Lyntha

Thanks for the advice. Sounds like good information.

Spotted the non-american

Great Job Everyone

We killed him last week. I forgot to post the picture. Edgeworth was totally there.

Update: I will be leaving raid no later than 10:15 tonight.

That's also my offspec gear. My shadow gear has all gifts. Anyways, yeah, what he said. Enchant your stuff!

<--- Can't touch this

It looks like the remaining kill order will be: Operator Thogar Kromog The Iron Maidens The Blast Furnace Blackhand General Information for each role on each Boss: Operator Thogar: Tanks: Taunt Swap for Enkindle, Pick up adds so we can cleave them down Healers: AOE heal through Men-At-Arms Damage, Tank Heal when adds are up. Healing CD's will be popped when men-at-arms are up. Melee DPS: Adds are top priority. Add priority is Firemenders --> Men-At-Arms --> The rest Ranged DPS: Adds are top priority. Add priority is Gunnery Sergeants (Only ranged can attack them) --> Firemenders --> Men-At-Arms --> The rest Everyone: Don't get hit by trains. Don't get hit by grenades. Move to your section when we split up. Run away if you get fixated More information on trains: Dodging trains is super easy. There are four doors on each side of the room. If you see a door open up, it means a train is coming on that track. Splitting up: At 2 minutes and 6 minutes into the fight, we get add trains on the middle tracks and need to split up. The raid leaders will split everyone up into 2 groups and we will break off then. Whichever tank doesn't have enkindling stacks will take the boss. Kromog: Tanks: Stack on each other at all times to split the damage of Fists of Stone. Taunt swap for Warped Armor. Get into melee range immediately after handling mechanics. Make sure that you get as far away from the boss as possible when he casts slam or you may get one-shot with high stacks of warped armor. Healers: Heal through Slam, POP Healing CD's for Stone Breath. Melee DPS: Handle Grasping Earth Hands (More info below). Ranged DPS: Handle Grasping Earth Hands (More info below) Everyone: Handle Grasping Earth Hands (More info below). Dodge Atramedes Reverbs, The Cone attack "Rippling Smash" and the stone Hands. Basically just dodge stuff. Be at max range when slam hits. Pop lust on the pull. Handling Rune of Grasping Earth: Throughout the fight, Kromog will summon a large number of orange runes on the ground. Every raider needs to get on their own rune. They will then be grabbed by a hand NPC called "Grasping Earth". When you are in the hand's grasp, you are immune to being knocked up by the ability "Thundering blows" which Kromog casts shortly after. Healers should focus on healers and DPS should focus on breaking people out. Their own runes should be DPS'd first to reduce damage taken then break out any slower DPS and (Especially) the healers and tanks. DO NOT kill your grasping earth before Thundering blows is finished casting or you'll probably die. We will assign positions to each group for where they will be going for tehse Iron maidens is a complex fight. I will work up a summary later.

We tried to do so Ansky. I thought it would work. It clearly didn't.

I wasn't around when you got kicked on false pretenses. I had no opinion of you from prior to when you came back into the raid. It's absurd to say that you have a stigma from me from then. If you feel that somebody is fucking with you, tell the officers and let us handle it. We let you just show up and raid last night and you did an awesome job. If we didn't want you in the guild, we would have kicked you already. We want you to be the same person you were last night, every night. This is the last that I am going to discuss your disciplinary decisions. I am frankly getting tired of repeating myself and it's getting on my nerves. We have discussed everything that needs to be discussed. Move forward and quit lingering in the past.

We tried to just use common sense. See "ATR, all of 2014". It didn't work. As I said before, a majority of the guild doesn't even need to worry about these rules. But we will be using them against the small minority that requires them. The ironic thing is that we've heard a lot of feedback from people like you and Summa who are just a pleasure to raid with and never cause issues. You guys have nothing to worry about. This isn't targeting you. It's meant to make the raid environment BETTER for you, not worse. It's easy to view our new rules as being more hardcore because it aligns with a more hardcore mentality. But that's not the intent. Efficient =/= Hardcore, but they do go hand-in-hand. We are casual because we raid 2 days a week and focus on having fun and not being dicks more than progression. There are two day a week raiding guilds who ARE hardcore who treat their raids like the most important thing humanity has going on. If you make one mistake, they jump down your back. That's not our guild, that's not what we're going to become. Let me ask you guys a question to further the dialogue: How was the first raid with the new rules? I thought that we were focused and accomplished a lot but there was still joking around and having fun.

