3.60. Dead Men Do No Deeps

"WOW : Blood Elf Death Knight"
Artwork by Timo Paananen

Tools 2.0

Oh, nice. I see the new guy is beating you again. How long's he been in the guild? What...three minutes?

As much as I proselytized Blain's motto to the guild, my own consciousness remained impervious to it. My damage suffered, and the first inclination was to always blame a desperate lack of gear as the possible root cause. The 25-Man progression raid continued to loot upgrades in ICC week after week, yet I remained quietly in the back, watching them pass me by, a kid pressed up against the glass of the candy store. With no DKP in my pockets, hunger pains persisted. Descendants of Draenor's longest running master looter eventually took notice, shooting over a whisper one night as we transitioned back to trash:

"Why aren't you looting?" Neps asked.

"Can't," I fired back a reply, "Still no DKP."

"It's been weeks."

"No choice. Still in the hole after getting Bheer's trinket."

"Yeah, but that wasn't your fault."

I sighed. Neps was right, but that changed nothing about what the rules were. That spend had to come from somewhere, and it wasn't OK make allowances for myself while the remainder of the raid did as I said, and not as I did. So I kept a stiff upper lip while players like Hellspectral closed the gap. There are other ways of improving your DPS. There's always another way. It was time to hammer some new nails in. And not with bare hands.

---

The first tool I turned to was Rawr. Developed by a handful of impassioned raiders looking to back their min/maxxing with raw numbers, Rawr allowed me to load up a profile that mirrored Mature's specifics: race, professions, and current gear loadout. Once a replica of my death knight was set up in Rawr, the application mathed out the most appropriate upgrades, enchants and gems. Rawr gave the entire fifty-thousand foot view of a character, even going so far as to recommend possible talent changes for DPS variances that existed between specs. Looking at the multicolored bar graphs sometimes revealed glaring deficiencies in approach; in some cases, it meant the difference between competence and ignorance. I spent my afternoon lunch hours playing with gear options, tweaking talents points, and watching Rawr redistribute the bar graphs appropriately. I adjusted those configuration options, experimenting with various builds until I saw the greatest combination of changes providing the most impact.

Another up-and-coming tool for the Death Knight class began to rise to prominence at this time. DKSimulator, written by a fellow going by the name Kahorie, claimed to run a theoretical DK through the motions after being given a starting set of statistics to work with. Specifying attributes like like hit and expertise while being tempered by varying levels of strength and critical strike showed me an alternate "perfect world" of where my damage should be.

The raiding environment was rarely a perfect world.

In most cases, I'd take data pouring out of the simulation with all the seriousness of a spilled salt shaker. A million and one factors separated simulation from reality. How much movement does the encounter force upon the player? Are there piles of adds to have to deal with...and are those adds even a priority for the DK? What degree of survivability goes into the encounter? Are you forced to face the front of the boss in order to stay alive, thereby increasing how much the boss dodges and parries? How many DPS cooldowns are sacrificed in order to stay alive? It's hard to rank on World of Logs when you're face down in the dirt. Many raid encounters had their handful of gimmicks and environmental considerations, all of which could skew what a player was capable of producing, vs. the actual damage that filled up a Recount meter.

That's why I loved Deathbringer Saurfang.

His father may have named him Dranosh, but he was all training dummy to me. When I stood toe-to-toe with DoD's melee, I could focus entirely on my rotation, never once worrying about movement, survivability, adds, or any other distraction a typical boss threw at us. Nearly every encounter had factors that skewed reports, making them difficult to compare with simulations like what Kahorie gave us. But not Saurfang. For all intents and purposes, the numbers DKSimulator dictated should have been attainable. And I was hitting them.

So why did World of Logs continue to report such discrepancies when comparing with other death knights? Awash with frustration, I turned to PvP in search of answers.

Rawr,
an application used to assist players in "mathing"
out their talents, upgrades, and spell rotations.

