Back to the Basics

I haven't blogged in quite some time, over a month now, so I think I'm about due.

I've been having a lot of fun in LK so far, despite some of the standard stresses that accompany leading a raid. Leading the raid is, well, it's still the same old Chaos. I missed it like hell, and we're back to doing what we do best: raiding.

We didn't push people to go crazy and cap out at 80 within the first week. The leveling grind tends to kill some people but I don't really have much sympathy for them, more so because I made the mistake of leveling my DK first and had to jump back onto my Warrior days after 80, and my warrior still hit 80 before some people did on their mains. We had one guy who would log on vent and ask if anyone wanted to group up to quest. The answer was always a resounding silence because he was still working his way through Howling Fjord and everyone else was already up to Storm Peaks. It's one thing to have a group quest you need help with, but no one is going to drop what they're doing completely to run this guy through all his quests because he hates leveling alone. He took a bit longer than the rest of us, but still managed to hit 80 by the time we started Naxx25.

Naxx 25 the first week went well. I had tickets to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra on our second raid day (which was utterly fantastic and amazing, and I'm definitely making a point to go next year again) so I missed out. I was a bit worried because we got stuck on Thaddius the first night. A few DPS consistently ended up dead early on, and we were hitting the enrage timer every single attempt so I was really surprised when I got home and found out they managed to kill Thaddius and clear everything else up to KT. KT was organized for the following monday, and despite an extra raid day everyone showed up and we nailed him in only 2 attempts.

The following week we managed to fully clear Naxx in one night, and get our first Malygos kill the next night.

Our raid success aside, we're still plagued by the same problems as always. We run pretty much a skeleton crew, meaning we have the bare minimum to cover what we need with no spares. Our guild has always operated like this. We've always had a very difficult time managing more than 25 players because someone always gets pissed off that they don't get a main spot and they quit. Even if they go to a much lesser progressed raid on the server that's a full dungeon tier behind, if it means getting a full time spot they'd take it. This is the kind of raid environment my server has. People don't care how good your raid is, they just want the full time spot. Then you look at guilds who were able to maintain a 30+ crew for the demands of Sunwell stacking, and its because that guild was likely the best on the server and people were willing to log on each night and wait for a raid spot if it meant raiding with the best. But again, my server just doesn't have that mentality. Epics in general > higher item level epics.

Thankfully, the content is easy enough now that I'm not worried about running with less than 25 people. We got the majority of The Dedicated Few completed over the holidays because we rand with so few people, and overall didn't have any problems.

I think our problems are going to start popping up more when Ulduar comes out because we will likely need to do a little recruiting. Right now recruitment has been very difficult. There has been nothing to attract people to our guild over the other 10+ guilds that are killing KT in Naxx25. Why go with us when you could go with one of them? We managed to pick up the Enhancement Shaman we were missing, and while she has a few things to work on, she certainly puts out numbers and was 3rd on Patchwerk for us. We have others needing to pick up numbers sadly as I beat out 2 DPS in the same fight. Again, another major concern of mine for when we start our 3 drake Sartharion attempts next week. We managed 2 Drakes this week in only a few attempts, but we only killed the first drake moments before the next one arrived. We used Drakes 1 and 3, so we need to cut our first drake kill time by almost half to be able to manage 3.

Ulduar is a ways off thankfully, but it doesn't mean that I don't think about it at least a couple of times per week, and think about things that we could improve now before 3.1. I think this is largely why we are pushing achievements because we need to challenge ourselves right now. And being "that guild" that is pro enough to get the achievements done is incentive to join us over the other guilds on the server.

We'll see in time. New year, we just had 2 weeks off. I'm going to give them a week to get back into the raiding groove before I start looking seriously at numbers and performance.