It was March 31st four years ago. A World of Warcraft guild called Unleashed was born. A few hours after US-Ysera server was opened. By this day a lot of stuff had happened, as I will tell you now.
One February night, I can’t remember the exact date, two of my closest friends and I went to a bar for a meal and some drinks. We all were playing Horde in two different servers, and we weren’t able to raid and see end game content because of raiding hours and lack of raiders. So, we started talking about creating a guild which can be ruled by the things we thought were right, like having a semi-casual schedule and focus on the person more than the player.
At the end of the night, Unleashed had been chosen as guild’s name and, since we were trying to start over again, we were re-rolling Alliance. We thought that strong foundations would help the guild to grow and linger, so we had to cover the three basic roles in a party: Tank, Healer and DPS. Also we needed a cool website and forums to recruit, so I offered myself to use my free time to make the website. Now we only had to wait until Blizzard released more servers.
If you are still wondering who were these three guys. Well, the answer is simple: our Guild Master Minimage and two former Officers: Therion (Deatherion at the moment) and Valkiria (this is me).
From that night to the release of Ysera server, we started recruiting on the Warcraft Forums. Some people got interested in Unleashed’s concept and we had enough recruits to sign the guild charter. I can’t remember all of our first recruits, but I do remember Emmalee, Aldoric, Pheral and some others that are in Unleashed no more.
After four years we have raided a lot of Dungeons. Zul’Gurub was the first raid instance for Unleashed, when we weren’t able to have 40 people online for a raid night. We had some problems until Character Transfer opened, I remember some guilds saying that transfers were wrong and all that, but for us, it was the only thing we needed to raid and it let us get Onyxia, Ragnaros and Nefarian. We were raiding Ahn’Quiraj when the Burning Crusade was released. That was the time when I stopped playing World of Warcraft. I came back later, raided some stuff and then left again.
When the Wrath of the Lich King was released, I came back and raided for about a year, and then I left the game again. Now I’m a casual player, who only does quests and 5-man dungeons, but I’m still a part of Unleashed and, most important, Unleashed is a part of me. That’s why I’m still in charge of the website images and I’m currently working on the Guild Site’s new look for Cataclysm.
In the end, I just have one more thing to say: Happy 4th Anniversary and thanks to everyone who had worked to make this guild what it is.
-- Valkiria
3/31/10
Happy 4th Birthday Unleashed!
Charter Member Aldoric - Ain't he cute in that noob gear?
Killasnail - The first screenshot
And one from our first KT kill, on our 3rd year anniversary .
Killasnail - The first screenshot
And one from our first KT kill, on our 3rd year anniversary .
3/26/10
3/24/10
Trials and tribulations of a gnome mage
I don't plan to write here how to be the best mage in WoW as I am no authority in the matter, just a player who has dedicated the past 4 years to playing a mage and improving with each patch and change of spec that subsequently comes out, like the one that was released live with yesterday's patch.
For the better part of vanilla WoW mages were known as vending machines and one button DPS, we were also on the top 3 DPS classes in the game. With TBC and the damage output of weapons re-done, melee went up in the meters while mages had to struggle with fire finally being a viable raid spec for all ocassions and then the rise of arcane as the top DPS spec by the end of TBC.
WoTLK has been much more complicated as a mage. First we had the Frostfire era in which every single mage was FFB and the few dedicated ones were pure fire. Then came the rise of fire with glyph changes, but the domination of FFB/fire was strong.
Then came ToC and the rise of arcane.
Once more arcane mages started dominating the PvE scene, the logs showed people up to 17000 dps in Valkyr twins and the arcane craze remained.
Personally, arcane is possibly one of the most difficult specs to master. This is because the arcane spec is not written in stone (sure, Arcane Blast (AB) x3-4 and get an Arcane Missiles (AM) proc or write off the stacks of AB with Arcane Barrage (ABarr)) seems like a very logic and easy thing to do. Mash one button 3 or 4 times and then mash the other one (I hate 1,2,3,4,5, bindings, so it's Q (AB) E (AM) and F(ABarr) for me, with 2 and 3 being different macros) and win at DPS. The people who think that are usually on the low end of the DPS meters as a result.
