One furious dwarf.
About the author
Hi, I’m Barthic*. I’ve been into PC gaming since I got hooked on Zork & similar text-based games in the early 80s. Since then, I’ve played quite a few games, but none has held my attention for quite as long as the World of Warcraft has.
In WoW, I run a successful “serious casual” 10-man raiding guild, and have done so for quite some time. By “serious casual”, I mean that we maintain a no-nosense approach to raiding, but do it on a very laid-back schedule (just five hours a week, split over two nights). We also tend to take summers off from scheduled raiding, which helps to prevent burnout. So far, we’ve been able to experience all of the 10-man raid content in WoW without feeling like we’ve become slaves to the game, so it seems to be working well for us.
I’ve learned a lot over the past few years about being a guild master, leading raids, and MMORPGs in general. The purpose of this blog is to share some of those experiences with you, while providing commentary on the state of WoW from a guild master’s perspective. Feel free to send me comments or questions via email, and thanks for reading!
A short history of the author’s guild
I started my World of Warcraft journey back in December of 2004, about a month after Blizzard launched the game. WoW was my first MMORPG, and I remember being amazed at the scope of the game — Azeroth was a massive world, and the list of things to do seemed virtually endless. I spent more time logged into WoW in that first year than I’m comfortable admitting.
I formed a guild in early 2005 before I had even reached the maximum level on my first character, mainly as a way for my friends and I to easily keep in touch while in-game. Neither me nor any of my friends had much interest in the 40-man raids available at the time, so we mainly stuck to small group content and leveling alts in those early days. To me, the idea of getting 40 people together to run a raid instance seemed like a logistical nightmare.
With the introduction of Karazhan in the Burning Crusade expansion, everything changed — Blizzard had created compelling raid content that required only 10 people. We ran Karazhan a couple times when we had the opportunity, and quickly became hooked as we started to down bosses. Soon enough, the guild had a stable roster of people that were enjoying raiding Karazhan a couple nights a week. When we finished Karazhan, Blizzard didn’t have another 10-man raid available for us to “graduate” to, so we briefly gave the 25-man raids that were available a try. While we were moderately successful, our original core of players found that we just weren’t enjoying ourselves like we did with Karazhan. Maintaining a group of 25 mature people felt like a constant struggle, and the game started to feel like work as we tried to find playing times that would accommodate everyone’s various schedules, and find subs for people that needed to cancel at the last minute.
The spoils from the Zul'Aman timed run.
Just as we were ready to give up on the idea of raiding, Blizzard released Zul’Aman, another 10-man raid. Zul’Aman had a twist: if your group could complete the first four bosses within a fixed time limit, you were rewarded with a vanity mount that couldn’t be obtained anywhere else. Completing that Zul’Aman time trial become our “endgame”. The 25-man guilds on our server were struggling to complete the same challenge, and they had a very significant gear advantage over us. We weren’t even sure it was possible to complete at our gear level (the highest-level gear we had came from Zul’Aman itself), but we made it our goal all the same. After several weeks of attempts, we eventually became the third guild on our server to complete the time trial, ahead of many 25-man guilds sporting gear two full tiers ahead of ours. We earned a fair bit of recognition for the feat, and found our niche as the only serious 10-man raiding guild on our server.
With the arrival of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, 10-man raiding guilds were finally acknowledged by Blizzard as a viable alternative to the larger 25-man size: every raid in WotLK was available in both 10 and 25 person versions. Even though the 10-man versions awarded inferior loot, we were ecstatic that we didn’t have to worry about hitting the 25-man wall again. Even better, Blizzard had introduced “hard modes” to several of their raid encounters for an extra optional challenge, in the spirit of the ZA timed run. Throughout the WotLK cycle, we continued to lead the way through 10-man content on our server, and found ourselves ranked in the top 100 worldwide strict 10-man guilds on GuildOx for the majority of the WotLK expansion. Not bad for our little two-night-a-week raiding guild!
At the time of this writing, the release of Cataclysm — the third WoW expansion — is just a few weeks away. More than half of the raiding roster that was with us way back in Karazhan is still with us today, and looking forward to the challenges ahead!