Lyntha

I just got too much stuff going on. Thanks but I'm good.

ATR got hungry and gobbled up the members of Elysium into our guild. They are an awesome group of guys and gals.

Totes gonna break it

So rude and so nude

Onto blackhand we go!

Baaaah

Keep the feedback coming guys, thanks. Just make sure to keep it civil! We're all friends here

Hey guildies. The officers need your input. We have recently started "Trimming" the raid group on harder bosses to push progression. This was never an option for ATR in the past due to a lack of flex raid on hard difficulty content. In the past, the discussion has been something along the lines of "Oh, this is a 25man raid, so we are going to bring our 25 best people". It's easy to tell someone they're sitting because they're not in the group of "Best 25 for this fight". It's a different story to tell someone "Oh, we're sitting half the raid team on this hard boss because they're just not good enough". What do you guys think ATR's "Trimming" policy should be?

Cool

This totally has nothing to do with Iron Maidens I see

These are all very good points Ansky. I agree with you and apologize if I was dismissive in the past. I'm not going to make any excuses... We as an officer crew just need to do better, especially at everything you mentioned.

We discuss ahead of time what our upcoming plans are for raid progression and where we are targeting next. It's never a quick discussion and there's usually 2-4 of us actively discussing it. To expand that discussion to 25 people would certainly be a large waste of time at best. We only have so much time during our normal raiding hours. We could do it on the forums ahead of time with all members but then people will just complain that people who have time to talk on the forums all day have their opinion valued more than those who can't. Do you really want us to vote where to go next after every boss or even every wing?

The officers really do have the best intentions for the raid group in mind at all times and we do what we think is best for the raid group. Sometimes, we're just plain wrong with our assessment. We will do polling occasionally but we really want you guys to just speak your mind and let us know as well. Everybody definitely seemed happy with our vote last week ansky and it's something that we want to do more of in the future, but it's not going to be like that every raid day. There's definitely a limit as to how much we can vote on and still be efficient. Just imagine if everybody in the U.S. voted on every bill that went through our government - We would never have time to do anything else. That's what we have our elected leaders for. We also have to keep in mind that our officers have to be impartial and do what they think is best for the raid group as a whole instead of what's best for an individual. Highmaul Mythic has a lot of items which are poorly itemized for many classes but there are still many huge upgrades in there for certain raiders which is why we started there last week. If we would have put it to a vote immediately, half the raid would have voted no because they were the half who didn't have upgrades in Highmaul. Just because something isn't good for one person doesn't mean it's not good for everyone. We have to act as a team and do what's best for the team. Edit: By the way, there are no more plans for us to go back to Highmaul now with the ilvl upgrade in BRF unless we hit some kind of unanticipated wall in progression.

Nope, I did them with moot and we had a blast.

Just a heads up... We tried doing CM's and it was HARD. Like way harder than CM's in MoP. CM's in MoP were challenging but fun. These aren't even fun. You have to group stack and cheese everything as much as possible to have a chance. I've tried it with two different groups and we didn't do more than one night with either group. Would not recommend.

Making those decisions faster IS being hardcore. "Making decisions faster" in your words is really just sitting people sooner before giving them a chance to improve. More hardcore. It's also going to give the officers less aggregate data to work with, causing us to make decisions based on a much smaller time window where individual actions are much more apparent. More hardcore. It's also setting a precedent where we are sitting as many people as possible, causing less people to get loot and slowing down raid gearing just to get a boss kill sooner. More hardcore. The question I hear you asking is "Can we be more hardcore?" My answer is "No". Not with our current raid and our current mentality. Us dropping seven people after less than 20 attempts on a new boss is WAY more hardcore than this guild usually is. Asking us to be more hardcore than that is a huge culture shock that I don't think the guild as a whole wants. If people want to speak up and tell me that my understanding of what the guild wants is wrong, so be it. Every boss is different. As of now, we don't start optimizing until a kill is imminent and we are sure that individuals are holding us back and don't seem to be improving. Setting a timeframe on this is unrealistic and not helpful.

Do you want to raid in a guild where you make 2 or 3 mistakes on a boss and just get sat? Do you want to raid in a guild where we are constantly swapping people in and out to try to optimize the raid? This isn't a hypothetical question, and I'm sure that some people in our guild want that environment. When I make decisions, I try to make everyone happy. There's a balance between being hardcore and optimizing our group as much as possible versus giving people all the leniency in the world and being completely casual. Where we fall in between these two positions is up for debate, but we certainly fall into the middle between these. We had less than 20 attempts on a new boss with many new mechanics before I sat a ton of people and we got the kill. How much more hardcore can you get before you start to adopt a seriously hardcore stance on raiding?

