The Push!

Hi all

Time for another blog post as we close on on our 8th kill of Mythic Antorus.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all been pleasantly surprised by the relative ease with which we have come back from what appeared to be the brink of death to add another two bosses to our previous kills in relatively short order. 

We really couldn’t ask for much better than two bosses down over two weekends and we now find ourselves looking at another two boss kills being within our grasp before things get somewhat more complicated.

By complicated, I naturally mean that wipe numbers become more significant the further we go past 8/11M, but in particular the question of class balance, composition and to a lesser extent stacking starts to become a bigger part of the effort v reward equation.

Coven requires ranged and dot classes (got the second covered, for the first we’re getting there), Aggramar is a DK/CC playground and Argus will want us a Disc priest or second Paladin and probably monk tank (thanks Bragfist!).

Thankfully, more than at any other time in our past we’ve got players working with OSs and alts to make the team more flexible and cover any shortages and this has helped us avoid what some other guilds typically have to do at this time which is recruit the classes they lack and bench players that have until now been regular in favour of those who bring the advantages the fights need.

With Argus taking many hundreds of wipes (some current guilds are up to 500-600) this means a lot of bench sitting once you get stuck into the pushing progress phase on the composition sensitive fights if you play a class that is more expendable than others.  What then often follows is massive collective burnout and further kills are impossible without the same stacked classes so the bench crew don’t get the kill unless they move to another guild still farming it.

With Weekend Warriors not being the sort of guild that takes just anyone, which is also ‘firewalled’ by a 25+ age demographic and not one which looks on weeks of bench sitting with no happy ending being much of a reward for an expansion’s loyalty and reliability, this trend for alts and OSs is a considerable relief and leaves open the possibility that if lady luck shines we might well end up knocking on Argus’ door before the next expansion launches, certainly if we keep up our current pace and focus and maybe one or two more alts or OSs start to get some love.

In addition to this we’ve seen the return to use of a system that served us so well in the past but that fell into disuse more recently as the calls to focus only on core raiders became to loud for me to ignore, that of the raid team back-up or reserve.

We’ve seen numerous players from the flex and social side of the guild step forward willing to help out and fill any gaps as we’ve gotten back onto our feet and indeed several of these continue to do so as we press further into progress territory, some, like Fearstrike, becoming regular in the process.  The Reserve is a truly honourable and valuable calling, being prepared to step in and help and then step or sit out again without rancour is a tremendous quality in a raider and there is no doubt that players like Bosix and Jimmy have proven a godsend and it’s been nice to see former raiders come back into the team when needed like Krumme and Lavalover.

Now, we’re in the final stretch and whilst I’m not promising Cutting Edge, we may well not get there or we may only get there after the BfA pre-patch (when nerfs usually hit) and still get CE and the mount, it’s amazing that it’s a possibility once again when it all looked very unlikely two short months ago that we’d find the numbers and commitment to keep raiding Mythic at this pace when a lot of us were ready to sit back and accept the bastards had won.

So, keep it up all.  I’m very proud of everyone and must say that the opinion of the officer crew is that the changes wrought by the defection of part of the officer and raid team to Team Cobra actually ended up being very positive change and helped give us a much happier, friendlier, more united guild and in the end no less effective raid team, better placed to avoid burn-out and division in the future.  

I’ll take the current raid atmosphere and cohesion any day of the week over what we had before.

In conclusion, thanks for sticking with it, keep doing what you’re doing right and I’ll do the same and together we’ll keep Weekend Warriors the longest running, successful, Seriously Casual™ weekend Mythic raid guild in WoW.

Thanks for reading.