Couldn't agree more. This is the time to be picking up dedicated raid-oriented people.

The issue is more that the lootwhores that lead most guilds are having enthusiasm issues with continuing on.

I know praetorian will disagree with my method of going about this but...QFT.

Seriously, I have known so many guild leaders whom beleive their ability to get people to sign their charter in march means that they deserve loot first now. Glad my guild is not like that as most of our loot whores are feral druids and rogues with every weapon possible and dkp that's off the charts.

Eh Feral Druids are going to be really negative in most DKP systems unless you have your system accounting for hybrids (well unless you think Feral Druids don't need healing gear :-p). Sure wouldn't call hybrid classes lootwhores. Its an issue I know our guild has that hybrids are all way below in DKP over the single focus classes (that includes warriors), which we are looking at trying to address partially in the expansion.

Most the people I know who are negative are not the ones I call loot whores its often people more to the top who have to have the best and will let upgrades rot so they can have the most DKP to get the best. The negative people often just pick up whats otherwise going to rot.

Anyways thats barely on topic and you have the wrong loot whores who are the ones that aren't going to want to raid.

Edit: BTW whats your suggestion to do with the overwhelming amount of leather loot in AQ? Let it rot so people aren't lootwhores as you say?

End-game guilds rely on people who desire loot. Take out the drive for loot, and your raid force will slowly dwindle to only those there not for loot, which more likely than not is only 20-30.

Juggernaut has to deal with this problem to a higher degree due to being the largest and most progressed guild on the server. You also recruit more people on average of the 'loot' mindset than a good number of other guilds on the server. I'm not faulting you for this method, but in cases like this it can and apparently did for a time work against you until Unwanted Prophecy took its downhill turn.

/shrug As far the topic is concerned, we're still pressing forward. I foresee us only hitting Loatheb or close to him pre-Xpac. I think we'll run into consumable problems at that point due to a lack of interest in farming the insane amount of herbs required (80 man hours+ per week), and our guild bank is not capable of handling such a steep requirement either. It'll be a large stumbling block that I'm not sure our raid force has the dedication to overcome. I may be surprised though.

As far as Juggernaut taking more "loot" oriented people, we took the people who applied to the guild. I'd love to say we had millions of applicants, and everything was roses, but for a very long time, we simply took everyone who applied who met our pretty basic criteria. Our loot system is not terribly palatable to "loot whoring" considering its a populist "everyone gets 1/5th of the loot that drops" system. You cant save your dkp, loot more than John, etc.

Also, lets be clear, Juggernaut is in better shape than its been in a long time. We regularly have 50 people online at raid time, we have 10 people waiting to get in, and rotating through content they need to be in for/see, attendance is at an all time high, and everyone is geared to the teeth right now, rather than 35 with 10 in no gear like we had during the big C'Thun push.

I'm not talking about Juggernaut specifically, we're on Thaddius, and have more momentum right now than we have had since we crashed through BWL, I'm on a high from last night still, where we pretty much one shotted the whole abomination wing(we had a couple of silly wipes, but not ones that took any time) which is more than I can say for many previous weeks, where wipes turn into 25 minute odysseys getting ready for another "attempt".

It's unfortunate it took UP breaking up to get us here, but now that we are, I am very happy with where we stand.

Still guilds like UP are disappearing on every server, not just CC.

To be fair, Cenarion Circle doesn't exactly have a pile of good apps to choose from so you likely have to take what you can get, despite possible loot whores.. I hate to make generalizations, but a majority of people I played with on that server were terrible.

I'll reply here.

If you think we only just now have to start thinking this way, I think you underestimate how tight things are for guilds like us.

This had to start for us a long time ago for us. And I'll basically be pushing it as hard as I think the members can handle.

One week, we did our farm really cleanly and had two days for new content. Got both Maexxna and Patchwerk (neither of whom we'd seen before) down. Suddenly, re-defining those as "farm" left us with less than a day for new content, consistently. I put up with that for about two weeks and then said, "ok, there's no way we can do AQ anymore."

