Confessions from a Server First ex-guildee

This is in response to the excellent article on Snarkcraft about getting into a top guild.

Factors for successful applications.

I was in a raid guild for a year and we all saw every app that came in. 90% didn't get through the door. It has as much to do with the app's attitude as it does gear and what the guild needs.

If the guild doesn't need anyone, you are probably SOL. We denied dozens of great people just because we had full rosters. So do your homework there.

If you have a bad attitide, forget it (this shows up when people ask questions about your spec and gear. Always say "I did X because I think Y, but I'll try what you said and see if that works better" (and then do that)).

Networking

If its a guild on-server, you are best off doing PUGs, forming friends, getting to know people in good guilds. What really stands out is when a guildie said "i puged X with them and they were pretty good". If you had an off-night, they are going to use that judgement and say "don't take this guy".

The more I get into the real world the more i see how getting into a guild is alot like getting a job, its a relationship with the guild but you also get in 80% of the time through knowing someone.

Fit

Most importantly, make sure you and the guild are a good fit. That's a huge part of the application. In my guild, we tend to make off-color jokes (not racist or anything, just dirty i guess you could say). That's how the guild is, and if you are easily offended, you just not going to fit in.

Make sure you can raid when they say they are raiding. If you can't do the 3 nights a week they are raiding, why are you bothering to apply?

Gear

Also if you are looking for a top guild, make sure like Seri said that your gear matches their progression. People who are doing T8 raids are not going to want to have you come in heroic gear, your dps will be half of what it should be. Run Naxx PUGs, even if they are painful, get that gear. Run Vault when you can. Run the daily heroic. As dps it's hard to get gear, but its doable.

Consumables Expectations / Time Commitment

If you are in a point of your life where you can't devote all this time to raid, don't apply to a hard-core progression guild. They are going to want 3-4 hours 3-4 nights a week, un-interrupted. Sure, stuff happens but generally if you are in the raid team but not raiding, then you are taking up a slot for people who can raid and are willing to do all of that.

Top guilds make you burn through money like crazy. You are expected to flask on everything, even naxx10. Bring consumables, etc, basically everything you can to increase your performance. Everyone else is doing int, why shouldn't you. Don't expect the guild to fund anything for you. In my old guild we had 30k in funds, but it was deemed that the raiders needed to farm for their own consumables.

Sacrifices/Attitude

Know what you are getting into. Top guilds run 3, 4 raids a week, 3-4 hours each. That's all that plus your dailies to bring in enough revenue to cover repairs and consumables. When you get a piece of gear, people are gonna want to see you get it gemmed and enchanted with the best enchant asap. Don't be stingy on epic gear, it really shows your attitude.

If you want into a guild which is the best on the server, expect sacrifices. Yes, everyone has lives outside of the game, but, just to give an example. In my guild, almost all the raid team took 4-5 days off work and leveled to 80 within a week (within a week, just to emphasis). Within two weeks they were in naxx10. Within 3 weeks they cleared naxx10 and were in naxx25. Within 4 weeks they cleared naxx25. This is on a 3 night/4 hour each schedule. You can guess that during the first month they played 80 hours a week. This is insane, but what a top guild does. It was at this point I decided this guild was way too much for me (so did about 25% of the previous raid team). I fully expect when Ulduar hits, if they don't have server firsts on all the bosses, they will be neck and neck with one or two guilds.

Attitude

Speaking of attitude, lastly don't be intimidated by the guild's attidude. So what if it's the best guild on the server. They have bad nights. The thing about top guilds is that they are willing to spend weeks in game and out learning strats, memorizing, gearing up their char as much as possible, so that you get to the raid, everyone is on top of their game, and your performance is maximal.


The Gkick

We never used to kick people because they couldn't show up, but often people were alted if they only make 1 raid in 5 (for example if 26 people showed up, the alt would have less priority). We only kicked people on the spot if they were a poor match for the guild ideals and doing asshat behavior. If they turned out to be true idiots then they were benched. This happens alot. I heard it over and over 'players who don't perform will be benched'. This has as much to do with not dying than what your dps actually is.

