About a month ago, someone on my server approached me and asked for my advice on leading a successful raiding guild. This person wasn’t interested in building a guild that could score world firsts or dominate the server competition. Such advice is something I cannot give, as I do not have any experience leading guilds of such caliber. Rather, they simply wanted to know what made Lunacy successful, and how they could go about improving their own guild.

First, however, I must lay out the history of Lunacy and define the style of guild it is. This is, afterall, the context in which I give advice, make decisions, and formulate opinions.

What Lunacy Is, and What It’s Not

Lunacy is a top 100 guild in the U.S. Our kill of M’uru placed 40th in the U.S., while our defeat of Kil’jaeden slipped us down to 64th. With this in mind, we can be considered hardcore. However, we are not a top 20 guild. We are not currently on the same level as any of the guilds on the front page of WoWProgress. Nor did we strive to achieve such a feat during The Burning Crusade.

I’m not about to pretend we’re something we’re not. However, to have killed Entropius (M’uru) well before his first nerf, and to have defeated Kil’jaeden two months before 3.0.2 is no small feat. This puts us in a relatively small class, at the 99.6th percentile of ranked guilds on WoWProgress.

Furthermore, having survived both M’uru and Kil’jaeden as a guild, whom people so fondly refer to as “the guild killers” is also an accomplishment I think is a testament to our guild and our ideals. We value the skill in our members and are constantly evaluating the level at which we play. If we cannot succeed or efficiently progress with the members we have, either we must improve or change our members. In this regard, we can be considered hardcore.

At the same time, however, I am not about to set a raid schedule of five, six or seven days a week. I value the lives of our members, as well as my own. It is simply impossible in this day and age for a person to raid on such a rigorous schedule and still manage to hold some semblance of a normal life. For this reason, we can perhaps be considered casual.

Hence, I always like to refer to Lunacy as a guild with a casual schedule that can accommodate raiders who approach their play in a hardcore manner. We are a “hardcore-casual” guild.

A Brief History of Lunacy

Lunacy did not exist during 1.x. Well, it did, but it was an entirely different guild than it was during The Burning Crusade.

During 1.x, I raided with various guilds. These included Exigence, Black Wolf Mercenaries and Project Mayhem on Proudmoore, as well as Zero Tolerance on Azgalor. My times with Exigence, Project Mayhem and Zero Tolerance were very short. And while my time with Black Wolf was extensive, I could no longer raid with them regularly once they had transitioned to a schedule that was exclusively Australian. After my stint with Project Mayhem, I evaluated my guild options and decided Proudmoore had nothing to offer me. One guild didn’t use voice communication, which I thought was imperative to success during certain encounters. One guild had a prominent officer that ninja’d loot from the raid of a close friend of mine and gloated about it on IRC. Another only raided weekends. And the last option I had was another Australian guild. With all of these guilds ruled out, I decided I would create my own guild at the start of TBC, and spent my time raiding casually with Black Wolf, PUGing BWL, running a PUG MC, and playing the TBC beta.

At first, I was going to transfer servers and start the guild elsewhere. I thought the Australian-American split between Proudmoore’s population was too problematic. However, I realized it would be difficult to establish a guild as a fresh face, and my co-GM convinced me to stay by offering to help lead the guild. This was when the modern version of Lunacy was born. I originally did not want to adopt the same name as my first guild, but Silver was a part of the original incarnation and insisted on the name. So I buckled and agreed, even though they are completely different guilds.

From there, we began recruiting. At the launch of TBC, we had merely five people who intended on raiding with us full-time. After a couple weeks, we had only eight capped members and raided Karazhan with a couple friends filling the last slots. From there, we slowly built our guild from the ground up, running heroics nearly every day to trial potential members and invite those we felt were adequate in meeting the guild’s standards.

