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This is a quick guide on how to be a loathsome raid member and alienate yourself from your fellow raiders. Hopefully these few quick tips can help you infuriate every player around you!

1. Contribute as little as possible to the raid: Whether you’re the tank/healer/or just regular Old Joe DPS, you are way too important to follow kill orders or any instructions that are coming from your raid leader. In fact, I encourage you to mute vent and listen to Metal as loud as possible. Remember, boss fights are no exception. Strive for mediocrity. After all with the 30% buff, you don’t need to do a damn thing. Remember, if you die, the raid should easily be able to 24 man it.
2. Roll on every piece of loot that drops. Don’t feel bashful about being worthless to the raid, you are entitled to roll and get every piece of loot that drops in the raid. Loudly announce your intentions for the loot that dropped over vent and moan/groan/scream loudly when you are out rolled. However, just cause you didn’t roll high enough to get the loot doesn’t mean that you lost. Petition the player that got the loot via whisper, informing them that the piece is a much better fit for you and complain loudly about the current loot structure over as many raid channels as possible. If you still don’t get the loot, continue to follow rule #1.
3. Conduct yourself as if you are an officer. Rank is for suckers. You know exactly what everyone should be doing at all times and you should let them know it. Give advice to players of your same class who have been consistently outperforming you for months (you should have ample time as you’re lying on your back during a boss fight). Don’t fret about gumming up Vent with advice and calling out specific players who you think are under performing, the raid as a whole will definitely benefit from your soap boxing .

Follow all of the steps above and you should be the single most hated person in your raid.

With all of this week’s talk about the Cataclysm Closed Beta, anticipation about the pending release is making our mouths water. This lax time as we are waiting for the release of Cataclysm is the perfect era to go back and snag up some of those memoriable retro items! Nothing says, “I’ve been playing WoW long enough to know which cool blogs know which items make a fashion statement,” like these retro drops! So grab your high-level main and spend some quality time in the old world.

Retro Raids

Warrior and Rogues should step back into Black Temple and snag up the Twin Blades of Azzinoth and the Curse Vision of Sargeras. Nothing screams Burning Crusade like these two distinguishable items that drop off Illidan Stormrage himself. On a personal note, I still remember how proud Hafrot (Loredrin back then) was when he finally finished Read more…

I’ve lately become very obsessed with trying to optimize my gear. The problem is, I was an English Major so math only works when I use my fingers and toes.  So I had to find some tools to help me determine if a drop is actually an upgrade and I had to change my way of thinking about gear.

First, the Best-In-Slot lists aren’t that useful while you’re still gearing up. It’s nice to know where you want to end up, but you don’t want to hurt yourself on your way there.  For example, a lot of classes need to use their T-9 sets until they obtain two or four pieces of T-10 because the set bonuses of the “lesser” gear are that good.  You want to be as strong in your raid role as possible now as well as in the future. Read more…

We are at just the beginning of what I like to call the Great Funk of 2010. Summer is upon us, which is always a big transition for raiding guilds as some people can raid more while others either stop raiding entirely or ease up, but summer is a minor worry for raid leaders compared to the glut of content and the daily news coming out of the Cataclysm Alpha then Beta. Keeping people interested in Wrath content will be a growing challenge over the next few months. Raid leaders know that if they are not prepared to survive the summer and early fall with a stable group of raiders, they will be behind when Cataclysm comes out.

So how do you recruit?

The short answer is.. well, it depends on your guild and focus.

Many guilds are lax on recruitment. Most famously, AIE on the Earthen Ring server recruits new members at the beginning of each month and there are no requirements other than filling out a basic form. They are able to recruit so many people this way, their needs are always taken care of. Ensidia and Premonition, although they do actively recruit, have such high regard that they will always have enough people willing to join them that they can be extremely selective and still survive the funk.

These guilds have very different recruitment models and both can be successful. But for the vast majority of raiding guilds, it is not so simple. Open recruiting waters your talent and personality base down and can cause your better players to defect, while super selective recruiting can result in a negative growth. In many ways, as the pressure to recruit builds, you can feel like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Remember that recruiting the right people is more important than just recruiting people. A guild comprised of many casual raiders, if you are not a casual raiding guild, will cause your committed raiders to leave and vice-versa.

It doesn’t have to be like that

Recruitment is time consuming, it requires the help of everyone in your guild, and it can be humbling. Everyone focuses on the easiest, but essential, recruiting method:  Guild recruitment threads on the Blizzard forums. That is a given, you should always do that,  but it is only the start and it is the least effective way to recruit.

Shotgun thread method

Instead of just posting on the blizzard forums, make sure you post on every available forum including: mmo-champion, tankspot, wow.com, curse forums, and any other WoW-related forums you can think of. Keep your wowprogress.com guild recruitment profile updated. Raiders who might be looking for new servers or even new guilds on their current servers tend to look at wow-progress  at each guild to see what they are recruiting, their raid schedule, and a link to their forums/website.

