What are we to do when the game begins to feel tedious and annoying? Why reroll of course. I’ve had a lot of issues in the past with my guild. I know a lot of them will come back to the game when Cataclysm hits; it’s the same ol’ cycle that we go through in every expansion. I logged on the other night, it was a Tuesday, usually a good night for us, and I was the only person online. It’s hard to raid with a guild of 1. Even when they decide to pick it back up, I know that it’s going to be raiding their way and not my way; their times, not my times.

Me and my pal Astar, and possibly Seeathis, if assuming we can persuade him are going to reroll on a new, low-population RP server. We’re going to start a new guild and start at the beginning again, AS HORDE. With Cataclysm, all the new areas are getting revamped, it’s time to go back and enjoy them all again. Raiding is the ultimate goal, but its only part of the new content being released in the expansion. I’m going to take my time and enjoy it.

Our new guild is going to be called “Evil to the Core”. I feel like a fresh start, on a new server is what I need. I’m planning on rolling an Undead or Orc Death Knight, and a Blood Elf Paladin. I’m going to play and try out both the new races and their starting areas, but I definitely don’t want to stick with a Goblin as my main class; to gnomey, never liked gnomes. Gnome and Night Elf Death Knights strike me as oddities, like Gnome warriors. People play them because they look like contradictions. I’ve never felt that either of those races fit Death Knights. You’re free to have your own opinions, but that’s mine. I don’t think I’d want UnholyGnome and BloodyNightElf in my guild (because those are the wonderfully original names they’d have).

Speaking of names, you people are getting lazy. I’ve ran into waaay too many stupid named in Silvermoon while I’ve been leveling yet another Blood Elf. Every time I see a HoofnHots or TrollTamer, I want to gouge my eyes out and quit Wow; another reason why I want to be on an RP server.

I’ve been thinking a lot about raiding lately and wanted to share some of my thoughts about the state of raiding in WoW. I’ve been a guild leader or officer for pretty much all of Wow 1.0 – 3.1. I’ve never been the hardest of the hardcore; but I’ve managed to find a good balance between hardcore and casual. I consider myself as neither.

Leading a guild has changed drastically between each expansion. In Wow 1.0, guilds were substantially larger and there were less of them to go around. At that time, recruits were plenty. Many people were just making their first steps from a “friend guild” to a real raiding guild.

My guild started out as a friend guild, but grew into a raiding guild as we all hit 70 and got bored with the 5-man dungeon content. At that time, Zul’Gurub had first been released. So we worked our way as a 20-Man raiding guild until we had enough for a 40-Man to attempt Molten Core.

Back in those days, choosing who got tier items and choosing who gets the fire resist and who’s main tank meant a lot more than it does now. Resistance was key is a lot of places, where today it’s really just a joke. There was tons of resistance gear in the professions for BC, but it was all pretty much worthless filler junk. Did any of you really use the Aldor and Scryer resist gear? If you did, you were stupid; especially if you dropped epics for them. As a tank, I maybe jokingly tried the arcane resist gear when we were stuck on Curator, but I never used it again.

I miss the synergy involved in planning a raid and planning groups. You had to plan who goes into what group, and make sure groups had healers (we didn’t’ know about raid frames back then, healing across groups was totally taboo). Organize classes according to buffs, work out your 5 minute pally buffs. Organize your DKP. I wrote a super cool website application to manage our “home-brewed” DKP system. It was a very different experience from WotLK or even BC.

The work and game knowledge required to do a lot of that is gone from the game, but managing a guild still has its headaches. The guild is made up of two types of people. Those who are in it for the guild, and those who are in it for the loot. I’d imagine that a given guild would be about 50/50. When the raiding gets tough and the guild wipes, it makes the first type stronger; but it makes the second type start to question their loyalties or question their ties to the guild.

Fast forward to WotLK; Naxxramas has often been quoted as the best dungeon Blizzard has ever made. The first version was intense and immensely difficult. For Wrath, they diluted it and repacked it as the first entry-level raid dungeon. Like clipping off a viper’s fangs, Naxxramas was now a much easier instance to complete. I’d say that Heroic Naxxramas really wasn’t all that much more difficult than the Normal version.

I really think that this has hurt Wow, since it was such an easy dungeon, even PuG’s can succeed. It’s bred a raiding atmosphere where instead of a few big successful guilds and a large recruiting pool; everyone thinks they can be a competent raid leader. Many guilds that have seen success in Naxx, couldn’t have held their own in the original version or in Ahn’Qiraj. I think this is a worrying trend because the guilds that are actually progressing into Ulduar are stuck with a dwindling recruiting pool because a lot of people are content to be in these guilds that will probably not be able to succeed past Naxxramas.

