Reading up on raids

For most of us, we are coming close to the point where we will have gathered what we are going to gather in terms of gear from reputation, crafting and heroics. Now we turn to the new tier raid content and look to the entry-level raids. We've been raiding content we are familiar with for so long and have grown somewhat accustomed to 'someone else' knowing the heroic fights and explaining them that a gentle reminder to read up on the raid fights ahead is due diligence.

Frankly, most of the many sources of "how to" guides or strats have slim pickings in regards to 'win' strats with the new Tier 11 bosses - strategies are, understandably, still being improved upon. An exception to this is Tankspot.com which just uploaded this week a whole host of win! Go watch them! Hence, we will need to prepare ourselves old school, by also referring to write ups found in Wowhead.com (old school would have been Thottbot) and wowpedia.org (formerly wowwiki). You can find a wealth of information on the instances, bosses, and mobs as well as strategies in the comments on wowhead. e.g.:

Baradin Hold   wowhead    wowpedia    [wowhead comments]
 - Argaloth (boss)   wowhead & comments   wowpedia

You will find that tankspot has the strat videos up and also that, for example, the Argaloth tankspot video is on wowhead.com.

The theme here is: Go prepare for raids! Go now! What are you doing still here?! Go prepare!!

The resources available to us in advance of stepping into an instance mean no one should need any boss abilities explained nor should there be any surprises on boss phases - tankspot videos pretty much lay out everything visually for you.

All raiders that will be in Tier 11 content are by default progression raiders! This is not like doing Naxx when ICC is the current tier - all raiders must step into the raid instance prepared both in gear, consumables and mindset. It will take far, far, far too long to explain every nuance to every raider for every trash pull and boss in the new content if people do not know the mechanics of the fights. What raid leaders will explain in the instance is how we will tackle the mechanics, will explain the strategy we will use and will answer questions. The raiders by default must know the mechanics before they zone in.

For example, Argaloth does a meteor slash. It is on the 'Abilities' tab for him on wowhead. Raid leaders will not be explaining that ability. When it lands, it should not come as a surprise to anyone and everyone should know what caused them to just lose 40k health on one shot and the healers should have been anticipating it as soon as they see the cast bar in DBM. Tanks should not need to be told that it places a debuff on them, just how we are going to handle that debuff (the other tank taunts the boss once their debuff has dropped).

Raiding windows are very small as people have to get home from work and have to go to bed - please come prepared so that we can maximize how much content we cover rather than how many hours we spend on the same bosses.

Thank you in advance!

Recruiting for Raid Groups

KOUGuild is currently recruiting all classes and all specs for new Cataclysm raids. Specifically, we are recruiting great people who are good players and have a character with an average gear ilvl of 340+

As always, great people are welcome even if their character is lvl 1. However, for the near and present raid groups for Tier 11, we are focusing on recruiting people that have been gearing up in heroic 5-mans already and are about 'done' gearing therein.

Contact in game any one of the following officers: Locksmith, Beartooth, Kimonorose, Orderedchaos or Ahnuksar.

Heroic Expectations

It is exciting to see all the people arriving in at 85 and moving up through the levels. It bears worth mentioning some notes on heroics and preparing for them in order to make the transition from leveling into dailies/heroics/pre-raids.

Pre-Heroics Gear:

"Too long, didn't listen" (tldl) version: Treat gearing for heroics in Cataclysm like you did gearing for raids in Wrath. Run instances a lot and get the drops and faction rewards before you put a serious amount of hours into the heroics themselves.


The guild message of the day for several days was a suggestion to complete your leveling in the Twilight Highlands (TH) zone. (Note: I would even go one further and suggest completing all of the quests in that zone until you have at least gathered all of the rewards that are Best in Slot (BiS) for you pre-Heroics even if that is after you ding 85.) If you didn't get a chance to do that, it is highly recommended that you check your favorite wow information sources (blogs, forums, person-in-the-know in the guild) to see if the BiS items for you pre-heroics come from quest rewards in the TH zone. If they do, get there and get them.

Those same sources will also give you a sense of where to find most of the normal instance drops you need. For the most part, I would expect them to be in Halls of Origination, Lost City and perhaps Grim Batol; if you have not yet discovered those instances, go do that to make grouping and queuing easy.

