3.5. The Changed Landscape

Sep 10, 2006: The original 40-Man team
 defeats Instructor Razuvious,
Naxxramas

School in Session

We returned to Naxxramas on the second raid night, December 14th, drunk with ego and testosterone. Much of the success of the previous night had gone to the raiders' heads; it seemed as though the students had become the teachers as we began to tear the Military Quarter's trash apart. We were driven by the excitement and anticipation, not of simply cleaning up the remaining part of the instance, but by the realization this was now possible. For the few original Vanilla team members that remained, Naxxramas (40) defined "brick wall"; to be able to conquer anything in that raid was a significant achievement. But as we worked our way through the Death Knight Cavaliers, Captains, Deathchargers and Dark Touched Warriors, the greater mystery still loomed: why had raids become so much easier? The progression team wasn't talking...yet. Maybe they were too focused on getting through Naxx, and moving on to Malygos. Maybe they were fearful of the answer.

Next on the docket: Instructor Razuvious. Raz was the first boss Descendants of Draenor defeated in the original Naxxramas (40) during Vanilla. It was a gimmick fight: the original encounter called for two Priests to mind-control Raz's understudies, turning his students back upon the teacher. Not only did it pull two healers out of the pool, but it forced them into a role they didn't play.

Some might say the original Razuvious was a test of a true raider in WoW. I know you've healed for for the past year and a half, but tonight, you're going to be tanking. Back in September of '06, we put our two best priests on that duty: the officer Haribo and his protege Volitar, a player who would go on to assist with raid leadership (albeit for a short time) during The Burning Crusade. It was through precision timing, and calm, clear communication that Haribo and Volitar were able to pull off the unconventional roles imposed upon them, securing us a kill.

As Neps and Arterea positioned themselves to mind-control the understudies, someone in raid casually mentioned in Vent, "Did you hear how they nerfed this encounter in the 10-Man version?" Wrath of the Lich King had introduced a new concept to the raid-game: Each raid would be doable in a both a 10-Man and a 25-Man version. 

It was hard enough to wrap our heads around a brutal, 40-Man instance being watered down to this new 25-Man walk-in-the-park, but to liquefy its remains into a fine 10-Man paste seemed sacrilegious. How would you even accomplish the Razuvious encounter with only 10 players? Forcibly bring two priests every time? Of course not. The new deal for WoW was "bring the player, not the class", so the Razuvious encounter had been simplified for 10s: two giant cylinders called "Obedience Crystals" stood outside the 10-Man Razuvious pit. The priest's mind-control mechanic was baked into the 10-Man encounter itself. 

The progression team laughed when they heard this; the kind of laugh you make when you find out your childhood hero is back in court for drugs and alcohol abuse. How typical.

We schooled the instructor with little effort, then proceeded to Gothik the Harvester, whom we pushed aside like a nerd in the hallway. Shortly thereafter, we found ourselves face-to-face with Thane Korth'azz, Lady Blaumeux, Sir Zeliek, and their leader, Baron Rivendare: The Four Horsemen. 

Many moons past, this was a test few guilds could complete. A bewildering mixture of debuffs placed on the raid demanded that Vanilla guilds bring nothing less than eight fully geared Warrior tanks. I remember watching videos of guilds performing the chaotic criss-cross "expand and collapse" maneuver that was needed to mitigate the debuff. The strategy alone was intimidating, never mind the unheard of tanking requirements. This was eight tanks we were talking about! I considered it an accomplishment just to have six Warriors in the roster! 

For tonight's diluted Naxxramas, we had but half of the original required tanks, one of whom was me. And, as we would discover, the daunting expand-and-collapse maneuver was no longer a requirement. Instead of the mind-boggling weeks and weeks of attempts that only the very best guilds in the world defeated the original Four Horsemen within, our execution took but a single pull.

"Sapphiron - Naxxramas",
Artwork by Patrik Hjelm

Wyrm and the Lich

After 4H, all that remained were the giant Frost Wyrm Sapphiron, and the ultimate bad boy of Naxxramas, Kel'Thuzad. 

Sapphiron was tricky: the raid had to allow him to freeze players by purposefully eating an Icebolt, then use those blocks of ice as human shields, a line-of-sight protection against Frost Breath. I say tricky not due to difficulty, but due instead to the encounter being very buggy. 

Players in our raid would die from the Icebolt, giving us nothing to shield us from the intensity of Frost Breath. I distinctly recall certain key spots along Sapphiron's outer ring that you did not want to be caught on when eating an Ice Bolt; these glitchy spots meant almost certain death. Other times, players positioned themselves perfectly behind an ice block...and died anyway.

Bugs aside, Sapphiron ended up only taking two or three attempts, and we left his bones in a pile as we headed down the final hallway, where we came face to face with Kel'Thuzad himself.

We had our hands full with the lich. Wave upon wave of undead scourge attacked us. Shadow fissures erupted under our feet, forcing us to be perpetually mobile. Kel'Thuzad would, at times, detonate the mana our casters relied on to power their pyroblasts, frostfire bolts, renews and rejuvs. Those mana-fueled bombs wrecked players standing too close to one another; we had to be mindful of where we positioned ourselves. 

He'd mind-control us at random, causing us to turn against each other, forcing us to apply crowd-control effects in order to stay focused and eliminate distractions. He'd even freeze people in blocks of ice, requiring healers to react quickly and heal them through the frosty damage. On top of all this, Kel'Thuzad sent two crypt lords after us, forcing us to off-tank, getting our players out of harm's way. 

Written out here in plain English, it seems like Kel'thuzad was a lot to digest. It wasn’t.

DPS blew up the waves of undead minions like pinatas at a child's party. The damage from Shadow fissures barely registered on the meters. Casters detonated by Kel'Thuzad struck each other with the ferocity of a light breeze on a warm summer day. Mind-controlled players were easily dispatched with Frost Novas and Polymorphs; even simple AoE fears did the job. 

