2.10. Carrying the Load

Kerulak watches while Gruul ends
the lives of his 25-Man raid,
Gruul's Lair

Stay

After coming off of our High King Maulgar kill with 11 people dead, I felt an uneasy tug at my gut. Our performance was going to have to be as sharp as the difficulty curve that TBC was throwing at us. Gruul's mechanics offered us no reprieve. He struck Ater hard, and employed a similar strike made popular by Patchwerk back in Naxxramas. But while Patchwerk's was Hateful, slamming an additional punch into the first melee in range with the highest amount of health, Gruul's was Hurtful, always choosing the second melee in threat behind the Main Tank as his target. Both Ater and Kurst's health were constantly spiking, and any hope of smoothing out that damage was diminished by the fact that we were painfully low on Resto Druids. In fact, we only had one to speak of: a new recruit named Breginna, who promised to do everything she could to flatten said spikes with her multitude of HoTs.

He struck our tanks with such fury that the cave shook around us, rocks breaking free from the ceiling and showering down onto random unsuspecting players. We were in a constant state of re-positioning, while Ater and Kurst moved together, slowly, cautiously -- bound by an invisible shackle that...if one or the other moved too far away from...would cause Gruul to choose a new melee in range as the second-highest threat as a Hurtful Strike target.

You'd know when it happened. A rogue would be alive one minute, dead the next. No time for a Power Word: Shield, no Ancestral Swiftness-macro'd Greater Healing Wave. Alive, then dead. Game Over. The End.

Aside from extreme damage pouring into both tanks, coupled with the panic that ensued after cave-ins, Gruul still had one big gimmick in store for us. The Gronn would punch the ground in a single explosive blow, knocking the entire raid in random directions. As we spazzed-out after landing, our feet grew heavy with mud and rock, we began to slow down, as if being pulled through clay. Soon, we all stood motionless in the cave, frozen into position, reduced to immobile statues.

Then came the Shatter.

Gruul would send a wave of damage out that multiplied against any player that was within the vicinity of any other player. The closer the player, the more damage that was multiplied into the Shatter. One poorly positioned player could easily take four or five other players out in a single Shatter. The goal, therefore, was to use those precious few seconds after the knockback to get away from each other as quickly as possible. This was not complex at all, not nearly as much as High King Maulgar. One boss. Three mechanics. It was practically a tank-and-spank. This should be over in a couple of attempts.

It wasn't.

An example of the many Gruul's Lair diagrams
guilds created to train their raiders on.

Yelling at the Deaf

On every Gruul attempt, players continued to amaze me during Shatter. The instructions could not have been communicated any simpler: Move away from each other. Spread out. Get away. Do not stand next to another player. How many other ways can it be stated? It didn't matter. Whatever we told the raid to do, they panicked and spazzed out. They ran into each other. They killed each other. The simplest of tasks became a nightmare, and paraphrasing the instructions was as effective as yelling at a deaf person.

You can yell all you want, but they won't hear you.

Other raiding guilds struggled with this, too. They created bizarre images which meticulously detailed out each one of the 25 positions a person could hold in the roster, mapping each slot to a placement in the cave and a direction for them to run. It was the thing of nightmares, a paint-by-colors strategy meant for a child, handed over to grown men and women as an instruction manual. Why was this absolutely necessary? Had we fallen to such a degree that each and every person had to have their hand held as we gently guided them to the bathroom to go potty?

But that wasn't the nightmare. The horror came when we realized it wasn't helping.

Even with diagrams and arrows drawn in crayon, players continued to panic, blindly following the path given to them per the instructions, not taking into account that their positioning was off or had changed as a result of the knockback. Walking the directions we gave them without thinking for themselves. Heading towards other raiders. Ending each others lives.

Six nights.

Six painful nights is what it took until we got it right. I can't even begin to tell you how many attempts it was. It was a lot. Far too many. Far too many for the first tier of raids, and far too many for players that should have known better. Both Blizzard and our raid team had made some pretty embarrassing mistakes in this first tier thus far. Yes, there was a huge onus on us to increase each player's personal responsibility, but from a practical perspective, one thing was clear: entry level 25-man raids were insanely unforgiving.

