Raider Availability Survey

We are attempting to be responsive to changes in people's schedules, and hence in when they are best available to raid. If you intend to raid in our groups, complete the survey below. Raid seats will be provided first to those that complete the survey and any vacancies, if any, leftover will be filled with raiders who did not complete the survey. This will enable us to place people - most likely - in a raid roster that best suits their personal schedule commitments.

Thanks in advance!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGctWE5FMkNFbDAyQldWSGlkSGVUMlE6MQ

Finally: Guild Achievement!

Job well done.

As long as we have been clearing the bosses as a raid group, it was nigh time we made a guild group composition for the achievement! For those for whom it was their first clear, a very special /grats!

(Interestingly, Armory has yet to update to reflect that we obtained the achievement! But meh!)

Stone Guard Practice and Polishing Tonight

All, we have a couple of tanks that we are bringing into MSV tonight to help them practice and polish the taunting routines. We will enlist some dps to help clear the trash, then release them and stack the raid with just tanks and healers and go about hitting the enrage timer a few times to give everyone some time to practice and polish before the real raid window later this week.

Please make yourselves available to support this activity.

Welcoming Ellesmira!

Please join me in welcoming Ellesmira to Ronin and bringing her healing and dpsing talents! We're excited to see a monk step into raiding with us and look forward to making a new long-term friendship.

Welcome Triaxen and Auuron!

This week we welcome Triaxen and Auuron to be Ronin! Warlock and DK. We are looking forward to seeing them joining the regular ranks of the raiders and to seeing this family team raiding together! Please welcome them and support them in finding everything they need in their new home.

Keep Your Raid Seat - Sign Up Early

In the most friendly manner, this is a reminder that if you would like to keep your raid seat, you should sign up early in the week. Raid events are posted no later than Tuesday - and typically on Mondays - and we start recruiting people to fill the empty seats on Wednesdays.

For known empty seats (when someone tells us in advance that they will not be available or when they sign up as out or declined), we immediately begin recruiting people to fill their empty spot. For unknown empty seats (e.g. when only 2-4 people have signed up and we have no idea whether more are going to sign up), we begin inviting people to cover off on those seats as early as Wednesday.

All of which is to avoid arriving at Fri/Sat and having to cancel a raid due to insufficient raiders and no available qualified pugs.

The obvious and common sense point is that it is poor guild relations to invite people to the event and then not let them in.

A catch 22 so to speak. We can neither ignore empty seats early in the week else we will not have decent replacements come raid night, nor can we find replacements early in the week and then not bring them to the raid. As you can see, this quickly translates into people who sign up late, sit out. And those that sign up early are not 'punished' by having the raid canceled because we waited until the end of the week to find replacements for empty seats we knew about several days earlier.

The simple solution is for everyone to respectfully sign up early - Mon/Tue.

Sign up before Wednesdays or your raid seat may already be assigned to someone else by the time you decide to sit in it. We absolutely will not punt someone from the seat just because a 'guildie' decided at the 11th hour to let us know they would be raiding that week. That is completely disrespectful and goes against the grain of what we stand for as a guild.

Sign up and show up - and may there be many loots!

Recruiting and Raiding Going Well!

We are steadily and successfully recruiting to fill the guild raid group with all guildies or at least always 8/10 guildies - and with the oomph to catch up again to the sponsored iRaid group and give it some healthy competition! Actually, we're aiming to get both groups running at the same level of progression (just like we were before) and with the same stability in week-to-week rosters.

Cohesively, all of our Ronin and iRaid raiders should be interchangeable and be able to fill a seat in either group and expect the same progression that week. Practically, we will try to minimize the shifting around to minimize re-learning and such (e.g. a leg dps in one group cannot just easily replace a pherom kiter in the other group on the big bug).

Both groups are pushing forward successfully and locking down more steady and stable rosters will only make that even more successful.

You can do your part to expedite that by both making your attendance regular and reliable, and by assisting in the recruiting efforts.

Welcome Dràeno!

Join me in welcoming Dràeno to the raiding roster. Dràeno returns from a break near the end of Cata with an extensive raiding background. Presently gearing up and we're looking forward to seeing Dràeno give our top dps a run for their money!

Raiders making headway

The iRaid group - backed and sponsored by Ronin - pushed Garalon down to 1% last night. Last week we cleared MSV and Will was such a push over that we forgot to screenshot it and simply zoned out! This week, we snapped a shot and then zoned into HoF right away with lots of time left on the raid clock. We have now compressed MSV into only taking part of a raid evening - which is where we want it to be so that we can farm it and spend the evening knocking down the bosses in HoF we have 'on farm' (first two only so far). That will leave us the second night to focus on clearing HoF and once completed, starting in on ToES.

