Kara!

Z finally got his kara key saturday and we had a chance to go play in KZ last night with our old guild. it was a last minute "hey, we think we're going to raid tonight. wanna come?" kinda thing, so it was a little rough around the edges. we made a mad dash to the AH on the way to the meeting stone to stock up on consumables and realized that we'd never really thought about caster consumables before. ended up buying some [Elixir Major Mageblood] (which was a mistake, but Harl can use 'em later), the [Schematic: Mana Potion Injector] for Harl (finally!), some [Superior Wizard Oil] (thought about going for [Superior Mana Oil] instead, but thought we'd try it without first and see what the mana situation was like) and a couple old-school [Flask of Supreme Power]s (they were way cheap compared with [Flash of Pure Death] and it's only a 10 point difference in spell damage). once we were fully raid buffed we were looking at +918 shadow dmg. mmmm, tasty. was even better when we brought in a shaman later on and had a Wrath of Air Totem at our disposal; zomg +1019 shadow damage! we wish that's what our stats looked like normally...

as far as the run went, it wasn't bad. they had cleared through morose on a previous night, so we started with maiden and then went on to opera (wizard of oz), curator, shade & chess; they all went down on the first shot. it wasn't always pretty, but we got the job done. prince was a different story. we made four attempts and never got him below about 40%. not really sure why he was so much trouble, but last night was just not our night for prince pwnage.

but what about "teh phat lewtz"?! we thought we'd be sitting pretty, being the only dps clothie in the raid (no mages or warlocks), but the loot gods decreed that it would be all healie gear, all the time. meh. we ended up with a couple bits of it anyway; the [Blue Diamond Witchwand] because none of the other healers needed it and the [Ribbon of Sacrifice] due to a very unfortunate error by the master looter. we still feel pretty bad about that, but at least it'll come in handy if we end up having to heal our way through the arcatraz again. we also picked up our first 10 [Badge of Justice]s. now we have to figure out what to save up for...

speaking of healing arc... never. again. we ended up going in as a healer because we really, really wanted our 3rd kara key fragment and putting together a group was like pulling teeth. we ended up with a prot warrior, 2 rogues, an elemental shaman and a shadow priest in healing gear (a little over +900 heals at the time). it actually went better than we expected it to, partly because the tank was awesome and also due to the shammie backing me up with a couple extra heals when pulls got hairy (that guy was on top of his shit. we love playing with people like that!). we did have one wipe right before the 2nd boss (damn you, aoe silence!), but all the bosses went down on the first try. that said, it was ZOMG STRESSFUL!!!1! we don't know how you full-time healers do it. we spent the entire run staring at health bars; praying they would stop going down and start going back up. one of our resto druids friends told us that she doesn't even know what the inside of most instances look like because all she does is watch health bars. bleh. major props to all you healers out there, but it's definitely not our bag.

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Karazhan, the Destroyer of Guilds

raiding changes guilds. some guilds ride out the changes just fine, others get torn apart by the stresses and challenges that raiding introduces.

why? what's so hard about raiding? it's just like doing an instance with more people, right? let's start by looking at what it means to raid. in this post-TBC era raiding is a 10 to 25 man affair (it was 20-40 in the pre-TBC era). much like running 5-man instances, not just any 10 to 25 folks will do. you need a certain number of healers, a certain number of tanks, a certain mix of dps and utility and so on.

take a minute and think about how hard it can be some nights to put together a 5-man pug. sometimes finding a tank is a nightmare, other times you have to beg and plead to get a healer to come along and you might even have trouble finding dps! now take it up a level and imagine putting together a 5-man heroic run. things like gear and skill start to matter when the trash can 2-shot you. that guy in all greens? yeah, not gonna happen. that hunter that always leaves growl on? pass, thanks. you necessarily have to be a bit more picky about who you bring into your group if you want to have a good chance of success.

combine two of those heroic instance groups, shake well and you get close to what you need as a bare minimum to start raiding. a couple of tanks, 2-3 healers, some mix of dps/cc/utility, a base level of player skill, mostly blue (or better) gear and, most importantly, enough schedule overlap to be able to play together for a few hours at a time.

