Impromptu 10M Normal

An impromptu 10M Normal mode into Wing 1 arose Thursday evening and while we zoned in planning on just going to see Immerseus, we ended up clearing all the way to almost Norushen down. For impromptu, it wasn't bad at all to get two bosses down in 3 hours. That being said, it also reinforces in a friendly and positive manner that we have more time to work in Flex difficulty before we are ready to efficiently clear enough bosses in Normal difficulty given the hours we have available to raid.

By no means does this replace a guild raid event nor was that it's intent -- it was no more than just an impromptu "hey let's go do this for fun!"

Flex will continue to be a focus for the scheduled raids at least for the next 2-3 weeks. After 2-3 weeks, the later wings will continue to be Flex even if we shift to Norm for Wing 1 -- more especially because we are likely going to have more than 10 ppl interested in Wings 2-4.

Raiding Tune-Ups and Tweaks

All,

We will spend the next several months polishing our raiding craftsmanship, clearing content, and going back for missing achievements. The latter two are obvious and require no explanations. Draw your attention to polishing and improving our raiding craftsmanship.

Our guild benefits from having truly great people to spend time with. Also, when we bend our attention to polished craftsmanship in our raiding skills and awareness, given sufficient gearing, we clear everything in our path.

Not to rest on our laurels, and to shake off the dust from taking things a little too casually in the past year -- can you legitimately assert that you take the basic raiding good practices of pre-potting and timely potting during each attempt?! -- we are going to raise the bar again and polish that raidcraft!

5.5 Flex difficulty until we "skill up" and reliably can efficiently take down the Flex difficulty content. Then we will move on to 5.5 Normal difficulty of the same content. By keeping the skills honed and polished, we won't have to dust off old skills when 6.0 arrives and instead can focus on gear collection as we press through LFR -> Normal -> Heroic.

We will keep the focus of the guild raids to align with our principles of Fun and Respect. We will strive for inclusiveness and structure the raids accordingly, however the players have to pull their weight and take accountability for improving lest they be party to holding the raid back -- which is not fun nor respectful.

We will take the next 3-4 weeks to REALLY polish.

We will take the following 3-4 weeks to shorten SoO 5.0 Flex to 2-nights a week, with wings 1-3 the first night and wing 4 the second night.

After that, we will add 5.5 Normal difficulty to the mixture in quantities that make sense based on the ease with which we are clearing Flex difficulty.

Think about where we are and that will paint the picture of how much polishing we need to get done!

We are focusing on QUALITY, not QUANTITY of progression.

All focusing on quantity ever did for us was slow down progression. If by any chance, your focus is on quantity or a harder raid difficulty than what we are currently not clearing, get your head into the quality program or get out of our raid group. Thank you very much.

We are looking for improvements in Knowledge and in Performance. The learning and training encounters are the first and second weeks at most; after which, we should all know the fight and be improving our performance of the strats. Long before that, we should all have improved our personal performances. Weeks 3, 4 and + are NOT the time to be learning to not stand in the bad!

Wasting other peoples' time with unnecessary wipes is neither fun nor respectful -- get your act together and polish your raidcraft so that you can participate in us all improving our raidcraft as a raid group.

On that note, please take due notice of the following and govern yourselves accordingly:

1. Keep the environment fun and respectful, and to the best of your ability, friendly and harmonious.
2. Time Management - time being, obviously, the most precious resource to every human being:
1. Do not waste other people's time - it should go without saying, however this is one of the areas that we have the most polishing to do. There are too many basics here to write them all out, use your head and be mindful that we are returning to a desire to spend more active time raiding during a scheduled raid than time spent standing around waiting to raid
2. Courteous notification if you will NOT be present or will be late (we expect you to be there, that is the default, tell us if you will not be there so that we don't wait around)
3. Performance:
1. Be prepared with knowledge
1. Know how to play your class
2. Know how to play your class in a raid to the benefit of the raid
3. Know the strats for the encounters and know how that relates to your role in the raid
4. ANTICIPATE (based on the previous three areas of knowledge) what you have to do next and act accordingly -- ie. be able to APPLY your knowledge usefully
2. Be prepared in your gear and supplies
1. Raiding 101 - all gear reforged, enchanted, gemmed
2. Have buff food, flasks, pots BEFORE scheduled start of raid
4. Good counsel - Accountability
1. Be accountable for yourself and your performance - that means not just taking blame, but taking action to prevent there even needing to apply blame
2. Provide good, positive counsel before, during, and after raids to help others improve their raidcraft so that the whole group can do more, have more fun, accomplish more things we set out to do
3. Hold people accountable in the most friendly manner and without reprisal
5. Attendance - Be there, or have communicated your absence in advance to a raid officer

These are not optional.

We enjoy raiding with you. Please make it so that you adjust with these simple improvements so that we can continue to enjoy raiding with you!

= )

Cheers,
-Beartooth

New Expansion! Positive Impacts!

New Expansion Announced!
It is that exciting time, again! Blizzard has announced that there will be no 5.5 and that all their staff are focused on the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, or version 6.0. With the proposed changes come several that impact our way of play (in a positive way) for which we will prepare for in advance.


Gear swaps stats with spec swap!
Blizzard has announced that gear (excepting trinkets, cloaks, and jewelry) will be spec-agnostic and that the stats on the gear will change according to the spec that you are in - including tier sets and set bonuses. Obviously, this is a huge boon for gearing up much faster for all of your chosen specs. ie. as soon as you have gathered the main gear slots in one spec, you will by definition have gathered all of gear for your other chosen specs' main gear slots leaving only the trinkets, cloak, and jewelry of those specs to gather.

The impact is that we will have more time to focus on the skills required for a progression fight in the new expansion because it will take less time to gather the gear that enables us to get to that progression fight sooner. ie. we will spend less time on the earlier bosses gathering gear (as ostensibly every piece of gear would be useful to the spec you are primarily in, and most of the gear will be useful to your offspec, too!)

Flexible-sized Raids was a Success and is now expanded!
It has been announced that LFR difficulty will be a flexible-sized raid (10-25), as will be Normal difficulty and Heroic difficulty. In addition, present LFR will be named LFR in the expansion, Flex will be named Normal, and Normal will be named Heroic. Presently named Heroic difficulty will be named Mythical in the expansion and will be restricted to exactly a 20-man size.

This has several implications to us:

• we will be able to do LFR difficulty together, if we so choose to schedule it rather than do it individually with the masses, and not have to endure the Sunday Night Madness that is LFR today (and ostensibly, the quality of the player base in LFR will drop significantly since the better players/guilds will LFR together without the unwashed masses.)
• we will be able to do Normal difficulty together today the same way we do Flex together, and it appears that we will then be able to do 'Normal' difficulty and still have the benefit of being able to include our friends from other servers.
• we will be able to do Heroic difficulty (once we get comfortable with the content on Normal difficulty) with a group that is 10-25 in size making early entry easier and overall making it more inclusive of an activity for our guild.

Free Insta-90!
Blizzard announced that it will be including in the 6.0 expansion a free character boost to level 90. The new cap is 100 however they have been very clear that this will not be a long, boring slog like 60-70. This does mean that if you were ever thinking of leveling something that you just didn't want to have to level through all 90 levels, this would certainly be the key to snap out that 90 and then cruise on up to 100! Leveling [mages] 10 levels instead of 90 has its attractions, I am sure!

The impact to us is that we may see people that have traditionally played one class, play a different one. As we draw closer to release, if you suspect you are going to have a significant raid role change, just keep us apprised in advance!

All in all, the new expansion looks awesome and I to see you all there!