We bought C'Thun instances from a lower-tier guild for a few weeks, but two days of pure new content work (my stated long-term goal) really wasn't happening. Thaddius took us a long time with piecemeal learning time. I was already making posts like, "farming 11 or 12 Naxx bosses every week while we finish this out is simply not an option." And if we're not clearing every Naxx boss, then C'Thun, who has long trash and doesn't provide Frozen Runes, is out of the question.

Now, with 10 weeks to go, it's just a pure push. 4H have to go down before the holiday lull (which may include a full week off of raiding) to have any chance, and probably a few weeks before--we need time afterwards to go back and refine the 13-boss farm into a really clean state to even have any time left in the week. I don't see how we can really spend any time outside of Deathknight Wing right now.

Will people go for it? I really don't know. To an extent, I should consider myself lucky to have 40 people showing up every evening--the only two Gothik-killing Alliance guilds on our server blew up in the past week. But basically, there's little point to playing right now unless we're going to go for broke on the new content.

The only way I see it possible is to pretty much drop AQ40 for my guild and put a pause on several of the bosses in the naxx wings so that we have more time to work on new stuff. I'll end up having to push Gothik and Thaddius at nearly the same time in order to give my guild time for 4H. People are already complaining about 4H being a tough fight though. It was hard enough getting them to farm pots for loatheb, which was seen as an impossible fight.

We're working on 4H now, and we've basically dropped AQ40 from our schedule (although I might have just brokered a deal that would net us a weekly Emps-dead instance from a guild which has decided to focus on Maexxna, Noth, and Patchwerk in Naxx before going after C'thun, so we might just put it back in on a slow night). This week we finally thought to get Gothik dead on Tuesday, so that we can do 4H when we have the tanks on, instead of hoping we have the tanks on when we want to do 4H.

-nothing to see here-

i would guess they pay X gold to the guilds GM who uses it (hopefully) for stuff he needs (flasks, tank repair costs, enchant costs, etc etc). Just cause most guilds on this forum are well beyond bwl and the begingings of aq40, dont forget that a bwl running guild could easily use 3 flasks a clear (if not more).

We were in this exact position a few weeks ago. We had really crazy progress through the first 5-7 bosses in Nax during the summer. We made our way to Thaddius and hit the back to school slump. Being on an RPPvP server doesn't help recruitment at all but the the guild recruitment forums have been a godsend. After a horrific three weeks on Thaddius we set a guild goal of KT before xpac leading us to make the decision to drop MC and BWL from our raid schedule. From then on, its been 5 days in Nax, fridays off, saturdays AQ40 until this week. Killing Gothik we decided to go straight to the Deathknight wing to focus on Horsemen. Now, after three days of attempts they're down and we're ready to clear the rest of the wings to hit Saph.

Our current Schedule is as follows:

Sunday-Thursday: Nax
Friday: MC/BWL (no dkp, not scheduled, just to raid, its what we do :P)
Saturday: AQ40

All I can suggest to a guild with similar circumstances is stay focused and pray that your members are genuine. Our attendance has only grown going through Nax. These last few days, the waitlist has been hitting almost 15 people and by no means are we a zerg recruitment or a large guild for that matter. Set small goals for progression on bosses and do what is necessary to meet them. The accomplishment of these smaller goals can go a long way to boosting morale in the long run. For example with horsemen our goals were set and met as follows

Day 1: Mograine and Thane 50% shieldwalls (goal met)
Day 2: Mograine and Thane 20% shieldwalls (goal exceeded with Mograine dying and thane hitting 14%)
Day 3: 2 Horsemen Down (goal exceeded with all four hitting the turf)

Now this may be somewhat of a special case as there was no way in hell we could have predicted our progress to be so tremendous but it just goes to show how hard people will work and focus to hit their target.