I have played with gump a long time and know him well. He brings his A-game every raid. He gives it his all. His A-game is just different than my A-game or Jim's A-game. That doesn't make him any less valuable to the guild. We each bring something to the table and judging somebody purely on their performance isn't what ATR is about. I'm saying that we didn't drop people on IM who were just making constant mistakes. No one person died early every attempt. It's a very long fight with many opportunities for mistakes and a wide range of people made mistakes. As such, other than edge cases (Edgeworth and Bash were doing especially poor), it was more effective to optimize the group for performance and give us a greater margin for error. Which is what I did. And it worked. Could we have sat people earlier? Sure. Should we have? That's debatable. I'm just explaining why I made the choices I made. Obviously, the more effort you put towards a game, the better you will become. But some people just have skill limits, man. Some people learn at different rates as well. Some guy can start awful at a game but become very good with very little effort. Some other person can start being good at a game but not improve much despite trying. Everyone's different. Here's the numbers I'm using: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/CdYKA1cfDhkrvN6R#boss=1695&wipes=1&type=deaths&cutoff=3 https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/CdYKA1cfDhkrvN6R#boss=1695&wipes=1&type=damage-done&cutoff=3 Those are still issues? It's just not 100% there fault.. It is still an issue though? Sure it is. Which is why they were sat.

I feel like I am constantly just explaining my actions to people at this point when they are nearly always well thought-out, and it's getting tiring. I'm not saying that I'm always right. Far from it. I make plenty of mistakes and admit them. I also welcome constructive criticism at any time as well. If I do something though, I typically do it for a good reason that made sense at the time.

That's not always the case. Ghost has been tanking for a while and changed to DPS for the betterment of the raid and was trying to learn a new spec while adjusting to a new fight AND a new role. His DPS gear is also out of date since he has tanking for a while and prioritizing upgrades with that in mind. Bash was undergeared and still getting used to playing boomkin. That excuses the performance (Or at least explains it, because bash is normally a great player) but doesn't excuse the deaths. Cabel plays destro, which isn't great on IM. Locks period aren't oustanding on IM, but destro is the worst by far on it. Destro as a spec is otherwise plenty good enough to play as your main spec, but it's just very poor on this fight. Im honestly not sure why we sat Imcute because he wasn't doing awful, but his spec is also not that great on IM. Mastric's native spec towers over the other two locks' specs on this fight. Some people just got sat because of performance issues that weren't related to long-term average performance issues.

