[World of Warcraft] Well, it has been a while since I have said much. It’s mostly because I have been playing WoW like a mad man and haven’t really thought of anything to say. I have finally got my first level 60 and am enjoying the heck out of it. Once you hit 60, you have some set goals you want to accomplish. For me, it was to get my full tier 0 set, get my epic mount, and get geared for raiding MC.
It didn’t really strike me this easily at first. Figuring out what to do at level 60 took me a few days. You have to figure out what instances you want to do for gear, where the quest are you want, and most importantly, how to run the instances. Often times the lazy people of the PUG community in WoW mistook “LFG” for “LFM.” Look people, I don’t want to be the raid leader of an UBRS group if I hardly know the run, much less which classes to get. I slowly began to learn the ways of these high end instances, however. I now scoff at anyone who claims LBRS is “hard.” One thing that became very clear, however, is that PUGs are going to make accomplishing my goals much harder. For one, I have to deal with people who think LBRS is hard. I had a group so bad that on a Baron Strat run we were getting patrol respawns before the second boss! To put icing on the cake, we get to the sequence of enemies before Baron and we wipe, making it impossible to even complete the run. Most importantly of all, however, is the fact that I have to LFG. LFGing for one of these instances brings me back to LFGing in FFXI.
I needed a new guild. The guild I was in, DoA (Dead or Alive), was a guild that I held pretty close to my heart. On my Shaman character I had actually run some instances and chatted it up with some members of DoA. I felt honored to be in the guild on my Hunter. Unfortunately, DoA did the level 60 split thing where the 60s basically don’t have the balls to tell the guild they want to quit because it sucks. Instead, they use the “You can be in that guild while you gear up and then you can join the big boy guild! Oh, and we won’t help you gear up. Haha!” So we get stuck with the few level 60’s that weren’t geared yet, which happened to be 4 Hunters, 2 Rogues, and a Druid. You can’t make much of a party out of that.
That wasn’t the the big problem. The problem was that the new guild leader then hooks us up with a smaller guild. This smaller guild has nothing but capslock broken “your momma” joke telling level 20-30 nubs. My brother and I /gquit the day we merge. I felt bad and a little sad, but I was tired of it. Of course, my brother is an open target being a Druid with innervate and no guild. Almost right away he gets a tell from a guy asking about a guild. It’s a new guild with several 60s that plan on raiding. We decide to join because we had nothing to lose.
It has been about four days now and we’re quite satisfied. We have about 30 60s and are increasing. Our second day of being formed we did ZG and downed the first boss. Another ZG attempt is scheduled today and we are going to start messing around in MC sometime this weekend if we get enough members. While a majority of us are not geared well, many people are helping others get geared and ready for MC. The fact that we’re already raiding, despite our lack of power, is a huge step up from any guild I had been in before.
Where this guild will take me I am not sure on. I have always wanted to join an up-and-coming guild. It goes back to my enjoyment of discovery. Rather than being in a guild that already has instances on farm status, I’m joining a guild that has to learn the ropes and figure out the instances together. To me, that is a lot more rewarding than getting epic gear. I do have my doubts, however. Some guildies seem to be too “needy.” I fear these greedy guildmates will ruin the guild for everyone. On top of this, a majority of the members of this guild are from another guild that, similar to DoA, did not do anything. So all the 60s of that guild decided to reform under new leadership and start a better guild. This alone could create unwanted drama in the future. Only time will tell.
.:lufia22:.
Good luck! For all the hate on “random inviting guilds” that honestly is sometimes how you get the best members. I put a ‘looking for guild’ ad up on a message board when I started WoW. Wound up with the folks from http://www.dizzarian.com and couldn’t of been happier. They are no uber raiding guild and barely made it past level 40 in WoW, but they are a great group of friends.
It sounds like you guys are off to a great start…. just don’t let petty loot squabbles get in the way when you do get to raiding!
Some suggestions:
1. Get rid of the needy and the drama queens. You should be very picky about accepting people into your guild. One bad apple can tear a guild apart (I’ve seen it happen). Build your roster slowly, making sure the people you recruit are quality – including a couple of recruitment runs through instances to make sure they don’t suck.
