteristics of the rush to 70: little food, little sleep and bad hygiene. Noone ever said those were bad for you, did they?

Some of the people of TFR has taken a first glimpse of Karazhan, and enjoyed it alot - perhaps except the corpseruns to Aran. The Curator went down:


And then we had some free epics after a little game of chess.


The ghosts of Karazhan must have had a bad effect on our normally quite nice and friendly GM, he behaved in pretty scary ways in there:

      - Maximilian

Patchwerk was taught how to play by a determined crew this evening. Really good work! Here's a shot of those mature enough to sit/stand still (hrmf!):


I'd like to add that our lovely paladin Aesil learned something about herself today and got her very frist raidgasm! Congratulations and enjoy your future raiding! If any of the other girls around have troubles reaching raiding climax, I'm sure Aesil is happy to have a little girltalk with you!


      - Maximilian

Good work and congrats everyone!


      - Maximilian

No wai? Yes wai! We just got a custom made newsadd script, thanks to Oenone! Let's all celebrate this magnificent day! I've been nagging about a news script since the day the site was made, and finally it's done. Where Helez failed, our heroic dorf has succeeded! Hail Oenone!

In other news, we just got our first Judgement Spaulders in BWL today after killing Chrommie for the n'th time. Aesil won, completed his set, and ended the evening with grabbing our second Ash'kandi. Grats!

I also want to congratulate Chidori on making it to the frontpage on wow-europe.com for the second time! So when the rlp-database is slow, you can lean back and enjoy the fact that you're at least a little more famous than before. Keep it up, Chi!

      - Maximilian

Fans of Chidori's Comics - rejoice! I have the honor of presenting the brand new site, brimful of your favorite comics - and more to come!

The Chronicles of The Flaming Ruby is easily reachable from a link to the right. Me, Chidori and Oenone have been working like maniacs the last days to get it up in time for the newest 50 page comic (yes, fifty)!

Enjoy everyone!

      - Maximilian

Woot! On our 8th attempt the Twin Emperors was dethroned. Kudos to everyone for great focus and determination!

We also plowed our way through the "hard" trash to C'Thun. We obviously had to try C'Thun on for size, and wiped gloriously with the Eye on 92% (of course without any tactics at all). Oh, and grats to Philo on the shield.

And now a little word from our sponsor:


      - Maximilian

I've finally released the subsite dedicated to "The Adventures of Fayan - The Greates Healer in Azeroth". Look to the right. I've also updated the hierarchy.

      - Maximilian

In our first real attempt at Inspector Razuvious we deaded the old Instructor - who certainly won't be instructing anything until next week - in our third or fourth attempt. All in all the fight was far from the big challenge I thought it was gonna be, so the whole routine "YEEEEEEEEEES" followed by "FUCK YEAH" followed by 0.0001 FPS due to intense clicking on the Print Screen button kind of drowned in a "cool let's continue!". That said - there was no lined up trophy screenshot, and neither did I push the Print Screen button once, so seeing there's no killing screenshots here's a totally unrelated one for you all:


Bankor at your service!

Anub'Rekhan here we come!

      - Kinx

I'm alive and kicking. There's a new button to the PLP-site to the right, i've updated the gallery and there's a few new wallpapers here too. Enjoy!

      - Maximilian

- Raiding matters

After some discussion and evaluation of our current raiding schedule and times we have worked out some new, and hopefully better (in terms of attendande and progress) raiding schedule.

The new raiding schedule will enter a test phase with immediate and perhaps long term effect.

You can all forget about having to worry about wether it is week 21 or 22, as it won't matter anymore. We will go over to raiding 4 times a week. This might be grave news for some, and great news for others, but for the guilds progress we believe it is for the best. Some of you might not be able to keep an excellent attendance, but we'll have to work with that over time.

Fridays will no longer be 40 man raid days. This is an action we have taken due to several factors, but the most important one is the fact that attendance usually blows.

Sundays will be the "new" friday. We no longer consider sundays a "big nono" when it comes to raiding, as queues are no longer a problem. Sunday will also most likely have a different starting point for raids, which we haven't fully decided on yet.

This is what your future raiding schedule will most likely look like (though the raid places may be scrambles):

Wednesday: Blackwing Lair
Thursday: Naxxramas
Sunday: Progress focus day (which will be AQ for now)
Monday: Ahn Qirai

- Council Info

We've been a little thin on the Councillor amount as of late, and we all agreed that we could use some new blood, with lack of attendance/resignation of some councillors.

