Moving Forward

The following is supposed to go on my Guild Portal Blog whenever it fixes itself.

Things sounded a bit bleak for my guild after the last entry I made an indeed they were. We had a meeting where the former Guild Leader, one of the founders of the guild and the person who had called the meeting, asked those in attendance "Okay, who wants to Ebay the guild?" Not a good start to the meeting.

Thankfully that question brought out strong comments of guild loyalty and a bit of outrage as a few players had been making slow and steady steps to recovery, like running raids at the scheduled times even when there were only 3 people from the guild in the raid group and several people running informal PVP groups in  Arenas and BGs nightly. Some people also got upset at the meeting and /gquit on the spot. So there were some shake ups, but for the most part we were able to restructure the guild a bit and give it a bit more focus and drive.

As a result of all of this, our raids have seen higher guild attendance, more players are joining in PVPing and we are on a new wave of recruiting that so far has been successful. However, all of this progress in resurrecting the guild has brought up some of the old issues that plagued us when we fell from being 9th on the server in 10-man progression to 76th during Wrath.

During the early days of Ulduar as people were getting burnt our from Naxx 25 runs, we focused and became a 10-man raiding group with a focus on doing Ulduar hardmodes. This began before the initial Ulduar nerf and as a result we were actually about to achieve several of them during Ulduar's heyday as the preemo tier of raiding. Unfortunaly due to the length of the Ulduar raid we had to spread out raiding to three nights a week and players began to get burnt out. Combine with the normal spring lull that happens in our guild this was basically the death of our hardcore raiding group. When ToC came out the few who were interesting in raiding were split between wanting to complete the content we had started and the lure of shiny new even more epic gear. As a result, raiding in our guild died and when it did finally start up again we had an influx of "Wrath baby" raiders who didn't have to think in order to raid and collect loot, and thus we began the era of carrying under-performing raiders through content because bodies were all the was really needed to to clear content.

So now after the whole dying guild episode, we're back at the point where we have people but they may not quite be up to par. I know I am one of those as I keep volunteering to heal on my Paladin and her Holy set is not quite as good as her Ret set and thus my healing suffers. There's been many times where our main tank and raid leader will call me on it. And while he can be a bit of an arrogant ass at times, he means well and without him we don't progress as a guild. Aside from my own shortcomings as a Pally healer, I've still been running a lot of older content for fun with him and he has been confiding in me about some of the short comings of other guildies who are geared to the teeth but dps, heals, tanking is not matching the gear level. I know I'm still having trouble learning how to be a Holy Pally again (I miss Scared Shield and the HoT Flash of Light would automatically trigger on it) so maybe these other players are still having isseus adjusting to changes to their class and specs. Several of our DPS only classes have had to roll different specs than what they used to (i.e. Combat Rogues now being Mutilation, Arcane Mages going Fire, etc.) whereas Mirax is still mainly a Retribution Paladin and really only had to worry about learning Holy Power management rather than a whole new set of spells and abilities. But Cataclysm has been out for almost 6 months now, so why are people still not up to par. It's a mystery to me, but hopefully things will improve as we get back intoa  regular weekend raiding schedule.