That's not what I said though. I'm saying on progression bosses when people are dieing to ridiculous things regularly.. Iron maidens is an example.. There were people messing up the 9 attempts on tuesday, and the 10+ attempts on Wednesday..Then we finally sat them..and we downed the boss. Your point about gear doesnt make any sense becuase I'm strictly talking progression bosses..not farm bosses where people can show up and get gear. If people in the raid on our second grouping of attempts are causing us to wipe all night.. We should be quicker to sit them. I'm going to take your response as no..but just so you know, its not just me requesting this..it's the 15-16 other people who think we're wasting a lot of time trying to carry people. But, I think its ridiculous that requesting people to perform better or be benched isnt a concept that the entire guild can be behind. Did you take a look at the logs? We sat the following people for the kill: Phobia Shinjung Mythosaur Cabelockjr Crimsontrail Lihuai Imcute Here's that list again, with their average uptime excluding events after 3 deaths (Typically when a wipe is called); Phobia - 83% Shinjung - 93% Mythosaur - 95.5% Cabelockjr - 100% Crimsontrail - 100% Lihuai - 100% Imcute - 100% 4 of these players were making pretty much no mistakes and 2 of the other 3 were doing very well. Bash was the only person doing lower damage and also making mistakes. Bash is also just getting back into raiding and gearing up and learning how to play boomkin effectively. Here's some people's uptime pre-3 deaths excluding deaths who stayed in: Kaelthas - 77% Roqwell - 80.5% Ansky - 87.2% Pikachu - 88.5% Jlogg - 89.5% Muln - 90.6% Mokou - 97.1% Mirus - 98.2% All of those players had early deaths. Some of them had multiple early deaths. They didn't get sat, because I wanted to optimize for performance on a particularly unique boss where being able to cast while moving and being able to multi-dot/cleave was super important. Your exact words were "I'm saying on progression bosses when people are dieing to ridiculous things regularly.. Iron maidens is an example.. There were people messing up the 9 attempts on tuesday, and the 10+ attempts on Wednesday..Then we finally sat them..and we downed the boss". We did not down the boss when we sat people who were making mistakes. We downed the boss when we sat enough lower-performing people to give us a much greater margin for error. As such, I'm not sure what you are advocating here. What I did worked, in that unique situation. I'm referring to the people who are late coming after break.. Those people are still getting EP with no minus. We have removed people from raid for being absent for readychecks post-break. We kicked cabel from the group last week for it during IM attempts. I cannot remember if we also docked him EP but it's not like it's getting ignored. If we slim down to 15 people...that is EXACTLY what im suggesting in point number 1 which you said no to? As for my statement.. Lack of effort=lack of skill... I'm not asking for hard core numbers. I am how-ever asking that if youre going to raid on a class...you should probably know how to play that class. We have a lot of tools for people to be better.. WA, Guides, simc, hell just ask and I'll do most of this homework for anyone. But not doing anything to be better is stupid. That's what I'm saying. On paper, Blast Furnace MIGHT be harder than Mythic Tectus/Butcher/Brackenspore. But how hard is an optimized 15-man Blast Furnace fight versus a not-quite-as-optimized 20-man Mythic Butcher/Brackenspore/Tectus fight? I'd say they are about even. If so, the question comes down to other benefits. Do we want more tier bonuses for example? If so, we go for Blast furnace. I want to see some discussion on this. Regarding your statement, Lack of effort DOES NOT equal lack of skill. Are you going to argue that anybody in our guild could raid in Method or be a world top PVP player if they just tried hard enough? That's not how it works. Some people are just plain better at the game than others. Some people have hard skill caps. Our own GM is an older guy who has a lower skill cap at the game. He does what he can and works to improve his gameplay as much as he can. No matter how much he tries, he will never perform at the same level as me and jim when it comes to shadow-priesting. He can work to get close, but I honestly believe that. I don't know about you, but I joined this guild to have fun in this game, and I will raid with Gump over some asshole who is better at the game 100% of the time. Gump also doesn't get offended when he's asked to sit on harder fights or asked to improve. He truly gives it his all. Would you prefer that we handle this situation differently? If so, how?

1.) Even high-end guilds need to adjust and get used to mechanics. It's not fair to sit people as soon as they make a mistake. There's a balance between letting people get used to mechanics, and sitting people to push progression. You are also forgetting something very important as well - The more people that we kill a boss with, the more loot we get and the better geared our raid is. We cannot just drop down to 15 for IM every week because gearing will then just be much slower. Not only is there less loot variety, but there's less overall loot as well. I clearly sat people last week during our first serious full night of attempts on IM as a kill was imminent and it was progression but I don't plan on sitting as many people for our second kill. 2.) Immediately punishing people for an ass-pull is understandable, but we are being slower on punishing people for lateness until they can adjust. After hearing feedback from a lot of people, we are also relaxing our definition of late a bit as well. We are still starting EP ticks at 7:30 but we really just want people to be there by the time we get to the first boss. If somebody can only be on at 7:35 every day, it doesn't really affect the raid too much. Lastly, I am not sure if we need to actually give out EP minuses for people being late if they are already losing EP via missing EP ticks. It's sort of double punishing somebody. What are everyone's thoughts on this? 3.) Not sure. We want to gear our raid as quickly as possible via the path of least resistance and I'm not seeing much discussion on the difficulty of mythic HM bosses vs the harder heroic BRF bosses. Do you have anything you can link me towards on this topic? The only thing I have to go off of right now is wowprogress numbers. In a single tier, if more guilds have downed Boss A than have downed Boss B, boss B is typically harder. With Mythic Highmaul, it's a bit more difficult since they are basically like half-tiers. Looking at boss kill stats, we can see that 8% of guilds have killed Heroic Blast Furnace, but 6% to 4% of guilds have killed Mythib Brackenspore, Butcher and Tectus. Comparing them is difficult, so feel free to point me towards any discussion on the matter so we can be better informed. We also have to consider that we can drop down to a 15-man or so slimmed down group for a blast furnace kill but we can't do so for mythic fights. Regarding the last thing you said: A lot of the people who are consistently lower performers aren't there due to lack of effort, it's due to lack of skill, which is something that they cannot control. Drawing the line on this is difficult if somebody is trying their best. We're not a hardcore guild.