Numbers are from parses. As I said, he had problems early on then appeared to have fixed it. See the following: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/character/991671/6/#boss=1706 https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/character/991671/6/# These are his normal parses for Butcher and Kargath. He started off rough, but then was well above 75 percentile on both fights. Looking at most of the fights in highmaul, he was above 50 percentile a lot of the time. After he improved and showed that he was doing alright, I stopped monitoring his numbers and didn't see how poorly he was doing in BRF. It's not reasonable to expect the officers to analyze the numbers for every single raider every single week. We try to identify individual issues and address them, not fix the world. Mokou lacts tact. But he brings up valid points. We should all be looking to help each other and improve our performance. If Jesseh is struggling, he should be working to improve himself. Looking at the highmaul numbers above, he clearly did well in the past so he's not a bad player. That doesn't change the fact that his performance in BRF so far has been not great and needs improvement. Mokou's post called to attention Jesseh's performance. He never once insulted Jesseh or called him names or anything. His goal with the post was to improve Jesseh's performance or at least call attention to the fact that improvements need to be made. Could he have more tact and been a bit nicer about it? Sure. But what he said was correct. By comparison, your post called him an elitist asshole and a bitch. How do you even see these things as being equal, let alone you being in the right and him being in the wrong? The officers will be having a chat with you before raid. This makes sense. If he's learning a new spec to improve his performance, he's working to improve. Keep tweaking man. Roqwell nailed it. I thought I had a way with words but Roqwell's analysis of the situation is spot-on. Regarding singling Mort and Will out: We obviously try not to do it and I don't feel that we outwardly do single them out. But nobody can deny that they have had a lot of issues in the past and it's hard not to want to jump on people who continue to have problems and stamp out the issue immediately. It's human nature. As you said Roqwell, they are both deflecting attention away from the actual issue (Them causing issues) and not focusing as much on fixing what they're doing wrong. Passive-agressive stuff like this really can get on people's nerves. The context of the situation would be completely different if you would just have some tact Mokou. You want our raid team to improve, it's not hard to see that. But you are not solving any issues if the method in which you communicate this comes off as aggressive and degrading. This is not Blood Legion, we're not going to just say "You are doing shitty dps". Instead, have a heart and realize that you are talking to another human being who has feelings and doesn't like being put out there. Take all of that passion for improvement and funnel it into more constructive criticism instead of negative criticism. You're fine Summa. You are one of our strongest healers. Also, we don't fight each other for shields that much. It's one thing to have two disc priests for a 10man raid. It's totally different thing to have 2 disc priests for 25-30 people. Not only that, but do you remember the first time we did Heroic Butcher? We were competing for WS debuffs and it didn't work out for either of us. At that point, I started leaning more heavily on CoW usage and try to ease up on PW:S usage. Healing logs will corroborate this. I'm not doubting that occasionally you could perform better if we underhealed and/or didn't use 2 disc priests. But it wouldn't be a huge difference and you are already doing a great job. Those hardcore guilds that underheal fights can only do so because their raiders are absolutely amazing at avoiding damage, healing themselves and managing defensive CD's. Our raid is just not as capable. That's not a knock on our raid either. It's not fair to compare somebody who raids 2 days a week for fun to a group of people who will literally raid for 80+ hours a week when new content comes out. It makes no sense to string by on barely having enough healers if we can just add 1 or 2 more and still beat the berserk timer while having a bigger healing cushion. Regarding the post being the same - I disagree. This is more of a reflection on my own leadership style than anything. I try to give people the respect and freedom to manage their own problems and resolve their own issues. I try to treat people like adults and let them grow and improve organically, while also being hands-on with people that require improvement. That has worked with this guild in the past. If you have a raid with 95% of people like this and 5% of people who act like children, the 95% will be much more vocal and keep that raider in check. It's a group mentality. Our raid just doesn't have that makeup. We have some amazing people in this guild who require no hand-holding and manage their own issues. We also have some people who don't realize how much of a headache they cause others and really do need their hand held. I tried to be the person to do the hand-holding and lead them down a path to improvement. Sometimes it would work but oftentimes it wouldn't. I'm no longer going to do this, nor are any of the officers. We are not changing the parameters of the raid. We are only going to make the raid more efficient and stop wasting people's time. It is super frustrating to only have 7 hours to raid a week only to log in and waste half of that time because people are acting like jackasses, arguing, ass-pulling, not being prepared etc. That's what these new guidelines are meant to address.

