@ aktep:
Yeah, there are nights like that, too. 
Ouch. Sorry dude, that’s rough. My current guild has a solid tradition of learning a fight, forgetting it halfway through our attempts and having to spend an hour re-learning it, then getting it down when we say it’s the last attempt. It’s frustrating, and I’m working really hard to get rid of that wasted hour, but it does feel good in the end.
You should recruit new tank healers, IMO.
Can’t get to the guild site from work. If it’s something urgent, PM me here instead.
I’ll do it myself: I got the Sindri kill face-down on the floor on the second attempt. Frost bomb fail, though quite honestly I have no idea how, because it looked like I should have been safe by LOS.
Personally, I’d like to get some more tanking experience in on the other fights. But I get your point.
The tanking cloak off BPC, a very nice 2H mace I believe also off BPC (I think it may be one of my pre-LK BIS items for Fury), and Last Word off PP. Also two 264 tokens that no one else needed, which are currently banked 'til I have the badges for the DPS T10 pieces.
And good on you, by the way, for being willing to switch out to an alt and miss getting the achievement on Strad right away.
Eh, nothing urgent.
Unchained Magic did give me a chance to laugh at you mid-attempt, which was gratifying. 
As for tanking experience, you should think about which fights you’re not as comfortable with and focus on those. Otherwise, get practice on heavy movement fights (Blood Prince Council, Professor Putricide) to get used to what’s going to be needed from you on Heroic Lich King. Just trying to think ahead.
Cheers on the upgrades; Cryptmaker is pretty boss. And thank you for that. I didn’t like having to do it at first, but learning the fight and knowing I can heal it (even being rather severely undergeared for it) is huge. Going to help a lot as we progress on HLK in 25s.
I saw the laugh. IIRC, I whispered you something insulting. Or possibly sad.
Good point about practicing DPS on movement-intensive fights–that’s definitely one of my weak points. I’ve always been a tank, so the Fury rotation is something I still have to think about, which means my numbers tend to drop anytime I have to pay attention to other things. I’ve also been used to thinking of my offspec as “what I do to fill the time when I don’t need to tank” versus “an essential part of the group on some encounters.” Part of the problem has been that my gear was such a mish-mosh of crap that I couldn’t contribute a lot; that’s starting to change.
Did you whisper something? I didn’t catch it; I was too busy being alive and doing my job to notice.
Otherwise, yeah, I definitely think you need to be thinking about your ideal Fury gearset (sans Shadowmourne) and working on your priority system until it’s second nature. Absolutely necessary for Val’kyr DPS and going to be huge for transitions as well, as Raging Spirits need to die as fast as possible. I’ve found it helps to do a lot of Heroics, actually, because things melt in there so you’re forced to change targets a lot and shuffle that priority system accordingly. I know you love your insta-queues, but might be worth it.
Hush, you! And even dead, I was doing my job: watching what the tanks were doing on phase 2.
At this point, I don’t even care about ideal–I just want “better than what I have now for that slot.” A lot of the pieces I need are going to be ones that a bunch of other melee still want, I’m quite sure. Not that I don’t often have a tab open to the Fury BiS list, but.
Fury does actually have more of a rotation than a priority. BT > WW > BT > Slam (if instant). And I’m usually having to work Sunders in there, too, which usually go in the gaps where Slam isn’t procced.
I’ve actually done this before, especially when I first got my DPS gear to the point where I switched my offspec from Arms to Fury. The problem lately has been that I’ve mostly been jamming my Heroic in whenever I have a spare second versus having the time to wait for a DPS queue. (I also hate going in where some stranger is tanking, because I tend to spend the whole run silently fuming about everything they do different from or worse than how I would have. Plus, I’ve started to run into problems where I have to spend half the run sitting on my ass because otherwise I peel straight off the tank, which isn’t terribly conducive to getting comfortable with my rotation.) But on nights when I have more time, I’ll try to start queueing as DPS again.
At least the one thing I’m getting from this conversation is that getting into a regular raid slot in a competent guild isn’t the easiest thing in the world even if you have fair bits of experience in lesser raids. I don’t feel so bad about my current raiding lack-of-schedule now.
The best guilds have very stable core groups, so yeah, it’s hard to get in. Especially for tanks, IME. Also complicating matters are the fact that to *have *a stable raiding group, you need to balance between “enough people that you can fill absences and balance necessary classes/specs around various encounters” and “so many people that you have problems gearing them all and half of them spend all their time with their thumbs up their asses.”
I’m in the latter, as one of 3-4 regulars sitting on the bench.