Ghostcrawler wrote this on March 19th:
"Players like to wave this banner, but it's just not true. If all you do is look at their damage logs, yes, a lot of damage comes from Arcane Blast and Arcane Missiles. Does that mean any Arcane mage can faceroll his way to 12,000 dps? Hardly. The good mages have a lot of things to manage in the way of mana and cooldowns.
"Requires skill" does not mean 20 sources of damage. It can also mean you have to juggle a lot to maximize the damage from 2 sources. That is the design of the mage in a nuthsell: a dominant nuke with a lot of infrastructure to prop up that nuke"
What I understand from this, and I agree with, is the intuitive value of the arcane spec. You can't just hope to spam AB and then AM and beat those pesky rogues or the always annoying hunters. You need to actually look at your screen, cooldowns and keep an eye on what is up on the boss, how your mana is doing and what you can aim for.
First, AB spam with the old Incanter's Absorption could end up being godlike. Valkyr twins logs can show how much a mage could put out with AB spam (here comes into play the intuitive part of watching your mana closely) and the use of AM in a timely manner.
When to burn your images+trinkes+Arcane Power and Icy Veins? Well that's a whole different debate. Of course, if you pot pre pull, right at the start of it you can nuke your way to 30 seconds of high damage with no fear of aggro. But here is the tricky part, if those missdirects or tricks of the trade don't come even close to your sudden burst of godlikeness you will still probably be way ahead of other people, including the tank, on aggro. Then you face the possibility of losing 10 seconds of dps because you had to iceblock or breaking your rotation to click invisibility or even worse, not fully using those 30 seconds you have with your images to go crazy.
There's a number of solutions to this problem that a lot of up and coming mages in the arcane tree can face:
1.-Don't go crazy, utilize your IV, AP and on use items wisely for the 20 seconds you have, then utilize the last 10 seconds to let your tank catch up in aggro and you regain some mana.
2.-Spend 2 talent points for 40% less threat.
3.-Don't use all your cooldowns on prepot, just go with prepot+images, last 5 seconds of your pot but all your cooldowns and go to town (the 10 second advantage should give your tank, rogues and hunters enough time to build sufficient aggro that you won't have to stop at all until evocation).
Now, mana can be a huge pain in the ass when playing an arcane mage. Sometimes a mana potion ends up totalling more DPS than a speed/wild magic potion. And unless you are clipping yourself during heroism+IV time, this is the exact moment in which you'll be going the craziest with 1.2/1.1 AB casts. Here of course comes you using your brain rather than just your fingers to decide what to do. You know heroism comes in 10 seconds, your mana is at 35%. Do you use evocation already with a gem to be maximized and with the GCD ready to pop everything up as heroism hits or do you use the initial seconds of heroism to use evocation? Or just say "fuck it" and use your mana and cooldowns and worry about mana when the time comes?
Ideally the third one is never your option, that works for instances and heroics, but not for raids. If the third scenario is your common option, you need to head to elitisjerks.com and read up the mage discussions.
But the first 2 are a consistent debate. Do you hold for a bit to be full and not worry about mana/be able to burn it all during heroism with all your cooldowns or do you use the initial seconds of heroism to use a sped up evocation and gem and then go to town? That's where the brain comes in.
Both are viable options, as long as you don't pop all your cooldowns and then hit evocation, in which case you are probably an idiot, and much discussed ones from time to time. Of course, you can just pop a mana potion along with your gem right before heroism and go to town, leaving your evocation up for the tail end of heroism.
So many choices to choose from and the only right one is the one that seems more viable and useful for the encounter and situation.