And those crypt lords I spoke of? The ones that joined the fight late into Phase 3? Our off-tanks picked them up with a leisurely "don't mind me, just checking my email"-level of urgency. As for Kel'Thuzad himself, well, his attacks were insignificant, unmemorable, and sad; a kid having a meltdown for not getting enough birthday presents.

Who was the boss here?

The only real risk of the entire encounter ended up being the blocks of ice he froze players into, which spiked their health down sharply, as its damage was based on a percentage of their health. Even that risk was something our healers adjusted for with ease, another non-factor in a long list of potentials. Kel'Thuzad died in only a couple of pulls.

As we lined up for our traditional "Accomplishments" screenshot, the raiders were aghast in Vent. As they expressed their disgust, a slideshow of the last three years flashed through my mind. The many nights of attempts on Ragnaros, each week, gaining more of a foothold in adequate fire resistance. The weekends we poured into Nefarian, the struggles of Lady Vashj and Kael'Thas Sunstrider, months and months of work clearing Hyjal and eventually getting us to Illidan at the end of Black Temple. And now, this. After one weekend of raiding, I was lining up my progression team for a "full clear" screenshot.

I felt as though I was standing at a bus-stop, long after the bus had come and gone.

---

There had to be a valid explanation for this massive shift in difficulty. Sure, I wanted to believe I'd done a reasonably good job at getting the raid team prepared, but I had to be realistic about my limits and impact on the guild. Fundamental truths could not be ignored. 

This was our first raid weekend. Aside from a few pieces in Obsidian Sanctum, we had no previous raid gear; it was a fresh start. We'd had no opportunity to practice any of these bosses before hand. In fact, there were really only a few of us that remained from the 40-Man days. But even that was a moot argument, because many of the mechanics had been adjusted, rendering those old Vanilla strategies (and any experience gleaned from them) obsolete.

Some folks may have got their feet wet in the 10-Man versions prior to our 25-Man start, but surely that wasn't enough to reduce the 25-Man to the point of complete irrelevance...was it? One might argue that DoD possessed a healthy amount of raid experience under our belts thus far, which may have given us a bit of an edge in tackling this first tier of WotLK content.

...but, really? This much of an edge? An entire instance cleared in one weekend -- the first weekend --no less?

The 25-Man Progression team defeats Kel'thuzad,
Naxxramas

Achievement Whoring

We were bewildered by these raid changes, at first. After having spent years in raids the likes of which players would never see again, fighting bosses requiring weeks and weeks of practice, it stunned us to consider that this drastic reduction in difficulty was the new normal. Only after careful examination of the achievement interface did we begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Nestled among the silly achievements like kissing all the critters of Northrend and falling in a drunken haze without dying were strategic, skill-based accomplishments. Kill Thaddius without any player crossing the positive and negative charges. Defeat Sartharion with all three drakes still alive. Kill Malygos in six minutes or less. A requirement of skill was still very prescient in WoW raiding, the difference now was that the challenge was no longer front-loaded. You could, in theory, choose how hard to push yourselves, rather than have that forced upon you.

Giving players a choice, at last, was the brilliance of this design decision. Brilliant, and misunderstood.

The barrier of entry to raiding had long been an immense wall to overcome for many players. Even with the days of 40-Man raids well behind us, 25-Man raids still posed a mountain of complexity to recruit for and coordinate. Implementing a regular schedule where 25 people met virtually and dedicate their attention for a block of uninterrupted time was easier said than done. Interruptions from real-life issues constantly barge in, demanding our attention and causing us to cancel. Farming for raid materials ahead of time, whether they be flasks, food, or potions, is monotonous, and not fun. And you need to have a focused, dedicated leader who knows what they are doing: a person that can navigate virtual traffic, identifying and resolving failures in the raid quickly. Raid progression wasn't as simple as walking into a dungeon, killing a boss, collecting loot, and walking out.

...but maybe it needed to be.

Maybe players didn't want to have to deal with all the drama of a gigantic guild, chock full of inflated ego and teenage angst. Maybe some folks preferred a smaller, more tight-knit group to play WoW with, and large, overbearing guilds were too oppressive to their liking. Maybe their skills weren't necessarily up to the demands that Blizzard's typical high bar was set for. They still deserved a chance to see that content, didn't they? 

In the past, the masses were incapable of seeing that content; you couldn't just waltz into Black Temple by yourself and expect to see Illidan meet his fate at the hands of Maiev...unless 24 other players had your back. Forcing all players to overcome those insurmountable odds just to catch a glimpse of the villain around which the expansion was crafted seemed...well...over the top.

So, how then, could one re-design raiding to broaden its appeal?

Lowering the bar to raid entry widened the audience to the endgame content. Now, huge percentages of players, previously not having a chance in hell of seeing endgame content, would be able to. In order to do this without devaluing raiding, there had to be an appropriate risk/reward structure. If players were able to prove that they had the skills, the coordination, and the teamwork that was expected of them in the days of The Burning Crusade and Vanilla, what would be the incentive to keep them coming back, long after raids had been trivialized? Achievements. Prestige. Special rewards, mounts, titles -- visual indicators that made it easy to separate the casuals from the hardcores at a glance. You killed the Four Horsemen? Big deal! We killed The Four Horsemen within 10 seconds of each other.

Even after solving the puzzle, I suspected the masses would not see it as I did. Ever competitive, exclusionary by nature, and skeptical of changes that made what was once difficult now digestible, many long time core players would pay no attention to risk/reward structure re-implemented in Achievements, focusing their contempt back at the raids themselves, and how this change was a slippery slope to a host of hypothetical futures in which players paid for upgrades, raiding would no longer require any skilled players and devolve into a mass of mouthbreathers, all the while dogs and cats shacking up with one another.