As SFG said, raiding guilds usually rely on a core group of people to push through content at a decent clip. Without that, we’d just be a glorified PUG. The biggest recruitment times are around the ends of expansions, as that’s when a lot of people lose interest in the content and are looking toward a new expansion to revive their play. So, the guilds that have staying power are the ones that have a solid enough core to keep moving forward even as they’re recruiting to fill gaps in their rosters.
If you would like to have a more regular spot, you probably will have to be open to potential server transferring. It always helps to have parses (from World of Logs or WoW Meter Online, etc.) that prove your capability. Otherwise, if you want to get in more for your raid or feel like you’re just sitting all the time, you need to confront your raid leaders and ask why or what you need to improve on in order to become better. I know that one of the things we’ve started doing (and that I’ve been pushing for) is to make sure that the Trial process is open and honest about the criticism being given, but it’s not always as transparent as you might want it to be. There may be a reason why you’re regularly sitting and it might be something that you have control over… or, it might not. If you’re happy sitting (not sure why you would be, but to each their own), then that’s fine. But, if you want more action and a regular raid spot, it’s something that you have to earn, and sometimes it’s not clear how to do that.
Anyway, the point of my rambling is if you don’t like your situation you can fix it, especially right now as tons of guilds are recruiting solid players. But, definitely be discriminating and do everything you can to ensure that it’s a guild you want to be a part of, or else you may end up being very unhappy.
This was a huge problem at my last guild and one of the things I love about <The Backseat>. Here, every trial member has their own thread where their performance can be discussed–both negative and positive aspects.
Contrast this to <Prototype>, where after being accepted as a full member with no negative feedback (and some positive), I suddenly found myself sidelined for most raids for a month, only to find out after the fact that it was because someone somehow got the impression that I had threat issues. But couldn’t give any solid examples or raid logs to demonstrate how they’d gotten that impression. With the result that there were new people who “knew” I was a bad tank, even though they’d never actually, you know, seen me tank. :rolleyes: And, of course, when I was given an opportunity to start over again, I tanked the whole night with zero threat issues. But by that point the damage had already been done and I was just ready to get the hell out of there.
I’m in the position now where I’m in a guild that’s contracted heavily and is populated by several RL friends who are second-tier guild officers. My DPS isn’t an issue–rather, it’s improving at the rate expected of someone who admitted to having 0 raid experience (even pugs) on their application.
I’m expected to slam into the XP game when Cata comes out and get onto the starting lineup for 10-mans by default, according to my friends–I’m (modestly) one of the faster XPers out there, and with my wife we’re a built-in EnhShaman+RetPal leveling duo which is viciously potent. I’m just impatient because I’m at the stage where even every 10-man normal ICC drops something that noticeably improves my DPS.
I think this is a misunderstanding that a lot of people have. It’s really not all that difficult to get into a high-end guild.
What high-end guilds are looking for is simple. They need someone who is competent, and reliable. You need to show up, you need to push your button and get out of the fire. That’s pretty much it, outside of the top 50ish guilds in the world who need players who are capable of developing strategies in addition to that.
Also, most guilds are having a recruitment drive for Cataclysm. So now is the best time to apply, even if your gear is a little behind. Go to: http://www.wowprogress.com/pve/us and look at the recruitment needs of various guilds and throw up some applications. High-end guilds are always looking for talent. And I say this as someone who has been a recruitment officer in a top 10US guild since early TBC until I went casual a few months ago.
Well, I’ll be honest, the first people that hit level 85 will probably be getting raid spots at first, but that does not insure that you will keep your raid spot in the future. It will help you out quite a bit if you can earn a raid spot now by doing whatever it is that you need to, so that you have that history of reliable, high-caliber play to help you keep your spot. Just my $0.02. Take it for what it’s worth.
I agree with everything else you posted. Do you mind divulging what guild? Either PM or here would be fine. I’m interested in picking your brain, if you don’t mind.
Vigil.
Ah, thank you.
Now you’re just creeping me out. 
I’m originally from Aurora, then I went to Death and Taxes, then I pooped out the idea of a merger between the two and Vigil was formed. I’ve not played in some time however, and actually looking at my windows 7 clock I see now that it’s been EIGHT months since I managed to wean myself off competitive raiding at the beginning of ICC. So the little amount of brain I can offer to be picked, probably isn’t at all relevant to raiding today.
Now I log in once or twice a week with
though, after FFXIV bombs I will probably end up begging for my raid spot back.
Hopefully my GM’s opinion on me:
“you want us to be a collapsing shell of a guild so that you can swoop in and save the day in the middle of the night and then vanish in the morning when you’re bored?” will have changed by then 
I was pretty sure it was Vigil when I read your post because of your earlier slamming of Mal’Ganis. Searching for Vigil brings up a post of yours.