Carved Out of Wood

Previously … I blew up a dying guild alliance with an offhand remark and so began the race to complete content before our former allies.

We avidly recruited, shoring up holes in our raid roster. We added a fourth raiding night. We raided well beyond our abilities at times. A green/blue equipped guild raiding Onyxia with only 28 players is .. not easy. We persevered. We failed. We won. We looted. We sharded.

The race to finish Molten Core content and move into Blackwing Lair was back and forth for a few weeks. Ultimately, they won that battle. They downed Ragnaros first.

They played around with Razorgore for two weeks while we earned our chops on Rag. TwatGuild decided to take (yet another) two week break from raiding to let their people … I dunno, rest or something, rather than have Razorgore rip apart their guild as he’s done to many others before.

From time to time, our guild has suggested raiding breaks, but I, personally, am very anti-raid breaks. Rust never sleeps, yanno. And good thing we didn’t. We downed Razorgore while they were vacationing in Upper Blackrock Spire or somewhere, who knows.

Let the Living Well begin! We dropped Vaelastrasz the next week, and the other BWL bosses in rapid succession. They’re back to messing around with the drakes, last I heard, after TwatGuild Rebuild #5.

While we were gloating in /gu and Ventrilo the other week, it got me to thinking: what a difference a year can make. Then, we were an allied little raiding guild, dependent in many ways on our allies and they on us. Now, we are the smallest endgame raiding guild on our server, still just a bunch of scrubs, only mere weeks behind the top dogs. That could change in Naxxlerammahamma — we’ll see.

We built this guild on next to nothing: a few warriors worth a shit, a core of superlative healers, a raid leader that would not (and still does not) ever give up and a roster of 50-ish determined, dedicated raiders. We are carved out of wood.

One of the pitfalls in running an endgame guild is redoing old content for newer members. To a certain extent, it must be done. Too much of it, and the veterans (read: The Equipment) burn out or look for greener pastures. How to remain accessible to new applicants, yet not backslide into a farm team for another endgame guild. That old chestnut.

Compare/contrast our guild application requirements from about a year ago to now.

Then:

Level 60 (because, y’know, when fights are marginal, level matters)
Molten Core attunement (duh)
And that’s it.

Shortly after storming into the MC, and being rebuked by the flame imp corps many times, we added the Onyxia key as a requirement and went from three scheduled raids/week to four.

Now:

Level 60
Molten Core and Blackwing Lair attunements
Onyxia key
Fire resist gear, that won’t gimp critical class stats overly: unbuffed, 150+. We provide FR gear to bump melee classes to their required unbuffed level (for example, rogues to 200)
Nature resist gear unbuffed 150+, same as above.
CT-Raid Assist and CT-Boss mods (there is no negotiation on these, although many have tried)
Ventrilo (again, no negotiation. Mic is not required, must be able to listen to raid calls)

The near future:

Add, frost resist gear and Naxxlerammledingdong access — we’ll provide the nexus shards, probably.
Minus, Onyxia key. Apps will be on their own to get their Tier 2 headpiece. Some weeks, we don’t bother with Ragnaros anymore. We’ll probably perma-drop him from the rotation.

Negotiable points:

The app’s talent spec. We require at least 4 of our raid priests to remain discipline/holy spec’d — the priests decide amongst themselves who are the lucky ones. Ditto for at least 2 of our warriors to remain protection spec. Currently, we’re about to require a Blessing of Kings-capable paladin because for some reason, our bastard paladins thought they could all drop this.

Really. Three raids now where we all go, “kings please” “priests/warriors/mages/etc. still need kings” “kings wru?”, and the paladins explain that they all dropped kings because it’s not a good spec for them. Waa waa. Four fucking paladins, not a kings to be found.

Anyways. Also negotiable is raid attendance. We don’t require attendance at anything — apps miss a few raids, tain’t no big deal. It is difficult, however, to vote yes on an application when we don’t even recognize the name.

Everything, besides the CTRA and Ventrilo, is negotiable when the app is a primary healing class. Dig this: we invited this priest to the guild last week who HADN’T EVEN RAIDED WITH US ONCE. Our priests all voted yes on his app, the rest of us fell in line (knowing our own place in the guild food chain), and he was tagged. Haven’t seen him since. (good call, priests!)

What difference has a year made?

Then was, meet our guild leader and can you get in the zone.

Now is, meet our recruit officer, your new class leader, the class leader’s assist, our guild leader and the raid leader and his assist, can you get in all these zones, what equipment do you have, do you have the raid mods set up, join your class chat channel, log into Ventrilo and SHUT UP. Sorry, that sounds rude, here’s some loot. You’re welcome.

Now, be back tomorrow to raid again.

5 thoughts on “Carved Out of Wood

  1. Pingback: One Year of Raiding at Watching World of Warcraft

  2. One of the pitfalls in running an endgame guild is redoing old content for newer members.

    My guild solved this dilemma by hosting PUG MC runs. Our mains who need Rag loot or some rare Domo drop fill out enough slots in the raid to make it viable, then we invite guild alts, potential recruits, friends, friends-of-friends and random weirdos from LFG.

    It’s refreshing to the old hands who go to hear the enthusiasm from the new folks, and (with the exception of Rag) they get a shot at DKP-free loot. PUGs and alts pick up the loot we don’t want on the mains, so there’s rarely a sharded item. The random weirdos provide the comic relief. People who wouldn’t have access to the content get to see it, mains get their tier two pants off Rag, and everyone’s happy.

    Maybe something like that would work for you.

  3. One main reason I left constatly raiding in Evercrack was the constant regear/refarm cycle we were in. We’d be constantly be trying to gear the newcomers to our level rather than forcing them to gear to us. I always felt it was a bad decision, and after about a year (guild above us left for WoW, leaving us as top dog) of treading water, I had enough and left. A pick up raid group is leading the server now, with raid loot decided by /random so they don’t have to do DKP management. Former raid guild is treading water still.

    It’s the job of that strong leader to know when to tell apps/raiding friends/etc to get up to our level rather than raiding 3 year old and getting tons of roting loot.

    Another thing that went away was that leader who didn’t give up. I remember raiding 5 nights a week, 20 days total, some PoP god for progression. We failed on it every time, with usually 2-3 attempts per night. When I left EQ, a single failure of anything would end the night, no matter how trivial. You can end-game raid when you only allow 90 minutes for content…

  4. Bleh, make that you can’t raid end game content in 90 min. Yay for writing skillz!

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