Guild Progress

Follow up from the last post…

Not only did we have a lot of people online for the raid, we were much more focused than I have seen in the past.  We finally got over our big obstacle – Thaddius.  That was a relief.  All it took was some real desire to succeed.  I was as proud of my guild as I had ever been.

But we weren’t done.  Our guild got to Frostwyrm Lair for the first time on Heroic (we’ve cleared the 10-man version a couple of times).  Most of our players had never seen Sapphiron.  We only had two players with any frost resist gear, so our five healers were really stressed.  On our second attempt, Sapphiron went down.

We took a couple of shots at Kel’thuzad to learn the fight, but it was late.  The next night we had an unscheduled raid.  So many people wanted to take another attempt at KT that we actually had 25 people log on on a non-raid night in  hopes that we would go back in.

And back in we went.  After a couple of wipes to teach the fight to the new people, we got into a groove.  We consistently got Kel’thuzad down to 20% or less before losing our off-tanks.  Finally, it seemed that we got the hang of avoiding the void zones, minimizing the frost blasts, interrupting his Frostbolts, and keeping dps alive.

And then I DC’ed.

Frantically typing to reconnect, I came back online and was surprised to find myself still alive.  I resumed dps and interrupts, but I had missed about two minutes of the fight.  Offtanks picked up adds.  And…

the dreaded 1% wipe.  Actually, it was closer to 0.5%. (note that I missed two minutes… 3k dps x 120 sec = dead KT)

And that was our best attempt.  Kel’thuzad lives for another week.

I desperately hope that the patch doesn’t come today.  We want one more weekend in Naxx to finish it off.

Guild Meetings.. We Haz Them

A lot casual guild leaders just let the guild “run itself.”  Everyone does their thing, they have raids, they level alts, they do group and solo content.  It seems like there is no need for active management.

Eventually, though, the guild can lose focus.  People might enjoy leveling alts, which reduces the number of heroics that are run.  Players might not make it a priority to show up for raids, especially if its the same content over and over.  If this continues, players will start slowly jumping to other guilds where more stuff is going on, and where the members are more active.

I saw this starting to happen in my guild.  Two months ago, we were in great shape – every night there were heroic runs, every Friday and Saturday we had full 25-man raids.  Guild chat was active and fun.

In the past several weeks, though, it has slowed up.  People were often “hiding” on their alts rather than run heroics.  We had attendance issues with raids… one week it was 22-23 online at raid time, then it was 18-20, then worse than that.

Time for… a meeting!  You’d be amazed how effective these are at re-energizing your guild.

I posted the meeting on the calendar about a week in advance.  I also sent invitations using in-game mail for people who don’t look at the calendar.  Thirty seven people accepted the invitation!  That’s a clear sign that they want to be involved, and they are waiting for the guild leadership to get things going.  We held the meeting on vent, and used guild chat for side conversations and Q&A during the meeting.

My agenda was about our plans once Ulduar is released, and how we are going to handle Dual Spec and loot distribution.  After that I talked about the difference between playing in a casual guild and raiding in a casual guild.  I talked about the commitment that hitting the “Accept” button represents when invited to a raid.  I put a huge emphasis on the importance of clearing Naxx 25 before Ulduar hits, for the pride of the guild.

And what do you know… we had too many people sign up for our Friday night raid.  We had to put people on standby.  Its been a while since that happened, so it felt good.

If your guild seems like its too quiet, or slowly losing activity, then maybe a guild meeting is in order.  Have an agenda, talk about things that people want to hear about, and try to inspire them.