TBear is right. In the end, we are still officers because we are advocates for the raiders. We work hard to make the raid environment better for you all. The goals of these changes is to improve the raid environment for the majority of the players. If we've made a mistake, we are open to logically laid-out arguments against what we are implementing. Bring on the discussion!

This is true, but we also have to caution that we are going to be more strict and rigid than we were before. I will no longer bend over backwards and annoy 24 other people for the benefit of one person. You cannot please everyone, and you cannot make everyone happy. I would try to do so before, but it's a losing proposition in the long run. Then get your flasks/enchants after the raid. Log in at 7:25 and get your seals real quick before you fly to raid, or have enough seals saved up that you can get your seals on break or after the raid. This is basic time management. I make it a point to discuss who wiped to what during learning and fix the mistakes. I don't hold it against everyone when are learning a fight. When we are going for a kill and one person continually messes up the Kargath fixate, for example, they get sat. If they are consistently getting sat for progression, the question begging to be asked is "If they are always sat for progression, why do we gear them up?". We're not making the guild more hardcore. There's a difference between super hardcore and being more efficient. We are trying to be more efficient with our time. We want everyone to do their best of course, but my post doesn't go over mechanics issues and consequences as much because that's not as large of a focus for us. We will only step in if somebody is doing very poorly consistently and has no reason to raid with us. We want to quit wasting people's time but we're not going to become super hardcore. This is giving the officers more tools. Our raid tonight (2/10/15) was great. We stayed focus and accomplished a lot but still had fun. I really want this to work out for everyone and don't want people fearing for their raid spots or anyone. At the same time, all of the officers want the capability to identify and remove any problem players before it affects guild morale. Really? You're sure there's absolutely NO ONE you would like to replace at the first occasion? Anyone who is in this guild is in here for a reason. We want everyone to succeed and we probably enjoy raiding with you more than we dislike raiding with you. That makes our job that much harder (And why I've failed so hard at in the past) but hard decisions must be made if we want to put the needs of the money ahead of the wants of the few.

We aren't going to be nazis about this stuff. If you log in at 7:35 once in a blue moon because you're running late, it's all good. If you log in at 8:00 every day, it's a problem. We HAVE had issues this xpac with people showing up late. Our heroic progression has been an absolute muddled mess at times because we would be constantly adjusting healer makeup to adjust for 3-4 new people arriving to raid late and messing up the ratios we needed. This is the stuff that we need to fix. The important things we want are the following: 1.) Are most people there at 7:30 so we can start trash without it being a wipefest? 2.) Is everyone there once we get to the first boss? You have nothing to fear Ansky, you have literally PERFECT attendance. You haven't missed a single EP tick. If everyone was like you, we wouldn't need to implement these changes.

