Welcome to the third edition of State of the Guild, an overview I write each major patch to keep you, the people, informed. It tends to be the case that most issues in guilds arise due to a lack of information and communication. In that spirit, this State of the Guild post will address where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Once again, for those of you want to know the basics, without reading the entirety of this post I’ve worked so hard on, I’ll make the important stuff pink so you can skim it like lazy assholes.

Progression, pre-5.2:

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed in our overall progress this tier, but I do believe — and the statistics seem to back me up — that it was due to a much tougher tuning of the raid, and not due to us sucking any more than usual.

If you don’t believe me, check our end-of-patch rankings for recent tiers:

ICC: 64th
BWD/BoT/Throne: 29th
Firelands: 31st
Dragon Soul: 24th
MSV/HoF/ToES: 23rd

We did the worst we’ve ever done when it comes to raid completion, yet ended up ranked higher than we ever have. Clearly, we weren’t the only ones having issues this time around.

Progression, now and in the foreseeable future:

The guild isn’t in the best place it’s ever been, so we do have a little bit of work to do.  Our roster has obviously suffered some dramatic losses, so we’re going to have to see who continues raiding — or returns to raiding — next week, and take it from there.  We may even possibly have to recruit.

As for the raid itself, the Throne of Thunder is a 12 boss, linear raid.  The fights range from fairly simple, to quite complex, but it sounds as thought they may have eased down on some of the DPS checks.  So, as long as we can get the mechanics figured out, we have a shot of doing really well.

What we need to work on…

This list is essentially a pretty obvious guide, but since I’ve received feedback at times from multiple guildies, I thought it would be good to go on record with them:

1. Gearing:  We should strive to have gear that fits were we are in progression.  Obviously there are times when folks are unlucky with drops, or cannot find the time to earn valor for gear, etc.  But we should all make sure we’re making an effort at showing up to raids with as great of a gear advantage as reasonably possible.
2. Practice:  As above, we can’t all hit up every wing of LFR each week, but we should certainly use it to our advantage.  LFR is a great tool for learning mechanics in a much safer environment, and any time a progression fight we’re working on is available in LFR, it should be utilized.  It’s helpful if our first attempts on any given night aren’t spent teaching anyone the basics of how the fight works.
3. Downtime on raid night:  Again, we’re really stating the obvious.  This is feedback we’ve all heard from multiple sources.  The two main things we should work on are being prepared at raid time, and keeping wipe time to a minimum.  We tend to do a lot of discussing the fight between pulls, and to some extent that’s a necessity, but I’m starting to think that we’d benefit more from simply getting more pulls in each progression night and learning by doing.  As far as being prepared at raid time, this doesn’t — by any means — need to be a scenario of, “You weren’t 10 minutes early, -50 DKP.”  But we should try to have flasks and potions made up and be ready for summons right around raid time.
4. End time:  We never used to have a set end time, but as the weeks have gone by we’ve settled into enough of a trend that we might as well make it official.  So, when raiding, let’s expect to be involved until 9PM server time.  If we know we can’t stay the whole time, let’s be polite and let the group know.

Raid Nights

Once again, it’s been suggested by a few people that maybe it’s time to revisit our raid nights.   I’m not convinced a change is necessary, but were we to adjust it, I’d imagine going back to Tuesday and Thursday would be the most likely thing.  If you have thoughts on this, please let me know.

The Raid Priority List

The Raid Priority List worked rather well last tier, so unless anyone presents any major objections I hadn’t considered, it will probably continue to be used

---

Anyway, it’s been a rough expansion progression-wise, but at least we still have each other?  I’ll see you all on our first raid back, which will be Monday, March 4th, as a final farewell to Heart of Fear.

6 comments

Tags: /cry, Guild Relations, Progression, Raiding, State of the Guild, Tier 14, Tier 15

Edit:  It appears we’ll have one more week of the patch based on recent blue posts.  I’m going to update the math here to account for that extra week.

While venting my thoughts on the lack of nerfs for Tier 14, someone reminded me that the item level upgrade vendor was intended as a way to help make content easier for struggling guilds, similar to the nerfs of Dragon Soul and ICC.

Because of this, I started to wonder exactly what the item level upgrades had contributed to our guild.  Please correct any errors I might make in the following napkin math:

• 750 valor points upgrades a single piece by 4 item levels.  Each player has 15 or 16 pieces of gear (dependent on two-handed or main/off-hand).  We’ll go with 15, so that means 750 points will upgrade the average gearset by .26 points.
• Patch 5.1 dropped on 11/27/2012 and patch 5.2 is tentatively scheduled to release on 3/5/2012.  That’s 14 weeks that the item level upgrades were available.
• A player could earn 14,000 points during that time, and could have saved up the cap of 3,000 points prior to patch 5.1’s release.
• That’s a total of 17,000 points, which isn’t divisible by 750, so we’ll go with 16,500 instead.
• Thus, if 750 points=.26 upgrade, then 16,500 points would equal a total gear upgrade of 5.86.

So, basically, if your raid team:

1. Saved up 3,000 valor points before Patch 5.1…
2. Continued capping on valor every single week (allowing, of course, for each person to miss 500 unneeded valor at some point)…
3. Performed 22 item level upgrades, and…
4. Never got a drop that caused a previous gear upgrade to go to waste, then…

Your raid team would have an overall gearset exactly 5.86 iLevels higher than they would if gear upgrades didn’t exist.

