1.10. Hammering Nails With Bare Hands

Descendants of Draenor defeats
Vaelastrasz the Corrupt,
Blackwing Lair

Voice of the Raid

When the corrupted red dragon slumped over dead, nobody in the guild had yet heard Blain speak.

After being informally inducted into the raiding roster by Ater, a relationship that had originally grown out of their shared Lineage II gaming sessions, Blain hadn't been talkative. The guild was known for blurting out crass jokes and nonsensical nerdy references in raid chat as we plowed through trash, but Blain chose to keep things close to the chest. Instead, his focus was on the raid and not so much on goofing off. The results spoke for themselves; in gear marginally better than a player would have minutes after dinging 60, he was wiping the floor with a good number of players in the raid. Some of these players would go on to claim he was cheating; that somehow, the add-on that we tracked damage with (Recount) was broken, and Blain had found a way to "fake" the values that displayed on our individual screens.

Denial, as they say, ain't just a river in Egypt.

We had managed a few attempts on Vaelastrasz before Blain set foot in our guild; they'd all ended poorly. The encounter was incredibly fun, taking advantage of a mechanic no-one had yet experienced: one-by-one, players would be cursed with the "Burning Adrenaline" debuff, giving them limitless mana, energy or rage, and cranking all their ability cooldowns to 0. Once transformed into this raiding machine, the player would have only a few seconds to crank out as much damage (or healing) as they could, before being forced to the back of the room, where the Burning Adrenaline debuff would overwhelm them, igniting them in a final explosion. Anyone near this living dynamite would be along for the ride to an early grave. Without preparatory research, we weren't equipped to manage the tank rotation needed to keep Vael still throughout the process, and he would turn randomly and blanket the raid with a crimson death.

Blain had only just re-written our raid strategy on Razorgore to deal with the undocumented totem aggro change in patch 1.10. His mastery at raid tactics and disinterest in listening to excuses had pushed us back into the Lair, wiping the floor with Razorgore using a legitimate strategy. It was through granular attention to detail that he gauged our viability on Vaelastrasz; if we were short by a thousand DPS, he'd know and would adjust accordingly. Vael was a tightly tuned boss, leaving only enough room to breathe without choking us. And Blain knew we were still very low on the raiding totem pole; most of us were decked out in Tier 1, with the occasional Tier 2 pieces from Onyxia, Ragnaros and Razorgore. Again, we were going to have to get through it legitimately, not by muscling our way through. So he dangled a carrot, and said if we could pound Vael into dirt, he'd speak in Vent.

Vaelastrasz the Corrupt took six weeks of exhaustive practice. We first laid eyes on him on March 14th, and in a moment of triumph on the evening of April 26th, 2006, with nearly all of the raid lying motionless on the floor, a young Mage by the name of Dandrak gained Burning Adrenaline. He unleashed all fiery hell from his finger tips in those last moments; his pyrotechnic acoustics layered amongst various raiders calling out, "Go Dandrak!", "Do it!!", "Kill him!!!". The great red dragon collapsed lifeless against the tiling. Cheers and screams filled our Vent server, our ears bleeding in this masochistic act of nerdism. When the yelling died down, my Shaman officer Kadrok reminded us of the promise, "And now, we must hear Blain speak!"

So on the sixth week, Blain spoke. And it was good.

--

Blain didn't reveal too much about his personal life, but I wagered a guess that he was located in the southern part of the US. His voice revealed remnants of a partially suppressed southern drawl, the way an accent tends to melt away as person spends time with people not from "these parts". I could relate; as a Canadian transplanted into America, my own pronunciations of words slipped away over time. But when tempers flared, I had a tendency to fall back on my instinctive tongue, rolling out "SORRY!" that was heavy on the SORE part. Likewise, when Blain got frustrated with folks in the raid, I'd catch him starting sentences with "Y'all".

"Y'all need to pay attention."

"I can't do this for y'all".

Then he'd calm down. Just like that, the accent would be gone.

"Do you need me to give you assist?"

I smiled. We lacked the ability to read each other's facial expressions in dealing with one another entirely over VoiP, so it was the little things like the presence or absence of an accent that helped me read my players.