2. Running an endgame guild is a lot of work. You’ll need dkp to provide incentives for attendance and to get your members to farm needed materials. A website with forums, dkp stats and a raid calendar should be established as well. Consider this carefully, as an endgame guild without these tools will never last for long, even with members with the best intentions.
I’ve been an officer in a guild, and I would never do that again. It’s a game, and I just want to show up and play, and contribute my share of time/mats to the guild. I joined a new guild right when it started farming MC trash, with good, professional leadership. Patience and some research is required to find a guild that is a really good fit for you.
Finally, skip the Tier 0 crap, unless you intend to upgrade some pieces to 0.5. Find out what stats you should be concentrating on (read the forums for your class), and use Allakhazam to make a list of non-rare drops and which bosses drop them.
I did this for my mage to get pieces with +spelldmg and +spellhit – and I continue doing this to get some minor upgrades as I wait for my dkp to build and mage set items to drop in MC.
“Finally, skip the Tier 0 crap, unless you intend to upgrade some pieces to 0.5.”
I have actually come to realize what you say is true, as I’m pretty much giving up on getting my gloves (the new PvP blue gloves are ten times better and my gloves just wont drop). However, I’d like to try and get my 6 piece bonus and get the 2 set PvP blue gear bonus (1.11 upgrade). I’ll have +40 AP, 4% chance to gain 200 mana per hit, and +20 AGI, as well as a 4% increase to multi-shot damage from the gloves. The chance of 200 mana will benefit my current lack of int gear for raiding. I focused on mostly stamina and agi gear pre-60 because of PvP and solo PvE. Stamina doesn’t really do much for me in instances, especially raids.
A good guild is worth its weight in gold, and I don’t mean WOW gold. Without a raiding guild at 60 you’re completely shut out of the best gear. Blizzard is trying to address that issue but .5 tier just doesn’t cut it. I hope that the new guild works out for you and your brother.
Maintaining a raiding guild requires a lot of time. I don’t think many players realize just how much time the guild officers have to put into managing and organzing the raids. And guild merges to get raiding numbers often is pure drama. I have friends who have been completely unsuccessful in finding guilds that are regularly running MC, let alone BWL and AQ. They’ve gone thru several guilds all claiming to be doing MC but find after a couple of weeks that they’re not doing it and can barely schedule ZG runs.
The guild I’m in is experiencing a bit of a meltdown. We have so many of the original members without alts for so long that most have become sick to death of the raids. We had MC, ZG and Ony on farm status but of late can’t get enough ppl to show up anymore, as most are finally rolling alts and are bored with their mains. It’s pretty retarded to see us cancel raids because of attendance. And when we do go, we end up disenchanting many of the epics because no one needs them. *sigh* I’m among the guilty when it comes to being bored with my main and the raids.
Seems like the WOW end-game can definitely be a tale of two cities.
Well, we had another successful ZG run. We tried out the bat boss and it took us several tries but each attempt we got better and better until we finally downed it. Then we decided to go back to the snake boss we defeated last time and we downed it in our first attempt.
We’re getting lots of encouragement, everyone’s supportive, and the guild leader cares. My brother has 8th grade graduation (8th grade…WTF) on thursday, which means he and I are going to miss the raid scheduled, so the GL is going to try and change it up for us so we will be able to get in. It’s probably because we’re short on healers (no Druid except my brother has Innervate right now) and ranged DPS, but I like to think it’s because he cares. XD
I have lucked into a great guild, too. I joined it not long after starting anew on this server, when the server was a week or two old. (Yum! Minty fresh!) There was the goal of eventually doing end-game raids, but the idea was to grow the guild naturally, and level up, instead of trying to recruit a bunch of 60’s (once there were 60’s on the server, that is).
We’ve actually started raiding ZG, and have successfully downed the first two bosses, snakeman and batgirl. Even better, we did it with a group that included half a dozen members in their high 50’s….
The guild isn’t going to require anybody to spec talents in any particular way, either. How cool is that?