The obvious caveat here is that this outcome expects perfect cooperation and luck from all of your raiders.  If someone doesn’t cap every week, lower that number.  If someone gets a HoF drop that replaces their upgraded MSV piece, lower that number.  If someone switches specs, or keeps two gearsets ready, lower that number.

5.86 is the absolute max.

Is a 5.86 raid-wide iLevel bump helpful?  Of course.  It could mean the difference between attacking HoF in 489s, and doing so in ≈495s.  But I’m not sure I believe that difference is as useful to a struggling guild as even a single 5% nerf would have been.

(As one final aside, I’d mention that a guild who regularly clears 16/16 is far more likely to cap on valor each week, and also, far more likely to have BiS pieces to bump up, so the item level upgrades are almost more beneficial to better players, in my mind, than they are to casual folks struggling to clear half of the tier.)

1 comment

Tags: /cry, Progression, Raiding, Twitter Feed, Valor Upgrades

Ok, so occasionally I get questions about our progression chart, and whether it means we’re doing good or bad.  For the record, in terms of “percentage of raid completed,” we’re about even with the Cata launch raids and Firelands, and far behind Dragon Soul.

But I decided to put together a chart based on “number of bosses killed,” to see what that would look like.  It turns out, that based on that criteria, we’re actually somewhere in between DS and the other raids.  It also may be a little easier to read in this format, and shows some interesting similarities in the trendlines, so let me know what you think about future graphing.

No comments

Tags: /cheer, Charts and Graphs, Grats!, Progression, Raiding

Our first few attempts on Will of the Emperor went pretty well.  On the other hand, our limited tries on Blade Lord Ta’yak went fairly swimmingly, too.  So, how about we kill both of them this week?  We know we can clear everything else pretty quick, and with the Elegon nerfs finally going into effect, he should be a one-shot as well, so we should have plenty of time to work on new bosses.

How about we clear MSV on Thursday, followed by progression in HoF on Monday?

Here’s what our progress could look like if we kill them both this week (click to view full-size):

6 comments

Tags: /cheer, Progression, Raiding, Upcoming

That’s right.  I, your humble leader and servant, have put forth much effort in making the forums usable for all.  Lavish me with whatever praises you want.

And hey, while I’m at it…are there any other things about the site that need to be updated?

3 comments

Tags: Site News

Since we finally had a full raid last night — but I forgot to have us roll for initial list positioning — I took it upon myself to use random.org to take care of it.  Here were the numbers it came out with:

I know sometimes people prefer to do a /roll themselves, even if it’s still all random  — you know, master of your own destiny and all that — but hopefully no one will mind that I did this to just get it out of the way.

The next full raid we have, we’ll do some ready check votes to finalize the potential rules outlined here:  http://www.thecunninglinguists.net/blog/2012/09/05/the-raid-priority-list

1 comment

Tags: Guild Relations, Raid Priority, Raiding

It’s about that time.  We’ve got quite a few level 90s, and a bunch of us are getting rather geared up.  So, with that said, I don’t think it’s crazy if I announce:

THURSDAY @ 6PM SERVER
MOGU’SHAN VAULTS
FIRST “OFFICIAL” ATTEMPTS

So, until then, do whatever you can to gear yourself up in heroic gear.  Remember that 463 is a good average iLevel to shoot for.  (But also know that WoW-Heroes seems to think that 459 is good enough to dip a toe into raiding, which, wouldn’t actually surprise me.)

In the meantime, today is Monday, which is a raid night.  So, if we have the right amount of people on tonight, I’m going to lobby that we head in, even if we’re woefully unprepared.  We can consider it a glorified trash run — because there are, as always, BoEs in them thar raids — where we just happen to make some attempts at the boss.

Deal?  Deal.

No comments

Tags: /cheer, Mists of Pandaria, Progression, Raiding, Schedule, Tier 14

Election season is over and the results are in.  In the big race for Author, there was a landslide…possibly linked to Miyoko having too much of a life for us these days:

Rashmahal:  33.3%
Thisby:  33.3%
Darthworgen:  28.6%
Sabriele:  4.8%

There were only two people running for Book Club, so they win:

Auttylynn -  Uncontested
Çull-  Uncontested

So, there you have it.  Your Authors for the next 3 months are Darth, Rash and Thisby!  Your Book Club is Auttylynn and the cedilla-loving Çull.

Congratulations to everyone.  Don’t fuck it up.

2 comments

Tags: Election Season

Well, here’s what I have so far.  A clear enough pattern is forming that I think we can go ahead and just finalize this thing:

So, that makes the raid schedule as follows:

Thursdays, 6pm server
&
Mondays, 6pm server

No comments

Tags: /cheer, Guild Relations, Mists of Pandaria, Raiding, Schedule

It’s time to punch your ballots and elect some folks to office! Once again, here are your nominees…

Running for Author are:

• Darthworgen
• Rashmahal
• Sabriele
• Thisby

Running for Book Club:

• Auttylynn
• Çull

There are 3 Author slots open and 2 Book Club positions available, so the Book Club nominees are running uncontested.

In order to place your votes, please send an in-game mail to Cutaia with your 3 choices for Author.  These ballots will be accepted until October 1st, at which point the winners will be announced and promoted.

Good luck to everyone.

No comments

Tags: Election Season