What Blain did reveal in those conversations in the weeks to follow were his experiences from his previous Alliance guild, one in which he raided as a Warrior and cut a path through Blackwing Lair with similar machete-like fashion. I laughed at this revelation: Blain had de-throned all of my rogues on the first day raiding with us, and it wasn't even his primary class. When we chatted, I came to understand his convictions about raiding, and what it took to succeed. In his eyes, performance was about how well you leverage the tools available. Gear didn't matter nearly as much as players thought -- he proved that with the embarrassing weapons he held when he joined us in the Core. Success in raiding required a state of mind and a professional approach. A carpenter doesn't build a house by pounding nails into boards with his fists.

Descendants of Draenor defeats boss no. 3
Broodlord Lashlayer,
Blackwing Lair

Plowing Through the Lair

The day after Vaelastrasz was defeated, we one-shot Broodlord Lashlayer, having never made an attempt against him. It was a euphoric boost in morale after struggling with Razorgore and the six week ordeal of Vael. One-shotting anything in Blackwing Lair legitimized what we set out to accomplish -- hardcore progression on a casual schedule. We were now 3 / 8, and pressing forward. The three drakes were next: Firemaw, Ebonroc and Flamegor, and we were able to knock them out a week at a time. All three of them draped us in Shadow Flame, so our entire raid had to be equipped with Onyxia Scale Cloaks, preventing instant death. We would, on occasion, have a forgetful player who left their cloak in the bank -- or simply failed to put it on -- and we'd know instantly when their health-bar emptied out in a split second. It even happened to Ater a couple of times and the results were nothing short of hysterical.

Everyone makes mistakes. We did our best not to repeat them.

Firemaw required bizarre placement:

Placement for Firemaw, 4th boss of
Blackwing Lair

I stood with the healers at a sharply acute angle against a wall in the suppression room. My view only granted me a glimpse of the tank, which alternated between Ater and Annihilation. This was done to LoS or "keep out of Line-of-Sight" Firemaw's Flame Buffet attack. Flame Buffet would hit everyone in line-of-sight of Firemaw, knock them back, strike them with fire, and stack a debuff which increased the fire damage they took. Staying in and being healed through it was not an option. One by one, melee and ranged had to step in sight of Firemaw, attack, gain a few stacks of Flame Buffet, then fall back to safety and let them drop. Meanwhile, the healers had to handle keeping the Tanks alive, which was especially challenging during tank transition. Moments where neither tank were visible were about as comforting as knowing your pet had broken out of the backyard and escaped into traffic.

Firemaw took patience and practice, but we got him without needing a prescription for Xanax. Ebonroc didn't require nearly the same intricate positioning as his brother, but called for three tanks instead of two, alternating between taunts to prevent Shadow of Ebonroc from inadvertently healing the drake back up to full. Shadow Flame was still an issue, so everyone continued wearing their Onyxia Scale Cloaks, the upside being we would be saved from instant death, the downsize being we lost the stats of our progression gear. For me, it was a loss of a piddly 17 Stamina and 19 Intellect from my Hide of the Wild. Today, it would be barely noticeable. In Vanilla, I lost a solid five minutes of healing mana in an already 15-minute long fight.

Flamegor was the easiest of the three; his mechanics were similar to that of Firemaw, but he unleashed fiery novas onto the raid which kept us wrung almost completely dry of mana. His annoyance was a constant Enrage. Led by Kaleu, our resident beast-masters had to cycle through a dispel rotation -- one we hadn't leveraged since Hunters first acquired Tranquilizing Shot via a drop off Lucifron. It had only been called for on Magmadar, but the Hunters had Molten Core seared into their brain. Putting the rotation back into place was as easy as the flip of a switch.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Firemaw,
fourth boss and first of the drakes,
Blackwing Lair

Random Loot is Random

Our burst of efficiency had a drawback. By the time we were three quarters of the way through Blackwing Lair, we were still geared to a quality best described as "optimistically average". Working backwards, Flamegor had died once, Ebonroc twice, and Firemaw three times. Meanwhile, we had four kills of Broodlord and Vael; Razorgore perhaps twice that. At roughly three drops per boss, that equated to approximately 66 opportunities to upgrade, excluding our weekly clears of Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair. In a perfect world, those 70-ish upgrades would have covered a wide territory of players in the 40-Man team, but unlike a hardcore guild, we didn't take the same 40 people week-to-week. It was not uncommon to have a player reap tremendous rewards from our loot, then not return to the raid for several weeks. Re-training new players, exacerbated by their lack of upgraded gear was crippling, and drew our progress out. 