For all the painful attempts, the wipes, the running back, going over positioning and clarifying not where you run during Shatter, but how...over the course of those six nights we eventually knocked Gruul down a peg or two. A round of yelling -- albeit somewhat muted -- filled the Vent server with what should have been considered a triumph and a victory.

I felt neither. And I had no idea why.

Kerulak poses with the 25-Man raid team
after the defeat of Gruul the Dragonkiller,
Gruul's Lair

Personally Irresponsible

Gruul's Lair was behind us, but it had opened our eyes. All the work we'd done in Vanilla, the struggles, the late nights, re-learning healing, refining keys and adding mods to the tool-chain...it all seemed irrelevant. Like we had never accomplished anything in a raid before, like we were all green and needed to start from scratch. Claiming the progress we'd made in Vanilla as a selling point to new recruits made me feel like a fraud as we languished amid tier 4. They would only have to be present in one raid to see the panic-stricken raiders get picked off by falling rocks to read between the lines. You're not progressing -- you are the very absence of progression. Look me up when your guild pulls their heads out of their collective asses.

In these opening weeks of our guild re-entering the raiding landscape, I was desperate for answers. Had we lost our touch? Was the difficulty truly as steep as we perceived it to be? Did the lack of a reliable raid assistant affect Ater more than I had hoped? Did it come down to an absence of mage leadership, or the inconvenient shortage of restoration druids blanketing the raid with Tranquility? Or was there simply a much broader, more overarching reason why everything felt oppressive?

As with any team, there are going to be folks that rise to the top, a great majority of competent individuals, and a select few bottom feeders. In the days of the 40-Man, the incompetence of those bottom feeders was masked by the sheer strength in numbers coming from the remainder of the raid. The majority of these shining-stars would act as a buffer for those who were unable to deal with such technical details as standing in fire. With the loss of the forty came with it the loss of that buffer, that extra padding that softened the blow dealt by a handful of dead weights. 

In the new world order of a 25-Man, each and every person had to account for their sins, and "carrying" would no longer be a viable option. By each player taking personal responsibility, the strength of the team became that much more robust. I believed it. It is what I strove for, and what I wished the guild to adopt as their mantra.

Wishing...is a very poor way to lead people.

2.9. Razor Sharp

Kerulak surveys the dead after
High King Maulgar is slain,
Gruul's Lair

High King Maulgar

The starter pistol fired for the 25-Man raid team in the middle of March of 2007, beginning with Gruul's Lair. Deep within the lair, two encounters lay in wait. The first of these was High King Maulgar, a "council" of five bosses, all attacked simultaneously, all dealt with in a specific order-of-execution. By defeating Maulgar and his four cronies, we would be granted access to Gruul himself. As the light approached green, we encouraged the core raid team to research these encounters ahead of time and figure out what they needed to do. Back in the saddle to lead our raids to victory was Ater, who now worked with me during the day at a web agency in Denver, Colorado. His partner in crime, Blain, had sold off his shares of the raid leadership company. While still present to help out, Blain no longer ran the show -- it was back in Ater's competent hands, and Blain's successor, well...

...Ater was still working on that.

Early attempts on High King Maulgar did not go well. The challenge of dealing with a multitude of simultaneous mechanics was startling for an entry-level raid boss. The encounter was at its most chaotic during the initial several minutes. After the pull was made, we slowly refined each tank's position, shuffling each member of the council into the best position we could. The hope was by doing so, we'd limit interference among the tanks. We got a handle on our optimal positioning fairly quick.

What we continually didn't get a handle on was the Mage Tank.

Our Mage tank's marching orders were as follows: Hit Krosh with an instant-cast, high-damage spell. Wait for Krosh to throw up his Spell Shield. Spam Spellsteal and get a hold of that shield. Get back to the far edge of the cave as quickly as possible. And then, range-tank Krosh until the Shield drops. Toss up any kind of damage resistance you have: Fire Ward, Mana Shield...whatever, because there will be at least one Greater Fireball that Krosh will make you eat, and you will have to be healed through it. Then, Spellsteal his next Spell Shield, and repeat the process until we say otherwise.

Simple, right?

Wrong.

