Pull, Wipe... Rinse & Repeat

It has taken a few weeks however we have finally found a progression point: Sindragosa! Down to 12% on best attempt. It’s a beautiful thing! And painful. It’s frustrating as all hell to go in and spend a night wiping and not get a First Down! Then again, they don’t call it a ‘Walk in the Park’ for a reason. The great thing about our guild is that it is less about ‘what’ we clear and more about ‘how’ we clear it. This in no way suggests that we won’t clear content; rather, it means we do not do it at the price of compromising respect, common sense or performance. No raiders are sacrificed in the process of getting a First Down!

Some of us have downed Sindy on other toons or on other servers and we know that this is a fight that demands a lot of performance from raiders and that all have fabulous internet connections and uptime the entire fight. I think this is one of the reasons I like this fight! It’s not easy. It’s fun. Of course, if you over-gear it already, then it’s cake as long as everyone knows what they are doing; however I am talking about people that sometimes are seeing it for the first time and may even have never experienced some of the formative fights that this Sindragosa fight includes the mechanics of (they may have come along after Naxx and H PoS were still hard). That just makes it even more nifty.

Nonetheless, wiping all night with no prize at the end still is frustrating and wears down morale and enthusiasm.

It is important for all officers and raiders to keep foremost that they need to put in their best performances on each pull and to have fun every time. Thankfully, we keep it respectful even when the temperatures go up and folks flare – our culture helps put out the fires before they get too hot. That being said, people need to take heed of comments and look deep to see if there is validity to what sparked a comment. A good example of that was that in the recent night of attempts, there was thoughts thoughted aloud that perhaps my paladin should be doing things differently than what I was doing. I took the point. I researched the heck out of it. I read all the trusted sources. I read all the holy pally blogs. I read all the results Google gave me to searches like “Paladin Healing Sindragosa”. Turns out, I am doing exactly what I need to be doing. But the point is that I might not have been and it behooved me to go do my homework to *confirm* my choices for that fight. It does not hurt to go look. Sometimes, they might not have been correct in asserting that you were not doing something correct – maybe you were doing it right – but by going and looking, you find something new you did not know. In my case, I saw a tip on one blog in the comments to a post that suggested both tanks be Sacred Shielded (one by another pally – either themselves if they are a pally or by a ret pally etc) so that my FoL can kick off the HoT.

So you see, it wasn’t that my progression pains showed me that I was doing something wrong, it was that it showed me something I could do even more – a slight addition, but an addition nonetheless. It made me a better healer go forward. And I had a great time that night despite a lot of wiping. And I got to play with people I really enjoy spending time with.

Progression fights are not supposed to be easy. They are not supposed to be downed in just a visit or two. But they serve wonders to improve your raiding sharpness and they are a great test of the true mettle of a guild’s raiding culture.

We are squaring up to clear and gear 11/12 in ICC 10m in 3 hours of raiding. That goal simply cannot be achieved if we do not bring our best performance to every pull, every boss fight and every raid. It is not enough to ‘have seen the fight before’ or to ‘have done it in a 25 m or on another character’. Everyone in the raid group needs to be working to do their best performance on that character in that raid during that pull – trash, or boss pulls. Bring your A game, everytime. Do your homework. Know what you need to do every moment of every fight, every single time. Study the fight strategies well in advance of where you are now. Know how to improve your game. Talk to others performing your role in raid groups that are farther ahead than you are. Find class leads and mentors. Become better in every pull we do. Shave off inefficiencies. Lose bad habits. Hone your raiding play like a finely tuned piece of work.

People are going to make mistakes – it happens. However, mistakes should be the rare occasion, not the norm. At this point, wiping on anything less than Putricide, Queen or Sindragosa is not cutting it. It is unrealistic to plan to clear 11/12 in 3 hours by the end of June if we are doing multiple attempts on every boss after Saurfang.

If you want a care-free, not-interested-in-downing-the-Lich-King raid group, start a new one and by all means have fun! There is plenty of room in our guild for multiple styles and approaches to raiding. However, if you want to down the Lich King in a LR raid, you need to get down right serious about making each pull your best performance.

Efficiencies and effectiveness are the path to getting to the LK fight. Top end performance is the requirement for downing the LK. For example, during phase 2 of the LK fight, while everything else is going on, you HAVE to be watching to see who he is targeting his Defile cast on as whoever that gets cast on has TWO seconds to drop the defile in a harmless spot and everyone else has the same two seconds to get away from that targeted player. Two seconds or you wipe the raid. There isn’t even time to warn you in vent. There are no B game raid groups downing the LK.

