Ginnunga news

In an excellent end to our last unofficial Christmas break raiding week we managed to kill Al'Akir and Nefarian for the first time (Al'Akir seems something of a push over, Nefarian certainly is not). Admittedly these are only 10 man raids but it's testament to the groups' composition and ability that we managed this and cleared out the bosses left in BoT.

This of course gave us more protector tier loot. Back in ICC while our DKs, Druids and Rogues were wearing their threadbare greys our Warriors and Shamans were fully decked out in both main spec and off spec tier loot so please Blizzard enough with the bloody protector loot.

Moving onto our first official raid of the new year we will be looking towards finishing off these bosses in 25 man and moving on to heroics, several of our members are not fully prepared for that just yet both from a gear and a full understanding of the boss encounters but this will go swiftly.

Fantastic work today guys, keep it up.

Resident World of Warcraft guru and legend Janne has created a nice guide about the Cataclysm dungeon achievements!

Quote:

Intro This guide is for the 5 man Cataclysm expansion achievements. All is welcomed to post here, or correct me if I'm wrong. All helpful posts will be added to this topic and credits given to the rightful people. All of the achievements are labeled with the dungeon they are at, and are in no particular order of easy/medium/hard. Getting started While writing this guide (and doing some achievements), the expansion has just hit live and the gear for the group members are mostly green/blue with maybe few epic items. This means, while the achievement may sound too complicated or hard now, the chances are (and will be), that the achievements will get more simple and easy to do as time passes and more epics and tiers find themselves in to the game. What you need in most achievements is good and balanced group. This usually means: 1x tank 1x healer 3x DPS ....

You can find the full guide here!

What's you character name and how did you come up with it?
Isseesoli. It's Finnish and if you translate it word to word it means "your father was", but it comes from an inside joke amongst my friends, a joke which is basically impossible to explain. But anyways that's why I picked it. All my other character names come from same kind of jokes, never been that much in to "larp"-nicks. Like Oonsaleehot which was my main in the start of WotLK which means "I'm certainly hot" or my current main Saunamajuri, "sauna major", which is the word for the person who is responsible for warming up sauna in parties and so forth. That's a joke about my self as last year I managed to have my sauna on for almost half a year which ended up making quite a nice electricity bill :D

How old are you?
24 in 2 weeks. So 23 :D

Where do you live?
Seinäjoki, Finland

What MMO do you play at the moment?
Got inactive in WoW when my summerjob started (same thing every year) and now waiting for Cataclysm to start playing again.

Any other games currently?
I don't actually play that much if you don't count WoW. Well I like FPS games, but haven't had the chance to try new MOH or COD, because my PSU ended it's contract prematurely. Mafia 2 is the last game I played I think, and it was really good.

What was your first computer game ever?
First one I remember playing is Keen.

What was your first multiplayer online experience?
First game I played in multiplayer mode was Rainbow Six: Rogue Squadron with my friend against AI, but it wasn't online. But it made me realize how cool it's to play with other people. I think the thing for me in online games never has been the "beating other ppl up" -part, but the aspect of achieving something with friends. Soon after that I started playing CS which I then played for next 5 or 6 years before WoW.

What was your first MMO?
WoW, never played any other.

What is your favorite snack while gaming?
Definently Chili Nuts. I could live without eating anything else :D

When/How did you join Ginnunga?
I used to play in a different server, but got tired to people slacking too much in my guild. I know Mohaiken irl and I knew he plays in a semi-hc guild so in August '07 I asked him if they need a mage and there was a spot. Shame people don't get the chance anymore to go through that interview by Lylar :D As a funny fact a member who joined few weeks before me, Joketsu, turned out to be my good irl friends big brother. I didn't really know him back then, but now I'm friends with him too.

Tell us your most memorable mmo moment?
I have to go with killing Nefarian with my old guild. Such an epic fight and also BWL is my favourite instance. In Ginnunga I think it's killing Kaelthas, also an epic fight with those legendary weapons and the flying. And the yelling in TS right after the kill was remarkable.

Tell us something nobody in the guild knows about you.
Hmm quite hard as Joketsu, Mohaiken and Kupparäysä know me quite well but; In Finnish school system in the 3rd grade kids are taught handy works with wood and metal and also textile works. In the 4th grade you have to pick either handy works or textile works and as you can guess boys usually pick handy works and girls textile works. But I wanted to pick textile, because the sewing machine was so much fun but my dad didn't let me QQ. Well to be honest later on I was happy he decided for me as you have to go with your choice to the 9th grade :D

Bastion of Twilight is now cleared and that pegs us at 10/12 bosses which isn't too shabby for an unofficial raid week but a pleasant Christmas present.

I'd be lying if I said all the content is completely on farm yet as we've only done these on 10 man but this should position us well to start picking and choosing between normal and heroics which is what I was hoping for. Now if only more feral loot would drop...

Oh and before I forget, nice hat ZZ.

A new expansion to lust over! We're currently at 6/12 bosses

Bastion of Twilight

Halfus Wyrmbreaker
Valiona & Theralion

Blackwing Descent

Magmaw
Omintron Defense System
Maloriak
Chimaeron

Time prevented us from finishing off Atramedes but he's a simple boss once people understand the sound mechanic and stop trying to be rambo. After that we'll be trying out Conclave and moving onto clearing BoT but it's currently like being stuck at a really good all you can eat buffet as most of the bosses so far you'll down without too much banging your head against the wall (Chimaeron was unpleasant though).

It's hard to compare expansions but it would have been quite an achievement for the first tier of Cataclysm to have been worse than WOTLK and I'm hoping to have heroics available after Christmas. Holidays aren't the ideal time for progress however!

Since there has been alot of stuff going on past few months in GFX land, I've decided to take a bunch of benchmark results from 6 different websites and 5 games they each did. Combined them all and came up with a few numbers.

The FPS results I've taken are from the 1920*1200/1080 benchmarks. According to Steam only 4% of the gamers use higher resolutions. In this resolution the HD6970 is a little bit behind on the GTX570, in higher resolutions the HD6970 will be a bit faster due to having 2GB onboard where the GTX570 only has 1.25GB. Keep this in mind if you try to decide between these two.

Since I have taken results from all games and combined them, I suggest you go look at benchmarks yourself if you only play one (type of) game. Since some games favor Nvidia or AMD more. If you are like me and some of the people I know and play whatever comes your path, these might be interesting numbers.

The prices are an average from Dutch webshops, you can find all cards a little bit cheaper if you search for them.

			     	PowerUsage in Watt	      	Prices	
GFXCard	       AvgFPS		idleavg	loadavg	       		euro	Euro/FPS

6870		44						220	=5,00
6950		53		172	339			270	=5,09
5870		49						250	=5,10	
5970		80						410	=5,13
460 1gb		37						190    	=5,14
6970		59		185	378			330	=5,60
570		61		187	414			350	=5,74
580		69		200	452			460	=6,67


6970CF		90						660	=7,33
580 SLI		94						920	=9,79

To obtain the data, I added up all the numbers and took an average. The datea was obtained from the following sites; HardOCP, Anandtech, Tweakers, OverclockersClub, Hardwareheaven & Guru3d.


Interesting to see that the HD6870 1gb is atm best bang for the buck, this seems to be the lowbudget computer choice, overtaking the GTX460 1gb. Eventho its definitely not the fastest card in the group it is one of the cheapest. It's followed closely by the HD6950, the HD6950 comes like the HD6970 also with 2gb, keep this in mind if you are running high resolutions. The HD6950 seems to be (judging from forums) the nuber one choice of the new cards to run in crossfire (combined with Eyefinity), due to its solid performance/price ratio. Sadly I have no benchmark numbers of this atm.

The HD5870 and the HD5970 score pretty well price/performance wise because they can be found for pretty decent prices in most webshops because of the new line. Dont think they will be around for long tho since they are discontinued. Most driver updates from now on will be mostly supporting the 68xx and 69xx line and where the HD5870 was a pretty solid card, the HD5970 has had its share of (driver) problems. In my opinion this would be a great time for people who already own a HD5870 to get another one and go crossfire. If you are in the market for just one new card I would go for one of the new ATI/Nvidia products.

Nvidia surprised friend and foe last two months with their GTX580 and GTX570, these cards have a better performance/power/price ratio then their 4xx line had. The GTX580 is the best single GPU videocard out there atm but it is pretty expensive, if money is not an issue this would be the way to go imo.

ATI still has to release its HD6990, with two GPU's onboard, it will be interesting to see what price and performance this card will bring. It will probably slightly less powerfull then two 6970's but also less expensive. Rumor has it that Nvidia is also working on a dual GPU card.

If I were to upgrade in the near future it would come down to the Nvidia GTX570 or the AMD HD6970. These two cards just pack alot of punch at a decent price. The Nvidia is a little bit faster on Full HD and lower resolution where the ATI seems to shine at higher resolutions, due to the 2GB. It also uses 40watt less which would make it overtime an even cheaper card then the 570.

