It's the second weekend in February and we are in the final stretch of MoP before the arrival of WoD in ~July. It is the perfect time to take stock of the state of the guild and re-examine our headings.
Present State of Guild Members:
Entering the final stretch of MoP, we are about 50 individual players strong, many with multiple raid-geared and ready toons to fulfill various raid roles. Several of our longtime members are in absentia as is often in our guild of 8 years - people go and come back depending on the ebbs and flows of their real world lives. The people we have are in keeping with our tradition of playing with great people and accepting nothing short of a fun and respectful guild environment.
Present State of Raiding:
We started out strong in the MoP expansion, slowed down to a halt in the third quarter, and returned with energy and enthusiasm in the fourth quarter. Essentially, stopping in the second half of ToT and picking up again in SoO when most guilds had cleared 10/14.
This weekend, still constrained by the sizing restrictions in the normal 10-man difficulty, we balanced a roster of raiders to push through our progression point (Nazgrim), through Malkorok, through Spoils, and made solid attempts on Thok before running out of raid clock Friday. Saturday was a rare day when we had 3/4 of our raid healing team offline otherwise I do believe we would have had Thok down this week as well.
For the first time in many years, we suffered from a healer shortage throughout this expansion. Today, we still do not have enough raid healers in house "in reserve" (offspec healers) with the gearing to step in and cover for a 'main raid healer' outage. It's a first we need to address.
In our Flex raid, we are pushing Garrosh to near P3 having made tremendous progress in the last 2 weeks with everyone paying close attention to their role and their performances.
An earnest inspection however, quickly reveals that these accomplishments are being pushed by raiders geared suitably for Heroic level difficulty. At least half of our overall raid roster is under-performing given their gearing levels which is preventing the players that are geared for Heroics from even beginning Heroic raiding (obviously, we have to clear Normal first).
We transitioned from Cata with 4 raid groups including non-guildies into MoP with 1 larger guild flex raid group. Early on, we saw the departure of some of the more Heroic hungry raiders to other guilds in order to satisfy their need for progression.
(Note: This is normal. People have to decide what is the right balance for them of a guild of people they enjoy raiding with and their hunger for progression. Finding the guild with the right people and the right progression is not an easy task and people have to weight one over the other frequently. Some of us pick great people over progression, some people pick progression over raiding with great people. We don't begrudge nor judge and everyone should simply recognize it as a norm both in game and out of game. Obviously, this isn't to say that guilds with more progression do not also have great people (!) but rather to highlight that some people decide to stick with the people you know and progress at the rate that group is moving at rather than move to a guild with new people and progress at a different rate.)
Potentially speaking, we clearly have the ability to progress at a faster rate than that with which we are progressing. However, kinetically speaking, observationally - so to speak - we are progressing at the rate at which we are progressing. This is the rate at which we progress presently
due to how we structure and prioritize our raiding regimen. Please re-read that sentence:
"... due to how we structure and prioritize our raiding regimen."
As far as I can tell, none of us are looking to get back into the rat race of competing for world or server firsts. However, many of us also want to move faster than how we quickly we are presently progressing.
Within 2 days of hitting 90, characters can be geared 490+ ilevel and therefore capable of ToT clearing; however, they frequently struggle with the nuances/mechanics and require characters in raid that over-gear the content aka "taking the dwarven hammer" to the boss fights.
The same becomes true of SoO. Characters geared 'at-level' with the content struggle to advance. After *many* attempts and weeks on a boss, familiarity sets in and over-gearing raises the raid to a level that enables the water to flow over the boundaries and get us passed the boss and onto the next one.
Gear is compensating for skill. During Cata, somewhere, we became complacent. Lazy. Raid UNaware.
We dropped the habit of good raid awareness.
Raid awareness covering: before we log on, before we zone in, during the raid, and after we log out.
Raid awareness is holding us back - people can argue about it if they
choose however they will have a lot of explaining to do when it comes
to the matter of fact raid logs. Things like people not using damage
mitigation or CDs are irrefutable examples of a lack of raid awareness -
of not knowing what is happening and what an acceptable response is to
present and impending conditions.
You can see it when we do Malkorok - even on Flex. If the raid leads are silent, puddles are left unattended, people fail to stack at the stack times, and people fail to move out again at the right times. We've probably done the fight over 20 times however people have gotten into the habit of waiting for the audible cue to act rather than to rely on their raid awareness.
In essence, they have become
raid leader aware instead of raid aware.
This is not something that we can 'fix' or 'address' in a conversation nor in a matter of a week or two. This is something that we, fortunately, have ~5 months to fix before WoD arrives.
There is a previous post linking to a valuable article addressing this very issue about raid awareness that will help you improve no matter how good or bad your present raid awareness is.