For DoD, the path was clear: we would become a guild of raiding achievement whores. They would both define how we operated as a raiding guild and quantify our successes in doing so. They mapped our goals, a raiding to-do list we'd scratch off one item at a time -- an in-game manifestation of "baby steps". In turn, we would use this collection of accomplishments to separate us from the guilds unable, unwilling, or uninterested to compete at the 25-Man level, thereby funneling more traditional raiding recruits our way. 

After a meeting of the DoD minds, work immediately began on The Twilight Zone. Reaching it would be our first major raiding milestone in WotLK, and set the stage for our progress down this achievement whoring path throughout Wrath. Getting there, however, would not come without sacrifice, and a decision that haunts me to this day.

3.1. Perestroika

Part III: Wrath of the Lich King

"It would never work, just as communism would never work in the real world, but if you look at it on paper, isn't it an excellent idea?"

World of Warcraft login screen, during the
Wrath of the Lich King ('09-'11) era,
Copyright © 2009 Blizzard Entertainment

The Restructure

In the summer of 2008, I had a lot to think about.

I built Descendants of Draenor from a group of people I used to play Quake and CounterStrike with, to a guild of hundreds. Over the course of both Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, the original ideals I set out for DoD evolved into two core goals. In Vanilla, my priority was to construct and grow a guild with other players of a similar, mutually respectful mindset. I accomplished this by building a solid core of friendly, helpful, skilled players. In turn, this catalyzed the assimilation of other guilds who shared that mindset. With a core reflecting my own ideals in place, we began to dabble in raiding. Initially, we saw impressive success, but it was haphazard and lacked focus. By The Burning Crusade, a second goal for DoD emerged: To make a real competitive push in endgame raid progression without having to maintain a hardcore schedule. We were working men and women after all, we couldn't be expected to raid until midnight (or later) throughout the week. I implemented changes during TBC to drive new behaviors surrounding raiding. We clearly identified the expectation of the raider, and what our unified goal was: the constant, consistent defeat of raid bosses, keeping pace with other hardcore guilds. I also stressed personal responsibility, compelling the guild to re-examine each player's individual level of contribution. Via these changes, we were able to maintain a two day per week raid schedule. It was this very schedule which allowed us to clear all of the content up through Black Temple, ending with an Illidan kill before he was nerfed in 3.0.

But there were other struggles beyond the schedule I had to give serious thought to. Players came and went in our raid rotations, and it frustrated the core players, leaving them stressed out. We had to retain a large pool of people to choose from, in the case that we had emergencies or last-minute-cancellations, and those fillers often left a lot to be desired. The disparity between player skill levels was vast. People coming and going also led to a decrease in overall raid performance. The "revolving door" of our guild also led to another issue: brand new players joined, raided, won items that my core had been working toward for weeks, then switched guilds the next day, effectively pissing off the entire raid team. Morale among progression was a roller coaster of highs and lows.

On top of all of this, my raid leader, Blain, had quit the game -- burned out from the exhaustion of having to deal with so many failed players, a cornucopia of excuses, and the lack of that "spark"; a willingness to simply cut out the excuses, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and dig in to endgame content until it was farmed. When he joined DoD at the start of Blackwing Lair, my then-warrior officer Ater had warned me, "he's going to whip this group into shape, but he's not going to make a lot of friends doing it." Ater and Blain played together previously in Lineage II, and Blain had made a name for himself as being detail-oriented and focused on doing whatever it took to be the best. When he joined the rogues, they were the most under-performing group of players in my guild. He walked into our raid wearing gear from Zul'Gurub and Dire Maul, yet within minutes, Blain was not only destroying the other rogues in DPS, he was quickly shooting to the top of the entire damage meters. He went on to become my raid leader for the duration of Vanilla, broke briefly at the start of TBC, but re-assumed his role when it was time to set the raid team straight. He then held the position all the way through the death of Illidan the Betrayer. By then, nearly four years later, he was completely spent. Nearly four years of listening to "This is too hard", "You're such an asshole!", "Why are you pushing us into more difficult content when we don't have the items we need from earlier bosses?"...he was done.

I didn't want him to go, but I didn't blame him.

These were only the in-game issues weighing heavily on me. I had a family that I was putting on the back-burner, and a career that was stagnating. I had to give some serious thought to how I was going to run Descendants of Draenor from here on out. The person whom I looked to for general leadership and guidance, Ater, was gone; I was officially on my own. I took my summer vacation out at my Dad's farm in a town called Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan -- a speck in the northern reaches of the Canadian prairies. Here, hours and hours away from any metropolitan city, I could step out on the deck at night, look up, and see nothing but stars. I'd stare upwards and lose all sense of time. No noise. No distractions. I let my mind go blank. All the stresses of the world washed away. I didn't care about the problems at work. I wasn't stressed about my family situation. And, it goes without saying, the pressures of running the guild were gone. Finally, I was able to think straight.

Kerulak, my main during Vanilla
Shattrath City

Learning from the Past

While I contemplated the state of my guild and where I wanted to go with it, I explored new avenues to gain insight and perspective. I read "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni, a fascinating tale of a failing company and its various employees, locked in a constant state of finger-pointing, stubbornness, and old habits. Although intended for the entrepreneurial crowd, I found an amazing amount of parallels between it and the difficulties I was experiencing managing a raiding guild. The book spoke to my plight so accurately that I paraphrased many of its concepts in a forum post that would help align the raid team during their preparation for Archimonde. Now on vacation, I returned to those notes, and re-purposed them into a new post entitled "Why Raid Teams Fail". In my post, I simply reiterated the same core fundamentals that Lencioni touched on. Instead of targeting a company and employees, my post was tailored for a WoW guild and its raiding members. I reviewed the forum post, and all at once, I had a path to follow.

This post would be the outline for my restructure.

