Week 5 is under our belt along with a twin set of Ragnaros kills. As of today, we have 82 level 60’s holding the Cue the Credits tag. There’s also been a rather steep increase in the amount of random whispers over the last week. An indicator of these smaller guilds falling apart, and our name holding more weight as we continue to grow in a positive direction. We have crossed a threshold where finding new talent will be easy for us. It is now up to the leadership to build a strong set of clear expectations for everyone to succeed within, both new and veteran.

In this post, which will be long, I am going to go over all the subjects the Officers and Class Leads have been discussing over the last week. Many of them filled with healthy debate and thoughtful discussion over how we want to set expectations moving forward. Everyone wants the best for Cue the Credits and it has just been a joy to work through all new challenges Classic has placed on this iteration of our guild. We are successfully running two 40-mans in a time where the majority of guilds are struggling to maintain one. That is not a testament to myself or the officers, but the community we have here that has been able to push hard week after week to meet the high bar we have set for ourselves. It is our fourth Ragnaros and everyone is still coming fully prepared as if it were our first and it is very much noticed.

A nightly routine the class leads and officers have gotten into has been looking through logs and picking apart the performance of a particular metric. Some DPS has been a stand out, both high and low, but the real points of contention have been related to uptime and mechanics. Loot is distributed from the council through a variety of factors, and being able to be valuable outside of the damage meter makes up the majority of that.

The Council Stares Down

Mechanics – On key bosses such as Lucifron, Shazzrah and Ghehannas, there is a clear lack of focus on mechanics from a handful of Mages. Priests for the most part have been okay, but it’s more due to there being so few of them in any given raid that it’s easy to lock that down as the only thing to care about. It’s a bit harder when you have 9 Mages – but ultimately it’s really the core mechanic of that encounter for that class. We are actively looking at dispels for those fights. We can kill the bosses, now it’s about optimizing them. Your damage as someone with dispels/kicks does not matter. Eventually we’ll get to full DPS runs but that is not an option while we continue to split our core in half across two raids.

Trash – Another item to come up after digging through the last few weeks of logging is that been a handful of players who have had the habit of going AFK during the most time consuming part of the raid – trash. This is unacceptable without a proper reason. Trash is boring, but important. It’s specifically important towards the Shazzah room where those pulls are harder than most bosses.

Class Knowledge – It’s now 6 weeks into Classic, which in itself has been solved six ways from Sunday. There is zero reason to be running suboptimal builds or itemization at this point. The rust should be off, pre-bis mostly set in place. This particular subject gets fairly length when it comes to specifically Warriors. This is due to the large amount of options they have, but also just the sheer number of them. Thursday’s raid was very telling in multiple aspects who “has it” and who is simply getting by. This will not cut it when we are pushing for BWL. With 80+ players now in rotation across two raids, the individual responsibility has increased significantly. Cue the Credits is a place to grow and have fun, but when it is progression time, we are not fucking around.

Golemagg – You may have noticed in the raid spreadsheet (raids.cuethecredits.net), that there are two new metrics being tracked on your archetype and class. Those are related to your latest DPS averages across Magmadar and Golemagg, in addition to the % parse you achieved. We do not want to create a parse culture where players are exploiting useless mechanics to achieve higher numbers. (DoTing dogs on Golemagg, for example.) However, we do want to make it clear that competition is not only important, but also healthy. As we balance out the raids week to week, it is important to get an accurate a read as possible towards the raids maximum potential. Those two encounters will paint the largest picture towards what a particular player is capable of. If you want to “show-off”, that’s the time. But keep in mind, ripping threat says way more than being middle of the pack. Self control is essential as we look on towards fights like Vaelstraz and Chromaggus.

Trials

For those of you new to the guild, first I again want to say welcome. We’re happy to have so many excited to raid with our long-standing team of players.

I wanted to touch on how our trial process works. In general, it is about a 4-week process. That gives us time to get a feel for your personality, effort towards assimilation, and skill. We actively try to avoid mercenary types who are simply looking for quick kills and quick loot, though they do sometimes slip in. We are in it for the long haul. We have been able to stand strong for 15 years due to our strong understanding of where we want to be within a game. We will not maintain #1, but we will damn sure be competitive with it. This is particularly important to stress now that private servers have “solved” the game. So we’re not only competing with our server, but established talent that has been farming Vanilla content for years. Our selling point is community with healthy progression.

