About

About Macbook

My name is Macbook and I play an Alliance moonkin, on Stormscale-US, a PvP server.  I started playing the game in March of 2008, and have only ever played the game as a druid, trying out all 3 specs before deciding that PvEing as a balance druid was by far my favorite spec.

In March of 2009, me and a few coworkers of mine decided to start our own guild.  It was particularly different for me to do this, since unlike them (they all rerolled to my server), I had a comfortable raiding spot in a decent guild, and had a lot at stake to lose if the guild we were going to make didn’t work out.  We formed a guild called <iRaid>.

Approximately a month after forming our guild and heavy recruiting, we went from barely doing Naxx25 full clears to downing Sarth25 + 3D, an enormous accomplishment for any guild, especially a newly formed guild.  We have been pushing Ulduar25 heavily since its launch, and despite recent turmoil with some players, continue to push heavily.

Guild and raid leading were completely new things to me up until a few months ago, and I had to pretty much make a 180% turn in how I looked at the game and raiding.  Hopefully you can learn a thing or two from my experiences; I’m still learning.

I also am the writer behind an increasingly popular Moonkin blog over at Moonkin.info, which has been featured in sites like WoW.com and MMO-Champion a few times.  If you want to see my character, he is Ballerkin of Illidan — just beware that I may sometimes sign out with higher iLevel gear for WoW-Heroes

About Brangwen

Hey guys, I am Brangwen and I have been running guilds for over 2 years.  Successfully, mind you.  I started as a complete noob (don’t we all?) and moved to accidentally starting a guild to go do kara in (yes, I am a TBC baby, I did do ZG once as a 60…) and came across the same issue everyone did at that time, moving from a casual 10man guild to running 25s regularly.  On the verge of collapse, I found another 10/25 man guild in exactly the same position.  We joined forces and that new merged guild, Harvesters of Sorrow on Frostmourne, has not looked back since.  We have moved from a casual 25man raiding guild to becoming what we hope, as of this content patch, to be much more in line with what people call “hard core”.

I have a lot of issues with the way strategies are written out on the intertubes and started writing down things that actually HELPED my guild get past a boss, things like, don’t stand in the red stuff, or mark this and that and do this because of this, use heroism when you get to this point and you know you are on track if THIS happens.  Also, what are you doing wrong that needs fixing?  None of the big strat sites talk about this kind of thing – they assume you know all this stuff magically.  We all know this isn’t true.  And so, NonElitistRaidinDiary was born, for me to document things I had learned along the way.

Macbook found my blog and invited me to participate in his adventures here in Ulduar25 (and beyond) – and I was delighted to join forces.  I know full well how good a merger can be.