Descendants of Draenor had been following the same set of unwritten rules I set forth since its inception in late 2004. Although we were still together and things seemed fine on the surface, there were cracks in the foundation. I had a raid team that, while successful, drained a massive amount of energy to manage and coordinate. I also had players of such vastly different skill levels contributing to raids that progression would stagnate for weeks at a time. This led to increased administration on my part, which forced me in-game for longer periods of time. I was pouring too much of myself in, and needed to balance my WoW time with my family and other external responsibilities. In order to accomplish that, I was going to need to refine and delegate. The guild would need a completely transparent set of expectations, unambiguous and unable to misinterpret. Every member would read them, confirm that they understood, and either meet those expectations...or be dismissed.

I reflected on the lessons I learned during Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, from the many individual experiences, players, and mentors that had come and gone. The highlights?:

Personally Oversee All Recruitment: The mass assimilation of guilds was a task I fielded solely during Vanilla. This granted me the luxury of first-hand knowledge of a person, and to go with my "gut" instinct when something felt right or wrong. This hands-on knowledge of people, in turn, was vital to the success of building a foundation comprised of guilds with similar mindsets as my own; it allowed us to make the leap to 40-Man Raiding. But in the course of TBC, I delegated much of the recruitment to my officer core. Each officer's opinion of a player varied too greatly. Thus, the pool of players that we expected to help us with raiding were suffered disparity. I solved this by personally taking on the recruitment process. All applications would go through me; there would be no more delegation of this task through officers. All invite privileges in-game were revoked. The public application forum (which often derailed into a flame fest) was locked. My guildies flaming n00bs during the app process went against everything I preached about being kind and respectful to fellow players and guilds. The open app process would come to an end. I would handle it from that point forward.

Everyone On the Same Page: "The Five Dysfunctions..." showed me that the team needed to speak a common language. The raid team's disharmony was sad and pathetic. It grew from (among other reasons) a generation gap; players in different age groups couldn't even agree upon the basic fundamentals. 38 year old players had a very different perspective on life than 17 year olds. If they couldn't see eye-to-eye on generalities outside the game, how could I expect them to form a cohesive team in-game? I imposed an age limit of 21 to diminish this generation gap. It wasn't about maturity -- it was about realignment.

Acknowledging Multiple Levels of Commitment: Ater taught me the value of acknowledging a player's contribution, and reminded me that players of different skill levels warranted hierarchical recognition. Players of poor quality fostered animosity among the team. Stellar players resenting foolish ones drained everyone's energy, and performance suffered as a result. Failing players could no longer be allowed to justify their behavior, and star players deserved priority over these mediocre folks. To solve this, I mapped out a hierarchy of ranks, each with its own requirements, rights, and responsibilities. Now, not only were there a clearly defined set of prerequisites that needed to be completed in order to set foot in a raid, players who exceeded them would be granted additional rewards and perks within the guild framework. Henceforth, two classes of player would be identified in the guild: "Raider" for general rotations, to come and go as they wished, and "Elite" for fixed rotations, whom I expected to be present every week, the rock stars of the team. The beauty of this solution was that the fixed rotation was perceived as a perk to the player, because they wanted to be there every week. And, by enforcing the attendance of the Elite, the overall performance of the team would remain high, instead of the sine wave of the past.

Elites Get 1st Round Bids: Players that treated our guild like a revolving door were murder for the progression team. Joining our team, gearing up...and then never setting foot in another raid again not only wound me into a ball of seething hatred, it flushed team morale down the toilet. I had a responsibility to provide some kind of incentive to keep stellar raiders returning to progression. In a somewhat controversial move, I introduced a change to our guild loot system, based off the aforementioned Elite rank. Players who gained the Elite rank by proving their consistent reliability and stellar performance would not only gain a guaranteed a spot in our raids, but would earn the option of a 1st-round bid, so that fleeting new members couldn't swoop in, bid and win the most powerful item in the dungeon, then hit the road the next day. This perk further incentivized players to outperform, and provided me with an additional layer of defense against cattledrivers; an in-joke we used when referring to top-geared raiders that suddenly left us high-and-dry.

Acknowledging Contribution Outside Elite: Not everyone that raided could hope to become Elite. Perhaps they weren't the greatest players in the world, or maybe not the most well-liked...but they still played a valuable role, and ought to be recognized for their efforts, even by contributing in some capacity without raiding. My vision of the new progression team would be comprised of a core of Elites, but it would be the Raiders (and others) that would allow us to continue to churn a rotation week-to-week, granting our members the schedule flexibility we committed to delivering. So, how would I recognize those non-Elites? I instituted the ability to earn a temporary "glory" rank for going above-and-beyond the call of duty, regardless of raid commitment. We would make a big deal about their contributions and assistance to the guild, both on the forums, and in-game with a special rank that granted access to the officer channel, even granting them temporary 1st-round bidding rights of the Elite rank, so that even non-hardcore players might be given a chance to shine. We'd name these players "Avatar".

Zanjina, my main during The Burning Crusade,
Black Temple

What Dreams May Come

The changes were significant. On paper, it read like an employee handbook. Was I going to scare people away? Would they look at this restructure, think it was some sort of joke, and walk away, pointing and laughing? I had to take a deep breath and make an important decision. Up until that very moment, my biggest fear was failure; that the guild would be seen as a laughing stock in retrospect, that we weren't able to accomplish anything of any value. I didn't want the entire four years to have been a waste of time and energy. My gut spoke to me again, much more loudly than ever before. So I stood out on my father's deck, staring up at the night sky in Hudson Bay, and listened.

It is time to come to terms with this.

There is a very real possibility that these changes will cause the end of your guild. You have to be willing to accept it. Prepare for it. And when that day arrives, be it tomorrow or years from now, you need to be ready to move on. No more excuses, no more crying about what was, or what could have been. When you are ready to accept the end of your guild, only then can you truly take a hold of that vehicle, and drive it as you always meant to. 