The final pre-heroics gear sources are faction reputation rewards and crafted gear. You can check for faction rep rewards with your trusted sources, atlasloot or wowhead.com amongst others. For who can make which crafted items in guild, open the guild pane ('j') and look at the professions that craft your needs. You can search to see who has that pattern specifically. You can also see who is leveling close to the right skill level to make your item(s) if there are none already there and help them. The auction house right now is pricey and it makes better financial sense right now to supply a guild member with the mats to craft your piece than to buy it on the AH - unlike the last few weeks we saw in Wrath where people were selling off crafted items lower than cost to make them.

You have to be geared as close to BiS (pre-heroics) to have the game even let you into the heroics and certainly for you to be able to contribute and not be a liability to the group. Due your due diligence and get the best pieces of gear you can get within reason and within the expectations of the group that you are running with (some won't mind, others working on bosses deep into the heroics will want you geared).


Strategies:

TLDL: Chat with fellow guild members who have been doing the fights a lot recently.

There are few if any strategies posted and published right now. Most guilds are working through the fights and are not sharing strategies because they are trying to get realm firsts in the raids and do not need to help others get to the raid stage. Having said that, there are several members who have been at level 85 since the first few days and have a lot of experience with the early bosses in the heroics. In Heroic Deadmines, we are working on Admiral Ripsnarl - hence we have a lot of experience with the prior bosses and can happily share that for in house knowledge.

Clearing:

 To manage expectations, in the beginning, plan to clear bosses - not instances. This is very similar to stepping into ICC for the first time: you hoped to clear a boss or some bosses; however, did not expect to clear the entire instance. Same here. While they are called 'heroics' - these are not the heroics of your Wrath grandfather. Yes, you will be doing 'progression' in a heroic! At least in the beginning you will.

So many classes have crowd control now that it is almost inexcusable to wipe on a pull after not using crowd control. We have all read about and heard how these heroics were going to be much, much harder and that healers would have a hard time with mana and tanks a hard time with survival. Use crowd control and avoid stressing the healers (don't stand in the bad). If the fights are taking too long, your dps needs more gear. If the tank is dying too quickly, the tank needs more gear. If the healer cannot keep the tank alive, the healer needs more gear. These are straight forward. However, one of the ways to compensate for any of the above, is to reduce the number of mobs that are pounding the health out of the tank at a rate that the healer cannot replace fast enough. Crowd control. Thus, set up your groups accordingly - you will want at least two cc'ers.

Knowledge Management:

When you learn a new way to do a fight or a way to pull / etc: Share that in guild chat with others. Share your knowledge so that more guild members can gear and clear. Be attentive to what the other roles are doing and pass that information on (e.g. if you see a tank do something that was very effective, pass that on if they are not in our guild and if they are, encourage them to share that tip with others).


Heroics are very demanding and they take a long time right now. We are very fortunate to have absolutely amazing and fabulous players in our guild that bring a great attitude and sense of humor into these demanding and stressful situations. Don't be afraid to ask for help or laugh at when the group failsauces. It's good times in there, however come prepared so that it does not just wear on your repair bills!

Former guild structure retired

Effective immediately, the by-laws, ranks and rules listed on the old guild forums are retired. By way of background, there have been many incarnations of structure the different leaderships of the guild have used in order to bring everyone the most satisfaction we can through the belonging we call colloquially “our guild”. The previous manifestation of said structure was created by those of us currently serving the guild in our capacity as officers and was created as a means to immediately assume the roles of officers and share the weight of leading the guild at a time of sudden change in order to prevent the guild closing its doors. However, the tenets upon which the structure was based were never fully realized and the by-laws were not given their full support nor exercise. Since then, the guild has prospered and returned to a healthy state and the former structure is obsolete and past its time.

The guild is currently structured in that traditional incarnation of a sole guild leader supported by active officers and the great people that make our guild such a wonderful and rewarding experience. We are evaluating whether to create a new home for our forums which would contain newly published rules; meanwhile, our traditions and culture continue to be in place and drive our behaviors: respect, fun and reliability.

Recruiting

In less than two weeks, we all have an opportunity to once again enjoy the wonders of leveling and gearing at end cap! As you level and gear to re-start raiding at level 85, your paths will cross with a myriad of types of players - some kind and some inconsiderate. We would like to attract and retain the respectful, kind and fun players! We encourage you to keep an active eye open for the kinds of players that you think we would enjoy spending hours with in raids and in vent, or just in general guild chat with. As always, the foundational characteristics of players we seek are respectful, fun and reliable.