Something that happens often in my case is that I need to save everything but images during BQL encounter because I have not been bitten yet, I use my images to keep my threat in check, so I don't blow everything up as soon as heroism hits the table unless I have been bitten or got the initial bite (when I get the initial bite it's because I pre pot and have managed to get up to 18k DPS in the seconds before the initial bite), if I am not bitten, then I keep thinking "hold it, hold it, hold it" but as soon as the bite lands I blow up every cooldown and potion I have available. This is when evocation comes in place of course, I regain as much mana as possible when I hear someone "I will bite Minimage next" and see that person coming over.
This will be the end of this entry for now. I know the entry itself is not a "How to play the mage" but it gives you points to ponder before you go re-spec into arcane thinking that the big DPS is coming.
There are a lot of mages with much more authority than me to "teach" you how to play an arcane mage, these are just questions that have raised several times with fellow guild mages and discussions we have in our mage channel.
Hope you enjoyed, any insight/comments are appreciated.
Minimage
For the better part of vanilla WoW mages were known as vending machines and one button DPS, we were also on the top 3 DPS classes in the game. With TBC and the damage output of weapons re-done, melee went up in the meters while mages had to struggle with fire finally being a viable raid spec for all ocassions and then the rise of arcane as the top DPS spec by the end of TBC.
WoTLK has been much more complicated as a mage. First we had the Frostfire era in which every single mage was FFB and the few dedicated ones were pure fire. Then came the rise of fire with glyph changes, but the domination of FFB/fire was strong.
Then came ToC and the rise of arcane.
Once more arcane mages started dominating the PvE scene, the logs showed people up to 17000 dps in Valkyr twins and the arcane craze remained.
Personally, arcane is possibly one of the most difficult specs to master. This is because the arcane spec is not written in stone (sure, Arcane Blast (AB) x3-4 and get an Arcane Missiles (AM) proc or write off the stacks of AB with Arcane Barrage (ABarr)) seems like a very logic and easy thing to do. Mash one button 3 or 4 times and then mash the other one (I hate 1,2,3,4,5, bindings, so it's Q (AB) E (AM) and F(ABarr) for me, with 2 and 3 being different macros) and win at DPS. The people who think that are usually on the low end of the DPS meters as a result.
Ghostcrawler wrote this on March 19th:
"Players like to wave this banner, but it's just not true. If all you do is look at their damage logs, yes, a lot of damage comes from Arcane Blast and Arcane Missiles. Does that mean any Arcane mage can faceroll his way to 12,000 dps? Hardly. The good mages have a lot of things to manage in the way of mana and cooldowns.
"Requires skill" does not mean 20 sources of damage. It can also mean you have to juggle a lot to maximize the damage from 2 sources. That is the design of the mage in a nuthsell: a dominant nuke with a lot of infrastructure to prop up that nuke"
What I understand from this, and I agree with, is the intuitive value of the arcane spec. You can't just hope to spam AB and then AM and beat those pesky rogues or the always annoying hunters. You need to actually look at your screen, cooldowns and keep an eye on what is up on the boss, how your mana is doing and what you can aim for.
First, AB spam with the old Incanter's Absorption could end up being godlike. Valkyr twins logs can show how much a mage could put out with AB spam (here comes into play the intuitive part of watching your mana closely) and the use of AM in a timely manner.
When to burn your images+trinkes+Arcane Power and Icy Veins? Well that's a whole different debate. Of course, if you pot pre pull, right at the start of it you can nuke your way to 30 seconds of high damage with no fear of aggro. But here is the tricky part, if those missdirects or tricks of the trade don't come even close to your sudden burst of godlikeness you will still probably be way ahead of other people, including the tank, on aggro. Then you face the possibility of losing 10 seconds of dps because you had to iceblock or breaking your rotation to click invisibility or even worse, not fully using those 30 seconds you have with your images to go crazy.
There's a number of solutions to this problem that a lot of up and coming mages in the arcane tree can face:
1.-Don't go crazy, utilize your IV, AP and on use items wisely for the 20 seconds you have, then utilize the last 10 seconds to let your tank catch up in aggro and you regain some mana.
2.-Spend 2 talent points for 40% less threat.