At the precise moment I realized this, I gained a new outlook on my ability to lead; I was overcome with a sense of confidence and direction. Once the fear of losing my guild was gone, all at once, the cloudy path ahead became crystal clear.

---

I returned home from my summer vacation, posted an announcement hinting to the changes that I had planned, and began to draft the first post that would pave our way: Who We Are, and Who We Are Not.

2.43. The False Step

Zanjina and the 25-Man Progression team prepares
to work on Illidan the Betrayer,
Black Temple

Contemplating Promotion

We pressed on and defeated The Illidari Council the night of July 27th, concluding a month of work. The path to Illidan was now clear. Time was of the essence. The next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was in beta, and I expected Blizzard to follow suit with applying the 3.0 patch to the game prior to its full retail release. This meant all existing encounters would be implicitly nerfed when our players gained all new talents and abilities. The defeat of 40-Man Maexxna was one of our proudest moments as a raiding guild, as we managed it prior to the 2.0 patch that trivialized said content. I insisted that the guild apply the same passion towards an Illidan kill, pre-3.0. Our original goal of defeating Illidan as a raiding guild was still doable, and would earn us a historic spot on the server, even when considering that Blizzard bolted on an entirely new raid tier after Black Temple, the Sunwell Plateau.

As The Burning Crusade waned, raiding guilds that were stalemating on progression began falling apart, and I picked up the pieces of these dismantled teams. I weeded through them, cherry picking the roles we needed and giving them a shot. This was my strategy to deal with any possible burnout the raid team was suffering as we neared our goal. Many of these guild breakups involved players who happened to be friends of Wyse. I found myself getting first-hand referrals on players she recommended; as the volume increased, I simply deferred to her judgement when taking new players in, bypassing the due diligence. The end result was a core of new players that were exceptionally well-geared and well-played, but were lacking in other social graces.

That summer was rough on the roster, and the BlizzCon 2008 ticket fiasco didn't help. Blizzard, unprepared for the popularity of previous BlizzCons, set up an online ticket purchasing website that completely buckled under the demand of WoW nerds across the globe. One such nerd happened to be my very own mage officer, Goldenrod. The sham of the ticket system failing, coupled with his growing disgust of mage treatment in PvP, was the straw that broke the camel's back. He announced that he was quitting the game, news that got back to me by way of one of my raiding priests, Neps. I shared this knowledge with Wyse in the hopes that she would assist me in holding things together through Illidan's completion. She obliged, expressing that she would reach out to the existing mages, folks like Turtleman, Dandrak, Barraged, and convince them to remain focused until the Betrayer met his fate.

Unbeknownst to any of them, Blain had already confided that he, too, would be leaving at the end of the expansion.

It was at this point that I began giving serious consideration to Wyse for officership. She had the unique benefit of being on-hand every day via IM; I could delegate the handling of situations at a moment's notice, without having to wait to log in to the game. It came from a feeling of desperation. I needed anyone available that demonstrated a sliver of leadership to help plug holes in the dam. This desperation clouded my judgement while I considered promotions -- it prevented me from seeing the warning signs. Signs such as Wyse expressing frustration at players who were tormenting her in guild chat, or worse, ignoring her outright. Signs in the form of her relaying to me how her friends in-guild were being "abused"; I would find out later that it was these same friends who incited arguments amongst players ill-equipped to raid. Soon, even laid-back members of the guild grew disgusted with her neediness and inability to handle criticism.

In a moment of clarity, my gut spoke to me. If you are going to extend a position of authority to her, she is going to have to demonstrate serious growth in both diplomacy and finesse. I listened to my gut and made the decision to hold back on the promotion.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Illidan the Betrayer,
Black Temple

The Betrayer

Descendants of Draenor clawed its way through the hellish summer months of 2008. By September, we had put in a solid four weeks of work on Illidan. Blain and I clung to the A-Team/B-Team rotations, allowing us to field the huge pool of players which now made up the roster. I drafted a "State of the Union" forum post, hoping to encourage those suffering from burnout to stay strong and remain involved in the rotations, so that we could claim an Illidan kill. Thankfully, the roster stayed full, and we continued our work on Illidan. Kurst continued his role of main tank and dealing with Illidan's Shear, while both he and Dalans worked together to perfect the Flames of Azzinoth tanking. Eventually, they were acting as a single cohesive unit. Within a few more weeks of earnest effort, Illidan Stormrage met his fate by our hand, granting us an official Black Temple clear date on the evening of September 21, 2008. It was both triumphant and bittersweet, because although we accomplished what we set out to at the start of The Burning Crusade, we lost many core folks from our original Vanilla raid team along the way. Still, few guilds could claim an Illidan kill; we now sat among those elite few. It was a proud moment for Descendants of Draenor, and the event remains permanently burned into my brain.

It was the week following our Illidan kill that would bestow upon me another everlasting memory.

Seven days later, we returned for our weekly clear. The rotations for that week were handled as fairly as possible; we brought as many must-have roles that were necessary for the kill, and rotated in folks that did not get a chance to be present for the first clear. Many core raiders fell into this latter category, officers included. Even the shaman Ekasra, whom I felt was vital to every raid that Kerulak was absent for, hadn't been present for the first kill. These folks all needed a shot, and thus, were rotated in on week two. As we were getting situated for a pull of Illidan, drama exploded in guild chat. Two recently acquired guildies (who happened to be friends with Wyse) threw a fit when they discovered they had been left behind for that evening's Black Temple raid. They were outraged that raiders who weren't involved in the initial kill were now getting priority over those who contributed to Illidan's defeat. Without even bothering to take it up with me and attempt some sort of resolution, they quit the guild.

This outburst of rage and immaturity would be the catalyst for Wyse's undoing.