Watch for players we should invite into the guild and let both them know and an officer know right away so that we can chat with them and get them into the guild before they get lost in the leveling shuffle.

Everyone in the guild has the power to recommend someone for a guild invitation. Sergeants and Officers can approach and invite players to join the guild.

Officers: Reminder to give potential new guild members your utmost attention if within your ability at the moment and to make a note in their Officer Note field as to who referred them. If at the moment, you cannot spend the requisite time to discuss the guild and themselves, set a time when you will both do so and follow up with the person making the referral.

On Comings and Goings

With the arrival of the Cataclysm expansion, we fully expect that long-time dormant players will return to the game - some of whom have their toons in our guild and some that do not. There will be all kinds of comings and goings. You should expect to see some people re-activate their accounts and stay in guild, and some will leave to be with friends that had departed in the past or been removed. Some re-activations will return to KOU from having left at a prior time. Active players may leave to be with old friends returning to the game and some will return to KOU for the same reasons.

Remember that just as re-activations will be people familiar to some and unknown to others, many of us will also be unfamiliar to them and some will be quite familiar. Our guild has changed significantly since the time when many players went inactive and has also stayed the same. Our structure and leadership has changed; our principles of respect, fun and reliability have not.

Changes of this magnitude can have unsettling effects and foster uncertainty. They are also opportunities to be times of great fun and reunions. Throughout all the comings and goings, KOU will be here and we wish everyone a happy holiday season and fun times during these cataclysmic changes!

We look forward to the exciting times ahead and to raiding the new content together.

Leveling: Pressures and Priorities to Get to 85

There are no pressures to race to 85. Enjoy the new leveling experience. The right time for you to arrive at level 85 is when you get to 85. We have long been a home and not a job and that is not being sundered during the cataclysm. Granted, we would like to take our place as an end game raiding guild on our server earlier rather than later and it would certainly be better to be amongst the first; however, we are not attempting to compete to be the first.

The priority toon to level is the one you want to level first. Our raid group will recruit whatever we are missing when we get there and take a look at who and what we have. Do not let your current role in our raid groups drive what you must prioritize to level to 85 first. Now is a perfectly well-timed point to completely switch out to something else if that is what you have been wanting to do! If we find that we have too many of one thing and too few of another, we will adjust, recruit and use raiding seat rotations if the lop-sided numbers so vastly exceed raiding group sizes (highly unlikely).

If I have to draw a line in the sand as to when should you be at 85 to get a relatively early jump start on raiding the new content, I would suggest that the last week of December typically offers a large amount of leisure time to people and that we are likely to see raiding begin at that time if it has not begun earlier.

If you know (or at least feel you know at this time) which role (tank, healer, melee dps, ranged dps) and which class you will want to enter raiding at 85 with, let us know as that allows us to improve our planning and target our recruiting better.

Have Friends that will Start WoW?

Blizzard is currently making it price-attractive to pick up WoW for new players (they have slashed prices on the original and BC to $5 each and slashed the price on Wrath to $10). Now is a great time to invite your friends to join WoW (and join our guild!). If you invite them by sending them a trial invitation, and afterwards they use the license numbers they get to move from Trial to full installation, you and they both get a month of free time and you get that snazzy two-seater rocket mount you see zipping around!

Already have the refer-a-friend mount on all of your toons and still have friends you’d like to invite to play the game? Let us know so that we can send them an invitation and we can share the refer-a-friend-mount love around the guild! Just mention in guild chat to us that you need someone to send a trial account invitation for the refer-a-friend program.

Gearing for Raids at Level 85

While the quest and instance rewards and drops will provide you ample “blues” (rare items) and prepare you for level-85 heroic 5-man instances, those drops will not equip you adequately for raiding the new level 85 raid content. The first priority, after learning your new spells etc at level 85, is to start running heroics with the guild. Running heroics with the guild will get you heroic blue gear and will increase our guild xp. You will need the heroic blue gear (not the regular blue gear) in order to get into raid instances and perform successfully.

