On Revving the Engine

A lot of unorganized randomness in this post, so be warned. 

So, about a week and a half after New year, AC is going to start raiding again.  We picked that time to give as many people as possible in our guild a chance to get to 80 and get at least some baseline gear.  It’s also my first time ever going into a new raiding cycle with a guild who has raiding experience.  It has its pros and cons.

The first pitfall we’ve encountered is divergent leveling rates.  At the time of this writing, I’m still only level 77.  We’ve got people who are 80 and have been doing back-to-back heroics for a week now, and are already accumulating quite a few purples.  We’ve got people who are still 73-74 and plugging along as fast as they can.  Unfortunately, there’s no real way to avoid this.  And unfortunately, it does mean that the people who pushed to 80 quicker are going to have to be a little bored while the others catch up as much as possible, before we start raiding in earnest.

It is a bonus though, knowing that you’ve got a core of skilled people, familiar with raiding, who you know you can work with to get the job done.  When AC was trying to start raiding in BC, it took us months to find enough people to start Karazhan – it seemed like every time we recruited a new person, two more would jump ship to a guild that was already in Kara.  I’m quite glad that I won’t need to work so hard this time.

Again on the negative side, I’m not looking forward to doing 10 man raids again.  I do find the raids themselves enjoyable, but trying to organize two 10 man teams is always a hassle.  And the transition over to 25 mans is a pain as well.  Hopefully the badge gear and heroic gear will help even out the gear level, so we don’t get stuck in the 10 mans quite as long.

We’re going to have to do some recruiting as well.  We lost some people due to Warhammer, and a few others decided to switch to other guilds and make it permanent after we stopped raiding.  Although why I keep getting applications from Tanks, I don’t know.  We’ve got about 80 billion tanks who want to join AC at the moment.  That being said, we’ve probably got enough to do 2 10 man teams, but if anyone misses a night, it could mess up the schedule.  We’re probably just shy of the 25 man mark, so we’ll see how that goes.

Yes, that does mean we will likely be actively recruiting in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes open if you’re interested.  We just need to get a final handle on who we DO have raiding and ready and what we’ll need to move forward.

Honestly, I do find myself missing raiding quite a bit.  I want to laugh and enjoy myself with friends, hear Cay scream when we get a guild first kill, etc.  I did kind of burn out near the end of BC, admittedly.  But I’ve got my second wind, and hopefully we can make a good run of it this time too.  Hell, AC started Karazhan about 6 months late, compared to the top guilds on Drenden, and when we stopped raiding we were at about #10 for progression.  Not a bad run.  We’ll see how we do with less of a lead-in this time.