This morning I went over to WoWJutsu to check out my guild’s progression, now that we have our first bear mount. It’s not that I expect us to be ranked crazy high or anything, but I was just curious. Well, we are ranked 31st on the server, which all things considered isn’t half bad. Keep in mind that we rarely run 25 mans in house (our last 25 man was probably 2 months ago) and we are most definitely a casual guild.
While I was there, I took a look at the big time raiding guilds that are on top on my server. We don’t have any guilds that have cleared SWP, but of course we do have our share that are running it. Still, there are many guilds FAR more progressed than ours. Just for giggles, I decided to look into how those higher up raiding guilds do recruitment, and see what kind of commitments they require.
I did this with NO PLANS to ever try to apply to such a guild, just as an academic exercise. What does it take to be in the top 10 guilds on our server?
Well, what I found showed me that I will never, ever, EVER be a part of any of them, and here is why.
First of all, I STILL don’t meet many of their gear requirements, and I like to think I’m doing pretty well. I don’t have ALL the good badge gear or anything, but I have the best pants and healy mace. (Frankly, it’s dang near impossible for me to farm badges regularly. When I log on at 10 pm, it can be hard to find a decent heroic run, in guild or not.) I also have a smattering of gear from ZA, SSC, and one of the best pair of healing boots in the game. (My armory, for the curious.)
From the looks of it, all I really have to do is farm the 230 or so badges to get the rest of the 2.4 badge gear.
Yeah, right.
Of course, I could also get lucky with a couple more drops, like the helm from Jan’alai in ZA and the T6 gloves from Azgalor, should I get lucky and be high enough on the SK list to grab them. Still, it would take considerably more time, unless I got REALLY lucky.
Ok, gear aside, what about the time investment?
Well, most guilds I looked at raid 4 or 5 nights a week, for more than 3 hours each night, and expect 80% attendance. So I’d have to raid 3 or 4 nights a week, 3 or more hours each night. And that doesn’t include time farming for consumables and the like. I play roughly 10 hours a week now, as a raider I’d have to put in at least 5 more by my calculations.
Add to that fact I’d have to raid Monday, Wednesday and Thursday nights in most cases.
Again, yeah, right.
The only way that would happen is if I went through the Big D, and I don’t mean Dallas. Now, I know there are those out there who have sacrificed their relationships for WoW, but I am not one of them.
I don’t have the gear, I don’t have the time.
So I sighed, realizing my lot in this game. There is only so far I can go.
Let me ask you this, though, why don’t raiding guilds value skill MORE highly than attendance and a few holes in gear? Yes, they do all have a trial period or other skill-based "audition" for the guild, but that comes AFTER they see you can make 80% of the raids and you’re already decked out in T6.
I am POSITIVE that if they gave me some kind of audition, maybe a run with them through Heroic MagT or something, they will see I’m no slouch.
Oh well, those are the breaks. That’s the sacrifice I make, or rather don’t make. WoW is a past time for me, and I have no intention of "clocking in" three or four nights a week. This has made me even more appreciative that I do have a raiding outlet given my time restrictions. I can only go once a week, but when I sign up, they always take me. I like to think I’m one of the better healers in my raiding alliance, and I can be happy with that.
Maybe Wrath will change the way things are done. We shall see.
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I’m a former twenty-hour a week raider who was an active participant in progression raiding back in the day — when I had the flexibility to do so, mind you. So I know some variation of what those guilds are expecting out of players.
What I fail to understand is why so many people require that kind of level of commitment. My guild, the Drunken Badgers, raids once (yes, once!) a week for five hours. We successfully made full clears of Mount Hyjal in under a month. We are currently four bosses down in Black Temple. We have a raid roster, but no mandatory attendance rate. If you don’t show up for a number of weeks (assuming you’ve let us know ahead of time), you get put into a sub status. That doesn’t mean that we won’t try to work you in when we can, though, or that you’re blackballed from the raid.
In the eyes of our contemporaries, we’re casual raiders and our progress has been nothing short of uncanny. We rely on recommendations to get initiates into the guild, but we’ll take applicants outside of the guild for the raid. Hell, most of the time we go out of the way to do a heroic five-man with a new guy just to assess his performance and mostly because we don’t want some egotistical idiot who thinks his gear to be the key to get into the raid.
The nice thing is that many of our raiders have their significant others in the raid, which helps allay the feelings of “you’re spending more time with those strangers than you are me!” spousal/significant other syndrome.
I dunno. Hardcore works for progressive raiding guilds who want to down content before anyone else, but, for me, I’ll stick with raiding with friends once a week and smashing content anyways!
I am with ya there PTD, that’s alot of time. I mean I play that much, but to have it all committed to raiding, not be able to AFK whenever I want, no thanks. And damn you!! I have that danged song in my head!
“I’m goin through the Big D, and I don’t mean Dallas…”
@Cynra
Thanks for the great perspective! I wish more guilds would do it like yours does. Does EVERYONE have to shoot for the bleeding edge? When you make WoW like work, doesn’t performance sometimes suffer?