Equipped with heroic blue gear, you will find a spot in our guild raid groups welcoming you! Depending on the number of raiders available in the first weeks, we will set how many and how large the raids are. By mid to late January, we should certainly have settled into who is raiding when and with whom - which in effect forms the base rosters of the level 85 raid groups. While each raid group will drive its own culture and rhythm, we will have at least one raid group that has a more hard core than casual approach and likely one raid group that is more laid back. This will give you the choice of how often and how hard you want to raid!

We have selected our Horde home: Mal’Ganis Server!

After intensive analysis, many hours test-driving servers (including server transfers) and polling guild members also testing servers, we chose Mal’Ganis server as the home of our Horde toons. For the Horde!

We had to select a different server in order to satisfy the need that players needed to free up character slots on Alleria server. We selected Mal’Ganis because it exceeded or was at the top of the category in all of the categories assessed - and because it made significant impressions on all of our guild members that test-drove the server.

There are at least ten of our players that have already moved characters to that server or started new characters there. For today, we are congregating in a guild I picked up at a cheap price with three bank tabs (I was using it for my bank toon). It seemed like a good staging ground to get everyone together once again on the new server and we will then create our new guild charter and sign it with all guildies signing it! (The current bank toon guild name is not something we have any interest in keeping as our guild go-forward: “Troublemakerz”).

Let us know Alleria-side and we can hop over and /ginvite you or if you know we are over there, simply /who Troublemakerz.

The changes to Orgrimmar alone have been absolutely amazing and while for some of us it will be leveling in the game akin to whole new game, even for those that have long-played Horde, the new changes are seriously bringing out about new content and look and feel. We are excited about giving ourselves a Horde home.

For the Horde!

Horde Server Analysis

To support the decision on which server to recommend as the suggested home of our Horde toons, we analyzed servers based on economy, progression, timezone, server type, population and ratio of Alliance to Horde. The clear leader is the Mal'Ganis server which was the only server to score positively in all of the categories.

For each analysis category (e.g. progression, server type) we allocated a server a value of a '1' or a '0' depending on whether they met best interest criteria from the Horde perspective. Each category is described below.

Economy - Each server's auction house was inspected on the Horde side, in Orgrimmar. For comparison's sake the same items were checked for pricing and volume to serve as benchmarks indicative both of the potential for obtaining gear or mats at achievable prices and for making gold by supplying the auction house. Example items were Primordial Saronite, herbs, ores, cloth, leathers, gems, crafted items such as Boots of Impending Death, flasks, enchant scrolls, cut gems, Miscellaneous Mounts, Miscellaneous Pets, Miscellaneous Other (looking for volume and pricing of the items sold from ICC raids conquering Lich King with Deathmourne). On server checks were validated with the Undermine auction history tool.

Progression - The top three servers to have the most guilds in the top 100 progression-based were awarded 1 point. The list was derived by using wowprogress.com and validated using other servers posting similar information. The criteria of progression speaks to the pool of players from which we would be recruiting and to the caliber of the PUGs.

Timezone - Servers with a timezone of CST were awarded one point due to their alignment with our current server's timezone.

Server Type - Servers of a PVE nature were awarded one point as were PVP servers where the Horde population so vastly outnumbered the Alliance population as to render that insignificant. Subjectively, on the Mal'Ganis server, I leveled one character 1 to 80 and saw one Alliance player once - whom did not gank me when he had the chance.

Population - Servers with a strong population base were awarded one point in the interest of ease of finding groups. It was found during the analysis of the servers that servers with low populations have very long 5-man queues and trade chat was filled with requests for LFM that lasted longer periods compared to servers with high populations where 5-man queues were under 5 minutes and raids were filled quickly with LFM requests. This category also looked at the impact of the population in regards to lag or queues to log in to the server. The servers with the highest populations counter-intuitively also had the lowest lag - or rather, no lag - when zoning into Dalaran or Orgrimmar (I suspect that the best hardware is running the servers upon which the best progression guilds make their homes - it may be the case that the guilds that require the least lag in order to optimize being the best in the world moved to low latency servers or it may be that Blizzard makes sure their servers are tuned best with the resources they have available to them; either way, there is no lag in Dalaran on a server with 30,000 people at the same time that there is lag on Alleria with only 9,000 people.)