The Ronin group is still settling into a roster that changes by about 3 seats each week which is causing some disruption on the smooth running of the first 4 bosses. The core group is reliably there week to week - it's the last three that seem to change each week. We are working steadfastly to secure a more stable roster so that they can get in sync together and make quick work of 4/6 and focus on clearing the last two - which really only Elegon is the hold up and likely won't be if they get to spend an hour of raid time on it.

This week, everyone pushed harder and performance was up across the board - awesome!

Raid Performance - Facts, not Fiction

After the extensive discussions last week, we reviewed the data - sticking with the old saying of "In God we trust, all others bring data." It confirmed what we believed. Let's step through the bad, the good, and then step off doing the things that clearly will get us from where we are to fully clearing tier 14 content as a guild. There is some frank, and data-based honesty that follows - weather through that to get to the sunshine on the other side.

(first the ugly and the bad):

• the guild group was assembled of guildies as requested by some members (9 were supposed to show up and one tank was a trial to see if he was joining the guild, however only 7 showed up, we pugged in 2 people, and they were the best dps performers in the group and actually were the best performers for the last two months including the iRaid) 
• neither group was stacked (other than guildies in one and the # of guildies that didn't fit into the other) and in fact, the data shows that overall and over time both groups were pretty much evenly matched and distributed - which is what we had based it on before we ran the raids that night and saw the outcomes (we only had the info on hand for prior performance which was evenly matched)
• performance on the other hand, was completely different and pretty much everyone except the guildies in the guildies group performed evenly - guildies were all over the map
• some of those with the loudest outcries were the lowest performers - the steady performers shrugged it off and simply looked forward to hitting the instance again next week

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aupln3XuJnjZdE5ueElkTUF6b0xTYjFIV1ZJcFRCX3c

(next, the good):

• the guild group has the gear to clear and there is a high degree of confidence by those asked that if the group can work together for a week or so more, that they can get into a groove together and clear the content - all we need for that to work is for people to show up reliably
• we have a strong bench in the iRaid that can help fill gaps week to week in the guild group until the guild group has a full and reliable roster - guild can accelerate this by everyone helping to recruit (if you didn't help at all this week after so many posted requests, don't complain)
• the changes that could be made to significantly improve performance are simple. e.g. the fire mage (level 488) doing less damage done than the 468 mage could switch back to arcane (which they prefer anyways), raiders could focus on individual performance and not the race to beat the enrage timer - you'll beat it just fine with your gearing if you just perform individually
• the healers in the guild group are solid and if the raid can both pay attention to taking less unnecessary damage and do more damage to shorten the fights, the group will be able to clear MSV based on the pure healing numbers and the damage taken numbers by the tanks

We used Feng as the means to baseline performance across the board week to week because it does not favor ranged over melee, nor multi-target over single-target, it has fewer mechanics that would skew comparability (e.g. Gara'jal's buffs, Stone Guards' jasper chains, pinning arrow in Spirit Kings), it is early enough that each group absolutely gets it down right now.

We looked at both average and best damage done. We looked at ilevel. We looked at performance of similar ilevel characters on a myriad of servers and what their performance is in a raid log (e.g. compare Dyasis in The Blood Legion on the Mal'Ganis server to our mages Novastorm, Toxi, and Mazius -- Dyasis is under our top two geared mages and doing well over 150% our damage done).

Last but not least, rather than take a personal opinion on whether raiders in the guild group are geared enough to clear MSV 10m, we looked them up on wow heroes. According to that standard, everyone is geared for heroic MSV 10m to be challenging (yellow) and normal MSV 10m is green or 'easy' for them.

It's not the gear. It's not the class. It's not the roster. It's something much simpler to improve: personal performance.

This isn't to drop the hammer - it is because we are not going to improve the problems if we won't identify/admit first that those are the ones we need to improve.

Perform better and at least match peers' performance. Recruit a few more people. Golden.

Keep in mind that ALL raid log parses world-wide for the past two months (including all of the raiders that have significantly worse gear than we do - e.g. we are in the top ten or top 20 of our classes on our server) show that on Feng no one in our group should be under 60k dps except for a boomkin or warrior:

Welcoming Remnia!

We give a warm welcome to Remnia and look forward to good times ahead together! Remnia joins our guild raid group filling a key missing spot of resto shammy / dps offspec. Please join me in making Remnia feel at home and welcomed.

