My World of Warcraft guild officers announced recently that we should consider reopening recruitment.
Let me take 10 seconds to consider it. …
Ok, I’ve considered — WE HAVE TOO MANY GUILDMEMBERS. STILL.
I was offline for a few days, I come back and there’s three new names in guild chat. ??!!?? Where did these people come from, asked I. Actually, the words I chose were, “who the fuck is *NewPriest*?” and “who the fuck is *NewWarrior*?” Because goddamit, recruiting was closed for a reason … WE HAVE TOO MANY GUILDMEMBERS.
Answers: Oh, *NewRogue* is the one woman’s husband. (Interesting. I had no idea she was married, and may I be the first to think what a curious relationship that must be.)
*NewPriest1* is a roommate of a guildmate. (So?)
*NewPriest2* is best friend’s forever of another guildmate. (So?)
*NewWarrior* was a pre-BC (Burning Crusade) app we pitied.
So, to back up my very unpopular opinion, I took a look at our roster, both our internally generated roster and the Armory … because my guild’s roster and equipment is still available in the Armory, unlike certain guilds that are excluded for some reason.
Here it is, cleverly anonymized so I don’t get in-game fan mail and requests for autographs gold.
63 raiding guildmembers?? We need to lose 1/3 of our roster to get back down to fighting weight and the officers want to be Ellis Island and welcome the huddled masses.
Tutorial for the non-WoW among us because the WoWzers know this already: Maximum raid size in BC content is 25 players. Once a boss goes down in an instance, those raid members are locked to that instance raid ID for a week (or a few days, depending on the instance). We can run simultaneous raid instances with a 63-man roster, painful as that has been, but if Guild Raid #1 is running low on DPS, we can’t throw them some extra DPS from Guild Raid #2 when everyone’s locked to an ID already.
I’m a big believer in one guild, one set of resources — not two guilds using the same website, forums and administration tools. Much as I love drama, smaller guild sizes are the way of the future.
And that’s pretty much what I posted on our guild forums, with a cleaned up professional graphic, of course.
More on this topic later when the officers tell me I’m wrong and that I’ll be running Guild Raid #2, congrats me!
Change is not something that comes to people easily. It was amazing to me to see our own guild clutch to its old membership ways in this new format. And in return, it was completely unsurprising the amount of drama this caused when we had to take the cream of the crop to clear out Kara and left others behind. Things will get easier when Kara fits snuggly into its ZG/AQesq role (other than the necessary attunement addition), and we can gel around 40-45 people who are ready to raid and all at the same time!
But until then, officers with not enough spine to lay out a clear direction for the future and make the hard decisions to stick to that vision are making life hard for all of us.
Our guild is going with the 2+ raids. They’ll be split on the day after patch day so that no two weeks have the same raiding force. It’s a real bitch, but Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided to screw everyone over by cutting the raid numbers causing chaos for every guild that was designed on a 40-man raid. I’ve seen so many guilds on my server collapse and disband it’s not funny. Cliques everywhere. My guild seems to be the only one not seperating to cliques. The only reason I can see is that the first and second rule of our guild isn’t “Do not talk about fight club” but rather “Real Life > WoW”.
We raid hard, but have fun. If someone can’t raid or isn’t able to do something else it’s just a case of “shit eh”. We’re all friends, and that’s the most important thing. We’re not here for server firsts, we’re here for fun. What we have in common is that we find raiding fun.
Lol, one rogue…
I presume you won’t be one of the ones rerolling a shammy eh :p
I’d reroll a shammy, I love the way they can… well, that thing in pvp… you know, the… nevermind i got nothing.
All I can say is way too many priests.
1 priest is all you need per raid, for fort buff and maybe improved spirit. Paladins can heal for far longer and stack better with auras and blessings, druids have combat rez + innervate, and shamans have bloodlust/heroism + totems for the party + grounding totems for the raid as well as shocks to interrupt.
As a priest myself, I’d rather not go to the raid than go to it and feel useless like I have been feeling in Karazhan. Oh yay shacklebot. /shrug
We currently have 57 level 70’s in my guild which is just insane.
I think the only reason it has worked is our guild has been/was alot like Thingy’s guild.
It’s changing though and has become rather unfun for me recently, with the only reason I am still there being I have friends there.
… that was basically the point I was leading up to but kinda left out. Don’t be too harsh. WoW is a game, games are meant to be fun. You lose the fun, you lose the people. Sometimes it’s better to find a way to make it work.
I think we have 40 on our roster…and we could use one more rogue. 🙂
The game itself has already lost its fun, to be honest. A lot of people I know, including myself (priest), a prot warrior, an ice mage, two enhancement shamans, a marksmanship hunter and several of the rogues have commented on the lack of fun factor, in both PvP arenas and PvE raiding.
Not to sound like a broken record, but Death & Taxes brings one holy specced priest to their raids, and the rest are shadow. They bring generally 3+ holy paladins and a few resto druids and resto shamans to round out their 25-man Gruul kills. Having that many priests is just not a good idea.
If you could persuade the damn Loladins to stop speccing for dps and actually heal maybe. 2 Priests / tanks (notice I say tanks and not warriors) is minimum for Karazhan imo.
Don’t hate the nomes …. punt them instead, much more gratifying 🙂
Our paladins (blood elf) spec holy and prot without hesitation. When they spec for support, they simply support better than holy/disc priests.
Even if you bring no priests to Karazhan, healing cloth won’t go to waste because all the hybrid healers can still wear it. But not the other way around…
Awesome.