You cannot change your work schedule and you cannot change what times you go to school, but you can choose what guilds you make a commitment to. If you make a commitment to raid in a guild whose hours are impossible to meet, it's not reasonable to expect a raid spot. Heroic scales up. More people equals more loot so you're not stealing loot. Even if we have to recruit to replace you, there should be on the spot on the heroic roster for you. The only thing I draw slight issues from. This policy is stricter than the attendance policies here at college. There are always instances where despite there only being a three absent limit the professor has certain circumstances where the absence will be excused. Same situation as the raid, I only see the dude two days a week for less time than we raid but there are still instances that can be excused because they are just out of the student's control or the situation is so severe it's understandable they can't be there. I get that a random post saying you won't be there with no explanation won't be excused but some instances when explained I think should be excused. The one-time situations that are severely unlikely to happen again but are keeping the raider from the raid. One-time situations will happen. That's fine. If you're sick or on vacation or something, that's all gravy. If you consistently miss raids due to your normal schedule, you shouldn't be committing to a raid schedule. We're trying to crack down on people who are regulary absent or late, not somebody who misses a day here and there. If you can make 100% of raids barring "Things that pop up", you'll be fine. If you commit to a raid knowing that even in the best-case scenario you will only make 80% of the raid, your actual attendance is going to be much lower because of random things popping up. Jesseh had DPS issues at the start of the Xpac. He has since improved vastly. He doesn't regularly make mechanics mistakes but isn't perfect either. Jesseh is the perfect example of an average raider. We love raiding with him (As we do with most of you!). Homeslice needs improvement on the mechanics front as well as the attendance front.

Precisely what TBear said. Jesseh and Homeslice started this xpac out a bit rough but have lately been outstanding raiders. Summah and Mike have always been outstanding. That doesn't change the fact that us letting them constantly show up late or miss raids is slowing down our progression and therefore wasting others' time. I want all four of these raiders to make it on time consistently, but that's beyond my control. What is within my control is ensuring that somebody will be there in that raid spot that makes it on time consistently. Attendance is not a hard number either. It's not like as soon as somebody goes below 85% attendance, alarms go off at ATR Headquarters and we remove that raider. We are looking for a pattern. If somebody cannot consistently make at least 7 of 8 raids, that will show. TBear is an excellent example. He missed a bunch of time at the start of the xpac but has since been here. We're not going to punish him for missing raids at the start of the xpac when he hasn't missed a single tick of EP in the last 2 months. Also, Jesseh is borderline not on the list. Jesseh was late a bunch at the start (Just like Tbear missed a bunch of raids at start) but has lately been much better. We will look to fix both situations, but deflecting attention from one situation to another isn't how we're going to handle things. There are 3 raiders who will be spoken to tonight and will be closely monitored by officers going forward. 2 for mechanics issues and 1 for behavior issues. 2 more players are going on action plans immediately and may be kicked. We are not saying one thing and doing another.

Yeah, that really sucks. You can understand why this needs to happen though. When you raid with us, you are an absolute pleasure. You bring nothing but positivity to the raid. That doesn't mean anything though if we go to do mythic progression and can't because three of our healers are missing because we don't enforce attendance tracking. During the past 10 raids, you've missed half of them. We can't roll the dice and have a 50% chance of you being there when we need you. The people currently at risk of failing to meet attendance guidelines are: Summa Thebestdk Crimsontrail Homeslice If any of these people cannot fix their attendance/tardiness issues, we will attempt to recruit somebody to replace them. If you can fix your issue before we replace you, no problem! But if we recruit somebody that takes your place, we are not going to sit the new person when/if you come back.

Me and Jim are just too nice. We really wanted to resolve issues instead of realizing that some issues are a lost cause. It's time to cut our losses and focusing on improving the raiding experience for everyone instead of for a select few. This new approach is being implemented to make us more efficient without sacrificing our core tenants. If one person is being unefficient, they are wasting the time of 19-29 other people, which is simply unacceptable. We are still going to try to keep our raiding environment fun and that's still our biggest goal. Hopefully these changes help to get us there. More information on Action Plans: We have discussed in the past that repeated infractions will still lead to removal from the raid team or a gkick but we haven't really fleshed out that process. The action plan process is our implementation of that idea. Here's how it works. 1.) The officers must agree as a majority that a raid member is: Repeatedly violating guild rules and guidelines This behavior has been ongoing for at least two weeks The individual is not showing any signs of improvement or is not improving quickly enough 2.) If all officers agree, the member is put on an action plan for a period of one month. They will be spoken to prior to the next raid and informed that they are on action plan 3.) Once a member is on an action plan, any infractions will result in removal from the raid team 4.) Repeated infractions during the action plan time period or severe infractions will result in removal from the guild 5.) If the member improves and is not an issue during their action plan period, they are removed from the action plan after one month.