Marrowgar and Deathwhisper may be boring to you now. Battleship may be child’s play and Saurfang may just be a small hurdle. Bring your A game to those fights as well. Use them to be as efficient as you can. Path to avoid pulling extra mobs leading up to Marrowgar. Help down boarding parties on our ship. Find new ways to take less time to get to the LK fight – the easiest of which is to one shot all the content up to his throne room.

We have the right players in our raid group. We can gear up the virtual characters that need gearing. We have room to improve on the speed with which we are ‘clearing and gearing’.

Let’s go get him!

Like then, we will return to herding the more serious raiders into a more demanding raid group and the more casual raiders into a casual raid group. Nothing new with that solution.

What is new is the small army of new officer faces that are going to be helping us accomplish this objective. In the past, we have relied on seasoned guild veterans. Today, we promoted four new officers whom are relative newcomers to the guild however embody our objectives very well. We have demoted veteran guild officers that have let their accounts lapse or have been afk too long. Not out of malice, simply in order to maintain true to our establishment that officer ranks in this guild are working ranks and you earn them by showing up reliably to do the work that needs doing.

As we grow, we will add more officers as we see necessary – ideally, we would like to see sufficient officers to make sure that rank has a constant presence online during core hours and certainly to make sure that vacations of 2-3 officers do not cause raiding to come to a temporary halt.

Recruiting is it’s own finicky thing right now – hard to recruit solid, reliable raiders if you are not doing 25man content. Chicken and egg issue. How to get 25 raiders reliably to have a 25man raid to attract new raiders?! Our strategy at this time is to continue reliably running our 25man raid each week and over time replace the number of pugs in it with guildies. We are targeting having 2 more serious raid groups and one more casual group (10 mans) and thus the 25 man would reliably be comprised of 20 more serious raiders and 5 more casuals that reliably show up, are ready, and can perform reliably.

This should give our raiding the shot in the arm it needs. Too long we’ve been mixing serious with casual again – heavily because we like raiding with each other and many are either serious or casual. Time to let the serious go after Kingslayer and the rest just have fun.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GZ39989

Thanks in advance. This will heavily reduce the “guess work”. By the way, if you also “prefer” to raid with someone else in the guild (e.g. your brother or spouse) and hence want to be grouped into the same raid group with them, please let us know that in the first question asking which characters are yours and which roles do you want them to have.

We take a relentless, pitbull-style approach to demolishing the content until the clock runs out. We’ve got excellent raiders with boatloads of humor, patience and a commanding presence to put in their best performance every pull – trash or boss.

We had initially planned to reach and start on Sindragosa mid- July and start on Lich King in the final week of July… we are going to need to move that up based on our progress! We are way ahead of our schedule and that is just fueling even more relentless, pitbull, high-performing raiding!

What we need to do next is get the second raid group consistently signing up and showing up – if we can make that happen, we’ll be very well positioned to go after some server firsts on Heroic mode.

http://legendsreborn.guildzilla.com

At this time, we are still using the in game calendar to schedule events and raids — which you can also access offline through WoW Armory if you want to sign up that way.

Wreaking Havoc in the Old Days

Legends Reborn has begun old school raiding again to grab up those achievements [in case any of them disappear after the expansion]. We started very old school and dropped a retaliatory strike down on the former Troll capitol of the Gurubashi Empire, Zul’Gurub. It was a small group, but the point was we got the ball rolling, again. Next time, we’ll take the stick to the Blackrock Orcs in Upper Blackrock Spire and beat back the dwellers of Blackwing Lair. At some point in the coming few weeks, we will circle back all the way to RFC and begin rolling up the dungeon achievements. For now, we are complacent to drive the raid achievements. We expect there to be a flurry of second iterations closer to the expansion as people try to finish up Loremaster and need the embedded quest lines to meet their 700 counts.

The screen shot above had nothing to do with the ZG raid, however everything to do with a bunch of guildies just out for fun!

Oh, and we’re recruiting again!

Right then, see you in the raid.

(ps. We long abandoned Kilrogg-H, simply not enough action or players. Instead, we have set up camp on Mal’Ganis-H as our Horde server. Strong showing so far. And of course, many of us have Horde right here on Azgalor, too!)

We are starting up nice and casual: one evening of 10m easy lewt content (OS and VoA) to help folks gear and 10m Naxx over two nights. We will be using the next few weeks to get into the habit of raiding again and to help gear up raid group members to be at similar gear levels. Once we have a consistent bunch of raiders in sufficient numbers and gear, we will take the plunge into running 25m raids.

A note on recruiting: All Sergeants, Veterans, Officers and Senior Officers can do guild invites – if you know someone you want brought into the guild, hook them up!

We are currently most interested in adding 1-2 lvl 80 healers ready for 10m Naxx to our guild roster, however we are currently recruiting all raid roles.