Hello,

My name is Zifna. I'm the guild leader of Resurgence Theory, a guild that got into Hyjal/BT about three weeks ago. We raid 5 nights a week for about 4 hours a night. We've been doing very well, 3/5 Hyjal & 5/9 BT, but I know that much of what we have cleared thus far is the "easy stuff." So, all's good so far, but with a number of our raiders cutting back their schedules to make room for classes as college starts up again, we've found that we need to recruit new members.

Unfortunately, the recruitment pool right now is shallow to say the least. We've been bumping our recruitment thread for some time on the WoW Guild Recruitment forums. I would think that we'd be fairly attractive with our progress in Hyjal/BT, but there are so many guilds looking for players right now relative to the amount of players looking for guilds that we haven't had nearly the response we had a few months ago when we were just another SSC guild attempting Vashj. Of the few people who have approached us, I think perhaps one is in a guild progressed enough to have killed Vashj, or has killed more than Void Reaver in Tempest Keep.

In addition to this problem of scarce and undergeared/inexperienced players, we add the extremely poorly ideated Hyjal/BT attunement process. In order to spend any time on new content we have found that we can run only one of the two T5 instances a week, so we've been alternating SSC/TK. This means it takes a long time after we recruit a probationary member before we can see them in a real raid... not only does this make the pinch of scarce members even harsher, I worry that it puts pressure on us to accept members that are not quite at the caliber we'd accept otherwise.


Judging by the flood of posts by BT/Hyjal guilds on the front of the WoW Guild Recruitment forums (I see 17 BT/Hyjal guilds recruiting on the first 2 pages) I can't imagine that we're alone in being frustrated by this situation. How have you guys dealt with the question of how to acquire and attune trial members while still leaving time for progression?

Just recruit people with "ok" gear and push them through t5 content.
If you are done with that then they can get almost every loot.
Like i wrote in another topic, we raided ssc/tk every week since first kill and only missed 1 kt kill the week we killed illidan. It wasnt that bad for us to recruit people then.
But we also raided 6 days a week and sometimes we extended the raidtime by 2-3hrs.
Usually 19-24 and sometimes 2-3hrs more.

It's tough. We've had barely enough people on for raids from the beginning of BT through Illidan. If any of your members have friends, now's the time to get them over. Post threads on guild recruitment and world of raids, but generally the apps you'll get will be....less than stellar. It also depends what classes you're looking for. I don't know how it is on horde-side, but for alliance you're just not going to find a shaman unless you poach them from another guild. Druids are incredibly hard to find too, as are decent warlocks and shadow priests.

The best advice I can give is pick people up no matter what class they are if your raids are shorthanded. Raiding with 25 sub-optimal classes is vastly superior to raiding with 22, so don't be afraid to bring in funky raid makeups.

That's about your best bet...is grab 6-7 people of various classes, take 2 nights 1 week and get them all attuned, and pray they are good enough/show up enough to hold you over.

Same thing with us Zifna. Lately we've been relying on our core members to show up for raids as some people had to quit for RL stuff since fall is here. Also there hasn't really been any decent apps lately even though we've lowered our expectations and took out the Vashj's vial requirement on the guild recruitment forums. I recommend doing SSC/TK every other week when you get a nice batch of apps despite your members hating those 2(90% of my member does). Keep reminding them that it's for progression and should be worth it in the long run

You vastly overstate the difference gear makes between players who have only been farming BT/Hyjal for three weeks and people who are working on SSC and TK. In terms of seeing people in 'real raids,' there is no reason you can't evaluate a player's ability on Tier 5 content especially when Vashj and Kael are arguably harder than early BT/Hyjal.

If you are having trouble with numbers, then yes, you will have to lower your standards and make yourself more attractive than the other guilds that are recruiting. By that I mean don't have exceedingly long application periods. Two or three weeks is sufficient to see how a person handles themselves in a raid. Don't have oppresively skewed DKP systems that block out applicants for months and months like I know some guilds have.

My old guild, Indomitable, collapsed with 3/5 Hyjal (and Azgalor at 4%) and 4/9 Black Temple around two months ago because the core of players was simply too small to sustain raiding. Don't let your position lull yourself into a false sense of security. Progression guilds need a solid base of players to draw from to form raids. Ease your requirements, make yourself more applicant friendly, and slowly separate the wheat from the chaff.

The recruiting pool is definitely bad right now.

What helped us was downing azgalor and gurtogg. Now our recruitment post says something like, "Recruting for Reliquary and Archimonde" -- which is a pretty appealing prospect for newcomers.

Updating our recruitment post with this information brought a swarm of apps our way.

Find Progressing guilds on your server who are not doing Vashj or Kael, steal their instances where possible to get the last boss only, makes attunement easier.

Well, ask nicely and buy rather than steal, but that's certainly one way of speeding things up

We've used other guilds instances before with their permission. Typically we use the 2 nethers we get from Vashj or Kael to make a belt for that guild, and sometimes one of their raid leaders asks to come along to see how the fight is done. It works out pretty well.

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far.

Well, buy or borrow rather than steal, of course... And this is something we've been looking into... Bloodscalp doesn't have a lot of opportunity for this but we may end up purchasing Ludicrous Speed's (Yes, the WowJutsu guys! <3) Vashj if they can't get her down. Various things have caused this not to come to fruition as of yet but it is a possibility we're pursuing.




And indeed, if the applicants we were finding were in the sort of guilds that were working on Vashj and Kael I'd be pretty pleased. But while there isn't much of a gear gap between Kael and 3 wks into Black Temple, there's a pretty big gear gap between "My guild kills Void Reaver" and Black Temple. So perhaps I misrepresented the quality of applicants that we were seeing... most have, at best, been 2-3 bosses into SSC + Void Reaver.

I'd agree that players' performance in Tier 5 can demonstrate their knowledge of a class... but if we've just run it for the week when they transfer over, they're going to end up sitting around for 6 days before we run it, or tagging along on unofficial activities like PuG Gruul, and then do so again before we run the other instance they need for a key. If they transfer over on a TK week from a guild that never got to Karathress it's going to be TK > SSC > TK+Hyjal before they can really raid with us full-time. We like to evaluate players not only on skill but also on attendance. It's all very well to be an awesome warlock, but if you only make it to raids once a week your contribution to the guild isn't going to be very large.

Our application post doesn't even have requirements at this point... simply a statement that having part of your keying process complete is a major plus in an applicant's favor.

To those who suggest getting a double-handful of applicants and trying to key them all at once... How would you go about this? Simply not run any T5 until you have 'enough' to bother with it, and then go for it? Simply have the applicants hang out on your roster but not be able to attend raids until you have reached your predetermined quota? I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything, simply trying to see how what you are suggesting would work logistically. I don't think I could find 6-9 people and have them transfer over simultaneously, unless perhaps I happened across a recently disbanded guild and found them all in the same place... Which I suppose is possible, just not something I can plan on. ^_^;