We dropped AQ too. We decided to burn all our banks ressources for the two next month. Dreamfoil and such will be outdated as soon as TBC hits.

On a sidenote, lag on french isp -> Blizz servers is destroying a lot of guilds trying to finish Naxx atm. It's been 3 weeks now. Empire guild (working on KT) made a FoH post-like on their webby called "Plane of Lag". Poor us.

Naxx guild with 11 bosses dead here. We had a short period of time where we might be short on healers (especially for stuff like Patchwerk/Thaddius), but have gotten 3 quality healing apps in the last week or so and will get 2-3 more from transfers and attendance overall has picked up. We still haven't dropped AQ, BWL and run MC on a free day and we've got a streak of 3 bosses over a course of 2 weeks. Slumped without a new boss last week, then burned 11 bosses in a raiding day and a half so we're expecting a new kill this week on Monday, our next Naxx night.

It probably helps us immensely that we have a very large core of 20-25 people who have always been around Art of War/Suicide Kings/Aegis of Fire and being the only Horde guild on our server with deep progression means we rarely suffer from losing members to other guilds on the server. While we were learning Thaddius, when this thread was originally written, we hit a cockblock and became stagnant, which probably didn't help too much because none of us realistically expected to kill Thaddius through Kel'thuzad by November, but I'd like to think the release of the January date spurred us on and we're aiming at completing Naxx as early as possible.

I don't really see any good reason to be dropping AQ/BWL from your schedule unless you had them on farm status for a VERY long time. We had some member turnover (who doesn't?) so we still have 5-10 members who need gear from each instance, but the main reason BWL is run is to feed our guild bank with buyers so we can keep ourselves afloat with consumable costs for Naxx. As far as AQ, CThun still has some amazing loot that simply has no substitute until you're killing Kel'thuzad really. Trying to lead DKP until our next Scepter of the False Prophet ftl >_<

Not to mention raiding Naxx 5-6 days every week just screams burnout to me. I love having the weekends being treated as casual raids (Friday MCs, Saturday AQs, Sunday BWLs). When Gothik dies, we'll probably adjust when we kill bosses and practice 4H first, but I am generally against trying to overschedule Naxx when you're looking at weeks of wiping to the same boss.

With January 16th on the horizon, I think the guilds that are within touching distance (Thaddius/Loatheb/Gothik) of 4H should be dropping everything to try and reach them before the end of the year.

We dropped AQ a few weeks ago to focus entirely on Naxx, and dropped two new bosses in that time and are working on Gothik. Unless you have the ability to guarantee top notch performance and attendance on every Naxx night (which lets face it, the guilds with less than 3 wings clear probably can't), then four nights out of five just isn't going to be enough to effectively reach your goals unless you skip out on farm bosses.

That said - in line with what some others have suggested here, I am strongly tempted to put the farm bosses to one side and spend a week entirely focused on getting Gothik down so that we actually get the chance to see and work on the 4H. For a significant number of us, we just want to actually see and play the encounter more than anything else. I don't hold many illusions of actually killing them in the next 4 weeks (December will be a ghost town for us), but I'll be damned if I'm not gonna give it everything we've got to make sure we actually get there before the curtains come down on Naxx.

And in comical news, based on my post above about health, Juggernaut is no more. Disbanded over lack of participation, and inability to raid due to poor attendance. LOL.

A good 25 of us have rerolled on a PVP server in anticipation of TBC.

Thaddius. Thats where we ended, with Thaddius at %7.

If you go in with the right strat, 4H will take a few days to learn. If you don't, then settling on the right strat may take a while. There's more than one "right strat," but you need a raid leader who fully understands how the fight works and what factors will make or break a strat. For us, we spent two weeks of pretty intensive work changing strats on a regular basis -- well, two major changes, and then lots of little fine-tuning -- until we settled on something that worked for us, and then they died that day. Now that the basic theory is all out there, this should be much easier. Refining your strat is obviously about "well, what wiped us there, and how do we fix it?" but the hardest part when refining your strat is figuring out which wipes were due to an unacceptable risk or other flaw inherent in your strat, and which were just acceptable risks that you have to deal with and learn to work around as part of the fight.