Using the WoW Guild Recruitment Forums to Actively Recruit

One of the absolute best ways to recruit is to use the Guild Recruitment forums on the official WoW forums. You would be amazed to see the number of people who post threads there looking for guilds. In fact, so many posts occur in that forum in a single day that it is worth digging several pages in. Need a Shadow Priest to fill a core raid spot? Chances are you will have 2 or 3 candidates in a single day.

Recruiting is work. It is one of the most important functions of guild leadership in a raiding guild. Do it well and your guild will prosper!

Progression in ICC has been moving along at a steady rate for many guilds. The stacking buff in Icecrown Citadel that updates about once a month to add increased healing, health, and damage done allows many guilds  to do previously impassible encounters and gives them enough steam to work through many more encounters until the buff is updated. Indeed, if we look at the graphs from WoWProgress, the leading site in tracking guild progression, the mechanic of the Icecrown Citadel buff has caused a steady increase in the number of guilds defeating each encounter.

In fact, they look rather linear. In comparison, the tier 8 and 9 progression graphs are not nearly as linear. After a short burst of hardcore guilds downing content, the number of new guilds defeating the content tapers off. Additionally, many less guilds have done older content than ICC. Click through for more… Read more…

When I say ‘chewing glass’, I’m referring to the activity of trying something very difficult over and over and over until you get it right. The hope is that once you are successful, you will be better able to repeat the success the next time you try.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

– Albert Einstein

We have all been in the situation. You wipe on a boss, head back in, and start over again real quick.  The inclination is that you hop right back in and try again and hope it goes better. There may have been a chance occurrence that caused you to fail in the previous attempt and people say “just get better”. You may also feel that because you are limited by time you need to get as many “attempts” in as you possibly can so that you get more experience. For example, say it is already getting late and your raid is going to end in 30 minutes so you group up and buff as fast as you can and try again. Read more…

One of the most difficult things about WoW is that to get the most out of the game play, you have to rely on other players. Usually, this isn’t such a big deal. You’ll occasionally find yourself in an instance with some disagreeable people or you’ll be involved in a raid that fizzles instead of fires. Trade chat can be an exercise in endurance, namely how disgusted can you get before you leave the channel. Outside of these events, my interactions with other players have been like my interactions with people in real life; mostly pleasant and predictable. I can rely on my favorite tank to show up for raids and I can rely on my fellow DPS to perform at the top of their game (and gently rib one another if they aren’t). Read more…

The following is a post by none-other than the master of the chatroom, Mullets!

I was listening to Blue Plz earlier, and Total Biscuit was giving his two cents on a blog post from WoW.com mage blogger Christian Belt, regarding raiding as a frost mage, and TB brought up numerous times times that  he does not think that frost mages are raid viable.

While listening to TB talking about this, a post by Brigwyn over at the Hunting Lodge came to the forefront of my mind. Brigwyn here argued that Blizzard believed Beast Mastery hunters were raid viable and listed counter arguments to Frostheim, who had posted otherwise. Read more…

Confession time. Raiding on my Warlock has become tiresome. I’ve raided with him from the beginning of the Burning Crusade and throughout WOTLK. We’ve braved the depths of Black Temple, explored the haunted hallways of Karazan, tested our mettle against the worst that Northrend has to offer in TOC, and taken the fight to the door of the Lich King in ICC. I’m well versed in the many different Warlock talent builds, used to slightly altering my play style each time a new patch comes out and I’m an old hand at grousing when my group makeup isn’t just right. It may be time to trade up mains.

There is hope on the horizon though and that hope (as odd as it may read), will be Cataclysm. Players often use expansions to switch up their main character. TBC saw the emergence of many new Draeni Shamans and Blood Elf Paladins, and WOTLK saw the explosion of Death Knights on every server. Cataclysm will be a chance for many people to change up their class once again. I’ve got a few thoughts poking around in the back of my head as to what I’ll change to…it involves a ranged pet class. Maybe its just the grass is greener on the other side but it seems that Hunters experience less instability than other classes do (dps wise) in game. For Warlocks, we’ve gone from the top of the DPS pile to the bottom and back more times than I can count in the past few expansions. All I’m looking for is a little more stability in my overall output and new class mechanics to explore.

Anyone else thinking of changing up their class in the upcoming expansion? If you are going to change up, I’d be interested to see a short list of likes and dislikes about your current class and what about your new class seems interesting.

You may recall our frequent updated on The Raid movie project being produced by Kevin Michael Johnson, in cooperation with TankSpot.com. I wanted to follow-up to make sure everyone knows, there are only 29 days left on Kickstarter drive. If you haven’t made a pledge, please check out the details surrounding the production, and the beneifts of becoming a sponsor.

Additionally, we are looking forward to having Kevin on for a brief interview this weekend. If you have any questions you would like to ask about The Raid, contact the sack!

Lastly, a new video has been released this week featuring Lady Raiders. Collectively they discuss the stereotypes surrounding female gamers, the luster of MMO raiding, and how much joy they get in kicking masoganist asses!

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