Ginnunga is an online gaming guild which was formed late 1999 in the game EverQuest by Jhurg (Eyke) and Laurent (Ernesto). We have existed in the online world ever since.
We have a basic set of rules and morals that guides our behaviour, regardless of which game we play and our motto has always been that we should have fun together. This does however not mean that we are just a family guild. We play to win - not always to be the best, but we are quite aware of quality, not just in personality and behaviour, but also in game excellence.
If you wish to know more of our online endevours, you can check out our history although that section is not fully fleshed out.
Well, we have had a busy week on Stormreaver Wrath of The Lich King expansion has been released and we have all been busy leveling to 80
Blizzard have re-introduced an updated level 80 version of Naxxramus Raid instance. 10 man & 25 man, and I'm pleased to announce that the 10 man version has been cleared.
The instance was very easy for us as we have exsperianced most of the content 2 years ago at level 60, and we managed to clear it all on first nights raiding in about 4 hours
We are now waiting for more of our memmbers to reach level 80, in order to raid Naxx 25 man, Sartharion and Malygos.
Also HUGE congratulations to a few of our memmbers who managed some server first Achievments (they were the first out of all the Alliance and Horde on the server)
Server First level 80 Tauren + Shaman - Zetzek
Server Frist level 80 Deathknight - Takyn (Calyn)
Server First Engineer 450 skill - Fizzul
Server First Enchanter 450 skill - Ly
So we managed to clear Warpblade Tunnels and Sigmars Crypt the other day. I was so annoyed by the drops that I never made a newsitem about it. So here it is. We cleaned it. Taa.
End-game in Warhammer requires special item sets that grants a special ward buff, which protects you from the high damage output of the monsters in the higher level dungeons, as well as in the public quests that you have to defeat to capture a city. This means that you NEED these items both for endgame PvE as well as RvR objectives. Let us here just focus on the two first sets, the Bloodlord/Annihilator or the Sentinel/Conqueror sets.
You can obtain the Bloodlord set from Bastion Stairs, however, one of the quests there is bugged, so you cannot access the chest piece, meaning you only have access to 4/5 pieces by default. There are, however, more issues with aquiring these pieces, which I will mention a little later, since the problem is the same with the Sentinel pieces.
The Annihilator set, which is the PvP brother of the Bloodlord set, is aquired from RvR. The boots, drops randomly from players, the gloves are bought from an RvR merchant and the remaining pieces are aquired from winning a gold bag in a keep PQ.
The higher level PvE set, the Sentinel set, is acquired from Warpblade Tunnels or Sigmars Crypt. To be able to obtain these, you are REQUIRED to have at least 3 parts of the previous sets, namely Annihilator or Bloodlord, or a combination of the two, meaning, 2 bloodlord items and 1 annihilator item.
The Conqueror set, just like the Annihilator, drops boots randomly from players and gloves from a store. The droprate is very rare though and despite having the most RP of any guild on our server, we have a very small amount of boots, I think 3 pairs. The other parts are aquired from Fortress capture PQs, which has never occured yet on my server, so I have no idea how hard it is, or how it works, but I assume it works just like a keep capture roll - meaning you get the parts from a gold bag from a keep.
Now, I mentioned earlier there are some problems when it comes to the PvE parts and what can that be? Well, the core of the problem is that when you defeat a boss in these dungeons, it drops 1-3 set pieces, but very often, those pieces does not match the classes of the people who defeat the boss. It is fully possible for a group full of Ironbreakers to get 3 White Lion parts. This means that the boss kill was useless, since the items are bind on equip. After you have killed the bosses 28 times without getting a single item drop for your class, it can be not just a little frustrating. Add to that, that there is a respawn timer on the bosses. In Bastion it's 24 hours and in Warprat/Sigmars it's 72 hours (The time is reported in minutes when you do /lockout, because I guess, that makes alot of sense. Not.).