3.-Don't use all your cooldowns on prepot, just go with prepot+images, last 5 seconds of your pot but all your cooldowns and go to town (the 10 second advantage should give your tank, rogues and hunters enough time to build sufficient aggro that you won't have to stop at all until evocation).
Now, mana can be a huge pain in the ass when playing an arcane mage. Sometimes a mana potion ends up totalling more DPS than a speed/wild magic potion. And unless you are clipping yourself during heroism+IV time, this is the exact moment in which you'll be going the craziest with 1.2/1.1 AB casts. Here of course comes you using your brain rather than just your fingers to decide what to do. You know heroism comes in 10 seconds, your mana is at 35%. Do you use evocation already with a gem to be maximized and with the GCD ready to pop everything up as heroism hits or do you use the initial seconds of heroism to use evocation? Or just say "fuck it" and use your mana and cooldowns and worry about mana when the time comes?
Ideally the third one is never your option, that works for instances and heroics, but not for raids. If the third scenario is your common option, you need to head to elitisjerks.com and read up the mage discussions.
But the first 2 are a consistent debate. Do you hold for a bit to be full and not worry about mana/be able to burn it all during heroism with all your cooldowns or do you use the initial seconds of heroism to use a sped up evocation and gem and then go to town? That's where the brain comes in.
Both are viable options, as long as you don't pop all your cooldowns and then hit evocation, in which case you are probably an idiot, and much discussed ones from time to time. Of course, you can just pop a mana potion along with your gem right before heroism and go to town, leaving your evocation up for the tail end of heroism.
So many choices to choose from and the only right one is the one that seems more viable and useful for the encounter and situation.
Something that happens often in my case is that I need to save everything but images during BQL encounter because I have not been bitten yet, I use my images to keep my threat in check, so I don't blow everything up as soon as heroism hits the table unless I have been bitten or got the initial bite (when I get the initial bite it's because I pre pot and have managed to get up to 18k DPS in the seconds before the initial bite), if I am not bitten, then I keep thinking "hold it, hold it, hold it" but as soon as the bite lands I blow up every cooldown and potion I have available. This is when evocation comes in place of course, I regain as much mana as possible when I hear someone "I will bite Minimage next" and see that person coming over.
This will be the end of this entry for now. I know the entry itself is not a "How to play the mage" but it gives you points to ponder before you go re-spec into arcane thinking that the big DPS is coming.
There are a lot of mages with much more authority than me to "teach" you how to play an arcane mage, these are just questions that have raised several times with fellow guild mages and discussions we have in our mage channel.
Hope you enjoyed, any insight/comments are appreciated.
Minimage
3/12/10
Iks Math Time
Cattman -
I finally got around to it so here you go.. no more asking me about it. I can explain anything you have questions on later at some point. Cattman had asked me to compare his log to one of the top rogues to see if there was anywhere he could improve or anything he should be doing differently.
Points to clarify - this is comparing you to Sanchoz who currently has the top parse on Deathbringer Saurfang for Rogues of your spec in a 25 man raid setting. I used this fight since it is very much a Patchwerk encounter for Rogues. I am not sure how the rotation adjusts with target switching etc. (which is probably important) but that is something I did not want to invest the time into investigating. You guys have the exact same spec and glyphs and were comparably geared at the time of the reports (~ 2 weeks ago) as this was pre-heroic ICC. Further, you have identical active battle time which is important for the results to not be skewed. Their fight is shorter so you will see I added a casts/seconds comparison for the main abilities to see the difference there. All relevant information should be included. I also have attached a link to download the Excel file if you want to examine it closer or see the full detailed list of casts as only the top piece is captured in the screengrab. Obviously, this is only showing casts so it isn't showing the white melee hits/crits or the venom ticks (shows up as Instant Venom in combat logs details).
