Raiding - At capacity

Raid was REALLY full on Wednesday. And I mean REALLY full.

There were 27 people there, and 2 raiders who didn't raid as they were not well. And I had an enquiry about a raid spot so I am super hesitant about saying anything to that person, though I wasn't exactly DIScouraging.

And as there were some 7.3 quest crumb lines being started up yesterday, there must have been something glitchy because we had maintenance right in the middle of raid again. Ugh. Nothing like maintenance smack bang in the middle of raid to ruin a night.

Of course, when you're rushing, you make mistakes. With the server shutdown 15 minute notice, we rushed in and then we had a mistake and had a wipe. Of course it happened on my tranq for the Embrace of the Eclipse, when it felt like it was not healing ANYBODY'S bubble off. Solution was just to use two cooldowns for that since we were so healer heavy.

The biggest piece of rubbish that evening was 3 vanquisher legs dropping from Mistress and zero Protector. With an extraordinary number of raiders on that token, that was a huge blow. Let me think... that's 5 warriors (Splatz, Moisty, Falln, Gale, Consti), 7 shamans (Cosima, Crooked, Spoon, Vork, Eurie, Slug, Fin), 3 monks (Aimei, Ram, Lushen) and 1 hunter (Ultra). Vanquisher tier is dreamy with 4 druids (Navi, Yeti, Gravy, Gen), 1 rogue (Pancake), 1 mage (Xethi) and no death knights. Conquerer has 3 priests (Amelior, Kinry, Mag), 2 paladins (Kj, Tri), 3 warlocks (Sev, Aza, Dugg) and no demon hunters. Good for me, since I got an warforged leg tier out of it. Woo!

Even Cosima/Koda, who is the most quiet and tolerant of our raiders, said "Navi, just saying, NO MORE PEOPLE IN PROTECTOR TIER FOR RAID please."

Now that prepatch stuff for Argus is up, I have had a few people thinking of moving classes. Splatz is considering tanking on the DK. I don't think Falln will change anytime soon, though of the shamans, only Spoon would be fluid moving to another class since he plays all his classes well. I wish he would play his mage but he moved that to another guild.

I have always been an advocate for "play what you want to play, not what the guild needs". Longevity in game comes from playing what you enjoy not something you've been forced into. That's why I worry about people like Kjerstin and Triarchi, both of whom are tanks at heart and being forced to DPS. I had a word to all the healers about DPSing and we should all take turns, even though Kinry is the loudest complainer that he might as well be sat out, and yes as heals he does an extraordinary amount of healing, but it gives the rest of us an opportunity to work harder and work on our own healing. This goes against all I said about play what you want to play, but it's either DPS or sit out.

We are not even recruiting! I honestly cannot believe the number of people we have who are interested in joining. A fair bit of it is word of mouth, which is lovely and speaks for itself, but I hate turning people away. Looking at what we have now, I feel like I can honestly say that we will never have raiding problems again, for lack of numbers.

What is going on? Why is the guild busting at the seams?

There seem to be a lot of ex-mythic raiders wanting to decrease their time commitments because of work and family. I suppose that late teens-early twenty year olds who played WoW and kept playing now have families and work commitments, and still would like to play but at a reduced level. Also, I am not sure people want to play a game for hours on end anymore - a few hours a time seems to be the most that people can sit still for these days.

Thursday went really well and we got everything cleared so that was a rather satisfying week. Interestingly, we had just on 20 people so it was a much smaller raid!

We'll see how things pan out with numbers. I do have on guildie leaving for a mythic guild but feels guilty about it - told her not to stress, we're all fine with people wanting something we don't offer (ie mythic). Besides, she can come back if it doesn't work out. I guess that opens a raid spot - but then, we're pretty full on healers anyway!