@Jess
Sorry Jess, I’m not even a country music fan, but I do remember that one!
Well, One thing to realize, PTD, is Bandits started WAY LATE. We’ve only been actively raiding about a year. We lost alot of time messing arround with rebooting raiding after a guild fracture and with struggling to get the appropriate classes, leadership and strats to get the raiding going again. If we had not messed arround so much and started earlier, I suspect we would be finishing BT in the alliance right now if not farther. We basiclaly lost 6-8months right there.
Oddly enough, the alliance values are starting to shift towards valuing skill over gear. Bandits in particular have a rep for being players that have done their homework and know how to play whatever toon they bring to the table. PTD, Zhenkhal, KelriK, DK… Alot of times, the leadership will juggle peope in the raid to work these guys in if they signup because they know they will be guarantees. Unfortunately we just don’t see many Bandits willing to signup for the alliance runs consistantly.
Raiding is goign to evolve. The gear difference between 10man and 25 man is not extremely significant. You’ll see a progression where folks will be pushing the 10 mans on every lockout timer they are avialble while the larger groups are able to go in and go for the min/max gearing avaialble in the 25man content. I think you’ll see our alliance stabalize and get started sooner this time arround and hopefully we can bring more bandits along.
@Din
Yes, it did take us awhile to really get it going. I do agree that it will be different this time around. I think we do have a pretty strong core of people that we didn’t have right out of the gate last time. Hopefully more Bandits will look to sign up now that things are changing a bit in the alliance. I personally try to talk to people and convince them to give it a try whenever I can. I know we have even MORE solid people that could really contribute.
yes I wish my hardcore guild would put greater emphasis on skill, and less on attendence. Whats the point of having highly ranked raiders who come to every raid… who are basically full of themselves and their own gear lusts, and dont give a damn about 24 other people? We also tend to recruit low geared people too (not sure why). It makes me cringe (and applaud of course! ) when I hear about more casual guilds knocking down bosses about 5 times faster than we do… and I know the differences are in skill, a lack of ego, maturity etc. Nothing to do with hours per week, or the stats on your gear. We wipe on hard bosses because people do foolish thing – not because our gear sucks.
I guess my perfect guild would be a combo of 15-20 scheduled hours a week, and all of the above!
I tend to believe the europeans are just naturally more skilled & mature too, and that’s why they’re always ahead of the US in progression. Look at the kind of gear they used to get some world firsts – its laughably low level and therefore pretty amazing.
“Let me ask you this, though, why don’t raiding guilds value skill MORE highly than attendance and a few holes in gear? Yes, they do all have a trial period or other skill-based “audition” for the guild, but that comes AFTER they see you can make 80% of the raids and you’re already decked out in T6.”
Basically, it’s because they require skill level _and_ attendance. If they have a raid spot to fill, they need them to be a great player as well as a readily-available one. If they’re raiding three nights a week, they need that raider to be available as often as possible – they don’t want to have to recruit three shammies who can only come one night a week.
Part of success is consistency; when learning a new boss, there’s nothing more frustrating than coming in for a second night at it, only to have half a dozen different people in the team who weren’t there last night – it makes it very hard to capitalize on past progress because the new people now have to spend all that time learning what you learnt last night.
Wht it boils down to is that they require skill _and_ availability, and they have to use one of them as a criterion first. If they used skill as the first criterion they’d wind up trialling many, many more raiders who they’d ultimately have to say no to anyway, when it became clear they couldn’t meet the availability requirements.
Speaking as a guild leader and raid organiser, I’d _far_ rather have a 90% player who’s available all the time than a 100% player who can only raid once a week.
Oh, and re the gearing thing – it’s generally because they’re recruiting to fill a hole in their progression raiding roster. If they’re raiding Sunwell, an applicant in Karazhan and early TK gear just won’t be able to perform to the necessary levels due to a lack of gearing. Sure, they might be great in a month or six weeks when you’ve geared them up, but you need them _now_.
Look at it like the employment market – sometimes a company offers internships or traineeships, where they’ll take someone on based on their potential and help them grow into a valuable asset; other times, they recruit for a skilled and experienced employee because they need them to perform right now.
Wrath is close enough that any guilds who are recruiting now are madly trying to get content done before it hits – they can’t afford to wait for someone to gear up. Post-expansion release, things may well be different.
This was the number one reason i avoided raiding in the first place.
Until some friends of my introduced me to the Lurkers (Terenas PVE sever Horde side), they do value skill over gear, they do have fun, WoW raiding isn’t a second job, it is fun, and I pitty those guilds who have forgotten that.
Absolutely with you there 100% PTD. The interesting is I came across a statistic somewhere-or-other that said only 20% of wow players were hard core raiders.
The guild of which I’m GM – we have kara on farm but have only taken down the first boss in ZA – is based more on having fun together than reaching unreachable heights.
We’ve seen people leave ofc to go to raiding guilds, but we’ve had a fair few of those return cos they didn’t like it.