Cattman XLS
Screenshot of Results:
Image Link
In my opinion, based on the overall results, you seem to be doing nearly everything you need to. Considering that rogue got Hysteria (twice) and also had higher tricks uptime from the other Rogue, those two things alone could attribute for part of the difference. He seems to be using Mutilate more than you are in rotation as you seem to be slightly favoring Envenom to Mutilate when choosing between the two. He also had slightly better RNG on his poison procs which also attributed to a piece of the difference. I think really the only thing I would get out of this would be to slightly tweak the Mutilate vs. Envenom when possible and maybe adjust your gemming to swap the Haste gems for AP.
While I was at it, I quickly did the same thing for Aedringonos for the Koralon kill from last night in comparing him to the top Unholy DK to take a look at the rotation. The rotation doesn't seem to be too badly off except for perhaps a few too many Plague Strikes and Icy Touches.. I would attribute the huge difference (100%) to Gargoyle timing and the fact that somehow the other DK casted only one fewer spell despite their fight being 26 seconds shorter:
Screenshot of Results:
Image Link
I finally got around to it so here you go.. no more asking me about it. I can explain anything you have questions on later at some point. Cattman had asked me to compare his log to one of the top rogues to see if there was anywhere he could improve or anything he should be doing differently.
Points to clarify - this is comparing you to Sanchoz who currently has the top parse on Deathbringer Saurfang for Rogues of your spec in a 25 man raid setting. I used this fight since it is very much a Patchwerk encounter for Rogues. I am not sure how the rotation adjusts with target switching etc. (which is probably important) but that is something I did not want to invest the time into investigating. You guys have the exact same spec and glyphs and were comparably geared at the time of the reports (~ 2 weeks ago) as this was pre-heroic ICC. Further, you have identical active battle time which is important for the results to not be skewed. Their fight is shorter so you will see I added a casts/seconds comparison for the main abilities to see the difference there. All relevant information should be included. I also have attached a link to download the Excel file if you want to examine it closer or see the full detailed list of casts as only the top piece is captured in the screengrab. Obviously, this is only showing casts so it isn't showing the white melee hits/crits or the venom ticks (shows up as Instant Venom in combat logs details).
Cattman XLS
Screenshot of Results:
Image Link
In my opinion, based on the overall results, you seem to be doing nearly everything you need to. Considering that rogue got Hysteria (twice) and also had higher tricks uptime from the other Rogue, those two things alone could attribute for part of the difference. He seems to be using Mutilate more than you are in rotation as you seem to be slightly favoring Envenom to Mutilate when choosing between the two. He also had slightly better RNG on his poison procs which also attributed to a piece of the difference. I think really the only thing I would get out of this would be to slightly tweak the Mutilate vs. Envenom when possible and maybe adjust your gemming to swap the Haste gems for AP.
While I was at it, I quickly did the same thing for Aedringonos for the Koralon kill from last night in comparing him to the top Unholy DK to take a look at the rotation. The rotation doesn't seem to be too badly off except for perhaps a few too many Plague Strikes and Icy Touches.. I would attribute the huge difference (100%) to Gargoyle timing and the fact that somehow the other DK casted only one fewer spell despite their fight being 26 seconds shorter:
Screenshot of Results:
Image Link
3/11/10
The birth of Unleashed
The guild Unleashed of the Ysera server was born before the Ysera server was up.
It spawned as an idea between 3 friends over dinner and beer, more beer than dinner but that's neither here nor there.
The 3 of us started playing WoW as it came out and instantly went to horde (how could one choose alliance after the Warcraft 3 cinematic with Mannoroth's demise?) in one of the terrible 20s: Cenarius. The problem with horde back in the day and in those original servers was that it was nearly impossible to find any sort of balance. You had 4:1 ratios if you were lucky, horde guilds squabbled over petty stuff and player poaching was a daily thing.
The three of us decided we wanted a change, at the time Minimage (me) was playing a horde warrior called Urgash and was trucking in Molten Core with an alliance of small horde guilds, but for every victory and every player we geared up, we had one big guild take em away and our little coallition had to rebuild, so when the option for a fresh start in one of those brand new servers with new hardware presented itself I like it, but I had my reservations. I had seen too many people reroll just to go back to their original toons, so I supported my friends but didn't want to take a very active role in the project.
