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You can see the current Method Roster here.

Method is always on the look out for the world's best players and exceptional applications of any class will be considered, we are however especially looking for the following classes:

Holy Paladin
Druid (All 3 specs)
Shaman (All 3 specs) - High, we NEED Shamans
Death Knight
Mage
Warlock
Priests (both Shadow and Holy) - High, we NEED Priests
Hunter
Warrior

Battle of the Best

Allvatar has provided one last writeup of Battle of the Best, along with a video of the entire event. We are having trouble playing it in the US, so we have made a backup copy available here. A higher quality download can be found here.

You can read Method's writeup or Ensidia's writeup as well.

Battle of the Best

You can find a report on this run here.

Preparation: Confirmation in regards to our invite to battle of the best came quite late, giving us 2 resets total to practice before having to keep the raid ID for the event. Obviously the best approach setup wise was to use a melee orientated setup so this is what we did. Our first practice run was basically used to judge where we could use invisibility potions to maximum effect as well as how much healing each boss was going to require and how much trash we could avoid clearing. The first practice run ended up being very slow due to the above “testing”, we also left Vezax and Yogg “untested” by doing them on hard mode instead due to loot wants. The second practice run we tried was with a slightly different setup in that we used a DK instead of our second healer (priest) with the intention of using the feral druid as second healer where needed. The druids healing spec was a mix of boomkin/resto to allow him to also do decent damage on Vezax. The druid spec didn’t turn out to be that effective and we decided that we would use a priest as second healer particularly for healing at Freya detonators and Yogg P1.
The setup we decided on was as you saw at the event. We knew that several of the bosses could be done with 1 healer and as such we wanted to use a priest that was able to play both holy and shadow this would give us a significant DPS boost on encounters such as Hodir and Vezax. Unfortunately our only 1-2 priests able to do this were unavailable on the weekend of the event and as such we were forced to use 2 healers for the full run.

Below is a basic breakdown as to how we proceeded with the clear.

XT: We pulled both trash packs at the same time with an interrupter assigned to each of the technicians to ensure no protective shield was cast. The enhancement shaman managed to die during the trash and used ank to avoid time waste, something we could have used later at Mimiron (see below). We pulled XT instantly after the trash and used Heroism bringing him to 75% and spawning the heart as soon as possible. The second heart phase started straight after the first and upon the end of the second heart phase he was on around ~5% allowing us to finish him off before the spawning of the 3rd heart phase. We killed XT faster than Ensidia giving us a good start to the “race”.

Kologarn + Auriaya: Rogues sapped the 2 dwarves in the first pack allowing the raid to pass by hugging the left wall, we then used an invis pot and proceeded with skipping the trash up to Kologarn. Our first fatal mistake occurred at this point due to our enhancement shaman rebuffing his lightening shield while under the effect of the invis potion resulting in him being pulled out of invis. One of the trash mobs hit the hunter in invisibility with an aoe ability and both the hunter and enhancement shaman kept running with the raid resulting in a wipe on the Kologarn stairs (DI was up for recovery behind trash). This wipe was extremely frustrating and meant we had lost the second section before even engaging a boss. Kologarn we simply killed the arms repeatedly until he died allowing the rumblers to be aoe’d down by our melee DPS. We proceeded and cleared the trash packs on either side of Auriaya before engaging her using 1 tank and just focusing damage on the boss with aoe abilities hitting the 2 cat adds.

Keepers: Going onto this section our invis pot was still on CD from Kologarn trash which resulted in us starting with Thorim first. We left the rogues in the arena with the priest healer and druid OT in DPS gear with the rest of the raid going corridor. We used a solo tank in P2 and Thorim went down quickly.

We did Hodir next, clearing the first giant, staying in the middle to avoid the worm holes at either side. We proceeded to clear the frontal middle worm hole + the revenant patrol before hugging the left hand side to the next worm hole -> clearing it and then using invis pot. We got unlucky with the fade out of the invis pot coming at the same time as the revenant patrol outside Hodir’s room reaching his entrance meaning we had to kill it before engaging. Hodir took a bit longer than expected, the haste beam(s) only lasted till around ~60% due to the moonkin dieing – something I have never seen before. Regardless we were ahead of Ensidia at this point seeing them on Thorim at around 70% around the time Hodir died for us.

Proceeded and cleared the first pack of Mimiron trash allowing our hunter to enter the vehicle and skip the remaining Mimiron trash and active the portal while the rest of the raid cleared the necessary Freya trash. We killed the ground tremor Elder before engaging Freya with the remaining 2 Elders alive. Our Freya kill was fast and smooth, being quite lucky and getting detonators as the last wave (the longest wave to deal with), allowing us to ignore them and DPS down Freya.

