Here’s what puzzles me. Given a big enough guild, is any one person expected to be there for everything? I mean, I’m sure the officers and raid leaders have a lot of responsibility to be around, but if you’ve got 50 active people, or even just 30 or 40, I would think a peon wouldn’t need to be there for every single raid, right?
I still remember my brother’s cautionary tale from when he played vanilla. He claimed he was the Warlock class leader for the guild, meaning he had first dibs on every Warlock upgrade the raid got. But he had to be there for every single raid, and the first time he missed one due to RL he got dropped from the top slot.
I know most guilds aren’t that bad, but it’s a bit of a dilemma. I’d like to experience the end content (specifically Icecrown if I can swing it), but a casual guild is probably going to have some difficulty getting there (I like the BDL just fine, but right now there’s, what, 10 active people, and not all of them have 80s?), and a hardcore guild is going to demand a lot from its members.
And to add to the “don’t scare you away” side of things the requirements for seeing raid content are dramatically lower now. There is no reason a reasonably competent 10-man group (assuming they get geared through conquest badges/ToC5 etc…) can’t clear most of Ulduar and all of Trial of the Crusader with only two raid nights a week. Hell, we cleared ToCr 10-man in like 2 hours last night.
Now if you want to do the heroic version or Ulduar hard modes you’re gonna need more time… but as far as I can tell “casual raiding” has never been more viable than it is now.
Well, we put the raids on the calendar and the first 10 that sign up have dibs (with exceptions made for required raid makeup of course). It is sometimes a problem, but generally not. We schedule maybe four raid nights (generally one night for ToCr and 3 for Ulduar - still trying to kill Yoggy) and people sign up for the ones they want to go to. Some raid all four. I generally do 2 or 3. We raid for 3-4 hours, and PuG a spot or two if we have to.
Well, BDL is a leveling/social guild and as far as I know always has been. Like Skammer said we were about to start raiding Naxx when a few of the interested lvl 80s quit WoW (which caused my toon, and maybe others, to switch guilds to get some raiding time).
I really don’t know what the current state of BDL is, but I will say that it’s hard to be both a raiding guild and a leveling guild because while raiding doesn’t have to be the 5-nights-a-week 5-hours-a-night commitment it used to be it still takes time and focus (as well as a few strong personalities to keep everyone moving and motivated).
GMs and officers get gear as “Core Raiders”, to get to that level, you have to get unanimous approval from the officers and maintain an 85% attendence rate over a moving 90 day window. Raider is a majority approval, and a 75% attendence. For raiding to work, it has to be a group effort, and groups work better where everyone knows each other, and knows how to function as a group.
I’ve never heard of a loot system where class leads get preferance over the rest of the raid, a good system makes the raid as a whole stronger, it doesn’t set up one or two people with BiS items, and leave the masses with the leftovers. Our system is DKP and rank based, with core main > raider main > core off > raider off > member main > member off > pugs & trails if any.
Not every single raid, no, but this is a pretty delicate balancing act.
You need to have enough active people to ensure that you actually can get a raid going, but if you have too many people you’re going to end up with a lot of members who don’t get a raid spot. Taking the time to show up for a raid and then being denied a spot isn’t a whole lot of fun, so if it happens too often peope will get fed up and leave for another guild. Then there’s the issue with the loot getting spread pretty thin so the overall gear level in the guild will increase slowly if there is to much rotation between raid members.
On the other hand canceling a raid because you don’t have enough people sucks too.
So if you really want to get anywhere in the long run you kind of need to have a guild where most of the people can come to most of the raids, with tanks and healers often being the most critical.
Of course, most of my experience is with 40 man raids, it is a lot easier to organize 10/25 man raids, specially 10 mans, because lets face it, getting 10 people to agree on a good raid time is a lot easier than getting 40 people to do it
This is the key. We currently only run 10-man content (although we’re going to start one night of 25-mans with another guild soon) and we have 7-8 “core” raiders (they don’t have that title but they come to pretty much every scheduled raid) including 2 tanks and 3 healers. This just leaves us with 2-3 spots to fill either with other guildies that want to come or PuGs that we know and trust.
Any more than this and you have people routinely getting left out (which we are dangerously close to, unfortunately) and have to try to set up a second raid group. Any less and you routinely have too few people to actually raid.
25-man raids make my head hurt after an hour or so. The mere though of 40-mans makes me die a little inside.
Later in the game you are likely to stay in cat form for every fight, heal between fights and run if you get swarmed. You might go bear to solo an elite here and there for a quest but mostly you’ll be a cat until moonkin and tree forms open up to you. Then when you hit level 80 you have to figure out what you’re main and offspec are going to be.