On top of all this: that handful of gear wasn't exactly a cauldron overflowing with purple power. The drakes were especially stingy with loot; they promised Tier 2 glove drops, but almost never delivered what we needed. In Vanilla, our set bonuses came at 3, 5, and 8 pieces. The most well-equipped folks (by this point) had Helm, Pants, Bracers, and Belt -- four pieces, one shy of the next bonus. Gloves or Boots would sate our hunger for more raid power, but the drakes refused to cater, and Broodlord liked to give us boots we already had. We took what they gave us, scurrying like rats in an alley as they dumped out the occasional scraps of nourishment; a Styleen's Impeding Scarab here, or a Rejuvinating Gem there. More often than not, though, it was garbage random off-pieces that the raid was unwilling to break their Tier 1 bonuses for.

And they knew what was coming, just around the corner: Tier 2 shoulders and chest. Staff of the Shadow Flame. Ashkandi. They weren't about to forfeit their place in line for a chance at a coveted weapon. They clung to their DKP and we dusted the side-grades. Constrained on gear and approaching the final two bosses of Blackwing Lair, I poured my faith into Blain's ideology. Gear is not what was going to get us over the hump that approached. We were going to have to be disciplined in our attack, leveraging every tool  available. They days of hammering nails with bare hands were over.

Chromaggus and Nefarian were going to need one hell of a hammer.

1.9. Enter: Blain

Blain adds some DPS to Buru the Gorger,
The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj

A Wild Rogue Appears

My Tauren Shaman took a seat at the mouth of Molten Core, drinking some of the Mages' conjured water, checking my inventory, making sure I had remembered to bring the Whipper Root Tubers I'd plucked from Felwood. Ater sent me a virtual nudge in the form of a /tell, indicating that the new Rogue would be joining us this evening. Fantastic, I thought, at last we'll get to see some real damage for a change. I spun Kerulak around to get a look a look at him.

His name was Blain, and he did not look geared for Molten Core. At all.

We'd spent half a year in Molten Core; it was now the second week of April, 2006. Both Onyxia and Ragnaros were regulars on the schedule. Weekly clears geared our raiders to the core-hound tooth; our players were some of the most well-equipped on Deathwing-US. Blain, by comparison, looked like any random scrub plucked from /general.

Yet, we struggled.

Part of the problem laid with the rogues; their damage was pathetic and inconsistent. They had one job: sustained DPS. A reasonably well-played, well-geared Rogue should easily top the meters. Ours weren't capable of such a request. Whether it was a lack of leadership on the part of my then-Rogue officer Evilexan, or the rogues' inability to grasp basic concepts like speccing out of PvP for raids, I wasn't certain.

They needed help.

The rogues needed guidance and leadership; someone to tell them to pull their heads out of their asses, get them educated on the proper specs and rotations. But the one thing they didn't need was gear. Seven months of running Molten Core had granted them nearly complete sets of Tier 1 Nightslayer armor. Some even boasted the Tier 2 Helm and Pants (Bloodfang), having been present to multiple Onyxia and Ragnaros kills. And in their hands they wielded Core Hound Teeth, Brutality Blades, Gutgore Rippers, and Vis'kags. No Alliance player on Deathwing-US was safe to perform their daily tasks with our rogues lurking in the shadows -- the might of their weaponry all but assured the Alliance a quick and painful death, perpetually terrorized by the "Descendants of Draenor" guild tag.

Razorgore held no such fear of our rogues.

So as I glanced up at this newly acquired Undead Rogue, standing before me wearing parts of the Tier 0 Dungeon set, augmented by a few random blues, wielding a Zulian Slicer in one hand and an Ogre Pocket Knife in the other, I had to ask myself:

How in the hell would this guy be our savior?