Upon running to Mimiron encounter I glanced at Kungen’s screen and saw Ensidia still on Freya P1. I knew we had cleared the first 3 keepers quickly, but I hadn’t realized we were this far ahead. Mimiron P1 was perfect - getting a flame suppressant just before the phase end allowing us to place all the fires at the wall which was of particular advantage with our melee setup - P2 was also perfect as a result. P3 was where the first error occurred in that our feral druid killed himself in fire while doing damage to the Aerial Command Unit. P4 was always going to be slightly slow for us due to having only an enhancement shaman and a hunter doing damage to the head. The enhancement shaman made the second error of the fight in that he died to an easily avoidable spin-up, the death of the hunter followed soon after and because our druid had already died in P3 we had no combat ress available meaning we had minimal to no head DPS alive. We wiped soon after allowing Ensidia to catch-up and pass us to take the win of the Keepers.

Vezax + Yogg: We invis potted the first trash pack + large mob to behind the Keeper’s gate and proceeded to the Vezax room killing the left hand side and center trash extremely fast. On our practice run we killed Vezax easily before the 3rd surge, this unfortunately wasn’t the case this time due to some player fail at range and Vezax receiving some healing from mark. As a result we ended up getting the 3rd surge which was something we were unprepared for and required Vezax to be kited, which led to a massive set back in that our enhancement shaman got mark and healed Vezax for ~15%. Therefore despite engaging Vezax faster than Ensidia we ended up taking a lot longer to get the kill.

While running to Yogg-Saron I glanced over at Kungen’s screen and saw Ensidia with P1 well under way.

You need 8 guardian blow up’s to kill Sara and end P1. It was our intention to kill her using her 3rd cloud spawn, we needed to activate 5 additional clouds before that point. We managed to successfully do this, meaning our P1 was extremely fast. We got unlucky in P2 getting the largest brain room (dragon), losing some seconds – our P2 was however as fast as it could have been under the circumstances - DPS capped inside and outside – we simply had to wait (portals to open -> brain to die). P3 all our DPS was on Yogg-Saron. Despite killing Yogg-Saron extremely fast the time we wasted on Vezax was just to much and Ensidia ended up killing him ~10 seconds before us.

Thoughts: Firstly congratulations and well played to Ensidia for taking the win. For us on the other hand it was a relatively disappointing performance. Due to playing side by side with Kungen on stage I often glanced across and realized in general we were faster. Unfortunately we made fatal flaws on each of the 3 sections after XT (kologarn trash, Mimiron, Vezax) resulting in us falling behind and inevitably losing.

Despite the loss we thoroughly enjoyed playing at the ‘battle of the best’ and hope another opportunity like this becomes available for Method in the near future.

Four of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft guilds worldwide will compete at the two Plantronics Battle of the Best @ GCO 2009, the first extraordinary and spectacular WoW summer event of the year 2009.

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On Saturday, August 1st starting at 16:00 CET two of Germany's finest WoW guilds will virtually clash against each other for the predominance of German World of Warcraft guilds: Irae AoD vs. For the Horde. Be prepared for an exciting, high-quality German match-up. Live on stage we will welcome of For the Horde Christan "Sahtras" Sachse and of Irae AoD Payam "Sanilas" Astheimer.

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On Sunday, August 2nd starting at 15:30 CET the audience will have the chance to witness the absolute World of Warcraft highlight of the Games Convention Online 2009 at Leipzig: Ensidia vs. Method, or the number one guild worldwide fighting against the number two ranked contender.
As a very special guest, allvatar.com is proud to be able to present you one of Ensidia's Guild-leader and WoW-icon Thomas "Kungen" Bengtsson live at the GCO in Leipzig. He will defend the Ensidia-colours live on stage, which will also be the first time for him representing his new guild Ensidia at one of the biggest games-exhibitions in Europe.
At this News Method keeps up and sends their Guildleader to Leipzig, too. Scott "Sco" McMillan from Method will fight for his Guild, live on stage.

Following are some more vital facts on the Plantronics Battle of the Best @ Games Convention 2009:
The Battle of the Best concept was originally developed and brought into life by allvatar.com and brings two World of Warcraft guilds together on one stage to compete against each other in a WoW-instance time-run.
In Leipzig there will be an Ulduar time-run (10 people per guild) for the first time in BotB history. Ulduar will be divided into four zones consisting of the respective bosses in the zone. Both guilds will always start with the same zone and will be getting points for killing the zone's endboss faster than the other guild. The points for boss-clearing a zone will be increasing from zone to zone so we will have an exciting and spectacular race from the beginning till the end, which marks the kill of Yogg-Saron.
The contender with more points accumulated will be declared as the winner.

There will also be an english moderated version of the stream here on allvatar.com!