In regards to gear, we have found there is plenty to go around and at times it makes sense to hand it over to a trial. Due to how we view the council at such a macro level in many ways, it’s not uncommon for the best choice to be handing it to a fresh trial. If I were to “heed warning”, it would be in regards to key items that will expectedly go to more seasoned players. These items being weapons, trinkets and rare long-term bis drops.

We’ve been much less strict about recruiting due to our heavy week 5 push towards two raids, not even requiring an application to enter which is pretty unique for us. So taking our time with promotions across the board, trials are no exception. In general you can expect to hit Member within a month. This is generally a less structured decision and more a “I really recognize this name in a good way”. If someone has been in the guild for 6 weeks and we’re still not getting positive feelings, that’s generally a big sign things aren’t working out.

Tuesday and Thursday are INTERCHANGEABLE

I am frankly starting to get a little frustrated with the number of times I have to repeat this. Our goal is to balance out both raids so that both groups are within punching distance of each other. Their goals are slightly different so Thursday will understandably be the “harder” raid. However with that raid comes some funneled epics if you are a core raider. It’s the selling gear raid, the recruiting raid. In terms of guild value, Thursday is significantly more important to our guild than Tuesday.

No, there is no “reason” why you got swapped to Thursday other than it just made sense that week. Thursday is not a punishment. The real punishment will be me slotting you for Tuesday, rewarding you no epics, and then slapping you in the fucking forehead.

Attendance & Sign-ups

This very much goes without saying, but attendance is critical. With two raids in play, attendance becomes a major, major element for success.

The new sign-up process that I built over the weekend building will be a new standard moving forward. Each week everyone will sign up and we will sort the raid into fresh groups every week based on whatever strategy we want to test. For example, this week we are testing a melee heavy group with Tuesday, and a Warlock heavy group on Thursday backed by a Shadow Priest. We’ll then dive into the logs and see the highs and lows of each combination.

Every week’s raid comp will be different, so never assume your group until your name is marked in BOLD. If your name is set in a bold font for that week, consider yourself locked on that day unless an Officer or Class Lead reaches out and tells you otherwise.

Some additional factors we’re taking into consideration for raid composition week to week are: relationships to other players, loot funneling, preventing loot root, or creating a buffer for potential recruits / pugs. While the Tuesday raid is slightly better, our end goal is for them to be within scope of each other. Thursday will generally be slightly worse simply because we are designing the raid to have non-guild players in it for potential recruitment, or selling gear.

Since we’re running such a tight requirement on each raid it is absolutely imperative that you let someone know or post in #raid-attendance if you will be unable to make a given raid day after you’ve signed up. We want to be able to invite straight off the sheet with confidence. If there is a need to run late or miss it’s very important for us to know so we can prepare. Be it by pulling form one of our agile players on Tuesday to Thursday, or PUG an additional player for Thursday. Either way, finding that out at 8:30PM is unacceptable. If it happens more than once that is an absolute problem and will be addressed immediately. We’re pretty easy going here, but not on this.

Discord and Assimilation

We’ve brought it up prior to race once or twice, but I want to specifically address it here. Since this is Classic which requires 40+ players to play together day in and day out, we want to focus on having everyone work together as much as possible. With the advent of Discord and anyone able to spin up their own server for themselves and 3 friends it has caused this odd situation where a guild of 80+ 60’s has the same 10 people online at any given minute. That’s weird.

Traditionally what comes with a guild is a VOIP server to use for whatever reason. This “active usage” creates a consistent community that players can interact with and get to know each other. While we’re not requiring it by any means, I really want to push for more activity within the guild discord and less of the personal ones. We can create channels and let everyone nest how they please, but it says a lot when you join a new guild and see the Discord server filled with players from the guild interacting and having a great time. Some of the best late nights I’ve had have been at a result of staying up due to the conversation with new people being so interesting.

There’s no one way quantify or put it into a spreadsheet, but the effort here to really integrate and form lasting relationships is important and noticed.

Summary

We are off to a great start, though not without some hiccups. Our goal over the next couple weeks will be splitting our new 80+ 60’s into 3 Onyxia’s in addition to continuing to recruit talent. My goal is to have 90+ 60’s to make up for unforseen misses and general holes in our comps for the week. Players will also be dropping off as we cycle out our lowest performers.

Thanks for reading to the end of this, and here’s to some sweet epics in Week 6!