I take it EJ is pretty big for a raiding guild. How do you guys deal with the problems of having such a large pool of players to draw from? Compared to most hardcore raiding guilds, with a tight group of 50-60 guys who show up everytime, it would seem that the loot and experience would be spread thin over such a large player base. Do you guys have a core group of players you take to all the high end stuff you're still learning? What kind of attendance % do most of these guys have?

We only have the same 40 people go every week, and if they miss a raid and we only have 39, they dont get to raid again next week and we replace them for that raid with a person selected randomly from the server.

Loot isn't spread so thin because they do multiple runs of MC/ony/zg etc per week.

They do make use of exploratory groups for new content.

For those who were wondering, this is how we ended up with Hellsoap.

And Hellsoap is our Resident Jackass.

We do have a large pool of raiders, but that is why we sport 2 MC's and 3 Onyxias a week.

The best-geared and longest-raiding members are typically the ones who do learning encounters. So, for a while, there has been a fairly select group of people going to BWL, but now that we have it down, we are starting to sub in people who haven't been to BWL.

I'm sure A'Q 40-man progression will be similar.

Yeah, basically, we're moving towards fielding two BWL groups. The problem is that just as you need a pool of 50ish dedicated people to consistently field a 40-man raid force, you need a pool of 100ish people to field two.

We easily have two MC clears weekly, kill Onyxia 3 times every 5 days (ugh I have 91 Onyxia scales in my backpack, WTB epic dragonscale crafting content Bliz thanks), and various Z'G runs over the course of the week.

Learning BWL, invites were strictly done based on best-geared, so you'd have a core of 25 or so people who were ALWAYS there, and then another 30 or so rotating through those remaining 15 spots on any given raid.

Right now we probably have 75 people in the guild who are truly well-geared for BWL, which makes for a hell of a lot of demand for BWL, but not quite enough for two viable groups yet. We can't two-group it until we get to a point where both groups can kill Nefarian, and we're still a little ways off from that. I'm rotating in about 5-10 noobs every week so they can learn all the BWL fights, and we'll go from there.

Only if you actually want to kill Broodlord.

http://thottbot.com/?sp=10442

Why not have one group that does Nef and another that does everything but in the interim?

TOO SOON

We tried this with molten core, when one group could kill ragnaros while the other couldn't. The problem with it is that people don't like to be in the "lesser" group, it really hurts morale, and then attendance suffers because of it. Nobody likes feeling that they're not "good enough to be in the good group" and that's completely understandable.

Instead of putting all of our best geared and least likely to go afk at an imporant time players in one group, we even it out so everyone gets an enjoyable experience when they do get to go, even if it means many people have to wait a while before they get their turn.

is this about me?

I still got a hearty laugh out of it

And that's after we've crafted an Onyxia cloak for damn near everybody who raids on a semi-regular basis.


It always is, love. It always is.

What happened this Sunday, Gurgthock!

What happened

You're lucky they got rid of the Vael despawn timer. :(

Paging Tokay to make yourself a damn cloak already.

Besides the warriors with less FR than a priest, we're not that undergeared are we? It's not like that fight has a lot to do with gear anyway (besides FR) since we're given so much mana to play with, it's just an agro fest and people fail to pay attention. As for most the other fights, it seemed to just be key things going wrong, and then there's the broodlord's murder strike, that was just bad luck or something, or as I bitched earlier, Assist the fucking mobs, I saw way too many tanks fail to be healed when the mob changed targets.

We had one with 7/8 valor and another with god knows what our second kill :-P

i bet the rest of your raid had good fr.

that didn't count, we had about 7-8 warriors and 6-7 rogues. all that melee= vael dead.

Undergeared for Vael is a) having less than 200 FR, B) having shite for HP, c) having shite for DPS, or d) a combination of the above. So while most all other stats are indeed moot since you have unlimited mana/energy/rage, the group Sunday night wasn't ideally geared for a successful dry run.


What'd your group look like on your Nef kill?

i never want to hear those words on a friday/saturday night!

Burn :(