The Sucking

It'd been quite some time since I last set foot in an arena. Sixfold had been my partner at the start of Season 5; I bounced back and forth between Arterea the priest and Aethist the shaman during Season 6 and 7 as the raid team tackled Ulduar and the Tournament of Champions. Now at the start of Season 8, partners were far and few between. I reached out to Neps one evening, asking him of his own team's status. He was unavailable, but repeated his original suggestion: ping the new warrior Sentra. He had a 3v3 team with an open spot; his partner in crime was a holy paladin named Nerffmeh. Unease set in.

My love/hate relationship with PvP continued to bother me. Every time I set foot in an arena, I felt like I was heading out on a date with an ex-girlfriend. You and I have nothing in common. So why are we doing this? I sucked at PvP, it was a completely different language. I'm not trying to mince words here: the level of suck I brought to PvP wasn't your typical  "Oh, it's not that bad, you're just getting your feet wet!" type of suck. We're talking a full on "Uninstall and kill yourself" degree of suckage. Teammates were driven to the brink of rage, and opponents reveled in my ineptness, an unheralded incompetence oozing from each fingertip. My gut knew exactly what my Achilles heel was the entire time.

You don't PvP enough. No practice = you lose. Call a spade a spade. Someone will end up carrying you, so make the best of it. Play the game. Get to know these players a bit more. You could use the perspective. They may even teach you a thing or two. It's going to pay off later when you need to make them see your side of things inside a raid.

In the days of the Burning Crusade, PvPers I shoved into Serpenshrine Cavern, like Ouleg, were the most alien in the roster. Most dismissed the crowd as a bucket of d-bags that weren't worth the time or energy. It's easy to judge people you know nothing about, people outside of your own comfortable social setting. There you are, trying to make a guild a better place for players...and then you've got these guys. Aloof. Untouchable. They wore a perceived elitism proudly, that they were "too good" to stick around until the end of the raid. And every wipe-and-run-back was colored with insults and profanities that made you feel like you were personally wasting their precious time.

As if nobody else's time was precious.

Judging and dismissing them was the easy way out. I had proof they weren't all a bucket of douche. Annihilation, Neps and Haribo were three of the strongest, most reliable officers ever to set foot in DoD -- all three avid PvPers. No, I decided to put the effort in, so joining this 3v3 team was the logical next step. If Sentra was going to see raid rotations, I was going to have to develop a greater vocabulary of techniques -- not unlike how I convinced Ben to start texting me on raids he'd be late to. Contrary to popular belief, there are other important people in the world who rely on you, so it's important to follow through on your word. Ben got it. Could I make it happen with more PvPers?

---

Sentra confirmed he and Nerffmeh were searching for a partner for 3v3, "Yeah. Got a team goin' already."

"Great", I answered, "shoot me an invite and let's get this thing going."

A few moments passed, then the bong of an invite request rang out of my speakers. I accepted the request, then promptly popped open the Arena Team interface to read our team's name:

N GGERS

I stared at the screen, and had no words. This was going to be a long Arena season.

An example damage report of a death knight on
World of Logs

Devil in the Details

Back at the office, my failing damage continued to distract me. Chunks of coding time were broken up by pulling up World of Logs, drilling down into our last report, highlighting my detailed spell breakdown, then comparing with a top ranked death knight I bookmarked. The differences continued to be night and day. I fired open another browser tab, typing the URL to the WoW Armory, cross referencing this death knight to my own. Now, the differences were trivial: we were both heavily draped in gear from Ulduar and the Tournament of Champions. Yet his damage gouged massive gaping holes in the report...a far cry from what piddly scratches I made to the surface.

"Sup?" popped open the IM window from the system tray of the desktop. Long since retired from his role as my raid leader, now completely absent from World of Warcraft, Cheeseus was still actively a part of my day to day chatter. More than anything, he was a numbers guy. If the puzzle involved math, he'd solve it.