I sent a /tell to Ater, "Are you sure he knows what he's doing?"

Ater told me to have faith and to watch; I braced for the worst. Ater called out into Vent that he was about to pull the Molten Giants and for everyone to be ready. I swiveled my shaman into position behind the casters, and hovered over Ater's name with my mouse, my healing trigger finger waiting for the first blow to strike him.

And then, it happened.

Within seconds of making the first pull in Molten Core, Blain's DPS shot up through the roof, topping the damage meters, tearing the Molten Giants apart.

It was not a marginal increase in performance, it was an order-of-magnitude difference.

The raiders watched in silence as he moved from mob to mob, swinging around from behind, tearing each monster apart, moving with lighting-fast reflexes from one minion to the next, as his existing target was still in the process of falling over dead. It was as if he had the kill order already planned out in his head. I immediately had a flashback to that night in Scholomance with Maxxum and his guild members, ripping the dungeon open from the inside out. Precision. Efficiency. Speed. Maximum DPS.

Hardcore.

Warrior officer Annihilation wields The Untamed Blade,
Blackwing Lair

The Kill-All Strat

Blain mostly kept to himself. He didn't speak in vent and only typed responses when addressed directly. I continued to watch him, mob after mob, boss after boss, and night after night. Just as Ater had assured me, Blain continued to impress.

He and Ater had a synergy about them; they would work together to strategize and refine our current systems, making our Molten Core clears even faster. Long after the raid was over, Blain and Ater would venture off into a remote area of Azeroth, often with several other volunteer raiders in tow, mapping out new strategies, then trying them out in a kind of "dress rehearsal". Like kids constructing an attack plan in the sand with sticks and diagrams, they'd go over positioning, practice mechanics, movements, patterns. Ater had not lied -- Blain was a perfectionist. And when he assisted in the smaller 20-Man instances Zul'Gurub and The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, he completely dominated the damage meters.

But this was all still junior-level stuff for us. Bosses we had mastered were, for the most part, brainless in their execution. The task at hand was to re-learn Razorgore, a boss we already knew was a brick wall. We'd already practiced and perfected a strategy, but patch 1.10 crippled its effectiveness. I feared what this meant. Weeks of unlearning, then even more weeks of re-learning, equating to zero progress in BWL. I doubted a single rogue would be enough to turn the tables as fast as we needed it to be flipped. Failing to put Razorgore on farm status in a timely fashion would most certainly spell the end of raiding in DoD.

---

The 40 of us stand in Razorgore's egg chamber, staring at the boss, wondering how we are going to pull this off. The only viable strategy that remains is the dreaded "kill-all" strat. Only the the very best hardcore guilds can do this; guilds far better geared and played than us. It's going to be extremely risky; it has a significantly higher DPS requirement than what we are capable of, not to mention the risk of the Legionnaires cleaving us. And the egg-chamber is small, enclosed area, so our out-of-combat battle rezzer is going to be useless.

Blain types into raid chat, "we’re going to be doing the kill-all strat."

This is crazy. We're not a hardcore raiding guild! We don't have the gear to meet the DPS requirements. The cleave is going to take players out all over the place. This strategy is absolutely destined for failure.

I watch in silence as Blain opens up the raid management window and begins re-arranging groups. One by one he analyzes the most efficient make-up for each corner of the chamber: A tank to control the mob currently being killed. A Mage to polymorph the incoming Legionnaire. The Hunter responsible for Dragonkin kiting. A Warlock to back the Mage up with a Fear, in case the Legionnaire breaks free. A Druid will act as another backup to sleep a Dragonkin if needed. A healthy balance of healers and DPS to burn through each corner as fast as humanly possible. I wait for him to move us into individual Vent channels to coordinate the communication, as each corner is going to have to call out DPS, polymorph, fear, stuns, kill orders, emergency heals...if we're all in one channel it'll be a catastrophe.

"We’ll be staying in one Vent channel," he types into Raid Chat.

What? This guy has to be absolutely bonkers, Vent is going to be a constant mess of talking; nobody is going to understand a damn thing with everyone yelling.