As things turn out, I was the one with most free time so I was proposed as the GM for this new guild, but I was already a GM and leading a coallition in Molten Core, but I said "what the hell? Might as well give it a shot" fully knowing that my two friends would help me along the way.
So one of my friends, Valkiria, created a site for the guild and we started promoting it in the Looking For Guild forums, as a reroll project when the new servers were live.
Surprisingly enough for us, we had people jump on board, make an account in our new forums and start waiting for the new server with us.
The third friend ended up naming his toon Therion and off we went, waiting for a West Coast server to appear, but none came up, we let the Turalyon server go away because it was East Coast and when Blizzard announced that April 1st 2006 they were bringing up their last server for the time being we jumped on it, regardless of it being EST. That server was Ysera.
As part of a drunken joke and keeping up with it I named my gnome mage Minimage.
We had applicants before the guild was a reality and they too jumped into the server as it came up, we made our own little channel to communicate while we farmed boars to have enough money for the guild charter. Of the initial people to sign the charter and donate money to the cause there are some still playing, most of them still in the guild:
-Emmalee, our first female member of the guild and possibly the longest standing officer. Still actively playing, if casually.
-Aldoric, the guy who didn't want to be the warlock class lead but ended up taking the mantle of raid leader all throughout Burning Crusade and who I considered a co-GM. Still actively raiding.
-Pheral, only active druid for a while, obvious class lead, and the guy who never let us know that druids were actually crybabies and drama queens. Still plays WoW but had to depart Unleashed due to schedules conflicting in WoTLK.
-Minimage, that'd be me. I have been the GM for the whole run of the guild so far, except for a couple minutes in TBC when we killed Archimonde and the promise I had made if we killed him was that I'd get a gkick if we downed him. I actually got two gkicks that night, officers were vindictive. I am still an active raider and loot hoarder.
The other charter signers stayed with us for the first part of Unleashed as a guild, most of them members, some became officers or class leads. Some names I remember from the top of my head: Vash (first hunter class lead), Elmasmalo, Lyu (officer who did nothing but liked the title) and Xarina (tyrannical officer who left the guild as we went into MC).
Unleashed was one of the top 5 guilds in the Ysera server during the initial progression, we were 4th guild to kill Ragnaros and we were also the guild with the smallest membership due to our raid times conflicting with server times. But then server transfers came. Ysera was up in arms when they started, but we saw the endless possibilities of increasing our roster with people from other servers, so we took it. I went on a crusade to lure transfers into our guild as every other guild basically closed their doors and hated on transfers.
From this initial wave of transfers came some members who are still with us 3 and a half years later: Bonesetter (who put us all to shame with his BWL decked mage while we were still scraping for tier 1), Killasnail (who keeps promising he'll come back to WoW shortly, we don't know whether to believe him or not), Aranah (who now moved to Spain but is trying to get a decent internet connection to play with us) and Saffy (my favorite guinea pig ever, that guy could take the most verbal abuse and never get mad). I am sure I am missing some, my memory is very good but not perfect so I apologize.
Every year we celebrate in a way or another that we are an older guild and the only alliance guild to be day 1 and compete in the raiding. Since TBC we have always been in the top 20 server list and top 10 alliance list, which is quite an accomplishment given how much we suffer our members. Our very first anniversary we made a very complex joke about us moving to another server, all officers were in on the joke and to make it more real we started posting it in the forums 2 weeks before april fool's (which you can see is our guild's birthday). Some people were up in arms for this, some others rushed to the presumed server and checked if we were there, others were skeptical. In the end the cat was out of the bag and everyone had a very merry laugh, especially because a guy didn't get skeptical or anything, he just up and transfered to that server right after posting his reply to our thread with words along the lines of "I love Unleashed, I'll go wherever you guys go, I am transfering my toon right now so it doesn't get stuck or something, see you guys there" and there was no time to tell him it was a joke. Sadly he never came back, we guess he just found a guild there, and there used to be a 3 month cooldown to transfer back. Of course, after that episode we stopped doing those kind of jokes in fear of it happening again.