Initially, our goal for the guild was set relatively low. The general idea was to create a guild that had the potential to break down raiding walls efficiently and clear all of the bosses in any given content cycle. This is something Proudmoore failed to do in Naxxramas, never defeating Gothik in Naxx-60 before the release of TBC. It was my intention to fill this hole and challenge other guilds by creating a guild that would compete on a level higher than Proudmoore was seeing in the waning days of 1.x.

From Hydross on, Lunacy achieved this goal. The only two bosses we did not achieve sever firsts on in tier five content and above were Lurker and Illidan. Illidan was a major blow to the guild, no doubt. However, it did not dent our morale and instilled in us a desire to rise again to number one in the Sunwell Plateau. Also, it was easy for us to take heart in losing the server first on Illidan, because we only lost by 30 minutes and actually managed to do something no one else in the world had done at the time. We were the first guild in the world to achieve a progression kill (that is, a “guild first”) with a paladin tanking Illidan.

Losing Black Temple to Renaissance did bring us back down to reality, however. Following the loss, we heightened our recruitment standards and vowed to approach Sunwell with an aggression that would elevate us to an entirely different level. If someone’s DPS still needed work, we simply erred on the side of caution and denied them entry into the guild. If they couldn’t deal with various situational abilities, they didn’t make the cut. However, I will admit mistake in being loathe to replace, cut or demote some of the existing members whose performance wasn’t up to our new standard. In this regard, we were slowly evolving, but there were some problems that persisted because we were still a developing guild.

Some Shots of Lunacy\'s Progress

As time passed, we became more concerned with our residual problems. After stalling for some time on Felmyst, Silver and I decided that we would sit anyone we felt wasn’t up to the task at hand for specific encounters. If someone was likely to conflag the raid on the Twins, they would only come in if we absolutely needed them. If someone’s DPS was too poor, we’d put in someone else on M’uru. This new caution and standard led us to place extremely well on M’uru (40th in the U.S.).

However, we weren’t done making refinements and our problems caught up with us. With the midsummer months bringing forth a great amount of attrition, anyone who hadn’t defeated Kil’jaeden faced waning membership and a limited recruitment pool. For this reason, it took us two months to defeat Kil’jaeden. Admittedly, this was perhaps also because we faced some internal problems outside the scope of membership. This experience provided me with perhaps the most perspective on just what I needed to do with the guild to make it successful in the future. For one, recruitment needed to be more aggressive. For another, I needed to act on not only performance problems, but also attitude problems. You can’t build a good raid or succeed if one or two people are souring the mood. And you can’t build a good raid if people don’t adhere to your guild’s philosophies. It is not enough to have people who show up everyday. You need to have people who exemplify what you expect from your raiders. You need to fill holes in your raid. And you need to hammer home your guild’s philosophies.

With that said, we now have a raid that I believe is even stronger than it was during our first kill of Entropius. I have a great amount of confidence in the foundation we’ve built for Wrath, which is something we obviously didn’t have during TBC when we were entirely new. That said, there are challenges ahead in transitioning to a new expansion. But I am not ready to discuss my plans for the future, as they are still being evaluated and decisions are still being made.

Needless to say, the evolution of Lunacy has been astounding and I have a great foundation on which to further build and improve the guild during Wrath.

What to Expect from This Guide

This series of posts is being written for people who hope to create or lead their own hardcore raiding guilds, and for those who find themselves thrust into the leadership ranks of such guilds. This compendium will offer advice and provide contextual examples for the creation, management and improvement of guilds that want to raid on a hardcore level, but maintain an atmosphere that breaks the mold from most other hardcore raiding guilds.

The series will cover the creation, building and refinement of a hardcore raiding guild. It will provide contextual examples from my own experiences, as well as references to the guilds who have ideas I sometimes like to emulate. It will begin by detailing the situations that can lead to the creation of a guild, followed by ideas on how to develop interest in the guild, how to evaluate players interested in joining, how to improve the efficiency and skill of the raid after the foundation has been set, and how to make any renovations necessary to heighten the success of the guild.