One step closer
Last night was heroic 10man night, which has quickly become my favorite night of the raiding week. Small group, more relaxed vent, loot I can use, a nice challenge; all factors that add up to heroic ToC-10 being a great time. Last night was no exception, even with two folks that have never seen an Anub kill, we were clearly on fire.
During Beasts we unfortunately wiped on Icehowl because we had two instances where the yeti hit someone that didn’t strafe fast enough. Once we regrouped I was forced to teach some folks how to strafe and imparted the wisdom of Stoneybaby’s awesome “Small Points” post. The next time we downed Beasts when everyone was on top of their game for the furball.
Jaraxxus was generally easy and we one shot him. Then on Champs we had what was probably the easiest comp ever: Enhancement Shaman, Rogue, Holy Priest, Tree Druid, Warlock, Mage. Burnt down the Shaman first, then the Rogue, then the Warlock. After the scariest dps was dead we doubled back and finished off the two healers, then put the Mage out of his misery.
Twins were similarly easy. (No boots, though, makes me a sad pally.)
As you can gather, I think it’s fair to say we’ve got the hang of the place overall.
When we dropped down to face Anub we were at 49 attempts on the clock. Mad Skill was so close we could taste it.
However (and not really this person’s fault) we brought a new guy that night who really hadn’t seen an Anub kill and had to learn our two-heals/north-south strategy on the fly. Two wipes later and I’ll admit I was getting very stressed. I felt that progression kill slipping away from us.
47 attempts left, third try on Anub and we executed the strategy perfectly. People ducked and dodged as needed, adds died fast, and Anub as well in short order. The “A Tribute to Mad Skill” achievement flashed on our screens. No 245 Ardent Guard, but I was still jubilant. It was a great victory for the guild.
Considering that each wipe that night was either due to (1) dopiness, or (2) not knowing the fight. Both easy things to overcome. Insanity will be ours very soon, I’m sure.
Now, to step back a bit from the warm glow of victory, let’s talk a little drama. There are some malcontents in guild that were complaining that they weren’t being taken to the heroic 10man and that only the “Inner Circle” was being invited. I need to address this–er, heroically, where they’ll never read my response. Their complaints are hogwash.
For one, to address the more explosive “Inner Circle” charge, we’ve rotated in folks every week to the point where we’ve now taken at least 20 different people in there. And we’ve invited others who were not able to go. There is no Inner Circle being taken week after week.
Anyone who’s done this raid will I’m sure sympathize that you can’t carry someone doing 3k dps through it just to be “fair”. I’m a bit of a black-hearted jerk perhaps, but my position is you have to earn your spot in a top-of-the-line run by being the best at your role. The reason that some people aren’t being invited is because they can’t perform at the level needed to succeed in there. We issue invites based their performance according to logs from that week’s 25man raid.
Do 6k dps and you’re probably going to an invite. Do 3k and spend more of the raid disconnected? Not so much.
There’s a part of me that feels bad about having to exclude folks like this, but on the flip side I have a responsibility to the guild and the other 9 people in that raid to give them all the tools they need to succeed. An underperforming remora of a raider is not going to help bring any success.
Armory Feed
Just gkick them all all – that’s what we did. Or – when we originally formed our last guild, we specifically stated that we were a 25 man progression guild – end of the line. We didn’t schedule 10 man raids, we didn’t care what you did with your 10 man lockout. We also made it very clear that if you saw people running 10 man and felt like you should be invited – you should probably start your own group.
The real telling point for us came when we had one 10 man group that was blowing through hard modes, and another that couldn’t do normal modes. Everyone in both of these groups were in on the same 25 man runs, and we used a straight /roll (not DKP, not loot council) so the loot was pretty evenly distributed around the raid. The other 10 never did get Yogg down – and again it was made up of mains from our 25 – and it had one of the main tanks leading it.
Don’t like not getting an invite? Take some initiative and start your own group
You’re always going to run into the problem when you have a 10-man team that is constantly working on hard modes. There’s no easy way to include everyone short of doing the hard modes a few tiers later when there’s no challenge. Our 10 man team working on hard modes suffers from a bit of turnover week-to-week, but it’s not horrible. My dream would be to have the same 10 people show up every time with no rotating members until we could carry newer players through.
We are actually lucky in that our ‘rotation’ is an 11th person we occasionally have to bring to fill in for someone having a RL issue – so our group is almost always the same.
The biggest pain is they are always complaining that we should run two heroic 10 man groups so more people can participate.
I don’t want to take a successful 10 man groups and turn it into two failing ones all in the name of inclusiveness. No way.
tell them to form their own heroic group just like adgamorix said…
makes no sense to destroy a successful group just so the average performers can get carried
Hey man glad the post helped your crew out. Awesome achievements! Grats on the kill
I think you’re too nice with the way you rotate people in. Be careful that your raids aren’t brought down too much. I wonder if anybody in your raid group was bitter about missing out from dopiness/a first timer.
With my guild’s hard mode group it was an inner circle thing. We had a bunch of core raiders that were straight out given preference because of how long they’ve been with us (raid synergy!) and how good they were. It was progression for us because we wanted realm firsts.
There were a bunch of people that I’ve had to just knock back and they were really bummed out. But they got their fix in the 25 man runs, were fed their epics and overall looked after. You can’t have everything. Except for the core 10 of us.
Congrats on the achievement btw.
I guess I can be considered a core raider, and I sat out last week. . I didn’t mind that much, especially since I volunteered. The truth is that most of the “core” raiders don’t mind sitting out once in a while, I think that many of the others like to kid themselves into thinking that the reason they don’t get an invite is because of some mysteriously exclusive inner circle, when in actuality it has much more to do with their own issues…