We have done Bastion bosses 28 times in a row, which has taken us a minimum of 28/3=9 days, but since the third boss was bugged and more or less unkillable (he is still uber bugged) we only killed him 3 times, so this actually took us a minimum of 14 days, if we did this PvE event every day we could, although constantly postponing it a little due to the 24h respawn, an 18 hour respawn would make alot more sense. Anyways, so we have spent the last month grinding Bastion and this one unlucky person didn't get a single drop. Damn it, he will just grab a few PvP pieces. Since the boots never dropped for him, he bought them from the Auction hall and then bought the gloves. It only requires renown rank 32, you can get that in roughly the same time as we have been grinding Bastion, so we spend another two weeks grinding scenarios to get up to renown rank. Of course we could have done this before, but let's say we haven't - trying to illustrate the effort here.
Now we have 2 pieces, but we need a third, since we know from secure sources that we need at least 3 wards to be able to do the following dungeons. We then decide to capture keeps to obtain a gold bag. The keeps do not always produce a gold bag, roughly every second or third keep shows a goldbag on the roll. We are usually between 12 and 24 people to take a keep. Taking a keep with just 12, requires the defenders to be sleeping, if you want to take the keep with 24, you cant have more than 15ish defenders. Ok, so we have on average 18 people in the warband and a bag around 40% of the time. That means we have to take 45 keeps to be sure to get a gold bag from a purely statistical point of view. Anyone who has played though knows that the contribution is borked up beyond repair, so most likely we have to take alot more than that. Anyways, so after taking 45 keeps we finally have the third piece of armor required to conquer the fortresses or city dungeons. This took us around a month to obtain.
Ok, we have now spent two months of playing to obtain our armour pieces and we are now ready to fight! We spend a couple of evenings getting wiped out in the Warpblade tunnels and when we finally manage to kill a boss that drops a set piece, he drops three pieces! YAY! - Of course none of the pieces are usable by anyone in the party. So now we get locked out for 3 whole days, and the previous full evenings we spent wiping, was for absolutely nothing. The items are bind on pickup of course.
Fuck it, perhaps we can PvP our way to our gear then? Well, as I said earlier, the boots are UBER rare drops from players, and they require renown rank 45, which is quite a hefty effort, especially if you prefer RvR over scenarios.
So, why is it like that? Why do we need to spend an enormour amount of effort and time to obtain absolutely nothing? I thought we had learned with Trials of Atlantis that we want to fight players, not monsters etc.
I thought we showed a great way with Darkness Falls, that instead of dropping items, monsters can drop badges or special coins, that can be evenly distributed among the group members, so they can save them up and then purchase the item that fits their class. Risk vs Reward and Effort vs Reward is then balances out!
With patch 1.0.5 Wars armor will be even MORE important, forcing us to focus even MORE on grinding stupid dungeons and find items drop that are useless (Sentinel items) or find Sentinel Armour that fits noone in the party.
Come on guys, I know the game is new, but this is something even a lowly gamer like myself could deduct with my left foot that it wouldn't work properly. My Ged.
Ginnunga has already killed Kil'jaedan on Stormreaver server the previous week, but it was after the recent patch 3.0.2 changes, which severely nerfed the current content in preparation for WoW's next expansion:- Wrath of The Lich King. Because of this huge nerf it was not seen as a "real kill", hence no news item.
However this small news note is to say- Congratulations to Drakhorn for receiving the Legendary Bow from Kil'Jaeden this week.
So, after alot of lagging and other problems we managed to get a raid going this Sunday the 19th. So we talked it over and decided to try BT and well. We went through it like a hot knife through butter. Two new first kills and more to come shortly!
Today the guildrank of Ginnunga hit 20.
This means we are half way to level 40! Ofcourse it unlocks alot of features as it gains rank, but at level 20 we have received a feature that boosts our Epeen a little bit.
We are allowed to display the Guild Heraldry on our cloacks and battle standard. This way Ginnunga will be more recognizable to our allies and enemies!
The best thing this heraldry has done for us so far. Was making the guild leader of Penta Thrust call our guild leader Urundir gay. Although the guy from PT was hiding on his ALT in a Scenario... To that we can only reply with our age old motto:
"In Ginnunga, we like men."