"Pissed that I can't figure out what's wrong with this damage report."

"I'm completely checked out of WoW, but you can try your luck and see what I can pull out of my ass."

"Long story short: Scourge Strike now hits as physical and shadow. Reports will break those casts out into two separate lines. So, assuming that one isn't a complete idiot...a Single Scourge strike that hits once should have two entries. With me so far?"

"Si."

"Perfect example is this report right here from a Deathbringer Saurfang kill. You will note in the report 14 Scourge Strikes. 14 entries that are physical, 14 that are shadow. Confirm that you see these and that I'm not high."

"Confirmed on the report entries. Can't speak to any drug addictions, tho."

I pulled up DoD's report from the previous weekend, drilled-down into Deathbringer Saurfang, then copied and pasted the URL into the IM client.

"Now look at my Saurfang from Sunday and tell me what's wrong with this picture."

Less than 10 seconds went by before I had an answer.

"Nothing. And you're silly."

I stared back at the IM client.

"OK. What glaring thing have I missed?"

"How many hits do you have?"

"15"

"And how many crits?"

"25...oh for fuck sakes...the shadow portion can't crit."

"Ha ha."

Something still wasn't right.

"Hold hold hold, back this bus up a second. This other death knight had 14 hits, 26 crits in both the physical and shadow. That doesn't make any sense at..."

...all?

"Son. of. a. bitch."

I glanced up at the date of the report in which the purported death knight was pummeling Mature in damage. December 8th, 2009. Opening day of Icecrown. Patch day. Three days before Blizzard would make a blue post warning unholy death knights that Scourge Strike was too bursty in 3.3 and would need to be toned down. I'd been comparing Mature's damage to a bogus report all along, inflated for the one night this top ranked death knight's guild ran Icecrown. That one and only evening Scourge Strike wailed on anything and everything, propelling her to the top of the charts. Charts that World of Logs did little to curate.

I scurried for another, more recent report, in an attempt to find a top ranked death knight. The russian alphabet filled my screen with glyphs indecipherable. I zoomed in on the the telltale deep blood red color that painted death knights in reports. His magic number for the evening: 7239. Mature's? 7884. I slumped back in the chair, satisfied.

For the moment...

2.27. The Tantrum

"Emonator - Blood Elf Paladin"
Artwork by Katherine Dinger

Making an Example

The rules had been written down and formalized. At last, the "I didn't know" excuse could no longer hold water. Blain was back in charge of commanding the troops, and my forum post "Let's Talk About Raiding" fulfilled one of his conditions to returning. It was no longer appropriate to allow players to justify their terrible, horrible play. Expectations were now crystal clear and concise. There wasn't anything wrong with choosing either a high or low level of commitment to the guild, but the days of treating these vastly different levels of dedication equally were at an end. The new edict was as follows: come in with a casual mindset and your chances of getting into a raid would be slim-to-none. But, prove to us you were willing to go the extra mile, take some ownership in your place on the raid team, and you'd see continued rotations. Ultimately, the goal was not to change the feel of the guild as we sold ourselves as a family-friendly option on Deathwing-US. The difference now was that in order to be considered for progression, you had to step up. It wasn't a requirement for recruitment...it was a requirement for progression.

The first time I made this type of change was back in Vanilla, after the fallout of a poorly thought-through guild merger...if one could call it that. I took a temporary leave from DoD and instructed my officers, along with a core of raid-focused players, to follow me to Ugly Black Warhorses. That lasted all of a day. The consequences of my actions reflected the severity of such a decision: those casuals who were ignored and felt betrayed took their leave, and thus produced the first exodus of DoD. That ostracized group of players were those unable to commit to any sort of raid schedule, and felt our approach was far too serious. But seriousness was vital to continued success. A fly-by-night attitude wasn't going to get us through Ragnaros...and certainly not through any of the content in Blackwing Lair (or beyond). So when I communicated our latest round of new raiding expectations to the guild, ones where we defined what was 'fun', I expected a similar backlash. Surprisingly, the pockets of resistance that developed didn't come from the casuals of the guild, but from certain players these rules were tailored to protect -- players that possessed a set of raid skills greater than the average guildy.