"Each corner has an identifier", Blain types, “A, B, C, and D. I want one person from each corner calling out their respective spawns. You'll call them out by 1st dragonkin, 2nd dragonkin, 1st mage, etc, so we'll know is crowd-controlling what."

This ought to be rich. How the hell is the raid supposed to know that?

"Here are the crowd-control assignments," he types. Blain proceeds to lay out every single call. Every crowd-control, every kill execution, from start to finish. He has, essentially, orchestrated the entire boss execution in front of us.

"Designated corner announcers in Vent will call out if their corner is overrun. Adjust as necessary."

We start. We swiftly knock out the controller and his guards, and the mind-controlling of Razorgore begins. Corners move into position. They start calling out their Dragonkin, just as Blain instructed. The Dragonkin are picked up and kited by Hunters. Mages begin to spawn, corner tanks pick them up, announce they have good threat, DPS begins tearing the Mages apart. We burn them as fast as we can. Legionnaires arrive, calls are made. Our raiders move quickly, polymorphing them into harmless sheep. How are we doing?

"Eggs going well, down to half", says the controller.

He continues to weave Razorgore throughout the egg-chamber, popping eggs left and right. One by one, more Dragonkin, Legionnaires, and Mages spawn. I start to get nervous, and glance at my mana bar. Still Ok, I can continue to heal, and throw out a Frost Shock here and there to assist DPS. Were we falling behind? More mobs arrived. I'm not sure how the other corners are doing, but am too focused on the Rogue’s strategy to divert my gaze. I keep my focus on the task, keep my corner tank alive. Careful...careful! Don’t break the sheep. How are the eggs now?

“Eggs still going well”.

I re-focus my attention. Burn the Mage down. Throw out a few more heals. What about the other corners? I'm nervous again; not getting a lot of feedback from the other teams. They are quiet, save for the "clang" of weapons and "whoosh" of spells being hurled across the room at our targets. Anyone overrun yet? Ah God, a Legionnaire is closing in on me. Watch out for the cleave, give the tank the room he needs to work. He grabs it up, faces it away; I'm safe from the cleave. How's my mana looking? I’m doing pretty well, I’ll throw out a Frost Shock, help my team get our corner down. Another Mage dies, the tank breaks a polymorphed sheep, and moves to the Legionnaire. My corner’s looking low on health; I get them back up safely. Ater's voice breaks the silence in Vent.

"We have extra mages in the middle, get them picked up".

A far corner sweeps over and gets those mages handled, I toss out some more heals. Someone calls out for how many eggs are left.

"We’re on the last egg, get ready to move Razor into position."

Wait...what?

Before I know it, the final egg is broken, and the Dragonkin are running out of the egg chamber in preparation for Phase 2. The tanks pick him up and face him away from the raid, bearing the brunt of his conflagration alone. I hide behind pillars and begin line-of-sight healing, stepping in only to top off the tank, and then stepping back, safe from Razorgore's conflag. The tanks switch. More heals continue. Blain and his melee are wailing on the boss, giving it everything they have, while Mages, Warlocks send ranged attacks flying from a distance. I glance at the damage meters. Everyone is pushing as hard as they can.

...and all at once, Razorgore falls over dead, the victim of a kill-all strat.

The 25-Man Progression team defeats
Razorgore the Untamed,
Blackwing Lair

Have Some Faith

I was absolutely stunned. I never expected my guild capable of such refined raid execution; to be able to come together and work in such a synchronized, coordinated fashion. But we had, thanks to Blain, who wasn't interested in hearing about how or why we couldn't do something...but was more interested in humoring the possibility that we were. He not only put that effort into his own personal performance, he turned the Rogues around until they were all top-performing, dominating the meters like they always should have. I vowed to never again doubt our capabilities and made it a rule to preach Blain's ideals to the rest of the guild.

From here on out, raiding wasn't about what we couldn't reach, but rather, how fast we could get started.