Another situation is that your guild will encounter something that mine did. When we started to wipe in early Ulduar, some of these people who were tied more to the loot than the guild thought that they could do it better. They split off and convinced seven or eight people to join them. None of these split-off guilds have ever really been able to match our former raiding progression, yet they still think they can do it.

I question their motives. If their rationalization for leaving the guild and betraying us by pulling members away with them; I can’t believe they’re qualified to run an honorable guild.

I’m in it for my guild. I wouldn’t spend so much time organizing events and recruiting if I wasn’t in it for the right reasons. I feel bad that a little wipage causes members to rethink their membership. I kinda think that they either weren’t a part of or don’t remember Molten Core and Black Wing Lair, and that the current raid dungeons like Naxxramas have made people think that the guild can learn entire fights in one sitting. To those people, I say Grow Up! If you want the gear, if you want to raid, you need to pay your dues and learn the content.

Have you had similar guild situations like mine? I’d love to hear about them. Send me a comment at questions@deathknighttactics.com.

I’ve had a really stressful week. I have to get this off my chest. The drama llama llama reeled its ugly head in my guild yet again. I’m a guild master, and we’ve been raiding, in one form or another since WoW Vanilla. To put this inter perspective, here’s a brief history of my guild.

We started The Core on day one of the release of the original wow. The guild leader was originally my best friend IRL Yuriken. Our first raid was Deadmines at level 14 ? (yes, we raided Deadmines with 10 people at level 14). We’ve come a long way since then. We server transferred from Argent Dawn to Icecrown and reformed the guild. When we did that as Burning Crusade was released, I took over as Guild Leader. We slowly built The Core into a second tier raiding guild (We were starting SSC\The Eye when the progression guilds were starting Black Temple). There were about five or six other guilds in our category that were behind the hard core raiding guilds.

By the end of BC, we had finished most of the Tier 5 dungeons and had started raiding Black Temple. There was a growing discontentment in the guild about people here and there thought they were better than other people. People got upset that our Random roll loot system gave equal priority to both veteran and new members for the new Tier6-quality loot that we were getting from Black Temple and Mount Hyjal. Three people, who I’ll label as malcontents, named Feldwin, Naborel, and Diatrysis decided that they didn’t like our way and that they could do it better. Keep in mind that two of the three hadn’t been active raiders for a while. Diatrysis never really showed up to much of anything and was a chronic alt-switcher, trying to soak up gear on multiple characters. We had pretty strict rules on main switching; which is one of the things they were disenfranchised with.

They ended up leaving the guild and forming their own guild called “Order of the Silver Hand”, a very original name … Through shady dealing, they convinced 11ish other people in my guild to go with them. Several others ended up leaving as well because their little revolt created the momentum for others to question the guild’s direction. One of the people that left to join them was Luniz, a healer that had been with us since the beginning of BC raiding, had struggled with us through KZ. They even ended up taking Jacy who was one of our officers. I was totally shocked that they could convince one of my officers to join them, someone I had trusted.

Fast forward to today. Following the release of Wrath, we all ended up raiding together for 25-Mans. I questioned the integrity of raiding with them, but others like Yuriken and Kilios thought they were trustworthy enough to raid with. We depended on them to fill 25-man spots for raids.

When UIduar hit, they was an initial 25-man raid which I couldn’t attend. A situation happened where a number of people from OotSH bailed on the raid, It appeared like an orchestrated bailing of the guild, immature words were spoken, and it led to a permanent OotSH boycott of our 25-Man raids.

Due to this, we were unable to fill spots for 25-mans on our own and had to go back to recruiting again. During this time, another one of our former raid leaders had left the guild to start his own. This new guild is called Red Dawn. Varehan was supposed to be leading our second Core 10-man night, but apparently he was just filling it with his friends outside the guild and a few people here and there who didn’t make it into the primary night. He was pretty much doing his own thing already, so he just made it official and left to do his own thing.

25-mans were out of the picture because we didn’t have the manpower, so we were just running 10-man Ulduar and Naxx to keep up the gearing. With only 10 spots to fill, people were getting anxious. Add to that near zero quality applicants and people started to get mad that they weren’t in the “progression group” and instead were in the “suck group”. A few people left or pulled out their alts, and that started a momentum of people leaving. As it stands now, I’ve lost about 8 more raiders to them. As it stands now, I barely have enough people left to form a single 10-man.

I’ve put a lot of time into organizing my guild, recruiting, and keeping it running for the last few years. It’s extremely demoralizing to have several people jump in and ruin it for stupid reasons. In both situations, there were active efforts to pull people from my guild. I didn’t do anything to these people except provide solid leadership. They’ve taken a good experienced, and geared raiding guild, torn it into three pieces, and now none of us can really do anything. I told my best friend that, I’m not necessarily going to quit now, but for the first time in a while, I can actually envision life without Warcraft. That’s how much this situation has burned me.