all this work to gather people together merely grants you the ability to set foot inside the raid instance. if you want to actually succeed, you still have to provide leadership, learn to work as a team, work out strategies for all the bosses and trash pulls and set up raiding policies (are consumables expected/required? how is loot being distributed? it's cool if I go afk for 15 minutes after the first pull, right?). building and managing a raiding team is not a small task.

problems arise when not everyone on the team views raiding the same way. some people are just there for loot. some are just there to see the content and don't really care about getting a boss on farm status. some people just want to raid when they feel like it and not be locked into a schedule. some are more dedicated than others. some players, especially the early members of a raiding team, will put in a lot of time and effort to make sure they have the best gear they can get (farming instances for that one drop, grinding rep for that one piece of gear, etc.), are stocked up on consumables before each run and are always at the meeting stone on time, if not early. others might show up late because they're "just seconds away from winning AV", forget to bring water, demand a summon because they didn't log in in time to fly to the instance or whatever.

while admittedly a gross over-simplification you can divide these people into two groups; the serious raiders and the casual raiders. you have one group that wants to establish gear requirements, set schedules, expects raiders to be on time and prepared. they are determined to see content cleared, bosses farmed, loot distributed to benefit the raid over the individual. progression is the goal and they accept that it will take work to get there. then, you have another group that maybe shares the same goals but doesn't want to (or can't due to schedule issues, etc.) work as hard to realize them. they aren't lesser players, but for various reasons they don't share the same level of commitment as the serious raiders. maybe they have scheduling issues or can only play for an hour at a time. maybe the thought of killing the same bosses at the same time every week bores them to tears. maybe they bristle at the idea of being asked to pass an item that's a clear upgrade for them because it will benefit the raid as a whole by going to someone else. whatever the reasons, raiding isn't as important to them as it is to the "serious" raiders.

a guild's initial raiding team will generally be the serious raider types. they'll get the gear they need, do all the attunement quests, farm up consumables and be the first to kill bosses in guild's name. the raiding team roster will change over time, however. old raiders may move on to other guilds and games, new guild members join or are recruited with the intent to raid, guild members that were still leveling when raiding began will want to join in on all the raiding goodness. if the guild's lucky, these new members will share the same outlook that the older raiders do and everything works out. more often that not, though, at least some of these new raiders are going to fall into the casual group. this is where raiding starts to introduce guild drama. how do you keep everyone happy?

what you tend to see is the serious types looking down on the casuals because they aren't... well, "serious" about raiding and the casual types looking down on the serious folks because they're become elitist. both groups begin to resent each other. maybe it's a poor loot call, maybe it's a dumb mistake that a new raider makes (flame wreath, anyone?). sometimes that's all it takes for this resentment to escalate into a full-blown screaming match over vent. we've seen it (heard it?) more than once and it ain't pretty.

unfortunately, there are no magic fixes. it really comes down to the personalities involved and the leadership and mediation abilities of the guild officers. some guilds end up with multiple raiding teams (there's still drama about who's on the "progression" team vs. the "training" team, though), some guilds simply stop raiding and sometimes things are bad enough that guild members leave for other guilds.

this sort of drama is what lead us to leave our last guild, (for the record, we're in the "serious raider" camp). prior to raiding things were very casual and we loved it. there was a core group that leveled together, instanced together and eventually began raiding together. we started off raiding by pugging in folks to fill spots that the guild couldn't yet fill. it was when we started recruiting new guild members and inviting freshly-minted level 70 guildies to fill out the raiding roster that the drama began. the officers (us included) were never able to "fix" things to the point that we were happy, so we moved on.

we keep in touch with the many friends we made in our old guild, of course, and that's how we learned that things had come to a head in NIIA. after what sounds like a particularly nasty exchange over vent, the guild split. many of the original members have formed a new guild called . we wish them all the best as they pick up the pieces and ready themselves to re-enter kara.

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