1.8. Razorgore the Unmaimed

Rogue damage is all over the board, as Kerulak
and the 40-Man raiders hover over Garr,
Molten Core

Terribad

At the macro level, we were making broad adjustments to our raid execution and seeing excellent increases in speed and skill. We were chain-pulling, tearing monsters apart, healers were buddying-up and managing their mana with much greater efficiency, and we had out-of-combat battle rezzers acting as a backup mechanism to ensure we kept a healthy amount of players alive through emergencies. Ragnaros was dead, and Onyxia's head was doomed to end up on the end of a pike in Orgrimmar, so swore our 40-Man raiders. It was time to raise the bar. Our sights were focused on the next tier of content, Blackwing Lair. However, the step up in difficulty was significant, and although no trash awaited us at the start of the instance, the first boss proved more than enough of an obstacle. After a few weeks of struggling on Razorgore the Untamed with no progress to speak of, we were desperate for answers.

I turned to my Ater for guidance, in the hopes of validating my own hunches as to where things were going south. A lot of those early months of raiding (and guild leading) in Descendants of Draenor were very much “learn-as-you-go”, and it wasn't uncommon for me to take a backseat and watch leaders emerge, taking note of how they addressed situations and resolved conflict. I had come to trust Ater's instincts more and more, as did the rest of the guild. People looked up to him, and when he spoke, they listened and followed. He exuded natural leadership, and employed all the basics (praise in public, scold in private, etc.) It was rare (if ever) that he had anything negative to say about anyone. So, it was that much more difficult to get him to speak negatively about anyone; it simply wasn't his style. It was this style which contributed to my mishandling of the Khaevil / Xorena situation, leading my Number Two officer, Graulm, to part ways with the guild. In my attempts to learn leadership by observing, I missed Blackrock-sized mountains of information.

I'd misread Ater's passivity as approval. Whether outright or innately, Ater understood the illusion of asymmetric insight, and didn't let it cloud his judgement of other people and the behavior we observed. We think we know people by watching how they behave and act, but we miss mountains of information needed to make accurate, impartial assessments. He picked his battles. He was less concerned with ego and players living out the persona of their in-game toons, and more focused on tightening up raid execution. Therefore, Ater would pour his energy into bringing clarity to raid strategy, rather than waste time telling someone they sucked. But even in the face of Ater's direction, bad players remained bad, and it didn't appear like he was able to get through to them. One group in particular took this terribad play to new heights, making them the biggest offenders of the bunch: the Rogues.

The rogues sucked.

Not having played a rogue, I couldn't be certain what they were doing wrong. Rogues in WoW were traditionally played by individuals who had a thirst for PvP (Player vs. Player) combat, and often specced into a role that would grant them survivability and burst DPS for that very reason (subtlety). However, these traits translated poorly into a raid environment, where high sustained DPS was a much greater priority. I discussed the Rogue situation at length with Ater, and while going over a few options one evening, he offered to reach out to a friend. They had played together in a previous game, Lineage II. He trusted this person, and stated to me that he would “whip the rogues into shape” and get us where we needed to be. Ater explained that, from his experience, this Rogue had an amazing attention to detail and could micromanage people's abilities on a entirely new level, providing insight into the tiniest of details, that even he wouldn't be able to keep track of while tanking/raid leading. It all sounded like a great idea...

...and then, Ater added, “there’s a possibility that this Rogue may rub some people the wrong way...”

The way I saw it, we didn't have a lot of options. Part of the reason we weren't making progress on bosses like Razorgore was that we were coming in way below the DPS requirement. If we could bring someone in who could tweak those numbers, I was willing to eat a few complaints from people who got their feelings hurt. I told Ater to seek out his Rogue friend, and determine if he could join Descendants of Draenor. In the meantime, I turned my attention to our other roadblock.

Kerulak and the 40-Man team prepare for an Onyxia kill,
Brackenwell Village, Dustwallow Marsh

Kiting Like a Scrub

The first boss of Blackwing Lair was a dragonkin named Razorgore the Untamed, and he would be the first of many bosses bring an entirely new level of complexity to our raids. It involved two phases, the first of which dealt with an steady influx of heavily armored Dragonkin, along with Blackwing Legionnaires that cleaved targets (hitting multiple players at once), and Blackwing Mages doing high DPS from afar. They trickled in slowly at first, but increased their frequently to such a pace that a raid couldn't simply overpower them all; they had to be controlled and killed in a focused, prioritized fashion. On top of that, a single player would have to mind-control the boss through the entire phase, weaving him back and forth across the instance, destroying all of the eggs in the chamber. Once the eggs were destroyed, phase two began, and Razorgore had to be taken to a corner and killed, switching back and forth between tanks, as one would periodically be doused with flames, causing them to become hysterical and run around in a panic.

