Starting into AQ40

12. 30. 2022

So this week my guild have undergone some changes.  We've had a change of raid leader (back to our original one, who's just came back from a wow break) and we've got BWL on farm and just started into AQ40.  By started, I do of course mean flailing wildly at Skeram.

I guess this is the make or break point, not for the guild, but for the raiding element within the guild.  It's a common joke now in our guild that if we wipe on a boss or if we are missing a couple of players for a boss attempt, that people start screeching “MERGE!!” or “ITS A MERGE!” in guild chat.   (If you aren't familiar with horde side on Warsong, a merge generally happens with most guilds after wiping a few times on a boss or  having 38/40 people in the raid)… so we like to make a bit of a joke about it.

We're at that stage now though where I guess you see who's there for the loots and who's there because they enjoy raiding and playing as part of the guild.  One thing that's really been annoying me though, is people's unwillingness to learn the boss for themselves.  Like, I'd rather wipe on a boss a million times than just ask other guilds how they do it and copycat tactics.  It's great knowing how the mechanics work but its even better building your own tactics to counteract those mechanics, at least in my view – this is part of the fun of raiding.  Without that, what's really the challenge in PVE?

As well as that, I guess you get to see people for who they really are – the ones that scream “YOUR TACTIC'S SH*T” but have nothing better to offer as an alternative.  Luckily we have very few of these kinds of people and I very much doubt they'll last long in the guild as most of us are happy to take things at our own pace.  We aren't competing with anyone else afterall – we're here to have fun and enjoy the content and the company.

Trying to get 50+ people to  go to maraudon and farm nature resistance gear too is a bit of a pain in the backside.  Myself included, I'm kinda enamoured with Diablo 2 once again so finding the motivation to farm stuff in an instance I really hate is virtually non-existant.  But I'll do it, for the good of the guild!  Brownie points if you leave a comment with tips on other NR you can get without having to do much farming

I guess we're sorta at the stage now whereby recruiting people is getting harder too – although we don't recruit people based on their gear (we recruit on personality), if someone gets bored and wanders off (which happens frequently) then generally the raid will suffer as we try to gear someone else up to take their place.  I mean, to the point where you can only really recruit people from other guilds or from recently disbanded guilds (but no problem, there's a load of those on horde side anyway).  This problem probably gets more intense at the higher end of the raiding scale too – right Naxx guilds?

It's lovely though having a fresh challenge.  MC and BWL are a lot of fun but hell there's only so much rocks and lava you can look at after a while…

Has your guild recently undergone any big changes or is facing a new challenge?    Let me know about your own experiences about what I've discussed today by leaving a comment below.