The problem is that even if you used cat to level up to 80, you are not likely to be a cat in raid.
Yeah, I may move Nahren out of the BDL once he hits 80 for that reason. I’m not too worried about that right now, though. My Ally Pally is 71 and climbing, though, and I do want to get into stuff with him, which is why I’m thinking about this now.
I got the vague sense it wasn’t a well-run guild, and frankly if the guild officers are going to penalize someone for needing to tend to RL (above and beyond the lack of loot or DKP from missing out on the raid), they can go blow a goat.
No kidding. :smack: I used to organize a tournament fighting game. Even though it was online and matches didn’t take that long, if we tried to schedule a match with 4 or 6 people instead of just 2 it was hellish. Organizing stuff above the base composition (10-man for WoW) gets exponentially harder the more people you add.
Glyph of Rake. Freaking godsend. Of course, before I got it my MO was to apply Rake, then Claw the hell out of the mob. So when I got the glyph, I found Rake would expire before the mob died. It’s a bit easier now that I’m using Mangle first, and I just make sure to do something like Pounce->Mangle->Rake->Mangle->Mangle->Rake->Rip.
If they’re not dead by the end of that, they’re either elite or 4+ levels above me.
I’ve been through that twice and in both cases the guilds imploded because too many people with all kinds of different needs/wants came into the guilds.
We’ve had the same problem fielding enough for 25s, but with some new recruits and summer being over, we seem to have enough on most nights.
Slight rant follows:
That said, I’m tired of Ulduar in any form. We just started working on Yogg after -finally- being able to kill Thorim every time. After that, people will start clamoring for hard modes, which simply doesn’t interest me. The same fights with some twists doesn’t seem like new content to me. Same with ToC 25s. We still need to kill Anubarak there. Then it’s the same old fights).
We have something similar, except no voting by officers. If you attend 76% of raids, you get a particular rank which gives you loot priority over people at lower ranks and offspecs. For people of equal rank, the person with the highest DKP wins. It works pretty well. The next lower rank is something like 30% attendance, so you really don’t need to raid a lot to get gear. You just don’t get it first.
Your head, shoulder, back, wrist, waist, leg, feet, and hand gear is likely to be very dimilar between bear and cat (with differences in enchants and gems). The neck, finger, weapon/offhand items are likely to be pretty darn close (once again minus enchant and gems). The big differences are the idol and trinkets.
In fact if you really wanted to, you could probably gear for bear and switch out idol and trinkets and have a halfway decent cat on your hands.
Yeah, both tanks and DPS need strength and agility. Tanks just need to prioritize stamina more, while for DPS it’s just a handy buffer in case the boss turns on them. Decent tanking gear should still provide plenty of offense bonus for Cats, and the Cat stat usage is set up to make the most of it. Judging by WoWwiki, it’s the only class/form that uses (Str2)+Agi+(Lvl2); all the other high attack power classes use Str+Agi+(Lvl2) or (Str2)+(Lvl*3).
I’m at the point with my pallies that the only times I use Consecration are when I’m fighting one mob and some more join the fight (“Okay, don’t have time for you guys at the moment, so here, suck on this while I finish off this other guy”) or when I’m fighting an elite or a mob several levels higher than myself.
As for those baby bugs in Tanaris … I just ignore them. I fight the big bug and let the little ones kill themselves on my Retribution Aura
Yeah, I was kind of annoyed last night when I discovered Keliraeda, at lvl 55, couldn’t drink the two ogre brews (Mudder’s Milk and … the other one I can’t remember).
I tried for the “Drunken Stupor” achievement, jumping off the TB elevator as it went up, but I jumped too soon. I survived, but didn’t have enough altitude. Then I tried to heal myself, but the spell kept aborting repeatedly. I’m all, “WTF? Am I too drunk to heal myself?!” Then I noticed I still had that ogre brew vendor targeted. Clicked off him and tried again, successfully this time.
I managed, I think, three Brewfest quests (aside from the starting quest): Got me my pet Wolpertinger (a jackalope with wings ?), zapped pink elekks in TB, UC, and SM, and did the ram racing quest where I had to ride a loop while a goblin tossed beer barrels to me. Speaking of those rams (legally obtained, of course ), it took me a while to figure out how to make them work. God I hate hate hate vague instructions on quests like that. I kept clicking on the “reins” icon, and the ram would speed up for about two steps, then slow right back down again. I was on the ram for more than a minute (and you only get four minutes) before I figured out that you have to keep clicking repeatedly to make it go faster and keep going faster. I mean, c’mon, the tooltip on the reins icon says something like “Loosen the reins to make it go faster!”, but in actuality clicking the icon actually makes you use a riding crop on the ram - absolutely no relation to “loosening the reins”. What, is it too politically incorrect to actually say, “Smack the ram to make it run?” Then I only accidentally realized that thing in my buff bar that counts up to 100 was the gauge telling me when my ram was about to become “exhausted”. Grr.