Razorgore required a nearly surgical level of control, and communication was the most important priority. Many competing guilds stopped dead at this first boss of Blackwing Lair, never to progress further. In extreme cases, raiding guilds arrived at Razorgore, failed, pointed fingers at each other, and ultimately disbanded; a very real concern and possibility for us.

The longer the guild went without killing Razorgore, the greater the chance of completely falling apart.

At the time, we were employing a “totem-kite” strategy, made popular by raiding guilds on the Horde side (as the Alliance didn't have Shamans in Vanilla). The strategy involved the Shamans dropping Earthbind Totems (which had a slowing effect on enemies) and running around the room, casting their infamous Frost Shock on every cooldown, which caused monsters to chase the Shamans. Once the Shamans had aggro on all the Blackwing Legionaires and Dragonkin, players would run laps around the egg-chamber, re-dropping their totems, ensuring the the monsters remained slowed. This monster-chasing-you act is referred to as "kiting". With the Legionaires and Dragonkin in tow, the remainder of the raid would spread around the outer perimeter of the egg-chamber and methodically kill what remained: the Blackwing Mages. The theory to the strategy was that if the Shamans could maintain a healthy amount of aggro and kite these slowed minions or "mobs" through their Earthbind Totems, the raid would no longer be stretched thin, and would be free to focus on killing mages. The strat had merit, because when the first phase ended, all of the kited monsters would turn and exit the room in a scripted event, leaving us to focus on Razorgore himself.

From a practical standpoint, the strategy was anything but. It was difficult. It put the wrong players in the wrong roles. It felt "gimmicky", like we didn't know what we were doing, cramming a bunch of things together at the last minute like a bunch of amateurs. I felt like an idiot running around in circles. I hated it. It took me out of a role where I felt I could contribute (as a healer) to being completely powerless to help (running around like a moron with minions chasing me, one wrong move meaning instant death).

The only other option was a fabled "kill-all" strategy, employed by only the true hardcore raiding guilds in World of Warcraft. The rumor was that these top played, top geared guilds would separate themselves into four sub-groups, each communicating to one another in their own designated Ventrilo channel, and they would simply kill everything. Technically, they would ignore Dragonkin (due to their high armor), but Legionnaires and Mages together were fair game. The DPS requirements to keep up with the kill-all strategy was completely out of our league, not to mention the extreme level of coordination and focus that was required.

It was a level of discipline we simply hadn't reached.

So, we put this pipe-dream out of our minds, and continued on with the totem-kite strat. Several more weekends of attempts went by without a Razorgore kill and things became more frustrating and stressful. But on March 15th, 2006, the Shamans and I managed to kite our way into Phase Two, and Razorgore was dragged to a corner, tanked, and killed. We breathed a collective sigh of relief and set our sights on moving forward, confident that Razorgore was behind us.

He wasn’t.

Patch 1.10 added weather effects to WoW,
along with the undocumented side-effect of
Shamans' Totems generating threat.

1.10: Totem Aggro

Less than a week and a half went by, and we were treated to a new patch, v1.10, which added Weather effects to the game. While casuals frolicked through the rainstorms and snow out on the surface, the Descendants of Draenor had bigger issues to deal with. Upon returning to Razorgore’s egg-chamber, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, our strategy of dropping totems and kiting mobs around the room completely failed. Unbeknownst to us, a undocumented "stealth" change snuck its way into the v1.10 patch:

Shaman totems would now generate their own aggro.

As soon as the Shamans and I began our kiting, the Legionaires and Dragonkin would turn to the totems, destroy them with a single punch, free themselves from being slowed, then catch up to us and beat us to death. We were nearly ready to break ground on the next boss, Vaelastrasz the Corrupt, and now had to deal with a huge setback; we couldn't even kill a boss we were supposed to be farming. We picked ourselves up after many failed attempts in the egg chamber, crawled back home empty handed, and I thought to myself, “now what?”