By wanting to increase accountability among the group, I (and the officers) naturally gravitated toward keeping the guild on a much tighter leash. As an extension of Blain's wishes, I wanted less fucking around in raids. We were there to get a job done; even Ater got caught up in this, once joking in Vent, "We're not here to have fun!" But the line between joke and reality had been washed away amid Blain's militant leadership style -- he was getting us back on the rails, which meant the raid team wasn't afforded freedoms and distractions formerly allowed in the instance. I continued to tighten the noose on players found hanging out in general chat while in raids. When people went AFK mid-instance without telling anyone, we docked them 1 DKP per minute. Efficiency inside the instance grew week-by-week, but my mentality bled outside of the raid and into the day-to-day operations. Suddenly, players that traditionally were brash and lacked a set of inter-personal skills became the target of more frequent officer wrath. If word got back to me about inappropriate behavior, players throwing tantrums, talking shit in battlegrounds, on forums, or in trade chat, punishment was swift. Before, I would often turn the other cheek and allow various cliques to play their little reindeer games. Now, I was calling people out: taking them aside and issuing a direct warning to them. If I don't see an immediate change in your behavior, I'm pulling the plug. During an evening of play at the start of November, a player by the name of Lhaktar pushed me too far. He'd been a perpetual repeat offender, derailing into bouts of unprofessionalism and profanity in his dealings with other players. I removed him from the guild temporarily -- a timeout of sorts -- with the expectation that this would be a wake-up call, so he could get his act together. He would become the example to which others would refer when contemplating taking our guild rules for granted.

Kerulak mediates an issue involving Lhaktar,
Orgrimmar

Clique Healing

Meanwhile, back in raid progression, we continued to scrutinize player behavior and attitude, assessing the driver behind each respective wheel. Players that came prepared, flasked and with food buffs were praised, while I made notes of those who were adept at the excuse machine.

"I don't need a flask, the carries do." 

"This is overkill. I know my job, why don't you focus on the other failures in the raid?" 

It was easy to pick out the players that were vocal in their defiance, they were dealt with the quickest. The ones who remained quiet in their solemn, critical rage were a much bigger problem to solve.

With Kadrok and Volitar both gone from the roster, my healing paladins had dwindled. Sir Klocker was my one guarantee from week-to-week and I'd relied on his healing since his early shaman days in Vanilla. But I needed more. We enjoyed the benefit -- albeit a temporary one -- from a passionate guy by the name of Corivs. His claim to fame was a multitude of paladins under his belt, both on the Alliance and the Horde. He understood all facets of the the class, be it Retribution, Protection or Holy, and helped immensely throughout SSC progression. But, as luck would have it, Corivs performed a magical vanishing act, without notice or forewarning, causing the officers and I to look elsewhere for divine inspiration.

The result of our collective recruitment effort produced two gals, Shimerice and Falnerashe, who both gave us a dedicated, loyal set of signups as we pushed further into SSC and beyond. By Tempest Keep: The Eye, the two pallies were nestled firmly into progression, spending their off-raiding hours within their respective yet independent social circles. Shim spent her off-raiding hours with folks like Dalans and Sir Klocker, a group of players that were long time veterans of DoD, and who had long proven their worth in our raid progression. Coincidentally, this group demonstrated an equally short amount of tolerance toward players that sung the excuse song, rather than take some responsibility for their play. Shim was generally quiet, while Dalans and Klocker fielded the brunt of incessant, ignorant play. She had a much subtler way of taking out her aggression on players that disgusted her: she simply stopped healing them in raids. Their group kept this on the down-low as much as possible, and since Dalans was in officership by this point, he took it upon himself to mediate issues that arose as a result of Shim's judgement. No sense in stirring the pot, he thought, especially with the leader on a guild-kick bender for any little infraction.