I’m also unable to drink from the kegs because doing so requires an Empty Brewfest Stein. I cannot find anybody to give me an Empty Brewfest Stein. Somebody in guild chat said you get it from a quest, and I’ve talked to all the Brewfest questgivers outside Org, and none of them seem to offer this stein. I’m apparently missing something here. I had to use the goggles to simulate drunkenness to do the wolpertinger and pink elekk quests, because I just wasn’t getting drunk off the Free Brewfest Samplers.
I’ll have Keliraeda to 80 hopefully before too much longer (she’s just a smidge away from level 56, which means only two more levels till Outland, but I fear I still won’t be able to raid with any consistency, what with my whacky, unpredictable work schedule. I’m pretty much just looking forward to being able to round up help for those NR quests involving big world elites. I’ve got several of those quests on my human lvl 80 pally, and they’ve been sitting, unfinished, in her quest log for months just because I can’t solo them but I’ve had no luck finding anybody to help me with them. The only ones I’ve had “help” with are a few that, when I went back much later to try them again, I found somebody else trying unsuccessfully to solo them, and invited them to group with me at that point. But my attempts to advertise for help in General have been mostly unsuccessful. I despair of ever getting Loremaster on that toon.
Regarding the Bloodsail Achievementeers, I thought they only scored rep by killing the Bruisers, not the NPCs (aside from those two “boss” NPCs - the goblin and tauren in the “boat” thing on the Inn). Am I misunderstanding something? In any case I’m sure killing flightmasters doesn’t get them anything.
Keliraeda spent a lot of time questing in Un’Goro Crater last night … great balls of fire that place is like a gold mine for skinners!
Dude, are we in the same guild? We were also top guild during BC but then we became more casual after a lot of the hard core players server transferred to another guild.
Its not just that they keep glomming up applicants, its the applicants can’t get into the top guild so they use the second string guilds (like mine) to gear up enough to meet the gear requirements for the top guild hodrde side is like the 5th most advanced guild on the server so that guild is likely to lose half their players when the faction transfers begin.
I once got rejected from a guild, officially on grounds of “not knowing how to play my class;” extraofficially, because I’d changed their whole raiding philosophy.
1.- WotLK comes out just at a time when I will be spending 6 weeks in a business trip (long hours and unreliable internet, playing from a laptop) followed by Christmas with the family.
2.- Once that is over, and of course being “subequipped” if you compare her with people who’ve been able to raid, my hunter applies to a guild.
3.- Their hunter CL admits me; he knows I’m still tweaking my spec, that I haven’t raided WotLK, that I still am not exalted with SoH, that I have raided a lot in BC; he likes me and he likes my answers about why I’ve done certain things in certain (atypical) ways.
4.- Before I get the ginvite, he leaves the guild. When they talk to me, I ask whether it wouldn’t be better if I reinterview. “No, come on in,” is the answer.
5.- First raid day. Everybody who is online gets invited. Everybody heads to the ordered location. The raid leader picks 24 others and heads in. The rest of us are outside, twiddling our thumbs. We can’t use guildchat since “it distracts the raiders.” We can’t be in TS to hear what is going on. After 20’ outside, I /g “I’m going to do my dailies, holler if you need me” and leave.
6.- Next raid day. Several other “leftovers” figure out they may as well… do dailies. Or pick daisies. Or anything rather than spend 3h sitting at Naxx’ stone.
7.- Third raid day. Hey, we have 11 “leftovers”! One says “you guys wanna head in for a Naxx 10”? Must’a been a rethorical question. Of course when the RL comes in /g to ask for a healer, the “leftover” healers are in the 10-man group and not interested in switching to the 25-man group. Oopsies.
At one point I was told I was doing 10% less DPS than the other hunter. I pointed out every single piece of eq he had was an upgrade on mine; my %crit was 18%, his was over 30%; I was still cooking my engineered gun; he had the one from KT25… There was no response. But yeah, the reason I was finally given to reject my request was “DPS too low” in spite of being 4-5 in DPS and total damage in the 25-man runs, which sounds like a lame excuse if I’ve ever seen one.
That notion of “I’ll take the 24 people I want and have the rest sitting pretty outside” is just beyond me. Thankfully it’s rare.
