Crimson Blade would like to thank everyone who supported us and cheered us on throughout the entire expansion. Without the support of the Frostmourne and Oceanic community we would not have been able bring Deathwing down as early as we did. As can be expected during the holiday season, Christmas and the New Years brought progression to a near standstill. Fortunately, we were able to refocus our efforts successfully enough to defeat Spine of Deathwing and Madness of Deathwing within two days of each other.

We receive one question particularly often, nearly to the exclusion of all others: where the hell did Crimson Blade come from?  Most of us had come to know each other as we were raided in various 25s guilds, while a subset of that group had played together since vanilla. We gradually became more and more tired of the guild politics, attendance issues, and squabbling cliques that were present within the 25 man.  While those issues are far from absent from the 10 man environment, we decided to take our 10 man team and make it our focus. Crimson Blade was formed back in May 2010 with the purpose of finishing off Lich King 10 Heroic as a strict 10 man guild. This meant forgoing any raiding of 25 man heroics, thus doing without the gear advantage that most 25 man guilds brought when attempting Lich King 10 Heroic.  While we had very little experience in raid leading or guild management, we had a general idea of the pitfalls we wanted to avoid. It was a tough time for us; we had main tanks and healers leaving, citing a waning of interest, which opened our eyes to just how easily a 10 man could be disrupted by the loss of only one or two members. In the interest of pressing forward, we opted to gear up some of our ex-guildies/friends we had met back in BC/Vanilla. Once they had geared up we were able to resume serious attempts on  LK10HM again. It took a while, but we finally downed it not long after some of Frostmourne’s top 25 man guilds’ 10 man teams killed it. Given the large gear disparity, we were pleased with the result.

With the announcement of Cataclysm came the announcement that 10 and 25 man raids would reward the same item level loot, a change that made the course of the guild clear.  We would remain a 10 man guild and focus on progression as best as we were able. We set the then-difficult goal of placing within the top 3 on Frostmourne. Unfortunately, we were plagued with many of the attendance and reliability issues that had nearly halted progression on the Lich King. While we had aimed to have the tried and true 4 raid night setup, we were lucky to get 2 raid nights a week due to key raid members being unable to make differing nights.  With such a narrow roster, we were unable to simply sub one or two members in to accommodate absences. While we were able to complete the tier within a reasonable time before the arrival of tier 12, we wanted to address the core issue of attendance. Our first aim was to make sure everyone could commit to 4nights/week and those who could not would be slowly phased out. As these players had been unhappy with their own ability to raid, this was not as painful of a process as it could have been. Secondly, we knew we needed to expand our roster and aimed to increase our flexibility with a team consisting of no more than 12 members.

With Firelands just around the corner, we were unable to make use of the PTR and had to rely instead on adapting other written strats for our own use. While formulating strats without firsthand experience was not ideal, our renewed drive for progression served us well in those first weeks of T12.  We were able to become a true competitor on our server, not slowing down in the slightest until makine it to Ragnaros. Ragnaros Heroic felt nearly insurmountable at first glance, yet we decided to keep pressing attempts even if progress was slow. We had put about 2 weeks worth of attempts on it before we began getting attendance issues again, reminiscient of T11. However,  this time the problem was two of our founding members not turning up. A difficult choice had to be made: we could either cease attempts on Ragnaros and hope that the issues would clear up before tier 13, or we could replace the members and continue onward. In the name of progress and the future of the guild, we settled on replacing the members. Once again we had to recruit, though this process was eased substantially by the more respectable level of progression we had achieved during the tier.  We worked on Ragnaros Heroic for about 3 weeks before it received its first round of nerfs.  While the fight was within our reach before the nerf, the changes streamlined the fight considerably and Ragnaros was down on the second day. Overall, we had jumped from a 600+ ranking in Tier 11 to a sub 100 ranking in Tier 12 and we were very happy and content. We had pushed our way up to  Oceanic 1st 10 man and US 2nd 10 man.