Serious Casual: What the hell happened here

Hello friends - I am Nite_Moogle. If you have been reading EJ's public forums for some time you may remember some of my posts regarding enhancement shamans that pre-dated the current compendium. I have more or less retreated from the public forums since there isn't much for me to add to the current understanding of game mechanics. About a year ago, I was part of a guild on Garona that was doing very early TBC raiding. I'd rerolled a Paladin at TBC release, only to discover I hated it at 70 and I ended up playing my shaman anyway. By May I was frustrated by poor performance by my guildmates and walked away from the game for several months. I continued to read EJ because EJ is a great place to read and post.

In late August I reinstalled and resubscribed and went to Mal'Ganis. I borrowed 10 gold from Mork and picked up a guild charter and made several other people from the Benefactor's Bar who were also playing on Mal'Ganis or happened to be in IRC sign it. This was the inauspicious start of <Serious Casual> -- I am the guild leader because I got 10 signatures before Rhydian did. (Sorry Rhyd. I know how much you'd want to be guild leader. ) There were no warriors after the first 2 days of invites so I rolled Airhorn on August 24, 2007. At this point I had only wanted to make sure that there'd be a competent tank available if enough people stuck around to level 70 that we could do some instances, heroics and maybe even Kara if we were really ambitious. Invites were extended to any Benefactor.

Fast forward to March 12, 2008 -- Illidan is dead by <Serious Casual>'s hand. There are approximately 300 accounts in the guild, and we're the 710th U.S. guild recorded by wowjutsu to clear all TBC raid content.

What the hell happened here?

That is a good question and one that I ask myself more often than you'd think. SC was a lightning strike from a clear sky -- it's unlikely that anything like this will happen again. I massively underestimated the potential draw of a guild composed of people that were interested in not being terrible (which is why they read EJ in the first place) even if it meant starting over. Patch 2.3 hit right as we reached 70 so people became well equipped with very good badge gear right out of the gate. The first few Kara clears went very well, and we started mumbling about maybe getting to see tier 6 before the expansion pack hit. A few members got involved with a TK raid group before the year was out. We pushed the start of raiding back a few weeks due to the craziness of the holiday season, even though people were chomping at the bit to get started.

Then it all clicked. The first 'official' Tier 5 raid was January 2, 2008 and we cleared the zone. Kael was downed by mid-month. Archimonde died on the first Hyjal raid. It took three (four?) resets of BT to kill Illidan. The time from the first time we set foot in to SSC to killing Illidan spanned 70 days. By any measure of success this is complete and total insanity and I have a hard time believing I have these dates are right without looking at the post history. Illidan was killed by over a dozen guilds before we were even founded and we're still in the top 725 U.S. to knock him down -- this simply blows my mind.

Did we get some help along the way? Absolutely. SC and EJ's casual members both cooperated heavily in tier 5 and tier 6 and we ran two clears of both T5 zones for a few weeks. We were able to purchase large amounts of Hearts of Darkness from other Mal'Ganis guilds, which saved tremendous time preparing for Mother. Gurgthock himself even came along for the first Hyjal raid. It wouldn't have gone this fast if we'd not had 2.3 badge gear to lean on, or if we'd had to deal with the bugginess and imbalance that plagued the initial releases of these zones.

Despite all this the guild has benefited the most from simply being in the right place at the right time. A large number of people had been frustrated with their guilds for some time and either transferred or re-rolled on Mal'Ganis for a fresh start. Success breeds success, and as we worked through the early level 70 content more people kept arriving. Even though the guild is still a social venture, the number of highly skilled players that came over is above and beyond what I had hoped for in my wildest dreams. Players who were used to being top dog at their class in their old guild were suddenly being pushed even harder to perform well, and they rose to the challenge. DPS and healing numbers that were well beyond what I and others thought was realistic to expect paved the way for [sigh] raid juggernauting. There were enough people that raid composition was almost never an issue, and we were able to field balanced raids without worrying about whether or not a substitute was going to be good enough to get the job done. Players that were two or three weeks off of level 70 were participating in the apex fights of tier 5. Raid leaders stepped up and shared the responsibility of herding cats. Loot was pushed to key classes like tanks and people passed off small upgrades to people that needed it worse. The mentality of the guild was always that of a collective, ever pushing forward. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction with what the guild has achieved and it simply wouldn't be possible without the awesome people that carry the <Serious Casual> tag.

In other words, you or I really shouldn't expect this to happen anytime soon. Your odds of finding a group of people like this aren't very good.

Why am I telling you all of this? It isn't to toot my own horn -- I haven't actually raided in nearly a month, and my play time has been nearly non-existent of late. In the coming weeks I will go over things that I have learned from this experience, and it's important that you understand that I am not just making things up. What's happened for SC is unique to be sure and it's been a huge success but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been done better. I think there are things both good and bad that would be useful to share with others.

Will what we've done continue in to the Sunwell? I sure hope so. Will we be competing with top guilds for world first progression? Probably not. But I've been wrong before.

Also, Gurg has threatened to ban us if we clear the zone first.