21/12/2008 - The daywe pwned the horde. We gathered 40 people and strolled through horde cities laying waste to all we came across, killing 4 horde bosses, in 4 horde cities! Now we all have black bears :oD Old school raids, the way it should be, with 40 people!

  16/12/2008 - Our first 25 man run at Naxx saw the first 4 bosses going down. Not bad considering over half the raid has never been before. Looking forward to many more! - First kill archive

Welcome to the web site of the Highland Warriors.
The Highland Warriors are an alliance guild on the Thunderhorn server whose aim is to enjoy the wonderful world of WOW in a fun and friendly guild. We are a level 80 casual raiding guild. Our main guild focus is around the people, not the epics and our recruitment policy reflects this. If you are an epic seeking glory boy, Google is here, good luck. If you want to play with friends, haven fun in a relaxed adult environment, enjoying wipes and kills, feel free to make an application here.
While we are casual we do still expect our members to work on their stuff and turn up when they say they will, although theres no attendance requirements.

~S~
Windavell

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News

Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your Restoration Druid at 80 - Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:00:00 EST
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week we take a look at how to gear a PvE Restoration Druid at level 80, in the hopes of preventing other trees from suffering our fate during our first 10-man Naxx run, which -- no, no, it's too painful even to think about. Pass the schnapps.

Greetings readers, and welcome to Wrath Gear-A-Palooza 2009. We'll be running one of these for each Druid spec.

I'm not going to "rank" gear numerically, because I think that's a fairly unhelpful means of organizing items when your access to all of them as a fresh 80 may be very limited. Generally you're going to have access to quest rewards and faction gear before you get access to badge pieces or oft-uncooperative heroic drops, so I've organized the list by where you can get particular drops. It's generally safe to assume that a heroic drop is better than a blue you're using from an Icecrown quest, but not always. If you're starting to move into higher levels of gear, I found the following links to be incredibly helpful, and I hope you do too:

• HoTsTree's gear list
• Resto4Life's post on Wowhead filters and pre-raid gear in the main slots
• Elitist Jerks post on Restoration Itemization and PvE Healing as a Druid

Otherwise, assuming a proper spec, gems, and enchants, you can successfully heal any of the game's 5-man or raid content (10-man or 25-man) with a healing set derived from the following list. That's a promise. This list assumes that you do not have access to 10- or 25-man raids for the time being and are gearing up primarily through questing, 5-mans, and heroics.

Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your Restoration Druid at 80

Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your Restoration Druid at 80 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Logitech launches salvo of G-series gaming peripherals - Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:00 EST

If you thought that Logitech was onto something good when they launched the WoW-ready G13 gameboard, the bigwigs at Logitech tuned into your brainwaves and decided to expand their gaming line. Engadget reports that Logitech is set to launch a slew of gaming peripherals to complement the success of their gaming pad.

The first of these is the $199 G19 keyboard, which has a GamePanel LCD, a 320x420 color monitor that displays "valuable in-game information" for over sixty games including -- ahem -- World of Warcraft. Aside from macro-bound buttons, the keyboard also has a switch for disabling the Windows button, so players don't accidentally lock themselves out of their game when they nerd rage.

There's also the G35 (I don't really know where they pull the number suffixes from), a $129 headset with 7.1 Dolby surround-sound capability and a "voice-morphing" option that allows players to disguise their voice or -- as the Logitech press release states -- "sound like (their) World of Warcraft character". With three different, swappable headbands, the headset seems configurable in more ways than you can shake a Snufflenose Command Stick at.

Finally, there's the equally configurable G9x mouse, a $99 variant of the award-winning G9 mouse and should give the Steelseries World of Warcraft mouse a run for its money. Or your money, since that's almost a full hundred smackers for interchangeable snap-on grips, five ready-to-play profiles, and on-the-fly adjustable dpi. The keyboard and headset will be available by the end of the first quarter, and the mouse soon to follow.

Logitech launches salvo of G-series gaming peripherals originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist digs into WoW - Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:00:00 EST
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes - from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

While we've written before about academics who are researching WoW from within, we're not sure that we've seen anyone whose primary fieldwork is the PvE raiding experience. Meet Alex Golub, Ph.D., an anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii. Golub plays a Resto Shaman in a Wrath-era raiding guild who's researching what he calls the culture of raiding -- "why people do something as crazy as run 25-mans four days a week."

"There is a lot of research on WoW, actually, but most of is based either on crunching Armory data to produce statistical analysis of game play, or it is more 'cultural studies' where people play the game a little and then write something beautiful about it," he explains to 15 Minutes of Fame. "My unique angle is that I am doing anthropological fieldwork in WoW, living and playing with a raiding guild and putting in 20+ hours a week keeping them healed and decursed."

The main themes of Golub's research (ahem): "American cultures of self-control, efficiency, masculinity and success amongst players of WoW." We asked him to boil that down for us. "I study how guys behave badly in Vent, and how/why people become emo and/or talk about why other people are emo," he explains. "I'm interested in how you get a group of 25 people to keep calm and collected as they try to do something really emotionally important to them, which requires relying on other people when its difficult to see them face to face."

Continue reading 15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist digs into WoW

15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist digs into WoW originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Developer resolution for 2009: Beat Warcraft - Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 EST
Our friends at GameDaily have a nice set of resolutions for game developers next year, and it's definitely worth a read if you're interested in seeing where they think the game industry might improve in 2009. But number three is the most interesting one for us: they suggest that game developers (and MMO devs in specific, we'd imagine) should make this the year that something else beats World of Warcraft.

It seems much more unlikely than last year: last year, we were looking down the barrel of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, and wondering if either one of those might cause a road bump in WoW's traffic. Age of Conan was called the steak to our game's McDonald's, but in the end, WoW players didn't do much more than give it a cursory glance. And while Warhammer seemed like a good contender to the throne, it hasn't come close to taking a bite out of Azeroth. This year, it doesn't even seem like there will be any MMO contenders. GameDaily cites Bioware's Star Wars MMO, but that's not coming out in 2009, and while The Agency and DC Universe Online might be getting close to finished, it's unlikely we'll see them on the shelves this year either.

This might be a year of recuperation, for both Blizzard and their competitors. Lord of the Rings Online is doing well, so their big task is just to keep the content moving, and unlike last year, Blizzard has no real impetus this year to really push their playerbase to stick with the game. As with everything, we'll have to see what happens, but I'd expect a much more subdued year this go-around for the MMO market. When the MMOs in progress now come to fruition in 2010, then things will likely get more interesting.

Developer resolution for 2009: Beat Warcraft originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Guild episode 6 of season 2 - Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:01:00 EST

It's Tuesday, which means The Guild is back yet again with more wacky hijinx. Episode six is out on MSN Video now (and on Xbox Live and Zune soon), and there's some blowback from the "eruption" at the end of the last episode. Clara continues her campaign of corruption, and Zaboo does something you should never, ever do to another player.

This episode seems long for some reason, but at the same time, it's kind of a breather for what we're sure will be an interesting episode next week. Felicia twittered the other week that they're working on editing down just the last two episodes, so the hard work for them is almost over, even though we're only halfway through the season so far.

And finally, The Guild got a tribute song last week, a video and tune put together by a fan. They're pretty excited about it, but we'll let you judge whether you like it or not. We will say that it is a nice effort, and it's good to see that there are fans of The Guild out there willing to put in the time and energy to do something like that. Rock on!

The Guild episode 6 of season 2 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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