SPG

And it’s about damn time.

It’s been a while, so let me catch you up.  Very end of Cataclysm, raiding Dragon Soul three nights a week, downing heroics.  I’m either too busy or too lazy to write frontpage updates, but we make quite a bit of progress, and clear Dragon Soul Heroic up through Spine in March of 2012.  We spend some time on Heroic Madness, but right around then some core people quit the game, myself included.  We call an end to our raiding schedule, and go into hibernation.  Like Cthulhu, only more handsome.

For all of Mists, we don’t raid.  For those of you who don’t know us, SPG has been a semi-hardcore raiding guild since Molten Core and Blackwing Lair were the endgame.  (I say semi-hardcore, because although we’ve always ranked competitively on our server, SPG has always been more about the people you play with than stroking our reptilian sub-brains to DPS meters or item levels.  It works, I promise.)  Mists was the first time since pulling Lucifron in the mid-2000’s that we haven’t been a raiding guild.  Our ranks dwindled to the friendly and few.

And now we’re back!  One of the great side effects of taking an extended hiatus is that it really pares you down to the people who love playing together.  Our environment is great; our tiny roster is full of friendly and positive young professionals who have their lives together and play for the fun of it.  It reminds me of an ancient SPG, when we were a scrappy young raiding guild undermanning raid bosses and having a blast doing it.  Except now with jobs and money.

Highmaul opened this week, and although we’ve had to pug a handful of slots each night, we’ve made some progress and had some fun doing it.  We blew through Kargath and Butcher, and then skipped right to Twin Ogrons and downed them on the second pull, which was both epic and surprising, since the first pull consisted of fifteen seconds of running around wildly and wiping at 87%.  We met some great pugs, including two remarkable healers that I attempted to recruit, only to find out they were Australian and don’t normally raid in the middle of the day.

Which brings me to something I’ve unstrategically buried in the part of this update where everyone will already have stopped reading. We’re not the most hardcore guild you’re going to find, and we probably won’t be a ticket to maxing your ilevel or earning Mythic achievements.  But for a certain kind of player, we are ideal. We raid well and take it seriously, but we have fun playing with each other while we do it. That can be a hard combination to find, and if you’re the type of person I’m looking for, you probably know that.  I mentioned that we’ve been pugging slots for our raids? We just put this band back together. We need a few people to round us out.

If you’ve been here for a while and rue the fact that this frontpage hasn’t been updated since 2011, Merry Christmas! If you’re taking a look at us and thinking about it, I’d encourage you to say hi. Come chat with us, run a heroic, fill one of our pug slots, see what you think. Maybe we’re not for you, but maybe we are. If that’s the case, we look forward to meeting you.

SPG is back.  Expect more.