Fal shared Shim's disgust with casuals, but was more overt in how she vocalized this distaste. She became frustrated easily, and liked to point out where players were failing, even if it meant ridiculing them in a public channel. "Idiotic" and "Retarded" were adjectives she wielded like a machete, slicing through the roster's self-esteem when players made mistakes. This outgoing, tell-it-like-it-is demeanor caused her to fall into a group of similar-minded folks, a social group less adept at discretion. Folks like Kargor, a hunter who continually managed to rub Dalans the wrong way with his less-than-stellar attitude towards raiding. Folks like Cyrant and Bamorm, two enhancement shaman brothers with a tendency to lash out at other players that got under their skin...

...and folks like Lhaktar, who may have meant well, but lacked the social graces I now demanded of the guild.

Complaints about loot were the worst, especially in a guild where I continually harped on the importance of skill over gear, an ideology Blain burned into my brain back in Vanilla. So in heated moments of aggression when players took to guild chat to whine about the loss of loot -- as Lhaktar did that fateful evening -- I had come to the end of my rope, clicking the big red button that ejected him from our roster.

As it turned out, someone else had come to the end of their rope...fed up with the shitty, imprecise decisions of the guild leader.

Judging Righteousness

With Shimerice making privately bad decisions about who to heal, and Falnerashe making publicly bad decisions about her etiquette, sides began to take shape. Unfortunately for Falnerashe, the winning side was the public-facing one: the one that came to raids each week, proactively driving progression, mediating issues with diplomacy rather than insults. It was not enough to kill bosses, we had to do so under the guidelines of our charter. Our guild image would be our success, and any blemish on that guild complexion would be lanced like an infected boil. Personal accountability. Respect to fellow players and guilds. Constant, consistent success.

If Shimerice's propensity to stop healing people reignited, Dalans or Klocker would smother it with a blanket, keeping it out of the public eye...and my own. Fal's support circle was less proactive and her fire raged into an inferno. Her behavior was out-in-the-open, pissing off guild members and officers alike, and was front-page news to me. With every new "retard" claim that Fal made, her mediation options dwindled; I was left with little choice but to rotate her out with greater frequency. And Falnerashe had no back-up crew in her clique -- she was already surrounded with like-minded folks that had troubles of their own adhering to guild law. Her only ace-in-the-hole was Annihilation, but unlike Dalans' strategy of simply dousing the fire, Annihilation's days of mediation were behind him. He had no intention of solving Fal's problems. As was his nature, Anni knew people; there was no point in teaching diplomacy to those who would never wield such discretion. As Anni explained succinctly, Fal was very much "like a cricket. Makes a lot of noise from a distance...but once you get up close, goes completely silent." 

He was right. Any attempt to reach out to Fal to help resolve her people issues was met with a closed door. So, my only other option was reduce her rotations, thus diminishing the impact of her negativity on the raid team.

---

A few days after I fired a warning shot over the bow for Lhaktar to get his attitude and behavior together, he was gone for good -- off to start a guild of his own: Triple Zero. It came as no surprise, then, that when I logged on to my forums a few days later that I was greeted to a scathing exit post, denouncing my mishandling of guild leadership. Falnerashe tore into the guild like an Enron shredding machine. It was a post of cruelty and self-righteousness, spinning a tale of how we had all failed her, failed the guild, and deserved her wrath for such mistreatment, while her friends were ignored and raked across the coals. The post radiated so much vitriol that I deleted it out of disgust.

The actual content of that post is foggy in my memory these many years later, and I do not recall the specifics of who she attacked and why. I can only hypothesize that her fury centered around Lhaktar's treatment (along with other friends in her clique) while players like Shimerice were allowed to run free with more discreet contempt. Perhaps Falnerashe felt she was better than all the rest of my players, better than me, and was too good for my guild. Perhaps it was none of these things at all, and Falnerashe was driven into a rage by an event that will forever remain a mystery.

