I haven’t made too many entries lately for two good reasons: raid assessment and recruitment.

Raid Performance: Sunwell’s Blessing and Curse

At this stage of the game, in Sunwell, you begin to realize the shortcomings of your raid. This is something both Hyjal and BT fail to do.

Archimonde is a great “retard check,” but I think people fail to realize it was not that intensive of an encounter in that regard. Healing through a soul charge is not impossible. You can easily succeed with one or two people dying. You also don’t need to put out a huge amount of DPS, like you do through most of Sunwell. And these two factors are really key in the reasons why Hyjal and BT fail to help guilds realize their shortcomings: you can live with a few people dying on each encounter, and you don’t need to put out metric tons of damage.

That’s where Sunwell has completely changed the raiding game. Brutallus is certainly doable with gear only from Hyjal and BT, but it’s only just doable. This means you can’t risk having people die, or you will fail to meet the DPS budget. Certainly, people can die, but you most likely won’t get your first kill if you don’t have battle rezzes lined up for them. That said, this is not true once you’ve picked up a lot of Sunwell gear on top of your BT and Hyjal gear. We can now do it with one fewer DPS, as proven by our last kill registered at 5:15 (Brutallus is on a 6-minute enrage timer). But it certainly creates problems for guilds that have terrible DPSers who don’t understand how best to optimize their DPS. Simply put: guilds with too many terrible DPSers will never kill Brutallus, no matter how much gear from BT and Hyjal they have.

So these factors have created a situation where my co-GM and I have done a little soul searching. In Hyjal and BT, having a few weaker players was forgivable, because we could live through their mistakes here and then. But, at the same time, while these players are weak in certain areas, they are strong in others, and they have been in the guild for quite some time now. So we don’t exactly want to tell them to bugger off and find a different guild. But we’ve decided we’re going to have to sit these people when their shortcomings are a problem. Otherwise, we’re simply going to frustrate our better and more dedicated raid members.

This is especially true on M’uru, because he is even more of a DPS and problem check than Brutallus. In fact, he is being called the most difficult encounter in the game by many. And I certainly agree, thus far. When anyone dies for any reason and there are no battle rezzes available, it’s a sure wipe. When someone doesn’t bring the proper consumables for the raid, it’s more than likely you will wipe. And if too many key members of the raid have to leave or don’t show up, you risk not having the proper raid balance necessary to succeed.

This means our standards for recruitment have become considerably higher. I no longer have the time to repeatedly demand that our melee and hunters bring demonslaying potions for Brutallus or Entropius until they do so. Nor do I have the desire to coach some applicant rogue on how to properly time AR so they can use it twice on Brutallus or Felmyst. I don’t even play a rogue, so why should I be telling one how to play? I want people who bring the best consumables without being prompted. This is a great indicator of people’s desire to succeed and impress their leaders. Additionally, I want people who already know how to play. No more of this “well, he has potential” bullshit. Sunwell is here and now, not months away.

So I’ve taken recruitment extremely serious of late. With that said: LF a well-geared and highly skilled elemental shaman. PST Lilume on Proudmoore and post an application at http://www.lunacy-guild.net on our forums. Yes, this is a semi-serious call for recruitment. It’s not my normal outlet for recruitment, but I’ve had great applications come in from unusual sources before.

M’uru

We’ve been spending about a month or M’uru now. No doubt, that seems like a long time. But my guild only raids four days a week, so we’ve spent a cumulative of 48 hours on him. This is less than what SK Gaming spent to kill him (and much less than what Exodus spent). Thus far, we’ve seen phase two about a dozen times. That said, we’ve finally managed to get two solid looks at phase two: 69 and 51 percent. We’re also consistently getting M’uru down to less than 20% in phase one, and this consistency should only increase and give us a better look at phase two. The most important thing is that we’re getting there enough to actually get an idea of what we need to do to perfect our transition and stabilize phase two. Once this happens, we can begin putting in serious work on the latter half of the encounter.

That said, however, it’s difficult to predict just how far we are from a kill. Certainly, phase two seems very simple, but it took us 50 seconds to get to 51%, which means we have a lot of work to do. Ideally, we need to get him to around 40% by that point. We also need to stabilize the raid The primary reason we only got to 51% was because shit had hit the proverbial fan and people started dying. I’m not sure if this is because we missed something like a dark fiend (which can wipe the raid), or if our healers were getting hit by the ball that knocks everyone all over the place when they’re hit with it. It’s pretty difficult to heal as it is, much less when you’re getting tossed all over and don’t have many instant heals to work with.

In any case, I think we have the DPS for it. 51% in 50 seconds on only our second serious attempt of phase two is pretty good, considering our tank hasn’t even had much of a chance to optimize threat while avoiding the ball that knocks people all over the place. Nor has he had much practice of generating threat while actually being knocked around by it when he gets caught. Also, our ability to survive currently is extremely poor, as people are still mystified by the fact that we’re getting to phase two smoothly. There is typically a huge degree of improvement between our first two attempts at something and those consequent.

One thing is certain, however: seeing well into phase two twice has greatly increased raid morale. And I think it has likely solidified confidence amongst our new recruits that Lunacy is the guild they’re looking for. And considering we’ve picked up an enhancement shaman that can put out over 2K DPS on occasion, I am damn well content at this point in time. Here’s to hoping for the best for our remaining progress!