This time should hopefully be the last move, because TSO appear to be quite excellent when it comes to reliability and speed. Certainly the Thunder website's performance has been superb since the move last week, with none of the problems of our previous host.

So Xmas has come and gone, as has another birthday, raid tier in WoW, and computer

I had got myself a new graphics card , but whilst testing it out some dust got into the casing and fried the motherboard :/

So that meant I had to purchase new equipment! So now my rig looks like this:

i5-2500k @ 3.3Ghz

Asus GTX 560TI

4Gb DDR3 Ram

I'm still using my old Antec 900 case, and the same soundcard and hard drives, but the above in conjunction with the new internet pipe mean everything is absolutely flying along now. It's great purchasing a game on Steam, and being able to play it less than 30 minutes later

As for WoW, Tier 13, Dragon Soul, was released at the start of December. We beat normal mode inside 2 weeks.

I shit thee not. It's dead easy :/

Only really the last fight presents any significant challenge, and only because the tricky part, phase 2, is behind 11 minutes of repetitive action smacking tentacles in the face like some PG version of a Hentai Tentacle short animated feature.

To say we were disappointed was fair. We had 2 groups out on the first raid night and both groups one shot the first boss. Ridiculously easy, he may as well have just farted and popped out his purples once we cleared his minimal trash.

We'll start T13 hard modes next week, as we gear up for it, but this content has to last us for about 5-6 months at a guess. I can forsee us losing bored raiders as a result...

Anyway, last post of 2011, so have a great 2012, and here's hoping the Inca's were wrong and the world doesn't end this time next year!

Yeah yeah, I know, I've said it a million times before, and likely a million times more, but I do want to keep the site active and updated as often as possible. That might mean shorter posts, but we'll try anyway and see how it pans out.

So a new theme, a bit simpler and less showy than the last one, although I still do like the Arras/Classical Gamer theme, so much so that I use it for the Thunder website.

As far as wow goes, we're currently still sitting at 10 out of 12 of the end bosses downed. Been stuck on Nefarian and Al'Akir for what seems like an eternity now, and with the T11 normal content nerfs the impending 4.2 patch is bringing, I would seriously like us to get it done before the nerfs hit, as they're substantial reductions in boss difficulty across the board. Most to the tune of -20%, in health, attack power, damage done, longer Feedback debuffs on Al'akir (meaning you don't have to stack the adds in P2, just kill them as they pop), less adds etc. As I said, substantial nerfs, and I thought we were at a stage now where we should be polishing off normal level content at the very least.

Yes, we're a casual guild, but that doesn't mean in attitude towards raids. I still expect raiders to do their utmost to do the job precisely and well. Hell if I can spend literally hours poring over my gear's stats, debating threat vs mitigation, gemming choices, rotation etc, why isn't everyone doing the same?

Either way, if we don't get them down before I go on holiday in 2 weeks it's likely we'll be looking at killing the nerfed versions. Which won't be satisfying to anywhere near the same degree otherwise.

4.2 of course brings Firelands with it, and the return of Ragnaros, the fire elemental Lord. Molten Core was merely a setback!

Oh, and I've also changed from a Blood Elf to a Tauren, hence tinned beef

4.2 will also bring some tankadin changes to one of our core damage reduction abilities, Holy Shield (What's that? Another wow patch and they're changing core Paladin abilities again? Well colour me shocked! /sarcasm) This time, instead of its current iteration where it becomes active if you use either Shield of the Righteous or Word of Glory (still an unfortunate acronym, WoG) and giving you a flat 10% increase in the amount of damage blocked upon a successful block, they're changing it to an activated ability that gives you a 20% increase in blocked damage, but stays up for 10 secs and has a 30 second cooldown.

Yay, another button to push in order to reduce damage. That's like what, 5 now?

• 3 min CD: Guardian of Ancient Kings: 50%
• 3 min CD: Ardent Defender: 20% plus 15% self heal on "near death"
• 3 min CD: Divine Guardian: 20% for everyone in the raid bar the paladin
• 1 min CD: Divine Protection: 20%
• ½ min CD: Holy Shield: 20%

We've rapidly gone from being the loltank, which was generally considered to be the easiest tank to play, to something with more buttons and activated abilities than the previously most complex tank class, the warrior.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have the tools to do our job, but with all the other incidental abilities we have that we need to use mid-fight (hands, seals, heals, taunts and hell, what about our attack rotation?), my UI is beginning to look like the fucking control console for the USS Enterprise. Some day soon I swear I'm gonna hit the wrong button and end up ramming through the nearest wall at light speed, leaving behind a rather large bloody Tauren sized smear and the faint smell of cooked beef.

So we've been offline since Tuesday evening about 7pm or so, due to the server that the site was hosted on (Evohosting's Firestar server) having an epic breakdown. Apparently the server was tootling along absolutely fine then just dropped like a sniper had hit the target.

I don't think the hosts have any idea what happened yet with it, because as mentioned above, their graphs and stats show the server running fine then suddenly the entire thing just died. It took 2½ days to run an FSCK (disk check), which admittedly was the hosts fault. The reason it took so long is because their data was on one huge partition, rather than having the disk partitioned off so it would have taken a lot less time to run what is apparently the longest FSCK in IT history.

So as you can tell, all the data was restored eventually (yesterday) and took me until this morning to patch up the SQL database errors following the migration to a new server.

To be honest, even though it's been 4 days of downtime, I can't really be too hard on the hosts as they've been brilliant in the 3½ years I've been with them. This is the first downtime (major or otherwise) that I've experienced with them. So fingers crossed lessons have been learnt on their part, and it shouldn't happen again, which is good enough for me.

I've decided, that for the time being, as long as your name and email is filled in the comment boxes then you can comment without registering.

However you can still register with the site to stop having to enter your details all the time. As you can see from my demo comments below this, your email isn't published on the site, so you don't have to worry about spam!

:E

I've made all the necessary tweaks to get the site running on the new software, so you should all now be reading this, rather than the vBAdvanced based front page.

I'll be adding more functionality to the site as I become more accustomed to using WordPress again, so expect some tweaking to be going on over the coming days and maybe weeks.

Well up top on the main page you have a rotation of current articles, and below this you have the 6 most recent & stickied posts.

Below that again is my twitter feed and beside that is a character sheet for my main WoW character, Saruya.

To the right is the navigation for the site, which should all be fairly self explanatory, including links to other websites and the various sections of the site itself.

More will likely be added as I tweak with the layout and content - especially the sections, as these will fill out whenever I post to a category for the first time.

I'm really loving the new layout. It looks fantastic. It feels a lot cleaner than the last version of the blog, and doesn't seem as heavy to me.

Everything looks a lot more organised and easily distinguished, and it should be a lot easier in future to update or change the theme as well, without having to worry about the forum, and editing navbars and such.

What do you guys think of the new site? Thoughts?

I decided to revamp the website again, as it was beginning to get a bit stale. So I've done away with the vbAdvanced front end and dumped the forum for comments. That said it still exists and will be re-worked in order to serve as a forum for the site proper.

So I'm currently using the great Arras theme for WordPress, which looks a damn sight more modern than the last iteration of the site.

I've also got a new URL for the website - www.saruya.net. The current www.the-yarn.net URL is registered until 2011, but when that expires I reckon I'll be moving to saruya.net full time, as it makes more sense.

Leave your comments below as to your thoughts on the new site, and here's to more posts!