Political Incongruity

By now, the raiders had grown into a unified, efficient team. They knew the goals we had set out to accomplish, and where our priorities lay. Clearing raids was the focus, being competitive and progressing so that the guild could experience the content was the endgame for us. We had burned into their brains that loot was not the reason we did what we did; we were not in this for individual gain or glory. The glory came from our accomplishments as an entire guild. Thus, any behavior demonstrating greed was immediately pounced on. The guild unanimously wrote the ex-guildies off as selfish and paid them no attention. Wyse, however, held a different opinion. She felt her friends had been mistreated and not given a fair opportunity at spots in the roster, reminding us that if it weren't for their contribution, Illidan would likely still remain undefeated. The result of this defiant public stance was an overwhelmingly negative response to Wyse.

Alienated, she became the focus of an entirely new round of personal attacks. Discussions she'd start in guild chat would cause officers like Dalans to instantly mute her. Any mention of the ex-guildies would cause my members to violently defend our morals and principles, further backing her into a corner -- with nobody on her side to defend her own claims. She made multiple attempts to contact me via IM, relaying to me the treatment she was receiving, but I could provide no additional support or advice. She had dug her own grave and nothing I could say or do would change the opinion of hundreds of guild members...including my own. It was not enough that she was a dedicated, experienced mage with a passion for progression and high-caliber play. She needed to be aligned with our ideals, our values. Instead, she remained frustratingly loyal to her friends; ex-guildies that had demonstrated selfishness and deceit -- not anything that I wanted us to stand for as a guild.

On November 11th, 2008, just six months after Wyse joined my guild, she posted a goodbye on our forums, and quietly left to join her friends. Various members of DoD made a concerted effort to be civil and wish her well; even Dalans left her a note: "Water under the bridge." I was appreciative that, in the end, my guild had the decency to let her know that she had been a contributing member. Skewed alignments aside, she had helped the raid progression team perform incredible feats. Without her, I cannot guess as to what amount of time we would have spent on Illidari Council, which potentially could have pushed Illidan far enough out, causing us to miss the pre-3.0 kill. I was thankful for her efforts, yet saddened that I couldn't convince her to see my side of the story. She would forever remain faithful to her friends, which in her eyes, were more important than the good of the guild.

---

A week later, one of my guild members started sending tells. "Hanzo, you need to jump into Vent. It's Wyse. She's pretty upset."

I popped on my headphones, turned on the mic, and jumped into Vent, finding her in a solitary channel. She was beside herself and in tears. I asked her what was wrong. Wyse proceeded to tell me how she had joined her friends' guild (the very same ones that stormed out of mine in a tantrum), and that she had been busy contributing raiding materials and gold from her characters to their guild vault. Once she had given them everything she had to help get their guild started on the right foot, her friends decided that they didn't need Wyse any longer, and kicked her to the curb.

It was an impressive demonstration of loyalty.

The very players Wyse had gone to extreme lengths to defend...had now turned around and cut her loose. She was distraught, not by the loss of trivial in-game goods, but by the betrayal of those she believed had her back, as she had theirs. I did my best to console her. I couldn't help but feel a certain sense of irony surrounding the events. Her "friends" had shown their true colors, something my gut had told me months earlier. It was unfortunate that she had to experience this first hand. As before, I wished that I could have found a way to convince her of this ahead of time. But, as with some people, the only way to truly convince them is for them to live through it themselves.

My experience with managing Wyse was profoundly enlightening. It was my first experience managing a player without the advice of a mentor, like Ater. I learned how to weigh my own needs in the middle of a crisis, but not jump to rash decisions like premature promotions. It was an exercise in keeping a level head. Dealing with Wyse reminded me that in leadership, I had a responsibility to not allow my emotional attachment to cloud my vision. The plucking of heartstrings is not a valid justification to sacrifice integrity, no matter how difficult it seems. And I won't lie to you...it is difficult to listen to someone pour their heart out, and hold yourself back from wanting to help -- to make everything better. It also reaffirmed my beliefs about people: you can't change them. All you can do is provide the necessary information to lead them down the right path. Whether they take that path or not is ultimately up to them.

I filed the Wyse experience into my stack of lessons learned, as I prepared to take Descendants of Draenor into the next expansion.

1.4. Two Suns in the Sunset

Kerulak and crew make their way through Zul'Gurub (20-Man)

Outlook: Hazy

In the meta game to build up my ranks to 40-man raid size, I was beaten black and blue. Guild leaders were hard to read and size up, especially without seeing them face-to-face. There were no hints, clues, body language to pick up on. Were they bluffing or giving me the straight story? Could I trust them or would they eat my guild up from the inside out, turning my players against me? Were they as skilled as they claimed to be, or were they “face-rollers” -- players who seemed so completely inept and incapable of stringing together a series of abilities that it seemed as if they were literally rolling their faces across the keyboard, randomly pressing a multitude of buttons in the process. The art of negotiation took extreme finesse, I had to listen carefully to what opposing guild leaders meant, which wasn't always the same as what they said. My experience with Juxta proved this: When he said one thing, Atrocity did another. Their raid coordination was non-existent, as was their leadership. I learned an awful lesson about blindly trusting players on the server, in the name of building a raid team, and Descendants of Draenor had a chunk of flesh missing as a result.

I continued on, seeking new faces for our roster, but it was no less difficult to acquire them. Sometimes I thought I had a guild merge wrapped up, only to find out hours later that they had completely changed their mind and gone a different direction, merging instead with a competing guild. It was stressful and exhausting, and required me being online every night, late into each evening. I'd open up new communications with other guilds, survey the landscape of the server, reach out to new players, and try to spread the word that we were the place to be for 40-Man raiding.

This, of course, was a blatant lie. We'd had about as much raid experience as Fred Savage had playing Super Mario 3 at the end of The Wizard: not a whole hell of a lot.