We had a handful of people we saw fit for such a privilege, but ended up asking Sandoval if he was interested in such a position in the guild. He happily answered yes, and he will be Councillor as of 05.07.06. Congratulations.

      - Kinx and the Council

Huhuran == Deaded.

And here is ze proof:

Right right, so our beloved "Webmaster" Maximilian hasn't exactly tormented your small heads with insane amounts of stuff to read on this page, so I thought I'd add some quick rant on progress over the last months.

I bet you all, guildies included, thought we skipped Skeram, bug trio, Sartura and Fankriss, seeing there's no proof here and all, but fear not I'm here to tell you that we've actually managed to kill those during the past months as well.


Skeram went down pretty early, followed by the bug trio without much time spent needed on them. As for Sartura, we all were fortunate enough to get a new hate object. For many I think it's safe to say that Cornelium stepped to second place, but theres probably those who keep him as #1.
But with some more time spent, and a week or two passed, Sartura faced the same sorry fate so many bosses have before.

Fankriss lying ahead of us, nearly ran away just by the mere sight of Team Smite & co (c), and was given a quick and painful death.

Right, I guess that puts us somewhat back to current time. Huhuran, Huhu, Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuran, whatever. In any case, I doubt theres spent more hours and sweat on any boss (except perhaps on Ragnaros) than on Huhuran. We've had about 2 nights of attempts on Huhuran before today, where we had some wipes on 8% and the like. Back to the workshop we went, tinkering more Nature Resistance gear and brewing more potions of the same kind.

So tonight we ventured into Ahn'Qiraj without any major hopes raised on downing Huhuran, due to the fact that we had to clear everything ahead of her and some other stuff. In any case we started off with a 3% wipe, and suddenly eyed the opportunity to end this flying bug of poison volley hell today. Second attempt went where doo-doo usually goes, but on our third attempt everything went the way it should go, and we ended the fight with only one death. /pat Hamfist.

In other news:
We only tried twice or something, but we did the Baron Run in 21 minutes. Linky link.

Oh, and finally, turns out your Guildmaster is related to the Grinch.


      - Kinx

BLACKWING LAIR: CLEARED

Tonight, just after midnight, the son of Deathwing and head of the Black Dragonflight fell to the might of the Order of the Flaming Ruby!


I'd like to thank everyone present and everyone that has contributed by staying through the wipes. Not that wipes was that bad today (except perhaps the one at 3%) because we had real good progress every time.

It was just beautiful to see how well phase 1 was handled in our last tries. The rest of the fight seemed to be cake as soon as we'd gotten the feeling for it over a few attempts. Oh, and we should be happy that we actually got quite good loot on a first kill for once. Especially big grats to Viserys on his brand new staff of Überness.

      - Maximilian

I just updated the site with a brand new gallery-section. Here you'll find links to some movies, and most importantly images from memorable events. If you have screenshots to share from a moment to remember, send it to maximilian@theflamingruby.net.

The joining page is also updated, along with a new applications thread in the forums.

      - Maximilian

This calls for a sexy party!

Ragnaros: Check.
Razorgore: Check.
And today, Vaelastrasz the Corrupt had to bite the dust.

Congratulations! And kudos for good work!

      - Maximilian

I though I'd just remind you that the Charter is here and that should should know it.

I've added a button to the raid booking-page too. Remember to pop by to sign up for raids.

      - Maximilian

Finally!

Onyxia has fallen!

Congratulations everyone!

      - Maximilian

Ojeh!

We have a member list! We have a member list! *sings*

It's maybe not that uber high tech, but it's something for now.

      - Maximilian

I would just like to inform everyone that we now officially rock.

Thank you for your time.

Oh, and if you're mad about the members section and no news script, then we're in the same boat. But I have a lot of work to do, so please don't hate me. I'll try to fix it as soon as I get some help.

      - Maximilian

I've added a section for the tfr-addon (which rocks). Look to the right. I've also added a donation button a bit further down. This is because it costs money to run a site, and a euro or two would be welcome.

Take care, I'll see you in Molten Core!

      - Maximilian

RLP Status is up. :)

      - Maximilian

Charter update and a few graphical upgrades. Guess it doesn't look like I've been at it for 8 hours. But I have. Go to the forums for updates on everything. The news submission script is getting closer, at least that's what I'm told. Then you can expect to see news here. And just not random Max-blahblah.

The Order sends it's condolences to Talons. Details on the tragic death of one of their members will arrive shortly in the forums.

      - Maximilian