The Heroic/Raid Trial

Almost every guild will make you do trials before you can roll on loot. This is to make sure that their investment isn't wasted. For your trial run, absolutely do not slack off. Do it when you are ready. My trial occured right after i transfered server, everything was a mess, i couldn't get on vent (didn't have it set up - relax, it takes 5 minutes to download and config it). I don't know how i got in (it was a new guild). I ended up ninjaing the first piece of loot from the heroic (They didn't bother to explain their loot rule of passing on everything then rolling). I got alot better, but I wouldn't have been accepted as the guild is now (they are much more hardcore now).

Main thing, be sure you are ready for the heroic. Your gear enchanted, gemed. Your consumables. Everything repaired (this is extremely important)

End is nigh?

I'm bored with WoW. I've been pulled into too many things in WoW. 4 different sets of friends started characters on 4 different servers, half horde and half alliance. I have 4 active mains, have leveled them all to 70+, i've done borean tundra now 4x.

To me the game always seems like a rush rush rush mentality. At first I started a few weeks behind my hardcore guild because i was busy doing RL stuff. When I got back, the hardcore raiders were all 80, and I got to grind to 80 while they were getting guild and server first achievements. (were #1 or #2 in alliance progression). Then I got to 80, did a total of 4 raids, decided I hated raiding now with my life the way it is.

Then! My horde guild decides it wants to do Naxx too, and I am the raid leader. So rush rush rush to 80. I'm now 75 and they are doing Naxx10 without me this weekend (sounds great to me).

Anyway main point is that I see several flaws in blizz and especially Wraith, and i predict that this is the last great expansion of the game.

1) The leveling time is far too long for a person to pick up and enjoy. The game has been out 4 years, but instead of doing horizontal content, they do vertical content. Granted it's shorter now, but we're still looking at 6+ months for a newbie to pick up and hit 80 in (as a first time, i could probably hit 80 in a month if i put my mind to it).

2) Wraith zones are far too narrow. We have quest ranges within zones that are only valid for characters in the back half of the zone requirement. For example, in ZD at level 75, you can only do half of the quests. You need to be 76 for the rest. Shol. basin? Need to be 76. What this means is that friends cant play together readily, unless they are the same exact level.

3) Problem with the game as a whole. Given that players are char levels 1 to 80, the likelyhood of your friends being at a similiar level are quite low, and in general unless you work very hard at it, its impossible to level together. The only way to actually play with your friends is only play that toon in the others presence.

Yes, recruit a friend helps, but that requires starting a new account. And sorry, not retroactive either. A friend recently picked up the game but didn't ask me about it, and thus didn't know about recruit a friend. By the time he told me he was already entrenched and didn't want to throw away a month of play time to start up with the recruit a friend method. This is a serious flaw and makes playing with friends that much harder.

4) Wraith is far too easy. Everyone just facerolls the content, and multiple wipes on bosses is rare unless people are truely clueless. Then people hit 80 and think they can stroll into 80. This is a mindset problem that blizz encouraged by totally lifting the rep requirements for heroics. Further, the attunements have been almost totally lifted in wraith (and they have no plan to bring them back). Yes attunements were a pain, but it was a roadblock meant to slow progression.

Now many guilds are done with all content and are focusing on achievements such as 3 drakes. This is far worse than TBC when guilds spent months struggling through kara, then had a whole another tier to look forward to (SSC/TK), and attunements to make sure people were prepared for that content.

Anyway, WoW is the best thing going, but all things end. After playing a game for thousands of hours its quite natural to be bored and want different things. But now the issue becomes how do we get our friends to try new MMOs?

Bad news for B3

Well the recession seems to strike deeper and deeper. Big Bear Butt got layed off today. I wish his family well and know times are indeed tight.

My guild

This pretty much sums up my raiding guild.

Big 80

Hit 80 last night, was a mad rush the last two days. Random thoughts.