Turtleman lays waste to the stage hands while
the Paladin Officer Kadrok keeps him alive,
Karazhan

Arcane Ignorance

Many of our washed attempts were directly related to the mage tank. Krosh resisted the mage's initial blast of damage. Or the Spellsteal was resisted. Or the mage was in the wrong position. Or the mage lost track of when the Spell Shield was about to drop, preventing them from getting up a Fire Ward to eat the next unprotected blast. Specialized gear for the mage tank was a must; high stamina and hit-capped or gee-tee-eff-oh. The problem was one that had plagued Descendants of Draenor for a lot longer than our pathetic few weekends of work on High King Maulgar. Our mages were a never-ending churn of new faces, rarely settling down on a dedicated, reliable individual. Back when Naxxramas threw us the curve-ball of having priests tank Razuvious, I had my healing officer Haribo, and one of his longest running, most reliable priests in the 40 -- a player by the name of Volitar -- take up the responsibility.

When it came time to ask a mage to tank Krosh, there were no officers to step up. No long-term rock stars. The roster was comprised of strangers. Ater told me he'd be asking Dazmon, a lone Mage left over from the 40-Man, to come equipped with the appropriate stamina-focused items, but Dazmon had never been called on to do anything but raw damage in the 40. And, like many of our mages, they didn't even bother putting effort into decursing, so asking them to perform a task like tanking was going to be a stretch...to say the least. I'd hoped to have Dandrak back, the mage that landed the final blow on Vaelastrasz, or perhaps Turtleman, an up-and-coming mage that dominated the meters through his tenure in the 40.

Neither were available.

Our churning mages weren't self-led, they didn't think about things like "maybe I should build up a Krosh-tanking set, in case I'm needed". And since there was no Mage Officer to speak of as we headed into TBC, any communication that might have hinted to other mages to be well-equipped fell to the floor and was swept under a rug. But the mages were only part of the issue, other changes in the lineup plagued us. Several weeks passed with this heavily fluctuating roster, and each time we set foot in Gruul's Lair, it seemed like Ater and I were gazing into another sea of faces that had to be trained.

Here's where not to stand. This is what's going to happen. Pay attention to these particular warnings. When Ater moves Maulgar over here, make sure you get out of the way. If Kurst has to have help with an interrupt on Blindeye, get a focus macro ready. Watch out for his whirlwind. Watch out when he yells. Watch out when the mage tank calls for a heal.

Why don't you take this coloring book and go sit in the corner.

The time we lost between inappropriate mage tanks and the re-education of new grunts each week made me feel like we could have completed dozens of runs through Molten Core. But the Forty was dead, the Twenty-Five was here to stay, and so part of that meant a much tighter tune on Blizzard's end. Raids were serious business, after all...and the effort they put into the complex gating requirements further cemented it into our heads: Not everybody belongs in here. Maybe you're one of them. And with every wipe, I heard it ringing in the back of my head like a bully on the playground. 

Are you one of the weak, pathetic complainers that's gonna cry about how hard it is? Gonna go cancel your subscription, 'cause you can't work out the pull on the very first boss? Gonna cry about it? Maybe give us a little QQ on the boards?

I said nothing and ran back.

Descendants of Draenor defeats High King Maulgar,
Gruul's Lair

Dethroned

On the third weekend of work on the High King, Ater was absent, gone for a work-related activity. Blain was still present and offered to assist, but not having a well-geared and attuned Main Tank sucked. Thankfully, I was able to call upon my ex-Warrior officer Annihilation to fill Ater's spot. Anni had already stepped down from leadership and raiding to focus on PvP, but it was in his nature to help when the call went out, so he dropped what he was doing and filled in at the last second.

The aura of frustration was ever present, while I sat and drank my Purified Draenic Water. Was it a lack of truly motivated raiders? A lack of having Blain involved in the day-to-day tasks of raid leadership? Or was it that this curve of difficulty was as sharp as a razor, unlike anything we had predicted or expected? Whatever it was, we stayed vigilant. Pulling. Wiping. Running back. Pulling again. Wiping. Running back.

Pulling again.

Wiping.

Running back.

Pulling again.

...not wiping. 

Staying alive. Blindeye dying. The raid collapsing onto Olm. Olm dying. Ranged focusing on Kiggler. Melee sweeping around behind the High King. Kiggler dying. Melee running out while Maulgar whirldwinds. Krosh still being off-tanked. Maulgar's health dropping. 3%. 2%. 1%.

And the King at last was dead.