What I can say for certain is that -- for Falnerashe -- the story would not end here. We would pick this up again, amid a backdrop of the frozen north, during a struggle to gain dominance over Wintergrasp. On this day in the not-so-distant future, it would remain to be seen if people, in fact, can change -- or if they remain shackled like slaves to their life-long hatreds and grudges.

1.2. The Casual and the Hardcore

Kerulak assists in a 15-Man pickup
group or "pug" circa Vanilla,
Upper Blackrock Spire

Casual is Bliss

If you've never played World of Warcraft, there are a wide array of dungeons to explore. These dungeons very typically take 5 players, which consist of a tank (the person responsible for grabbing a hold of a pack of monsters and keeping their attacks focused on him), a healer (a person responsible for keeping the tank from dying), and three miscellaneous players which fall into the category we call “DPS”, which is WoW-speak for “Damage Per Second”. Those three remaining players focus all of their attacks on the monsters, and kill them as fast as they can, before the healer runs out of mana, which in turn, causes the tank to eventually run out of health and die, causing the monsters to turn their attention to the rest of the party, killing them off one by one. This chain of events ultimately leads the entire group of players falling over dead, and having to run back from a graveyard, this is the act of “wiping”.

For seasoned WoW players, this is common knowledge, but what may not be so obvious is that, back in Vanilla, there were a few endgame dungeons that required more than 5 players. Scholomance, for example (a dungeon dedicated to the schooling of dark wizards) wasn't a 5-Man dungeon, it was a 10-Man. And it was not something that was done quickly, it took hours to complete. It took patience and very slow, methodical execution; one wrong move would lead to a wipe, and it could be caused by something as simple as standing 2 ft. to the right of a pack of monsters (“trash” as we call them), rather than 2 ft. backward. Scholomance was an end-game dungeon, and it required everyone to be at the max level (60, at the time), and it was unforgiving to the general populace, because it demanded exquisite control and discipline of your character and the ability to work together.

However, most of the players in World of Warcraft didn't posses this sensibility, having grown accustomed to the lightweight dungeons they experienced during the 1-60 leveling grind. Today, a multitude of online resources exist, that have combed the depths of WoW and provided guides, tutorials, tips and tactics for players, but in Vanilla, these resources simply did not exist. As a result, the majority of the WoW player-base ultimately remained in a sort of “blissful ignorance”, unaware of the game’s depth and mechanics, and didn't have a clue that their skills could be refined, taking their play to an entirely new level. They were forever lost in the illusion of The Matrix, logging in, checking their auctions, cooking virtual food and mixing/matching sets of armor to tweak their character’s costume.

We called these players casuals.

Uld flirts with Maxxum of Dirty Work, Inc.

Eyes Wide Open

Several months into Vanilla, I struck up a friendship with a player named Maxxum. I had tried (unsuccessfully) to recruit him away from his guild on multiple occasions. He was always polite when he refused, but he would still strike up a chat with me whenever possible. One day he invited me to help fill the 10th spot in a Scholomance clear. I wasn't particularly looking forward to another 2 hour dungeon run, but to help break up the monotony, I said I’d come along. When we got into the dungeon, I was still getting adjusted and settling down in my chair, making sure all my macros were set up when the chaos erupted. Like some kind of bat shit crazy insane players, Maxxum and his guild began tearing Scholomance apart. They moved from pack to pack in a blur, having some kind of unspoken system; their efforts were completely synchronized and coordinated. A Rogue would sap one monster, stunning in position, a Priest would shackle another undead minion, locking it in place. All of the players then focused their attacks onto a single monster at once, the remaining targets left alone, incapacitated. With everyone beating on a single monster at once, it was annihilated.