Forecasted State of Guild Members:
We will continue to grow our guild membership and will continue our tradition of maintaining a fun and respectful environment. We are currently especially looking for players that enjoy healing in raids.
Forecasted State of Raiding:
We will re-visit when we raid -- both the nights and the times, including the stopping time. Especially once we have new raiders on the roster as often happens, or we enter a new season (WoD expected out during the summer), we always re-examine our raid nights, when we start, and when we end. It is likely they will remain same or close to same as we have raiders that need us to start no earlier than we do and raiders that need us to end no later than we do. That optimal window may shrink slightly (start later and/or end earlier) however it cannot expand (it cannot start earlier nor end later).
Content update/patch 6.0 will bring about the largest effect on us as a raiding guild: it will remove the sizing restrictions to a raid size other than up to 25-person or 20-person Mythic difficulty. To us, 6.0 means we are no longer constrained on who we bring (up to 25) because of the flavor of difficulty we select. Presently, we can only bring "everyone available" to Flex runs and we obviously have to cut the list for that night to 10 to do 10-person Normal difficulty. No more come 6.0 -- except Mythic forcing the 20-person limit.
HOWEVER, and let us be frank and clear about this upfront: just because we can fit another raider into the raid group zoning in to an instance does not mean we will.
In a progression fight, every ounce of performance is needed and there is no wiggle room to carry anyone. In the beginning of the raiding in the new expansion, every fight is a progression fight. Bring a suitable performance to your peers or cheer our guild on from guild chat. It's that simple. No compromises.
On farm fights, we can bring as many people as we can without compromising our ability to proceed; that is, if we decide we want to clear at a slower pace and use the fights to help gear and make familiar other raiders, we can do that - but of course that only works if we can actually down the boss with them so that they can get the gear and become familiar with the fight!
Bosses will not be on 'farm' for several weeks, likely, other than the very first ones and the raid group is going to want to optimize our time in the raid instance in the first weeks to quickly get past the 1-3 farm bosses and work on the "end of wing" progression boss. It is highly unlikely that anyone that is not actually "holding their own and contributing to the kill" rather than "slowing us down or holding us back" would be in the raid group on the farm bosses in the first weeks of the raid instance being available.
Why say this? Because presently people have gotten into the comfortable feeling that being in guild means being in the raid group if the raid instance does not restrict sizing.
This is further made of urgent need of your attention because as soon as the most difficult level of raiding is available to us, we will begin raiding that difficulty level. This is a very important change from the flex-first approach taken in SoO. In SoO, we took the approach of clearing enough of Flex before starting in earnest in Normal.
In 6.0, we are expecting Normal (Flex re-named) and Heroic (Normal re-named) to be available at the same time. The first week Heroic is available, we will start raiding Heroic. No delay. No dependency on clearing Normal bosses only that first week. As a matter of course, we are likely to do the boss on Normal first, then do the boss on Heroic -- giving us the chance to see the fight with less punishing mechanics, then hammer the Heroic version with the added familiarity of having completed the Normal version. Let me say this again:
In WoD, heroic raiding starts week 1 that heroic raiding is available to us.
We are not interested in seriously competing for server standings, however we are not planning on slacking either. Everyone has ~5 months to polish their raid awareness and in-instance performance - if you want to be zoned in as part of that week 1 heroic raid group, start now.
Right now.
We will run one raid group for the guild. It's a model that works all over the world. There are up to 25 raid seats for people to fill performing their roles.
Now is the time to knuckle down and learn to play your main character better than you have ever played it before. *Everyone* has room to improve on how they perform with their main character. Make those improvements. Your raid seat is counting on it.
In no way are we discouraging people from playing their alts (who knows, one of them might be your new main in WoD?!), however, we are saying that we are going to be moving at a pace and at a rate that will not allow for under-performing.
We are very likely going to have 16-23 raiders in a flexible-sized heroic raid. Especially at the beginning of the expansion, those are all going to have to be 16-23 PERFORMING raiders.
Not only are you utterly useless if you are dead, worse, you are a hindrance because the boss's health is higher and the mechanics are harder for the remaining raiders to have to address.
So don't be dead. Raid awareness is your friend.
With all that being said, we are entering what is likely going to be some of the most fun we have had in years in raiding - for once, we will always be in the position to bring everyone we so thoroughly enjoy raiding with every week. We can only hope that everyone makes the effort to be in the raid group. Life will waylay some players - it always does. However, they will be able to catch up once they have the chance to literally catch up.
MoP has been a thoroughly enjoyable expansion from a raiding content perspective and the first 3-4 raid instances were MUCH better than the first 3 in Cata. Let's cross our fingers that WoD keeps with the trend and we see some phenomenal content coming later this year!