So, the marketing spin continued. Desperately, I lobbied for Descendants of Draenor, in the hopes someone would bite. Meanwhile, I filled the gaps by piecing together a few Molten Core attempts with whom we had left in the roster, though it was never a complete 40-Man group, and although we managed to make our way past the two Molten Giants at the door, we typically didn't make it much further before people had to start logging off for the night.

How in the hell was I going to keep 40 competent players online, on a regular schedule?

I prayed that I would get another opportunity to make a guild merge happen. If it did, I reasoned, it would be the last opportunity I'd get to make it right; if I botched another merge, all would be over for Descendants of Draenor, and any hope of us ever tackling 40-Man raid content would be swept away into the virtual ocean of WoW guilds on Deathwing-US.

I got my wish.

Kerulak, accompanied by newly acquired
members of The Final Cut, lay waste to Zul'Gurub (20)

The Final Cut

A few weeks after the Ugly Black Warhorses incident, I received an email from a player named Darange who said he wanted to have his guild and officers have a chat with our officers about a possible guild merge. They were members of a guild called “The Final Cut”, and I had no knowledge of them or their exploits on the server. I arranged a meeting between both sets of officers, and we would hold an online chat to discuss any questions they might have for us. Going into that chat, I was a wreck. My guild’s roster was slipping away, and the previous few guild merge attempts all ended in stalemates. This one was going to either make or break us, I thought. I wanted to bring ammunition to that meeting, something that could definitively put us ahead of other competing guilds, but kept coming up snake eyes. We had no proven raid experience. I needed something for us to latch on to, to make us appeal to the members of The Final Cut...I just didn't know what.

We met with them and chatted. Introductions were traded, and we talked about our experience with the game, and where we wanted to go. I was struck by how very well organized they were; they came across as very professional. There was no shit talking, no typical “dude” or “bro” or any of that--the conversation was professional and mature. In fact, as the conversation continued, I couldn't get past the feeling that I was being interviewed for a job. And it was at that precise moment that the light went on upstairs:

Hardcore players take raiding seriously. It needs to be approached with a level of professionalism that casuals simply do not possess. If we want to sell ourselves as a successful raiding guild, without having any actual raid boss kills under our belt, we are going to have to demonstrate this level of professionalism.

I immediately steered the conversation towards the work we had put into the planning stages of our raids. I spoke of our DKP system, and how loot issuing would be enforced. I discussed with them the role of the various officers in the raids (before the officers even knew what I was talking about). And when the other guild asked about our existing efforts in Molten Core, I was sure to communicate that, while we hadn't seen wildly amazing success, we had definitely seen progress, and had a system we would follow, refining until bosses fell over dead.

It seemed a bit bizarre to speak about a video game in much the same way I’d describe performing management-related tasks in my career, but everything about successful raiding guilds spoke to that extreme level of dedication and focus. I must have said the right things, because a few days later, I was mass inviting the members of The Final Cut into Descendants of Draenor. It was the last significant assimilation we needed to push us over the edge into 40-Man raid territory. We began testing the waters with this new set of recruits, dipping our toes into the then-new 20-Man instance Zul’Gurub. Initial reports were fantastic. The new recruits gelled so well with our existing roster, that we made huge improvements in our ability to execute content. Prior to the assimilation of The Final Cut, we hadn't even managed to get much further past the first boss (High Priestess Jeklik)...and were now consistently killing Marli, Venoxis, Thekal and Arlokk, with Hakkar (the final boss) in our sights. The dedication and focus to raiding was paying off.

Descendants of Draenor defeat their first boss,
Lucifron, as a complete 40-Man raid team.

Molten Core

One night, while questing around Stranglethorn Vale, my Shaman officer Kadrok sent me a tell:

“Uh, you know we have 40 people online right now?”

I popped open the guild tab, and sure enough, there they all were.

“Wow. We do have 40 people online. We could totally do Molten Core right now.”

Not a second word was spoken. Immediately, the officers began rallying the troops, and players were suddenly being mass invited to a raid. Was this it? Were we about to become what I had set out to accomplish? Actually be the size enough to field a 40-Man raid and be successful at it? The raid roster filled up with 40 players, and we began our flight to The Burning Steppes, headed towards Blackrock Mountain, where the entrance to the Molten Core awaited. The raid chat lit up like a marquee as officers began organizing their groups of players, figuring out who had which position, who would perform what role. One by one, we arrived at the entrance, leaping over a brick ledge and falling into a sea of lava, only to be quickly teleported into the Molten Core. I’ll never forget zoning in with the guildies surrounding me, as we began to buff, get into position, and nervously make that first pull of the two Molten Giants towering above us at the Core’s entrance. I held my breath, and we pulled. The Warriors ran up, shields in hand and grabbed a hold of the gigantic stone creatures, arcane missiles flew, fireballs and shadow bolts cascaded across the cave entrance, lightning shot out of players’ hands, and our health spiked up and down frantically as the healers struggled to keep us all alive, while the Giants pounded our raid into the ground. We continued to volley attacks at the Giants, the tanks struggling to keep them in position, and eventually, the two gigantic creatures made of molten rock fell over dead with a huge crash. We surveyed the results...we weren’t dead! The two Molten Giants lay silent at our feet, and we had survived.

And just like that, we were a raiding guild. On October 12th, 2005, we executed our first 40-Man boss kill, Lucifron, catapulting us into the raiding spotlight in which there would be no turning back. And the speed bumps were only beginning..

1.3. My First Mistake

Elephantine opens up on Shade of Eranikus,
assisted by Hend, Chariot, Stein and Tandr.

