When your guild hits a raiding roadblock

It’s the same damn thing every time. New content comes out and your guild goes rushing in head-on and promptly knocks themselves out on some obstacle they weren’t prepared for. Sometimes the object blocking your progression is a glass door, which isn’t really an obstacle at all, just something you need to slide open and slip through. Othertimes you’ve got a brick wall in your way.

For my guild the Keepers of Ulduar (heroic) are proving to be a mix of the two. Hodir we initially considered a giant, frozen brick wall, but with the assistance of our new strategy the fight was simplified to the point of absurdity. I can’t count how many times in my “WoW career” I’ve been in a guild that’s stuck on a fight, and with one teeny tiny stupid little change to the strategy the whole fight opened up.

Like, for example (and this is embarassingly obvious in hindsight), on Akilzon in ZA we used to switch to dpsing the birds which would prolong the fight until mana ran out and we all bit the dust. Then, one day we realized “hey let’s ignore the birds.” And we one-shot Akilzon. /facepalm

But those are the happy happenstances when the difficulty of an encounter is how you approach it. Worse are the ones that you can’t overcome due to the unwillingness of mathematics to get out of your damn way. That is, sometimes you don’t have enough healers, or the dps isn’t pulling their weight (while the tanks, of course, remain infallible!) and progression suffers as a result. Those times, what do you do?

As I see it, you have only one option, keep trying. (Disclaimer: I’m a bit of a masochist.)

Yeah, we can’t down Freya consistently, or Thorim at all, and the thought of Mimiron in 25 man causes me to lose control of my bladder, but damned if we’re not still getting gear from the first two sections of Ulduar. That’s not a bad thing, and after enough time you’ll be able to drag The Numbers into a side alley and beat them into submission while no one is looking.

And then before you know it you’ll be rolling in tier 8.5 gloves.

Of course, the major threat to the guild during week after week of fail is that people will get frustrated and stop coming to raids. Thus, the delicate balance must be preserved between progression and wiping.

The solution, moreover, is definitely not to slink back into older content (as I’ve seen suggested in my guild). Yeah we can do the safe thing and farm Naxx25 and Malygos, but why? What’s the point of spending two nights in that floating hellhole at this point in the game?

But I digress. Today is the start of another raid week. Tonight we’ll clear up to (and hopefully including) Auriaya, and probably leave Ignis for tomorrow. Then we’ll spend the rest of the week on the “harder” stuff: Iggy, Hodir, Freya, etc. We won’t down Mimiron, Vezax, or Yogg-Saron. And, you know what? I’m ok with that.

Because eventually we will. As long as keep gearing, our day will come.

… But hopefully before 3.2.