LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 5:57 am Post subject:

Well, since I made this original post my guild has kind of blown up. We went from around 50 members to 120. 60 or so of them being level 70. We're running 2 groups through Karazhan each week and 2 groups through Zul'Aman about once a month. Just on the gear push to get new members ready and then we're going to start 25 mans probably end of this month.

We got really lucky. We recruited a guy and his son into the guild and they have provided us with quite a few quality members. I think they have referred around 25 people to us, just folks they met while out instancing or playing BGs or what have you, and every one of them has been a keeper. And we had another guild collapse into us that we got about 10 good quality players out of.

I think largely what made a difference is that we put together the best 10 people we had and started making attempts at ZA. There's a thread on our realm forum that keeps track of raid progression and the biggest influx of people came after we posted that we had cleared ZA.

So, for the moment things are looking up. If these people last through the end of this month for the gear push then we should be golden when we start Gruul.

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 4:47 pm Post subject:

Well,I've built 3 guilds up and so far 2 ran out of gas just as we were going to hit the end game. THe 3rd is currently BT built and people are bored with WOW and stresses are building.

All I know you cant force people to show and that some think they should be special and not perform.

Pick your people and thin out the ones not performering fast. Let someone else have the headache. Get your 30 people and keep them focused.

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 7:27 pm Post subject:

Here are a few things I learned from my guild's descent:

Make sure your raid leaders are mature - At this point, our guild had three separate Kara raid groups, all fairly successful. One of our newer recruits apparently rubbed the raid leader of one of the groups the wrong way, so the raid leader decided he would no longer raid as long as this person was in the guild, screwing over all of the other people in that Kara raid group. We eventually demoted this raid leader because of this, so he got mad and /gquit.

If you recruit a group of people, be sure they have the same guild philosophy that you do - A month or two before my guild fell apart, we recruited about seven people from another server into our guild. The "leader" of this group was immediately made an officer. We had always been an odd guild philosophically; while we had hardcore tendencies, we always acknowledged that this was supposed to be fun so we shouldn't take it too seriously. The leader of this new group played to win, and anyone who didn't share his ambition was dead weight as far as he was concerned. He would constantly bark orders during raids and would throw tantrums if people questioned him or we weren't doing as well as he would have liked. He caused several good members to /gquit, and about a month later when our guild leader agreed that he should be kicked, the guild had become so dependent on the contributions of him and his followers that we were basically crippled when they were gone.

Never, EVER, promote me - It's not that I was a bad leader. I wouldn't have climbed the ranks so far if I weren't at least competent. But promoting me seems to either reflect current turmoil in the guild, or precede future chaos. When I was just a regular member, we were one of the top guilds on the server. My promotion to class leader came around the time we first started having problems, when we had lost several of our most skilled and geared members (including my predecessor). My promotion to officer was because the guild leader and current officers liked my suggestion to just demote the raid leader I had mentioned instead of kicking him, which also was around the same time we became crippled by getting rid of the hard-ass and his followers. The suggestion that I become the guild leader was when the old guild leader had grown weary of the burdens of leadership and transfered servers, at which point I don't think we could have even gotten far in Kara. I canceled my subscription at this point.

Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 8:19 pm Post subject:

Well, we had our first shot at Gruul tonight. Went in and killed both HKM and Gruul, no wipes... total one shot.

I really wasn't expecting it at all... after having come through with other guilds on the server and being there for the wipes and learning. Especially since these are the same people that struggled for months to down Shade of Aran in Karazhan.

It's amazing to me to go from not being able to field 10 people for a Kara run to one shotting a 25 man raid on our very first attempt.

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 8:27 am Post subject:

Congrats. I've seen that before.

Its like watching a balance slowly shift from one side to another. It's rarely one thing but many and from guild management POV it's actually the lower performing people finally stepping up their own game.

Top people will perform and the true benefit from raid success is gearing the bottom since its a hell of lot easier to gear someone say 10 % or more below a same class person.

For example Blackdog is Elemental Shaman with 1260 nature damage that is doing 1500 dps on Supermus. Now to get him higher we'd need to down the T6 boss. But to raise the bottom up all we need to do is heroics and SSC / TK.

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 12:25 pm Post subject:

edh wrote:
Congrats. I've seen that before.

Its like watching a balance slowly shift from one side to another. It's rarely one thing but many and from guild management POV it's actually the lower performing people finally stepping up their own game.

Top people will perform and the true benefit from raid success is gearing the bottom since its a hell of lot easier to gear someone say 10 % or more below a same class person.

For example Blackdog is Elemental Shaman with 1260 nature damage that is doing 1500 dps on Supermus. Now to get him higher we'd need to down the T6 boss. But to raise the bottom up all we need to do is heroics and SSC / TK.

Yeah, this is the philosophy that we've always gone by. We don't use any type of DKP, never have. When something drops, whoever it's an upgrade for gets to roll, as long as it's for whatever spec they came into the raid as.

But it's always kind of been an unspoken rule, if 2 people roll on something, whoever wins the roll will usually look at what they're wearing and look at what the other person is wearing. If it's marginal for them, but huge upgrade for the other person, they will generally pass to the undergeared person.

Been doing things this way for 2 years now and haven't had any clashes amongst our own people. Sometimes if people from outside the guild are involved it can be a sore spot. But I think we get lucky in the fact that for most of our people, we are the only guild they've ever known. They never got into the mentality that alot of other guilds have. Things like moonkin shouldn't wear cloth, enhancement shaman and hunters shouldn't roll on leather, resto shaman/druids/paladins shouldn't roll on healing cloth. That sort of thing. To us, upgrades are upgrades and unless it's a class specific item it's fair game to everyone that can use it.

And all of our people understand that you're only as strong as your weakest link, so the passing of gear isn't generally a big deal to them if it's needed.