After numerous tries, the Noble Knights rallied and floored all the characters of the Wizard of Oz event. Each player suffered heavy repair bills, but in the end victory was sweet. Congratulations to Gajahmada for winning [Wicked Witch's Hat] and Helelady for winning [Ribbon of Sacrifice]. The fight was long and drawn out, but extremely exciting! The Crone herself fell hard after the Noble Knights cut down the first five mobs. Curator, here we come!

• Full raid statistics from December 16, 2007 (courtesy of WOW Web Stats)
• Low-resolution video of the Wizard of Oz fight (YouTube, coming soon)
• High-resolution video of the Wizard of Oz fight (Divx, coming soon)
• Screenshots

The Noble Knights powered their way through Karazhan all the way to the Opera Event, where the Wizard of Oz gang finally stopped them. Congratulations to Gajahmada for winning [Spectral Band of Innervation] and [Shadow-Cloak of Dalaran], and Mierra won [Bracers of the White Stag] and [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch]. In addition, Mierra made off like a bandit, winning [Ring of Unrelenting Storms] off a trash mob. After the victory over Maiden, Bluedevils won [Gloves of Quickening] and Jeriarterd won [Bracers of Justice]. UPDATE: Screenshots now available!

• Full raid statistics for the December 15, 2007 raid (courtesy of WOW Web Stats)
• Screenshots from the raid
• Full strategy for Wizard of Oz fight with video (Flash and Divx, courtesy of uber.com)
• Full Karazhan boss strategy audio (MP3, courtesy of WOW Radio, The DungeonMaster show)

In order to ramp the progress of the Noble Knights guild members, the Karazhan raid has been split into two groups: Alpha Squad Karazhan and Omega Squad Karazhan. Though managing both groups will be initially difficult, it will give everyone a chance to gain experience and gear up, and will allow those in the Omega Squad to run on an alternate schedule. The list of guild members assigned (and not currently assigned) is available on the Karazhan Attunement List page. Note that the list will be changed periodically and members may be moved around based on role, need, and availability. Guild members that are approaching  level 70, be sure to ask your fellow guildies for help to get you attuned for Karazhan.  With so many members becoming attuned, we  look forward to forming a third Karazhan Raid Team real soon.It is also important to note that at a future date members from each squad will be swapped between groups to help balance the skill sets and share experience and strategies.

I did a major upgrade on the forums and core blog systems earlier this evening, right after the Saturday night Karazhan run. Brought the forums up to phpBB 3.0 RC8 and pushed a huge update for Wordpress from 2.2 to 2.3.1. The latter was the easy part, and with it comes a lot of optimization, tagging features, and a cleaned up news-posting workflow. The forums, however, suffered a HUGE problem… long story short, all the user-accounts are gone as well as the (few) posts that existed. All guild members should re-register their forum accounts (do not click Lost Password; you must create a brand new account). FORUMS HAVE BEEN MOVED! I really apologize! The good news is that I was able to salvage all the forum categories, including the new raid discussion forums for Karazhan! Each person can now create a custom signature that is updated (live!) from the Armory. See below for an example. Again, I’m sorry that the accounts needed to be purged… in the long term this shouldn’t be a problem; it actually helps smooth out the system on the blog end (does that make much sense?) UPDATE:FORUMS HAVE BEEN MOVED! Sorry, but without the WP-United mod, managing passwords would have been a nightmare. You can now save your password for each domain. New forums link is here.

Example sigs: