As you can see ,if you've ever been to Encoreraiding.com we've changed a few things around. I'd like to thank Calor and Llnith for their continued hard work on getting a new design off the ground. I'd like to thank Feya and a few others for bringing more innovation to the table and putting together what is ,obviously, the best our website has ever looked. I know a lot of things still don’t work or are slightly buggy, but it hasn't even been 24 hours since the changes. Check back frequently for site changes and guild updates.

The PTR opened up Monday night and includes many changes to the game as well as ,hopefully, the release of Ulduar sooner than later. This is an exciting time for Encore as a whole. Since the day we formed the guild, we knew that if we kept to our standards and kept setting and achieving goals that we would eventually be in the upper echelons of guilds and be allowed to test content before it goes live. As you saw in my previous post, so far we've taken Wrath as sort of a break. Despite this fact, we're clearing massive amounts of content each week in 2-3 of each heroic raid for some people. It’s still more relaxed and laid back than Sunwell. We didn't put much emphasis on achievements, and just kind of let people level and come and go as they pleased. Getting started as late as we did in serious raiding and being 4 instances behind left us with a great hill to climb, and we all needed a rest. Well, that’s over. It's flattering to hear some of the upstart guilds referring to us as the "gatekeeper guild to greatness" in the respect that if they can keep up with us on content, then they're in the top of the guilds that don’t abandon their lives 7 days a week to conquer new content. To those of you that aim to share a toast with us when we completely destroy Ulduar, we'll see you at the finish line.

I'd like to take a minute to thank all of the people that have contributed to Encore's success, from the original leaders that stayed up long hours interviewing applicant after applicant to make sure that the pedigree of players we accepted were no less than we expected from ourselves to the raiders that came into the guild as scrubs in blues and played their hearts out to help us get on track to becoming a respected and envied guild. I'd like to thank the people that stuck with us through the hard times when our healers weren't very good, when we only had 1 priest in the guild for things like Felmyst, and everyone who contributed to our success in TBC all the way to the end. I would like to thank the Encore that exists right now all the way down to the casuals for bringing their best every time they log in even if it is only to get in a pug VoA. I would also like to thank guilds like Angry and Blood Legion for giving us guilds to look up to in our journey from nobodies to somebodies in this World of Warcraft, and I wish them the best.

This may sound an awful lot like a good bye post, but saying thank you to the people that made you successful doesn’t happen enough. Every night I log in to lead raids and call people out over the one or two mistakes they make in a raid week and get to be the bad guy all the time, they don’t realize that regardless of the fact that they may have died in 1/50 void zones or 1/100 flame walls, they are at home enough that people can accept the fact they made a mistake and move on with it(only to be made fun of for the rest of their time in Encore/WoW career.)

In closing, we won’t ever be Ensidia or even Blood Legion, but that’s not what we set out to do. We set out to raid between 15 and 20 hours a week and have guilds that put in twice that time wonder what the fuck they're doing wrong. We did that, and we're going to do it again. Only this time, we don’t have to play catch up.