For our second year I threw a tantrum during Kael'thas attempts and started insulting everyone in the guild, including officers, and as part of the ruse Aldoric up and confronted me about it, so I gkicked him, which prompted other officers to gquit becuase of my tyrannical ways. Everyone was shocked but didn't say a word, then we told them it was all a joke and after we reinvited everyone we had our very first Kael'thas kill. What made it more memorable was seeing the kill screenshots afterwards and noticing a guy, Randomname, was unguilded in them. Right after I kicked Aldoric Randomname, a fellow warlock, gquit as a show of support to his class lead and friend, but since other officers gquit as well and the remaining ones were trying not to laugh as we ranted in vent, nobody noticed he had left. So he was unguilded in the kill shots.
Thanks to the kill it was a very memorable night. And then the guilds who were competing with us for the Kael'thas kill didn't believe we had done it due to it being April 1st.
Last year we didn't do anything special, we kind of forgot of our birthday coming and we just took a screenshot of all of us in the site Ulduar was to be released.
This year we are not sure what we'll do, but we are closing in on the 5 year mark, which for WoW is like living to be 125.
This in short is some of the story of Unleashed. We have great stories to share, great debates to start (some of our members are wall of text makers and theorizers) and we will keep this blog updated with all sorts of things, more than one person will be the one posting in this blog since it's a guild blog.
Until then, Lok tar ogar! I mean, for the alliance!
Minimage
It spawned as an idea between 3 friends over dinner and beer, more beer than dinner but that's neither here nor there.
The 3 of us started playing WoW as it came out and instantly went to horde (how could one choose alliance after the Warcraft 3 cinematic with Mannoroth's demise?) in one of the terrible 20s: Cenarius. The problem with horde back in the day and in those original servers was that it was nearly impossible to find any sort of balance. You had 4:1 ratios if you were lucky, horde guilds squabbled over petty stuff and player poaching was a daily thing.
The three of us decided we wanted a change, at the time Minimage (me) was playing a horde warrior called Urgash and was trucking in Molten Core with an alliance of small horde guilds, but for every victory and every player we geared up, we had one big guild take em away and our little coallition had to rebuild, so when the option for a fresh start in one of those brand new servers with new hardware presented itself I like it, but I had my reservations. I had seen too many people reroll just to go back to their original toons, so I supported my friends but didn't want to take a very active role in the project.
As things turn out, I was the one with most free time so I was proposed as the GM for this new guild, but I was already a GM and leading a coallition in Molten Core, but I said "what the hell? Might as well give it a shot" fully knowing that my two friends would help me along the way.
So one of my friends, Valkiria, created a site for the guild and we started promoting it in the Looking For Guild forums, as a reroll project when the new servers were live.
Surprisingly enough for us, we had people jump on board, make an account in our new forums and start waiting for the new server with us.
The third friend ended up naming his toon Therion and off we went, waiting for a West Coast server to appear, but none came up, we let the Turalyon server go away because it was East Coast and when Blizzard announced that April 1st 2006 they were bringing up their last server for the time being we jumped on it, regardless of it being EST. That server was Ysera.
As part of a drunken joke and keeping up with it I named my gnome mage Minimage.
We had applicants before the guild was a reality and they too jumped into the server as it came up, we made our own little channel to communicate while we farmed boars to have enough money for the guild charter. Of the initial people to sign the charter and donate money to the cause there are some still playing, most of them still in the guild:
-Emmalee, our first female member of the guild and possibly the longest standing officer. Still actively playing, if casually.
-Aldoric, the guy who didn't want to be the warlock class lead but ended up taking the mantle of raid leader all throughout Burning Crusade and who I considered a co-GM. Still actively raiding.
-Pheral, only active druid for a while, obvious class lead, and the guy who never let us know that druids were actually crybabies and drama queens. Still plays WoW but had to depart Unleashed due to schedules conflicting in WoTLK.