Juxta

By late August of 2005, the raiding roster still wasn't where it needed to be. I'd boosted the roster up significantly, and stuck to my guns on keeping our name, and retaining our officership. It was at this time that I was introduced to a player named Juxta. Juxta was doing the exact same thing I was: building up a raiding roster of folks to take on Molten Core, and poaching players from guilds he'd had some ties to. I wasn't clear on the history, only that he had come from Pretty Pink Pwnies, and was looking to construct a more robust raiding machine. His ace in the hole was another player named Atrocity, whom recently formed a new guild and brought Juxta in. Atrocity boasted experience in both leading and managing a raid team. I didn't foresee a merger working with them, so I tried an alternate approach: I began to quietly negotiate with Juxta behind the scenes, because although he wanted changes I was unwilling to compromise on (new guild, shared officership, etc.), I felt it necessary to try to have some kind of back-up plan in the event my guild mergers failed.

Initially, I had a lot of skepticism about dealing with Juxta. We would converse over IM during the day, determining the best course of action regarding schedule, rotations, how to issue loot out, and so on. I'd pitch my stance on DKP vs. Loot Council, he'd concur. Then, I'd find out Atrocity scrapped our mutually agreed upon ideas, in favor of his own. At times, they'd contradict one another: Juxta would track loot by hand, via a spreadsheet, then Atrocity would announce we'd use a mod to import a "DKP string" -- data generated in-game which listed out the details of our loot distribution -- into a website. I continued to negotiate with Juxta and flexed my diplomatic muscle. If I could convince Juxta to see my way on things, I reasoned, he would strong-arm Atrocity into seeing our side. 

Unfortunately, the reverse was becoming true.

As conversations continued between Juxta and I, it became clear that Atrocity was the player in control of this new grass-roots raiding guild, and that Juxta and I were being relegated to mere officership in their proposed structure. Juxta confided in me multiple times that he wished to retain the guild leader position, but it wasn't going to happen. Atrocity was playing favorites to people whom helped form the guild. Was signing a charter a reflection of management experience? Yet it appeared through our discussions that Juxta's players thought he was the Guild Leader. He even went so far as to ask for my vote in determining who the next GL would be. I played the game and assured him I'd be on his side. But his jaded views on loot continued to unnerve me. He claimed running a loot system in his manner "for four months without problems" was a clear indicator that it would succeed. 

Four months wasn't nearly enough time to see the long term negative effects of a poor loot system.

Uld captured in Blackrock Depths.
Also present: Knall, Churaliya, Gutrippa, Sassin,
Chariot, Hend, Yurimaru, and Creepindeath

Ugly Black Warhorses

Juxta claimed that he was fast approaching raid-ready, and wanted new forums setup, along with the loot rules posted for all to see. They had even decided on a name: Ugly Black Warhorses. I felt the guild name left a lot to be desired, but continued to play the role of diplomat and fed him my recommendations; I even went so far as to offer to buy the domain name and set up the website. Besides, owning the domain name was strategic; it might prove useful if I needed leverage down the road. I continued to play the game.

Then, on the evening of September 18th, Juxta dropped a bomb on me. He stated it was time to institute the merge, and we would proceed into Molten Core for our first official unified raid. I had only shared my negotiation strategy with a number of the DoD officers, so my guild was largely unaware of what was about to transpire. I issued out a quick message to those folks that were currently online, stating "not to freak out" and what was about to happen was "only temporary". And just as curious question marks began to arrive in guild chat, I /gquit Descendants of Draenor and accepted an invite to Ugly Black Warhorses, with my officers in tow.

The DoD officers and I sat in this uncomfortable, awkward guild, and a feeling of dread began to sink in. There was absolutely no organization or consistency in communication. People didn't know who was coming, going, in charge of what, or where we even planned to go. Guild chat became an unreadable mess of sentences beginning and ending with "LOL". I whispered over to my DoD officers and sized things up, "this isn't happening." Juxta ordered us up to Molten Core to begin pulling trash, but things fell apart long before we even caught a glimpse of the first boss. As I had suspected, the Ugly Black Warhorses were to become yet another failed guild merger of players unable to coordinate and tackle raid content.

The only problem was: I'd made a terrible mistake in judging how it would affect DoD.

Uld dances next to Jundar and Maergon in Scarlet Monestary.
Jundar would go on to form the guild Horderlies.

The First Exodus

When the officers and I returned to Descendants of Draenor later that night, expressing that...sure enough, it was a failed experiment, and that we were to continue on our own, we were welcomed back with disgust and disappointment. What had been the point of this experiment? Were we really intending on moving forward long-term with Ugly Black Warhorses? Why hadn't the rest of the guild been looped in? What would've happened to DoD had UBW succeeded in Molten Core that night? They were all valid questions, and my guild had every right to know those answers. I had been purposefully ambiguous because I truly didn't know how it would play out. The thought of trying to explain my strategy seemed like it would have confused people, and pissed them off even more. But, keeping silent had the same effect. They felt I betrayed them and their trust. And I had.

I was painted in a new light. The officers may have understood and felt the pain of this failed experiment, but I couldn't say the same for a handful of guildies. They began to challenge the long-term direction of the guild, where we were headed, and even if I was the right person for the job. Passive aggressiveness ensued. Biting remarks and smart-ass comments were directed at me, both in-guild and on the forums. I deserved it. But I didn't it want it to continue. I encouraged those players who truly felt our direction wasn't aligned with their own goals to re-evaluate. So, a handful of them did exactly that.

And so it was, the first exodus of Descendants of Draenor spawned a new guild on Deathwing-US, Horderlies.

I bear no ill-will toward them, because in the end, our goals were different: We wanted to focus more on raid content, they preferred to remain small and casual. But, far more important than that, I wasn't honest with them. They had every right to be looped in on sweeping guild changes, even if my changes had a hidden agenda which favored us in the long term. You reap what you sow. In my attempts to ramp up the guild to an adequate size, I was actually losing people. Things were starting to look grim.

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.