I think for most people it would come down to what they prefer, but if you are planning to game at a higher resolution in the near future and don't mind saving the environment while you do it, the HD6970 will be the choice for you.

On November 13th 2007 we had a catastrophic harddrive crash. We were lazy and never go to install an old backup. The crash resulted in topics and messages being listed, but their content was not there. Post content is not saved in the same database as the database that holds the thread and message info, so all those old posts came up empty or in some rare cases even with content they were not supposed to have. For security reasons, all the affected posts (23,000) were purged from the public areas of the forum.

Today we went ahead and removed the posts (87,244 posts, 10,058 topics) also from the private parts of the forum. This can in some cases maybe also affect the site content. If you notice something broken or missing, please send a PM to Ernesto with the broken link. We will be running linkchecking of the forum and the website, but sometimes the human eye can detect what the machine miss.

Post counts for old members will be severely affected.

What's your character name and how did you come up with it?
It's Polluxia! It's derived from Pollux from the Castor & Pollux myth, in which Pollux is an immortal hero and together with his brother Castor they become part of the Gemini constellation. Ahem. The real story is that I had to name my Guardian in EQ2 something cool and I had just watched Face Off the night before and as my character was a female; I named her Polluxia. Polluxia has stuck through all the games I've played sofar

How old are you?
I'm almost as old as Ernie. But not quite! I'm 31.

Where do you live?
In a small town south of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Surrounded by sheep and yokels.

Which MMO do you play at the moment?
None. But this is mainly due to me being solidary with Argee who broke his computer while trying to fix it.

Any other games currently?
I can highly recommend Scramble (= Boggle) on Facebook and I will gladly take on any challengers! I am The Bogglemeister™

What was your first computer game ever?
Probably Frogger. My family lived in the basement of my dads office in Amsterdam for a while and on the weekends we would roam the empty office floors and play Frogger on the computers. Later on, when we got our own computer, I played a lot of Blockout, Prince of Persia (the sound effects still haunt me to this day) and Paratroopers. And of course Pong and other Atari games, but by then it was already very retro (ie: my brother found an Atari with a bunch of games at a local dump store.. I think) and other people had a Sega or Nintendo console. Until I started playing MMO's, I only played computer games very occasionally, but I've always been very fanatic and competitive when playing, whether it is MarioKart or Tekken or PhotoQuest.. I always want to win.

What was your first multiplayer online experience?
Does playing hangman in a chatroom count? No? In that case, see my answer below.

What was your first MMO?
Everquest 2 in late 2004. I was hooked from the get go and the Dutch guild I was in at the time was one of the best on the server raiding wise. Polluxia was the main tank of the guild, until they nerfed my class and I raged and decided to play a solo friendly class (bruiser) instead. After a while the guild needed a specific healer for raiding, so I levelled a pink gay lizard defiler called Pinko and played him during raids. Ever since I discovered how incredibly rewarding (..) playing a healer is, I've stuck with a healing class in most of the games I played since. I played EQ2 for a long time off and on, but finally quit early 2009. After EQ2 I played Vanguard, AoC, WoW, WAR and some LOTRO, D&D and Aion.

What is your favourite snack while gaming?
None, but I won't say no when something edible happens to be sitting on my desk!

When/How did you join Ginnunga?
I met most of you Ginnungaboongans in WAR, while playing in Renegade Legion, in 2008? Through WAR I met the love of my life and he happens to be a Ginnunga veteran, so I had to join! Also, the many thoughtful and kind messages I received from the Ginnunga members after my son passed away were of great support and I realised the bastion of manlove has a heart of gold and I needed to be part of it

Tell us your most memorable mmo moment?
Loads in EQ2; getting a server first with my guild on a named raid mob in Spirits of the Lost/Cazic-Thule, server firsts on completing advanced collections on my bruiser and freerunning/jumping through Qeynos.

In Warhammer I'd have to say my first solo kill on a witch elf (before they were nerfed!), roaming around in Caledor with the Italians and the epic guard switching and rezzing going on and of course the insane amounts of forum and in-game drama after Cog's keep taking stunt.

Tell us something nobody in the guild knows about you.
I always tell people I can't really play 1st person shooters because I get so nauseous while playing, but I am really just frustratingly bad at them.

ZetZek dinged 85 at 12:15 CET today after just below 12 hours of gaming after the expansion release, gaining him fame and glory for being realm first 85 Shaman, but even more importantly, he was the guilds first level 85 which grants him the title Better than DeathStorm!

Way to go ZZ!