-Minimage, that'd be me. I have been the GM for the whole run of the guild so far, except for a couple minutes in TBC when we killed Archimonde and the promise I had made if we killed him was that I'd get a gkick if we downed him. I actually got two gkicks that night, officers were vindictive. I am still an active raider and loot hoarder.
The other charter signers stayed with us for the first part of Unleashed as a guild, most of them members, some became officers or class leads. Some names I remember from the top of my head: Vash (first hunter class lead), Elmasmalo, Lyu (officer who did nothing but liked the title) and Xarina (tyrannical officer who left the guild as we went into MC).
Unleashed was one of the top 5 guilds in the Ysera server during the initial progression, we were 4th guild to kill Ragnaros and we were also the guild with the smallest membership due to our raid times conflicting with server times. But then server transfers came. Ysera was up in arms when they started, but we saw the endless possibilities of increasing our roster with people from other servers, so we took it. I went on a crusade to lure transfers into our guild as every other guild basically closed their doors and hated on transfers.
From this initial wave of transfers came some members who are still with us 3 and a half years later: Bonesetter (who put us all to shame with his BWL decked mage while we were still scraping for tier 1), Killasnail (who keeps promising he'll come back to WoW shortly, we don't know whether to believe him or not), Aranah (who now moved to Spain but is trying to get a decent internet connection to play with us) and Saffy (my favorite guinea pig ever, that guy could take the most verbal abuse and never get mad). I am sure I am missing some, my memory is very good but not perfect so I apologize.
Every year we celebrate in a way or another that we are an older guild and the only alliance guild to be day 1 and compete in the raiding. Since TBC we have always been in the top 20 server list and top 10 alliance list, which is quite an accomplishment given how much we suffer our members. Our very first anniversary we made a very complex joke about us moving to another server, all officers were in on the joke and to make it more real we started posting it in the forums 2 weeks before april fool's (which you can see is our guild's birthday). Some people were up in arms for this, some others rushed to the presumed server and checked if we were there, others were skeptical. In the end the cat was out of the bag and everyone had a very merry laugh, especially because a guy didn't get skeptical or anything, he just up and transfered to that server right after posting his reply to our thread with words along the lines of "I love Unleashed, I'll go wherever you guys go, I am transfering my toon right now so it doesn't get stuck or something, see you guys there" and there was no time to tell him it was a joke. Sadly he never came back, we guess he just found a guild there, and there used to be a 3 month cooldown to transfer back. Of course, after that episode we stopped doing those kind of jokes in fear of it happening again.
For our second year I threw a tantrum during Kael'thas attempts and started insulting everyone in the guild, including officers, and as part of the ruse Aldoric up and confronted me about it, so I gkicked him, which prompted other officers to gquit becuase of my tyrannical ways. Everyone was shocked but didn't say a word, then we told them it was all a joke and after we reinvited everyone we had our very first Kael'thas kill. What made it more memorable was seeing the kill screenshots afterwards and noticing a guy, Randomname, was unguilded in them. Right after I kicked Aldoric Randomname, a fellow warlock, gquit as a show of support to his class lead and friend, but since other officers gquit as well and the remaining ones were trying not to laugh as we ranted in vent, nobody noticed he had left. So he was unguilded in the kill shots.
Thanks to the kill it was a very memorable night. And then the guilds who were competing with us for the Kael'thas kill didn't believe we had done it due to it being April 1st.
Last year we didn't do anything special, we kind of forgot of our birthday coming and we just took a screenshot of all of us in the site Ulduar was to be released.
This year we are not sure what we'll do, but we are closing in on the 5 year mark, which for WoW is like living to be 125.
This in short is some of the story of Unleashed. We have great stories to share, great debates to start (some of our members are wall of text makers and theorizers) and we will keep this blog updated with all sorts of things, more than one person will be the one posting in this blog since it's a guild blog.
Until then, Lok tar ogar! I mean, for the alliance!
Minimage
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