Maxxum and his guild had a system, and it was like nothing I had experienced before. It was fast, efficient, disciplined. Each member of the team was mindful of every piece of info available to them; where they needed to stand -- the tank facing the mobs away from the party, while the melee DPS positioning themselves carefully behind each target, thereby reducing dodges and parries. The healer took a proactive approach to each pack, contributing to crowd-control, winding up large heals in preparation for big damage, then cancelling if the heal wasn't needed, thus conserving mana. When we walked out of there 45 minutes later, I was stunned. I'd never seen a group of players clear Scholomance in under 2 hours. There was a term that WoW players used to describe this level of dedication to the game, this expert-like knowledge of the game's mechanics, which led to a flawless execution of content.

We called these players hardcore.

Having experienced both ends of the spectrum, I knew that Descendants of Draenor would have to lean less into casual and more into hardcore, in order to truly stand out and provide a respectable, successful home for players on our server. I wanted to know what it would take to get my guild to this level. When questioned, Maxxum gave me two words as a response: Molten Core. I didn't know what it was, only a few people in my guild seemed to have a idea, it was something that was referred to as raid content. But it wasn't just like any dungeon we had explored before, it would require surgical coordination to execute correctly. And it would require a few more players than 10 to run...

...it would take 40 players.

I’ll never forget the last piece of advice Maxxum threw my way: “Watch out for that first pull. It's a doozy.” I started to do research. I snuck into a few Molten Core attempts that had been pieced together by random players in Orgrimmar, thinking they would have enough leadership and coordination to make a few pulls. Those attempts all failed miserably...at the first pull. I would watch as the two towering Molten Giants guarding the entrance would stomp forward, shaking the ground, and bashing the pathetic members of the raid into oblivion. Tanks would fall over dead in one hit, healers would be out of mana in seconds, and players ran around in a panic, trying desperately to get away from the Giants. And one by one, the raid was destroyed. It was embarrassing to see players this incoherent. There was no way I was going to let this content go unfinished. My guild had cleared everything in the game thus far, and it was time to make the leap...the leap to hardcore.

Kerulak surveying the guild roster as he
continues to assimilate guilds during Vanilla

Resistance is Futile

The plan to shift Descendants of Draenor into a new mentality of hardcore raiding seemed very daunting. I wasn't really very sure how we would pull it off, so I began simply in bite-sized chunks. The first order of business: mass guild assimilation. I hiked up my recruitment and began negotiating talks with other guilds on our server who were also interested in starting raids. Guild assimilation was very cut-throat. I was constantly competing with other guilds who were trying to do the very same thing: promise great rewards with absolutely no proof of experience. These competing “raiding” guilds hadn't set foot in Molten Core either.

Said they had. They. Had. Not. 

I had to find a way to make my guild stand out from all the others, even without a track record in the instance. So, I used what I knew we had under our belt as leverage. We were a solid team of passionate individuals, and we had explicitly laid out the most fair and just treatment to all our raiders. We even had a DKP system in place (rules describing how loot is issued out) before even setting foot in Molten Core, having researched this by reading blue posts on the Battle.net forums, taking their advice, ultimately leading us to other successful raiding guilds on other servers (notably, Elitist Jerks of Mal’Ganis-US). I had to make a lot of gut instinct decisions when deciding who to go forward with, and who to hold on, but I stuck to my guns on the most important fundamentals: I wanted players with honesty and integrity, who were respectful to each other, and who would demonstrate loyalty. And the one thing I would not back down on is: I would not give up our guild name. Our guild name would remain unchanged, and our core leadership would always be retained. Many other guilds decided to merge, form new names, and bring officers from both sides. They very rarely worked out; drama and power-struggles often caused these guild merges to end in collapse. We wouldn't follow suit. We would retain our identity. This was simply a non-negotiable for me.

Guild mergers, as I would discover, were not so easy to facilitate. Desperation would lead me to make a decision that would cause the first mass exodus of Descendants of Draenor, and almost cost me the guild in its entirety.