In the past year, the officers have run the guild in a manner in which we try to be all-inclusive. We tried to adapt the guild to all of our members. The officers have sat down and discussed how we run our guild and decided that this is not the right approach. We are putting the needs and wants of the few in front of the needs and wants of the many. Our attempts to be friendly and inclusive towards one person would result in us unintentionally making the experience worse for everyone else. It's not fair to our raiders to suffer a degraded experience for the benefit of one person. We are no longer going to tolerate actions and behaviors which impact the majority of our raid and our raiders to try to be fair or inclusive towards individual members. The goal of this guild is to have a casual approach to the commitment necessary for raiding (2 days a week) while maintaining a focused and efficient raiding environment so that we can have a good time. We have failed our members in some of these aspects. We are going to be implementing the following changes: 1.) There is no longer a "Late" or "Excused Absence" with regards to how we track attendance. If you are late, you are marked as absent for the night. If you have an excused absence, it is still an absence. We only raid 2 days a week and people consistently being late or taking excused absences are crippling our ability to progress. It doesn't make sense for us to gear people only for them to not be there when we need them for mythic progression. 2.) Not being inside the raid by start of raid or after a break is an EP minus. Continued issues will lead to you being marked absent for that night because you weren't there and active when you were expected to. One person wasting 19-29 other persons' time IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE. 3.) If you cannot maintain 85% attendance, you will no longer be part of the mythic team. This means 85% on-time attendance. This number is just under you missing one day every 4 weeks. If you cannot make 7 of every 8 raids, you will not meet this requirement. Since we only raid 2 days a week, it's not unreasonable for us to expect our members to be there. 4.) All members must be prepared with regards to role strategies for bosses. We will expect all members to read up on boss summaries and know the major things to watch out for your role. We don't expect you to watch a 15 minute long video and know every part of the fight... That's what the raid leaders are there for. We do expect you to take 1 minute and read up on what major abilities you need to watch out for on each fight. 5.) All members must be prepared with Seals, Flasks and Enchantments prior to start of raid time. We are wasting too much time handing out flasks during raid. Maintain a stack of your own flasks or talk to the officers/Kansir after raid or before raid for flasks when you get low. Failure to have flasks or enchantments will lead to you being removed from the raid team. 6.) Negative attitudes are not allowed. This is pretty self-explanatory. Negative attitudes snowball. 7.) Making fun of the rules or complaining about application of the rules during raid times are not allowed. If you have a problem with the rules or how they are applied, bring it up the officers after raid time via whispers or forum PM's. There will be no more wasted time with people bitching in TS during the raid about the rules or saying "I think Raider X deserves a verbal warning for what he/she just said!". If you feel that the issue is time-sensitive, whisper an officer during the raid but do not abuse this. 8.) Problem raiders will be removed. We have allowed problem raiders too much latitude and it is negatively affecting the morale of the raid. Individuals who continue to have issues will be presented with an action plan for improvement. If they do not immediately improve and do what is asked of them, they will no longer be part of the raiding team. We are starting this process on two individuals.

There are only 5 people in the guild with PERFECT perfect attendance (Never missed a single EP tick). They are: Lyntha Ftfk Ansky Mastric Chillr On 2/17/15, the Snuggel may be leaving this exclusive club. As long-time members know, I work an IT job and in the past would have to work after-hours and work in an on-call rotation despite the fact that I do IT project management and not IT support. My company was reorganized and I am no longer lumped in with our local support group and no longer have to work that crap. As a final parting gift to our team, my new manager decided to throw us into one last after-hours rotation for a network upgrade at my company. I have to work on 2/17/15 after-hours during the cutover to monitor critical pieces of infastructure and resolve any issues that come up. Normally this cutover starts at 7PM, meaning I would be missing the whole raid. Luckily, the cutover during my shift has been moved to an 11PM start time because we are impacting Operating Rooms which are usually still running at 7PM but die down (haha) for the most part by 11PM other than emergency work. As a result, I will be leaving raid early to go to work on 2/17/15. Exact departure time is still to be determined.

The biggest problem was with the officers, so good luck.