October 7th the recruitment for our Warhammer section opens once again!
Judging by the amount of people who have been in contact with me, or other members and officers the past few weeks, there's quite a few people who are interested in getting their chance at joining our comunity. I am ofcourse very glad that the interest is there and I hope the reopening of our recruitment will give us the opportunity to add even more great people to our roster.
In addition to what has previously been stated in our recruitment section, we will from now on only accept players who are rank 52 (or level as normal MMO lingo would describe it) and renown rank 20, or above.
Regarding classes, the recruitment is open for everyone. But we ofcourse have a greater need of certain classes then others. However we are firm believers that a great person or player is something that outweighs their choice of class.
So tomorrow I'm looking forward to sorting through some awesome applications together with my officers and other faithfulls. A little tip to everyone is to write as much information as possible in the applications. There's no such thing as a too long application, one of the main reasons they get rejected is because of the lack of information.
So the best of luck and I'll see you online!
Edit by Ernesto, November 4th: Altered the required rank for joining to 52 since apparently it was confusing for some.
Written by Gromk - Urundir Mon, 06 October 2008 14:02
The 25th of September 2008, at 1:08:51, Ginnunga claimed our first keep in Warhammer online.
Thanks to all our members for giving us such a great start in Warhammer, old and new alike. Not just thanks to the good guild exp, but to the great atmosphere we have in the guildchat and on TeamSpeak.
The picture below is copyrighted by Gartagirl enterprises. Steal it at your own risk.
"Who needs sleep when you have a keep?"
Defensive raid breaking up and going to bed now, after some three hours of fighting against the "Destructatron". Outnumbered but high in spirits the soldiers of Ginnunga kept their Emperor proud!
Written by Gromk - Urundir Thu, 25 September 2008 01:57
Last night we decided to roam the RvR lakes to try to take back a few objectives and keeps. We gathered up the guild at a quarter past eight in the evening in Marshes of Madness with our minds set to snatch the keep there.
We headed straight for the keep, ignoring the Battlefield Objectives in the hopes of being able to ninja-take it with as little opposition is possible. The plan worked and the keep fell after just a few minutes, while we ran to take the other battlefield objectives. While taking the last objective we got the message that our keep was under attack. We ignored it since it's quite often buggy and triggers whenever some destruction lad runs close to it. So, we decided to head back to the warcamp to fly to Barak Varr with the intent to continue our conquest, however, when we were almost at the warcamp we saw that the keep was taken. We quickly took a left turn and ran towards the keep and found a large gathering of Destructions in front of the keep.
The destruction players, which consisted mostly of players from the guild Darkwind took their stand on the keep side of the bridge, so we lined up our tanks in the front and slowly started crossing the bridge. There were casualties on both sides and the fighting went on for quite some time, but we finally managed to take down all their healers and hence their "reinforcements" stopped so we could pass the bridge and break the door.
We got up into the keep lords room and there were only a few defenders, but thanks to them and reinforcements that came in from behind, they managed to twart our attempt at taking the keep. The destruction players combined with the keep lord and his cronies were simply too much for us to handle.
We gathered up and made another attempt at controlling the lord room, but we were quickly wiped out so we revised our plan and went at it again. Third times a charm!
This time we took it a little slower, made sure to take out people from both behind and up in the lord room, while shooting down their healers and nukers up on the platforms in the lordroom before making our charge. We also focused all power on the keep lord himself, while we offtanked the champions as well as we could, which is pretty hard with all the knockback and destruction players whacking you in the face!
After I do not know how long we managed to wipe out enough Destruction players and they seemed to either have lost a few defenders, or they were just too slow at getting back, so this time we managed to take the keep.
After the keep was secured, we moved to Barak Varr and claimed the keep and the objectives without much opposition at all. After that, it was getting too late, so we packed our bags and headed of to bed. I love beds. Comfy.
In conclusion, it was an awesome night with loads of fun with some pretty great fights and I do think we raised our outnumbered (globally) Order banners quite high. We all look forward for future battles just like these! Good fighting!
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