1) Jeez leveling is time-consuming. I'm the last in the guild to level to 80 I think. I wonder what that says. Yet the guild is 'casual'.
2) I imagine most casuals wont hit 80 until January sometime, like end of January. We're looking at 8-10 hours per level at a casual basis. If you play 20 hours a week (which is alot), that's 5 weeks.
3) Most of the quests are great, but at the end I was really left searching for quests. One quest that unlocks a quest hub was bugged and that whole series of quests was denied to me.
4) If you play with rested XP all the way you will still burn through all but 3 zones, the start zone, and likely two middle zones.
5) The XP required per level doesn't change much at all, but the XP per mob and XP per quest does. So it does go quicker at higher levels.
6) Many of the later quests are single quest extremely long quest chains. At most you'll have two quests in the area with very short quest chains. So get used to flying to do the quest (or running) and coming back, and repeating this 4-5 times.
7) Thus an epic flying mount is almost required for the later zones. It will take much much longer without this. However if you sell your goods on AH, dont try to level professions, sell the greens you get, you should be close to 5000 at the end.
8) Professions: Enchanting becomes awesome, no longer do you have to do endless amounts of dungeons hoping for that rare drop, and every third quest gives a reward green or even a blue (there are much more quest blues now). I calculated last night, i saved almost all enchanting mats and have about 3000g worth, too bad I need 6000g worth of mats to get to 450.
9) This implies that they design it to get you halfway to profession cap while leveling, and the rest you do after cap.
10) quests are the absolute fastest way to level. Don't do an instance more than once, and that after you have several quests leading there (the dps boost from the blues means decreased leveling)
11) Shadowmeld (night elf racial) is a feign death type spell, if you run through an area and do no damage to the mob but attract it, hit shadowmeld and they'll run back to their area. This is insanely useful.

Done Raiding TBC (really)

Just announced today that the guild was taking a break from raiding. We didn't have enough to run 25 mans today or yesterday, and there is only a week left. With 5 raiding days to go, and all pre-SW content cleared, it just didn't make sense to raid when people wouldn't be able to use much of the loot (at this point most of us have gotten everything except the upper boss loot). People were very busy doing BGs and other stuff and we generally had a good time, i think everyone is really looking forward to wraith and I have no doubt people are going to come out of the cracks and the guild and server will be a thriving place again in a few weeks.

I managed to get a second piece of T6 set on sunday, now i just need to get into MH to get it. I'm now fully rocking SSO badge gear or T6 drops, so i'm happy I won't be needing to replace that gear, at least on one character.

I also ran the Scourge event and got 2 pieces of T6 equiv loot (seemingly) on my horde hunter.

So now I need to get my lock to 70 or 68, and finish leveling tailoring/enchanting.

Change is good

What an interesting two weeks it's been. I took a hiatus from raiding a few weeks before the patch came out. Now its out, and raidings been very easy. How easy? We struggled through all of BT, losing people on Gorefiend, Bloodboil, Council...We got up to Council and were thrilled.

Then came patch aka Nerf city, population us.

I've never seen stuff drop so quickly.

Last Sunday we dropped Illidan for the first time. (i say we, i mean the guild, i wasn't there)

Tuesday was bugged, the instances were down. I think we did Gruul, everything else was screwy.

Wed. we (me included) one-shotted everything in BT and did a 2 shot on Illidan due to random DCs.

Sun. we blitzed through MH and downed Archi pretty quickly. He really is freaking easy, you just can't die. Well, easy for us ranged, it sure seemed like healers/melee had their hands full. Then we decided to down Lady vashj. And we one shotted her. And then lurker just for kicks.

So 7 days, 3 end boss kills, i'm exalted with both MH and BT, I need Kael for the vials quest turn in, then i can get the sexy ring.

Raiding is so ridiculusly easy its not funny. We can get through Kael next week, then I bet off to sunwell. I really like the lack of mana pot consumption. I have only used 2 or 3, whereas normally i'd be downing 20 or 30 in a raid. This sort of thing makes it dramatically cheaper to raid.

Plus the leveling, plus the random kara group. yes, busy week WoW wise.