On April 6th, 2007, Descendants of Draenor was officially back on the raiding map. It was not a clean kill by any means; 11 of our 25 raiders lay dead at Maulgar's feet. Also high up on the sucking meter: Ater missing our first official boss kill. It was very important to me to have the core raid team present for our first boss kills as often as possible. But we were at the mercy of who was available (and keyed) to raid that week, so we did our very best to make do. I stressed to officership that I didn't want it to become a habit; it would not only leave players behind from a gear perspective (there were no alternatives to gearing up for raids in TBC), it caused us to have less of that family feel in the guild.

I didn't want us to turn into a cold, faceless raiding machine. I wanted the machine to have warmth and life, to cheer alongside good friends who had banded together, stuck it through, and against all odds, made a difference. Together.

As we lined up to take our screenshot in front of the fallen King, I surveyed the roster. Of our original 40-Man core progression raiders from Vanilla, 15 were present, and 4 of them were Officers, a bittersweet reminder of what impact the loss of the forty had on my guild. We took our screenshot, congratulated each other, and swiftly moved down to the hall in preparation to get our faces smashed into the ground by Gruul.

2.8. What Rolleth Downhill

Kerulak faces the fel reaver Negatron
while completing "You, Robot",
Netherstorm

"WANTED: RAIDERS. MUST BE KEYED"

After bandaging the wound in the guild that was the result of Dreadlocker's exodus, I returned to the day-to-day grind of recruiting players for the 25-Man Progression raid. Part of this process involved (among other things) ensuring that players were "keyed" for raids. Attunement gates were a constant thorn in my side, having first dealt with them in Vanilla. The attunements in Vanilla were trivial by comparison and played a very important role. Keying ensured that players were ready for raid progression, keeping players out that couldn't be bothered with the effort necessary to gear up and qualify themselves as a player capable of what lay deep underwater in Serpentshrine Cavern, or housed behind the arcane walls of The Eye. The thought was: If a player had the capacity to complete a series of dungeon-related tasks (some of which were quite challenging), this keying process would ultimately vet the player -- it would prove to the game that the player was prepared to raid. From a casual perspective, raiding was not easy. It required finely tuned talents, gear, and skill. If you knew what you were doing, if you were adequately prepared...raiding was a straightforward part of the game.

Attunements were a clever design to vet players, and even provided them with an implicit order-of-execution for raiding. Players would connect the dots, and rarely waste time slamming their head against a wall, raiding content in dot B before they had wrapped up their work in dot A. So while attunements were a clever design to funnel the appropriate players into raids as needed, they also served to act as a non-stop stream of headaches to raid leaders and guild officers charged with recruitment. With Vanilla, attunements were quick and easily knocked out, even the worst of which (the Naxxramas rep grind) could be subsidized by guild coffers. In The Burning Crusade, however, there would be no subsidization. Finding the right people became a full-time job.

The first problem with keying in The Burning Crusade was that there was absolutely no concept of guild-related keying. Even if you had a core raid team of 20-ish players all keyed for a raid, there was no concept in the game to "grandfather in" the remaining five players. Everybody had to be keyed, period. For a cut-throat hardcore raiding guild with players clamoring to be given a shot, perhaps this wasn't an issue -- perhaps their experience was more of a fire-and-forget system. Once their core team was keyed, they were slicing Naga into sushi and never looking back. But for a guild like Descendants of Draenor, where we strove to be a little more caring toward fellow players, the burden rolled downhill to the existing core team. It became a repetitive, mind-numbingly tedious task for them to endure, re-keying players as the roster gained and lost members. Even for the most resilient, carefree of my guild...the seeds of burnout had officially been planted.

Kerulak assists more players working
on their attunement chain,
The Arcatraz

Sapping the Will to Live

Even if the roster wasn't losing players, Descendants of Draenor still faced the short end of the stick when it came to raid attunement. We didn't kick people to the curb if they missed a single raid. To us, the onus wasn't on the player, but on the guild, to wrap a warm blanket around you, keep you warm and comfy, in the hopes you wouldn't look elsewhere for another home. And because we took players of all shapes and sizes, never once dictating who could or couldn't come to a raid, we were forced to maintain a much larger pool of players. New players were joining all the time. So the keying process never ended. It was a constant, ongoing struggle that ate away at our souls and dulled our enjoyment of the game. God forbid, what would happen if a real-life issue were to come up, causing you to lose a core member of the raid team? Back to the start of the keying process you go.