Ratio Alliance to Horde - Server population alone is not a sufficient indicator without taking into account how many of those on the server are Horde. Additionally, this factor comes into play with Server Type where it was found that Mal'Ganis despite being a PVP server, has such a lopsided 1:11.8 ratio that for all intents and purposes it is akin to a PVE server.

CONCLUSION - While there were some surprises (the servers with the best PVE progression are actually of the Server Type PVP), based on the criteria, Mal'Ganis is clearly the leader in suggested realm for our Horde toons.

Guild Focus for Remainder 2010

We have posted the focus and notes for the guild for the remainder of 2010. Clicking the cover image left will link you over to the Google Docs -hosted .PDF presentation file. We recognize that many guild members have not had the time yet to digest all of the reported changes in recent patches, coming patches and the impact post-release of the new expansion. This package attempts to compile the most relevant of these changes as related to what you can do to better aide the guild in advancing in Cataclysm.
As always, contact an officer in game with any questions or suggestions.

Looking forward to breaking into the new content with you all!

Get Your Cataclysm Now!

You can buy your Cataclysm RIGHT NOW! This of course means that it will do the digital download in advance of go live and you can login to the expansion as soon as the servers flip it live on Dec. 7th.

Older Raid Instances Help Hone Raiding Skills

If you think running pre-ICC raid instances is a waste of time, let me know when you are quickly downing Felmyst in Sunwell, or completing the Safety Dance in Naxx. No really, running "older" raid instances in these pre-Cataclysm weeks is helping our new raiders to learn more about raiding - in ways that has nothing to do with role or class. Even veteran raiders are getting refreshers on some of the subtleties of "fine footwork". Felmyst can one shot an entire 80s raid in ICC gear with her breath weapon. She drops three of these in Phase 2 and if even one person gets in contact with her gaseous breath, they become charmed and the raid must kill them or be killed by them. This is not a mechanic we deal with in ICC (Lady DW but that is nowhere near the scale of this - an entire raid can be charmed).

Of more interest to our raid leaders, are the soft skills of raiding that these instances hone: the simple (yet seemingly inexplicably difficult to achieve) "sign up and show up" skill; settling into a normalized raiding schedule reliably; learning the subtleties of overcoming lag and movement needs; taking breaks when the raid leader calls for them instead of "whenever"; and perhaps most important of all, honing the skill of frustration management when things are not going smoothly despite what appears to be a "simple thing".

Signing up, showing up on time, keeping the raid from growing too long from too many bio breaks, and managing frustrations are hallmarks of a great raider - all skills that can be honed in every raid instance in the game. And all skills that will last long after you replace that ICC gear.

On Ranks and Raiding

Ranks: With the recent changes (patch 4.0.1) came along a degree of finer detail for managing guild administration and the functions that ranks can perform. In light of this, and in an effort to take advantage both of the game mechanics changes to the ranks and of the interest of guild members to take on more substantive roles in the guild, we will be making some changes to the ranks and who is in the respective ranks.

If you have an interest in taking on more guild functions, let any of the officers know and Locksmith will get in touch with you to make appropriate changes.

Initially, the changes to 'who is in which rank' will largely be a clean up effort to move characters that have been offline for greater than a month to a different rank - this will accomplish both removing the clutter from who we have currently that is active, and will prepare us for an easy house-cleaning exercise to make room for new people. While we have not traditionally been in the habit of removing absentee characters, we also did not have a larger % of the characters in guild absent than the % that is logging in actively. As we prepare for the changes in Cataclysm, we too have our own changes to make to present to the new members a house that is not full of dead wood.

Raiding: It is great to report continued vigorous raiding and much fun had by all! Seems we are beginning to coalesce on who can raid when and we are working to make sure that there are raids for all to participate in. We have recently seen the addition of our 60+ to our Vanilla WoW raids and now 70+ to BC raids! Congrats Ahnu on your awesome BT gear!

KOUGuild Objectives Fall 2010 for the Next 7 Weeks

We are largely in the "getting ready" for Cataclysm phase. Notes and focus directions will be posted here shortly.

We are Legendary - The Ultimate Collection

We are on the final stretch towards Cataclysm expansion release (planned for December 7th) and we are facing the extended server maintenance tomorrow for the 4.0.1 updates. Most of the Cataclysm achievements cannot be completed until after the December 7th release of the expansion; however, Blizzard is making an exception for the legendary items and grandfathering them into the guild achievements upon release of Cataclysm.

