setting up for and quals for Kara raiding

right then. lets begin.

group composition: our target group role composition until we have Kara on farm status will be:

• 2 tanks (preferably, one of them can multi-role)
• 3 healers
• 5 dps

specs: the tanks and healers have to be spec’d for tanking and healing respectively – no proxies in off-spec. dps can spec however they want as long as they meet the min. thresholds for dps for their role/class.

gear: mostly blues or better. greens should be a minority. check out this post for recommendations on where to look to see how to improve your gear/enchants/gems: Bremm’s Musing. where are you going to get all this goodness gear? you are going to craft a lot of it and you are going to get it as drops – especially in Heroic instances. for some classes you can get some of your gear from pvp rewards.

knowing each other: best way to learn to work together, is to start with helping each other get to 70 (even if you are 70 already), get keyed and get geared. do those Heroic instances together. even raid them or other instances. if you have not raided before ‘for real’ then you have a new user-interface to get not just accustomed to but adept at using.

quals: right. this is the part that will seem to give the potential-raiders the most grief. over the next week or so, we will ‘mature’ these figures with some more reviewers. as of right now, several key sources have been polled and reviewed by accomplished, experienced players in that class.

tanks: warriors & paladins {defense 490, health 12K, armor 12K}, druids {defense 415, health 15K, armor 15K}

healers: +1200 healing, mana 8K

dps melee: 600 dps consistently

dps ranged caster: +600 spell damage

dps ranged combat: 600 dps consistently

BIG CAVEAT: these numbers are still in review – hence they are not yet final. they are provided to give you an idea – especially if you are already level 70 – of where you need to be ballpark before you are getting close to ‘ready’.

read more. perform better.

if you are not reading blogs or ‘news sources’ for your class or group role, then you are not taking advantage of tips freely available to help you perform better. running a feral druid tank? are you reading the 2-3 blogs focused on druid tanking? you should be! got a priest? have your macros in place yet? read the blogs – they have them posted!

the more you read, the more you know. this is certainly true of the myriad of posted strats for the bosses and instance guides. never done SL on heroic? read about it.

time in recce is never wasted. prepare for raiding by first ’skilling up your knowledge’.

coming soon: quals for Kara raiding

as we get closer to starting raiding Kara as a guild (likely in May), it makes sense to post the quals for getting into the raid groups. as most of the experienced raiders will attest to, there is more to getting into Kara than just being level 70 and keyed. e.g. hunters should be running at about 500 dps (awesome would be 550 or 600); +spell damage on a mage should be at +600; defense on a warrior should be at 490 or on a druid bear 415. the quals will be posted shortly so that everyone can plan accordingly.

where do you get the gear to shore up those quals? some you get from crafted gear and good socketing, some you get from running heroics, and still yet some you can pick up in pvp rewards.

looking for information on something…?

… use the ‘useful links’ to wowhead thottbot and allakhazam to find where that thing is, who drops it, what the rate of drop is, what it has, where that place is, what zone to quest in… etc etc.

i am seeing a lot of requests for basic information in our guild chat channel and i’d like to encourage everyone to learn to fish rather than just give you fish. besides, if you look it up, you get a generally accepted answer to your question that is reviewed and commented by the overall wow community rather than the opinion of whoever is online in our guild at that time.

not discouraging questions – encouraging that you ask interesting ones that are not simple wowhead.com lookups.

roster spring cleaning started

one of the ways that we achieve our 2nd quarter goal of 50% of the guild over 50th level is to level more than half of our roster over level 50. another way is to remove from the roster enough characters so that 50% of our guild is over 50th level. characters under level 50 that have not been played in months are neither leveling, nor being retained (since they are not actively helping the guild in any way).

starting from the bottom of the stack, lowest levels with no activity, the roster will be “spring cleaned”. to avoid being cut, stay active in the guild or speak to an officer and ensure that they put a note in your toon’s officer note field to the effect of when you will be back. we are perfectly able to accomodate folks that need to take an absence – just be sure to tell us!

Heinkel Promoted to Rank of Senior Officer

Please join me in congratulating Heinkel on his promotion to the rank of Senior Officer. Heinkel has been a dedicated member of the guild for over a year dating back to the beginning of the guild. Over the past year, he has taken on increasing levels of responsibility and has proven his reliable track record in supporting our guild objectives. His attitude towards commitment to our guild rather than as an individual and his limitless capacity to stop whatever he is doing to assist our membership is an example to us all. I look forward to working with Heinkel to achieve our guild objectives.

Be *Selective* When Recruiting – Your Recruits Are Your Care And Responsibility

It should go without saying that when you offer someone an invitation to join our guild you have taken a few moments to ‘interview’ them as to ‘why us’ and ‘why them’. Find out what their definition of ‘a good guild’ is. Everyone has different expectations and definitions of what a good guild is and just because ours is ‘according to our expectations’ it does not mean that it is according to theirs. Find out what they expect. If you do not have the time to find out, do not invite them into the guild. If they do not have the time to explain or answer, do not invite them into the guild.

When they leave the guild, either if I see it when I am online or by checking the log that I see as guildmaster, I follow up with them to find out why they left.  What I am finding more times than not, is that they have left because we did not meet their expectation of giving them run through after run through and leveling them up, giving them all the gold they need and giving them withdrawal privileges from our guildbank. These departures are entirely avoidable by simply not inviting them into the guild in the first place. Most recently, I watched Heinkel (70) spend an hour helping someone (23) in Duskwood only to watch them quit the guild once he helped them finish their quests and he logged off.

Do not be too shy to ask them if they expect to be leveled, run through instances non-stop, funded, and given our guild bank keys. If they say ‘yes’ to any of those, there are perfectly good guild matches for them and we are not one of them – so do not invite them to join us. It just means that our folks waste time and resources on them which could easily have been used to help you instead. i.e. When Heinkel was helping that person in Duskwood, he was not helping someone else, who is likely a good match for our guild, simply because he cannot be in two places at the same time. Let’s use our resources and time wisely by not wasting them on poor recruiting choices.

Be *selective* when recruiting. Take responsibility for the people you recruit into the guild. Ensure that they are introduced to the membership and officers, that you tell them to read our website and the guild message of the day (and guild information). Find out if they need anything and ask an officer to help them with it – in case they are shy or do not want to ask themselves having just joined. Certainly if they are significantly below you in level, consider yourself on “run through” duty if they ask for one and you were their recruiter.

We are not trying to curb your recruiting drives! We are trying to reduce the revolving door syndrome and the waste of resources that can go along with that.

Finally, this is a social ‘club’ just like any other in RL and I would expect you to take responsibility for anyone you bring into the guild in no less a manner than you would in any RL social club. I expect you to help them and support them to the best of your capacity for their first several weeks until they become full rank Members. While they are Initiates, you are the first and most familiar person to them – do not just “drop them off” into the guild with an invite and then leave them to find their way in our culture or on the doorstep of officers to take care. It *is* one of the duties of Officers to assist Initiates as needed and reasonable; however, it is first and foremost the responsibility of the person who extended to them the offer to join our guild.

This will foster a stronger guild community and by extension a stronger guild.

Roster Spring Cleaning Coming! Login to keep your toons active!

If it has been a while since you logged in to some of your toons, log in to keep them active. If you know of folks that are active but not on some of their toons in our guild, tell them to log in to keep them active. Spring Cleaning on the guild roster is coming again and we’d rather not clear out someone that should not be.