It gets better. Keying also didn't carry over across a player's account. If we had players with multiple alts that wanted to provide different services (healing on one character, tanking on another, etc.), it wasn't enough to key one of those characters...we had to key all of them. This was certainly a perk that hardcore raiding guilds lost out on. I'm not suggesting that hardcore raiding guilds didn't gear alts for progression. To the contrary, it was plainly obvious to me from posts on their guild websites that guilds like Death and Taxes and Vodka wouldn't even bat an eye when discussing the possibility. To them, rolling an alt at the drop of a hat...just to lock in a world-first kill was a decision made as easily as being asked whether or not you want to super-size your meal.

The difference was: they were re-keying their same people. That same core team. Players who were already so exceptional at the game that keying was a mindless endeavor, a task done while they watched an episode of "Lost" on a second monitor. We weren't re-keying the core team. We were keying people that wanted to raid, and didn't have a chance in other guilds because of it. It was that double-edged sword of trying to establish a guild that gave a shit about people over progression.

Like many guild leaders, I dealt with this by demanding requirements up-front for new applicants:

"MUST BE KEYED FOR KARAZHAN, SERPENTSHRINE CAVERN, THE EYE, ETC."

It was a pipe-dream at best. Like a tech recruiter asking for an applicant with a degree in Comp. Sci., the best I could hope for was an applicant that wasn't completely drooling over himself. Other servers may have fared better than us, but on Deathwing-US, it was the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack, only to find out weeks later that there was never a needle to begin with. In many cases, applicants came to us because their previous guilds didn't have the capacity or interest to key for raids. Opportunities to recruit former world-first raiders was a rare luxury. I wished that there was a way for us to attract that type of recruit. Until that day arrived, we swallowed the pill...keying new folks until our eyes glazed over like zombies.

Kerulak assists ex-Priest Officer Haribo in keeping
Ater alive, while Goldenrod dishes out DPS,
Karazhan

My Kingdom for a Raid

Two months after Descendants of Draenor passed through the Dark Portal from Azeroth into Outland, things were looking nearly raid-ready. It was the second week of March 2007, shortly after the release of the movie 300, that Ater informed me we had the people necessary to begin our work. Unofficially, raiding had already begun, thanks to the bizarre dependency that Karazhan imposed upon us, dropping Tier 4 Gloves and Helms. For the shoulders, chest and legs, we would return to that which was most familiar to us, the raid composed of a much larger group of individuals, all working together in tandem to execute the threat that towered over us.

When the twenty-four invites were finished, and we swarmed around the entrance to Gruul's Lair, I have to admit...I felt a sense of loss. A monarch looking out across his kingdom laying in ruins and on fire, razing his peasant villages in order to rebuild a new city of marble of stone. 

The Forty is dead...long live the Twenty-Five.

But my crumbled kingdom had another threat to deal with, another monarch ready to usurp the throne: High King Maulgar. Maulgar was a council encounter, one of many in World of Warcraft. A council-style encounter comprises multiple bosses being engaged at once, rather than a single central Internet Dragon. We'd handled bosses with "guards" in Vanilla as far back as Molten Core -- Garr was protected by a ring of eight Earth Elementals; Sulfuron Harbinger had four priests healing through our damage. But a true council is one comprised of a myriad of mechanics, each threatening to end our progression with its own individual talents and specialties. 

High King Maulgar was exactly that. 

While the King bashed away at Ater's shield, Kiggler the Crazed hurled Shamanistic bolts of lightning at our raid, Blindeye the Seer would be off-tanked, waiting for the moment when he would cast a giant heal. He would require his own Power Word: Shield to be purged off, lest the heal be uninterruptable. Olm the Summoner, a Warlock, would set upon us with a Felhound -- we would use our own Warlocks' powers to enslave the Felhound and turn it against its master. And as for Krosh Firehand, a Ogre-Magi casting spells suspiciously reminiscent to that of a Mage, we would turn to our own Mages as a solution. They would ranged-tank him, spell-stealing his Fire Ward in the process. Without the boon of Krosh's spell-stolen Fire Ward, our Mage tank would die in a single blast of fire.

...which is exactly what happened. For weeks.