I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to talk a little bit about what I’ve been up to in game. Darkbrew and I have started a guild, and it’s going amazingly! We got the LK down on 10 man normal last week, and last night, we roflstomped our way through the first two hard modes. We’re probably able to get down at least 4 of the other easy hard modes tonight, but we have paused to see whether we can get Saurfang with this group.
If he looks like he’s going to be enough of a challenge that we’d have to spend another whole night on him, we’ll skip him and do the other accessible fights.
One thing that leading a guild has taught me is the value of team chemistry. Spending a little time joking in vent between progression attempts is time well invested- it eases the sting of repeatedly hitting your head against a hard encounter, and helps avoid loot drama.
I’ve noticed that on my realm, there are a lot of older 25 man guilds that have stopped raiding because of lack of attendance. This has led to a rash of new 10 man guilds that are stocked with 25 man geared and experienced characters, so it’s hard to set your guild apart. A couple of things I’ve been doing that I think help are:
- Providing flasks and repairs. It’s not nearly as expensive as I though it would be, and the opportunity cost is, what, mammoths? Bikes? Achievements? Screw that.
- Acknowledging that nobody likes to be benched. The reality is that most guilds will find themselves in a place where they have too many raiders for a single 10 man, and not enough for a second concurrent raid. We’ve handled this so far by using alts of the first group to run everyone who got benched at a later time of the week, however this can’t continue forever- most people can’t dedicate enough nights a week to make this a viable strategy. Once we have enough people to reduce the number of alts in the group to a reasonable minimum, I’m planning on putting half of the well geared and highly skilled raiders from the first group into the new group, including an officer or two. I can’t overstate the importance of avoiding a “B team”. Nobody wants to feel like they’re second class raiders.
Anyways, I promise to keep these “what I did this summer” posts to a minimum. Also, if you’re looking for a new challenge with a fresh, dynamic team, you should consider applying with us! [edit: we raid Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 PM eastern till 11 PM eastern] We’re particularly short on rogues, locks, and shamans, and could use a (blech!) feral druid. Preferably a tamed one that will keep mangle up.
Sure….no room for hunters?…I think a raid would rock with 3 or 4 hunters…10 man that is! Think of the …… …….”FIREPOWER”
8 hunters 2 healers. kk? ;-)
Keep up the posts on the guild. Any solutions to the benching issue would be great to share.
Eventually if you can get 2×10 with half of each raid being alts then you can gear up non-alts twice as fast. The cost: twice as many raids. However they’re ten mans so they can go quicker.
Playing devil’s advocate for a moment here, what is the problem with a “B” team?
Probably the B team has less-skilled players, thus they don’t progress as much (otherwise they wouldn’t feel like a B team).
So why is it better for your raiders, your guild members, to be forced to raid with worse players, rather than grouping with people more or less on their play level?
Sure the B players don’t want to be on a B team that isn’t as good, but surely the A players also don’t want to be on a B team and feel like they’re carrying people. Ultimately it seems like no one wants to raid with the B players, not even the B players.
So why is having a B team bad?
There’s a spectrum of skill and gear levels in any group of people. Having a B team means that some perfectly acceptably awesome people will have to be put into a group with the bottom half (gear and skill wise), and that’s a recipe for losing good players.
By keeping high minimum standards of performance, we can have two evenly matched groups that accomplish almost as much as a single stacked group would.
Also, putting people into a B team means that they’re more likely to try to find greener pastures. Too much turnover is bad for guilds, and I think the guild will be better off if we work on skills development for our weakest players rather than put them in a team where we don’t have to raid with them.
The goal, I would think, of the B team with A team raiders is to see how the A team does handle themselves, how the A team does things right, how they do it period. If they LEARN from the A team, they can BECOME part of the A team. or they combine to form 25 man VOLTRON!
I avoid the use of the term “B” team. They already know, looking around them, where they fall in the grand scheme of things. Tacking a moniker on the teams is just asking for it.
I work with my raid leaders to decide what our goals are for scheduled raids. Because we run everything, we are not beating the doors of ICC every week. People are allowed to go with Pugs into ICC with the knowledge that we might throw together an impromptu run but please don’t run what’s on the schedule. (Hate, with a white-hot passion, the in-game calendar and I can’t get people to either go to the web site or use Guild Calendar.)
We’re going to do an ICC run. Our goal is 2.5 hours or the first tier, whichever comes first. I have a lot of family people and I stress they need to think of their families when raiding. No, we don’t plow through content as fast, but I have fewer ‘off-site’ dramas.
When I’m trying for a guild clear of something, such as what we did with Naxx, it was spread out over 3 days. I mixed up the groups. No one went more than 2 days of the 3 days. Each group had specific goals to accomplish on their day and, if they got those done, targets to continue to. This completely removed the letter team designation. Everyone worked toward the ultimate goal.
If you can make those people who haven’t achieved the uber gear feel as special as those who have, then call them “A” and “B”. I have found, however, that because of the cultural connotations of these letters, people can get down on themselves if they find, for whatever reason, they are running with a “B” team.
Good luck. You’ll pull your hair out and find you’re micromanaging tons more than you ever wanted, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
Ok a little update that I think might add to the point. I was on the A team permenently in my 10 man guild, and recently they all decieded to “Take a break till Cata”. Well I moved to a 25 man HC guild. Well last night, I was invited to the off night hard mode 10 man run with the A team….I screwed up a few times, but I learned from it…(PS don’t distracting shot Saurafang).
The point is, I knew all the fights in reg and 1 or 2 differences in HM…but we got to 8/12 straight in HM, leaving Prof, Frost and LK for tonight….
I learned! I learned the difference of how I needed to step up my game, and help the raid, which is the whole intent of theB team, to prepare you for the A team.
My new guild doesnt put it that, as the GL wants to run 2 HM groupd, but cant get the pop on off 25 man nights….so it kinda forces the A/B scenerio.
One of the previous guilds I was in absolutely refused to make teams for fear of losing players from team envy, and as such kept switching people out in the one 10 man raid they could schedule without making teams. Because of lack of coordination, or consistency or whatever this caused a guild that would otherwise have taken 10 mans through lich king, and then HC, to get stuck on rotface for 2 months. Needless to say they lost players to lack of progression. If you can keep progress up it may work, but if you don’t have enough to do that with multiple groups, stagnation can kill a guild.
Well, there are many factors that can contribute to that. Assuming I enforce a minimum level of skill and performance in raiding, I don’t see the same problem happening.
Also, fwiw, we’re already 5/12 in HM
Grats on the new guild, LK kill and heroic progress. My all-officer, one-night-a-week, 10 is in close-to-a-similar position as yours. We found that Saurfang was actually an easy heroic mode with three healers and strong dps. We have melee (DK, Ret Pally, Enh Shaman) handle one Beast (alternating stuns between the ret pallya nd the pally tank) while the other tank (a warrior) stuns the opposite beast while the three ranged burn it (hunter, demo lock, moonkin). They almost never make it out of stun alive and if they DO get a hit off better it’s on a tank as they will one-shot almost anything else.
We also found both Rotface’s and Festergut’s additional heroic mechanics to be trivial.
To be honest, Marrowgar gave us the most difficulty until we switched to a tanks-scatter-and-everyone-else-collapse strat.
Here’s a WoL from that night – maybe if you can see that your raid is at about the same level of heal/dps output you;ll go in with some real confidence. Knowing you can win is half the battle!
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-2c7swsctyr38c5w0/
Drat – that WoL is from 2 weeks ago when we had subs in. It looks like we didn’t log last week.