Raid Rosters

*** Major Update ***

When iRaid launched first week of January 2012, Ronin did not have enough geared raiders to fill a 10-man. Today, it has more than fit in a 10-man. These things we know already. Nowadays, we juggle who is available which week and hence based on balancing each raid is which group they have been assigned to - many people staying in the same group week after week, and some changing occasionally to maintain balance and to attack specific goals that week (e.g. getting a guild achv for a boss kill).

The masses have spoken and people would prefer that each group have a pretty permanent roster. Rather than two mixed groups within iRaid, a guild group has been requested and rostered. Beartooth and several other Ronin will continue leading the iRaid group - we have no interest in just dropping those people, consolidating down to one group and benching many each week, nor in any other option that basically reduces how many people are raiding.

For clarity's sake, the raid rosters are available in the following google document:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vBUmooc2-OKZfhSud6_E6SCCWZxl3m8XqQJgzsp753s/edit

It is HIGHLY recommended that if you want to keep your guild raid seat, that you pay careful attention to being reliable in showing up each week. The benefit of the larger iRaid group was that there was more built in flexibility to personal schedules and routine outages for stretches of time (e.g. someone is typically available on Saturdays but for the next 2 months is not). However, in the smaller groups, if someone were to have a known long-term outage, that person is likely going to be replaced unless the raid group is going to gamble on whether they have a full 10 people each week.

The guild group has our best tank, our best healer, and our best geared dps. Where it is at risk, is regular and reliable attendance. Take care of that, and the road ahead is smooth sailing.

MSV 10M 6/6 Cleared!

Congratulations to each and every raider last night as we downed Elegon and then easily toppled Will. Frankly, the series of Elegon attempts and final kill were perfect examples of people taking responsibility and pride in their personal performance - and it paid off handsomely.

First attempt on Elegon had him at 8%. Subsequent attempts had him at the raucously heart-breaking 1%, 0%, 0.4%, and finally at downed.

We mixed-and-matched raiders to both 10-man groups last night to provide diversity in the healing and tanking classes, the loot soaks, and of course we tried to accommodate people who wanted to raid together. All in all, we started out with two very evenly balanced groups. The second group had some attrition from pugs and ended up closing out 4/6. The first group to take down the Stone Guard had a barrel of laughs seeing multiple glitches on multiple bosses not to mention the occasional hilarious player-versus-player murdering all in all to close out 6/6 for the night.

Getting Elegon down was a significant milestone and very much enjoyed. As we all knew well in advance, Will of the Emperor was as tough as a wet napkin and we killed it on the second attempt ever - not much to report there!

Congrats to all, again!

Continue casual attendance - or clear tier 14?

Happy New Year! What a wonderful thing that a new year is - it's always exciting to start a new year and you don't really know what lies beyond until it is already past. Very much like wrapped presents under the tree or landscape on the other side of a mountain range.

We go into 2013 with a fun group of people that enjoy knocking the content around together - most of them guildies.

We find ourselves with a new year and a soon arriving Patch 5.2 with new content and, of course, a whole new tier of gear and raiding challenges!

Now, late in Patch 5.1, we can look back and see that we started out strong and then waned. One of the nice things about keeping the iRaid data around is that we can literally see where we surged and where we started trailing off. We can see that where raid attendance started to get spotty at the individual level, raid performance at the raid level declined. We can see that where raid attendance at the individual level was reliable, that raid performance at the raid level improved constantly.

Knowing that we tried to find further information on when were better raiding times for the raiders, and knowing that we either received affirmation that the best raid nights were on the days already being used - despite the attendance issues - and knowing that most raiders did not provide further availability information, we are unlikely to find that changing days will affect attendance reliability. So for now, the raids stay scheduled for Fri and Sat.

If we are to complete tier 14 content before the inevitable content nerf that will come with Patch 5.2, we have some work to do - starting with attendance!

Everyone likes having a raid group that is there when you want it and everyone enjoys a level of commitment of "I'll raid if I want to and not if I don't feel like it"; however, that casual approach is not translating well into progression beyond Spirit Kings normal mode - for either of the groups.

We don't know what lies ahead, however we do know that we enjoy raiding with each other and we know that the casual attendance approach is not accomplishing progression.

The obvious question at hand for each and every single one of our raiders is 'do I prefer casual attendance commitments or do I prefer accomplishing progression?'

It's a question that we will be answering this Friday - please come with your personal answer in hand so that we can discuss as a raid group how to proceed. We always try to make big decisions like these together and the only way that happens is if 'we' contribute to the discussion/decision.

The raiding must go on! (See you Friday!)