Well to as great an extent as possible, we try to go into fights without any prior knowledge (though boards like this and its readership naturally make that a tenuous position to maintain :) ), and it's for this reason that I am both looking forward to 4H and also not overly confident that we can take them down in the time left. Hell, I'm still arguing with people about trying to crowd control at Gothik because our Ghost Side just can't keep up with the bastards.

I guess it's unavoidable that eventually someone will pipe up with "I heard you can do it like this" type suggestions, and we'll just crack on with what works best in practice.

I think it's safe to say that this is, and will continue to be, true of virtually all complex encounters that we come across in this game. Well said.

This came up several pages back, but if you're in a rush for frozen runes, you can actually get the runes from Anub, Noth, Patch, Gothik and Instructor (in increasing order of difficulty) with a hunter, druid, or rogue alt each week. Some classes work better for some spawn points and for a few you will want to have one class help the other get there and then leave the raid instance.

Heres a few ways to do some of it with a hunter:

Patch:
Drink a GNPP. Put on that kick ass nature set you made for huhu. Use a dream vision pot to find where on the wall the rune is. When the pather has left the front room and is about half way back into the room where Grob shoots the slims down, have cheetah on and pop a regular invis potion and take off running. You will be well into the room filled with slimes before invis wears off and generally the slimes in the room, while they see invis, dont react very fast to you and you will get hit at most once which the GNPP takes care of. Hop the slime river and FD on the corner. Once the pather comes in and out of patch's room, stand up, wait on FD timer then pop a lesser invis pot and run over to the rune. Loot the rune =)

To make this smoother, its a nice idead to have a druid and pariest in zone to buff / shield the hunter as he takes off. they can easily leave the raid / instance before the rune gets looted. The only random component is how quick the slimes react to you and therefore how much dmg you take from them. Same basic thing works with a druid and a soulstone or a rogue.

Noth:
Turn on detect undead, pop a GNPP, put on the huhu nature set. When the gargoyle begins moving away from the entrance, pop a lesser invis pot with cheetah on and run to the left side of the door down to Noth. FD there and I mean right in the crack or the guys to the left will agro you when you pop up. The garg that roams the entrance has a reasonably small agro radius. The one that roams the stairs has a huge one so if hes out run close to the undead on the left of the room to avoid him. Look at the pathing between the garg that roams the entrance and the garg that goes up and down the stairs. What you want to do is wait for the entrance garg to be flying away from you and out of agro range then stand up, turn on monkey, and wait on FD timer. When the stairs garg flys out pop a runspeed potion and deterance and hook it down the stairs and around the corner then FD and wait a sec and then eat some 4k food to cover the 7 stack nature dot you're probably carrying. If the stairs pather starts coming down run to the far left wall and eat some more until its off. Loot the rune. If you keep almost getting to the promised land and cant quite do it get soulstoned.

Anub:
come on

Gothik:
This one is plain hard with a hunter, easy with a rogue. Use an invuln pot and soulstone to rez after instructor wails on you or have a hunter pet pull instructor for you from the stairs. Then stealth past weapons, sprint past shade and vanish. Having a hunter to assist is definitely the better way to go.

When my guild got Grand Widow and failed to go do Maexxna one week (a while back) I made it all the way up past the trash between GW and Maex with a hunter but thats not really the point here since we're talking about alts farming new instances. I did a lot of this stuff just for the fun and challenge of doing it, then factored out the farmable bits and started doing that each week with several alts. I have a rogue, hunter, and druid.

If you really want to buy frozen runes, I might be willing to sell have an alt xfer pvp servers and sell. PM me. (sorry if thats against the rules)

We had someone manage to get Heigan's rune in an instance with only Noth dead.