It makes perfect sense since you cannot go back and farm re-earn the legendary item on a same character and while there are many, many players with many, many alts, there is also a very large population of players with only one main or only one character they raid on.

What it means to us: We are in a huge farm mode for these! They unlock one of the most gorgeous mounts and guild rewards in the game. And it ain't half bad to have the legendary items either!

I would like to thank Fatine for the phenomenal job he is doing of making sure we put the old school raids on the calendar and get to taking them down. He has been performing superbly in that difficult role which I asked him to take on when I took on the role of guild leader. Similarly, I would like to thank Eochaidh for his long hours and amazing IRL Loremaster role of knowing what we need to save up and which raid instances to do in which order so that we can obtain the pieces we need to get the legendary items.

Lastly, I ask all of you to make a point of helping our guild gather these items - it will make a significant contribution to our guild stature on the server, will help with recruiting, will be a tonne of fun and last but not least, will get us one of the most gorgeous mounts in the game!

Kara and BT fun runs! Oldies Night!

We feel there should be more bosses that vomit minions.

Another night of win. We had a blast! And we had very good attendance all throughout the night. Once again, oldies night turns out to be a major success!

We started out with Kara and closed with Black Temple.

One of the great things about doing these oldies, is that you get huge gobs of reputation which helps drive achievements. There are also the achievements for simply completing the oldies.

A lot of the fights are obviously quite new-raider friendly; however, some of them will still rip a few people apart -- especially if they are close to 'at level' and are using them an xp run or gear collection.

Everyone that has the quest or completed it can summon Nightbane.

Kara is a great way to help a level 70 friend gear up as they level through 70-80. It is also a decent way to train up newcomers to raiding. You have a lot of control and flexibility built into the level of forgiveness the instance has now that most people are level 80.

Third time is the charm!

The fight that may pose a problem if you want to solo Kara, is the chess event fight. This fight is certainly more suited to multiple players engaging.

Demonhunters rejoice! The demon Illidan is down!

A great fight by all counts - especially if you have never seen it before (like our tank Eochaidh - we made sure to not spoil it for him and made sure to wipe once!). For those Loremaster addicts, this instance is packed to the brim with relevant lore.

Classic Raids Series - Success!

Thank you Fatine for running another very successful classic wow raid! This evening we brought some friends - some from as far away as Victoria Island, B.C., Canada and we took down AQ40 for the achievement. While this has concluded our series of completing the original raids in order for everyone to get the achievements they are working towards, we will be keeping this on a regular rotation for faction reputation grinds and for those that are seeking still yet more tier pieces (I know I need my Tier 2 helm from BWL for Locksmith).

Starting up this week, we will begin the Burning Crusade Raid Series - starting of course with everyone's favorite: Kara!

Cataclysm Release Date Announced: Dec. 7th

Blizzard has announced an official release date for the Cataclysm expansion: December 7th. Of tremendous interest to many of us will be that the expansion will be available for digital download in addition to the traditional retail store version.

We have nine (9) weeks until the expansion.

In short order, we will post a game plan for the next 9 weeks and for the weeks immediately following December 7th. Stay tuned.

Is this thing on? KOU goes infostream

"Good news everybody!" the information channels are up and running. One of the comments often received by officers lately is that the membership wants more ways to access information about our guild and what events are going on. While the in game mainstays such as "Message of the Day (MOTD)" and "Guild Information" continue to be used and are certainly quickly updated on the fly, we have added a solid infostream for the guild:

Blog is up (obviously) at http://kouguild.blogspot.com
FeedBurner feed is running at http://feeds.feedburner.com/KOUGuild
Twitter account is setup at http://twitter.com/kouguildand
Email account is up and running KOUGuild@gmail.com
Forums (legacy) currently continue at http://kou.guildomatic.com/ and will remain in place until replaced - although we do not currently have that in the immediate plans. There are better solutions today than when these were set up, however, changing them out is not presently a priority.

All of which serves to bring you more ways to receive information your way. (Note: at this time, sign ups for raids and events continue to be in game using the in game calendar.)

We will be using the blog and twitter accounts to routinely push new information out to the guild. Subscribe, follow, visit, share, socialize, digest - consider infostream up and running!