Rusty

No, I didn't give up on blogging, just got overrun by the holidays, travel and such. Back as of last Saturday, we did manage to scrape up enough people to venture into Naxx Sunday & Monday. It felt a bit rusty and between that and some delays to fill, connection issues and such, we didn't actually make it to the Frost Wyrm wing last night.

Tonight marks a whole new type of adventure for the guild -- Heroic raids with 25. There's a lot about this that I'm in "wait and see" mode about. How hard will it be? How quick or smoothly will the raids go? How many people and who will show up?

A couple of people have contacted me about joining the guild and I've been holding off on deciding what to do. Until the holidays, it felt like both 10-person teams had fairly reliable groups of 12 or so and were more likely to disappoint people left out than struggle to fill. If somebody contacts me and wants to raid, I wouldn't want to take them and then have them sit on the bench all the time waiting for a chance.

But 25 > 2x10 (sometimes the math is simple ;), so I think we might need a slightly bigger pool of raiders to fill Heroics reliably. If we have ~75% attendance, we'd need 33 raiders. I think many people are already >75%, so that's probably too many. Also, I have a hunch we can do parts of Naxx with <25 in a pinch. But there's still room for around 5-7 more people who specialize more in 25s and sub occasionally in 10s. Would these new players be ok with that deal? I'll check tonight.

And then there's the issue that maybe we'll be doing more 25s than 10s sooner than I thought. I'm planning 2 & 2 this week tentatively, but if Heroic Naxx is rolling, maybe that changes in a couple of weeks. Maybe non-heroic Naxx becomes an off-night and/or pug based activity. Or maybe we grow up to have a decent shot at 35 online and run both Heroic and/or non-heroic on the same nights.

I think a lot of people are looking forward to tonight, which is good. Hopefully the transition won't be stressful, they sometimes are. I have a hunch that in addition to the new recruiting issues, we'll be running into the old filling issues of trying to pick 25 people based on class, ability and performance. It'd be nice if I could pick a list of 25 in advance of raid night like we do with the 10s, but I'm not sure how well that will work. Maybe it's time to figure out the signup system bundled in the guildlaunch website. That might work better than the in game calendar for this.