Before I logged off for the evening, Ater took me aside and said his Rogue friend had decided to join us, and would be present for our next raid in Molten Core.

A glimmer of hope, perhaps?

1.7. Tricks of our Trade

Kerulak gazes up at Ragnaros during
40-Man Raid work in Molten Core.

Fine Tuning

Raiding in Vanilla was unlike anything I had participated in throughout my gaming career. Just getting over the initial hump of requiring 40 players to be online at once, and coordinating their efforts in real-time struck me as somewhat of a miracle. Only once fireballs were flying across the giant dungeons, felling great behemoths left and right, did we begin to realize that we would need to proactively find ways to improve, even if it meant a tiny little little bit each week. These marginal improvements that we'd apply from week-to-week would infamously come to be known as baby steps, which was our only real weapon against the competition: other raiding guilds vying for bragging rights and new raiding recruits -- some of whom could easily come from our own roster. It was my job as Guild Leader to provide a raiding environment that was both fun and successful. Other guilds were doing the same thing, so I had to find a way to do it better.

In order to stand out amongst a sea of raiding guilds, Descendants of Draenor needed to collectively assess class role, ensuring that we would approach our raids with the highest level of professionalism possible. Other raiding guilds were failing by being extremely wasteful; they would send players into raids without knowing who should play which role, instead just playing “however they wanted”. By looking at some of the world's best raiding guilds (at the time) we discovered a fact early on. Each class in WoW had a specific role in raids, and in order to be effective, deviation from those predetermined roles wasn't an option. In many cases the choice was obvious: A Rogue, for example, is a class that leaps out from the shadows and quickly ends his foe's life with razor-sharp daggers or swords. In a raid, rogues play only one role: Melee DPS (Damage Per Second). Rogues fall into a "pure" category class, alongside Mages, Warlocks, and Hunters. They do one thing: kill bosses in the face until dead.

The remainder of classes in WoW, however, can play multiple roles. This is based on how they have their talent points applied (what we refer to as their Talent Specialization or "Spec"). A Shaman, for example, could be specced to hurl lightning bolts from a distance, making them a Ranged DPS class. Or, they could be specced to utilize two one-handed weapons up close, swinging them at their target with the fury of the winds, standing side-by-side with a Rogue. This style plants them firmly in the Melee DPS department. Alternately, they could spec a third way, remaining at the back of the raid, blanketing their friendly party members with a protective layer of spells which replenishes health and grants shields. This style of play falls into the Healing category. We refer to classes that can play multiple roles based on their talent specialization as "hybrids". During Vanilla, the hybrids of WoW were the Shamans (if Horde), Paladins (if Alliance), Druids, Warriors, and Priests.

Just Because You Can...

While multiple roles were available to the Shaman in a raiding situation, there was truly only one spec that was viable due to the way Blizzard had balanced each of the nine classes. The cards of fate revealed to me that Shamans were to play the role of a healer, nothing more. The raiders in Descendants of Draenor quickly assessed what their role was, and embraced it, and if they didn't, they would be replaced by players that did. To lead by example, I was the first Shaman to lay down my weapons, and take on the responsibilities of a healer. I began to spread this belief system across the raiders of Descendants of Draenor, so that they, too, would embrace their class's fated role. Many did without hesitation. Some, however, remained in denial. They had originally chosen their class because of the emotion it instilled in them when they saw the class tearing monsters apart upon the lands of Azeroth. Choosing a Druid, for example, may have spoken to certain players because of their ability to shapeshift, taking on the form of a Bear that was virtually un-killable, or perhaps to a Cat, entering stealth (like a Rogue) and sneaking up on a foe, tearing them limb-from-limb. 

Being told that in order to perform at your maximum capacity, you were to stay in the back of the raid and cast healing spells on your party, came as an awful blow to some. Once provided with this revelation, many threw up their arms in disgust and walked away from raiding. Others bit their tongue and played their fated role as was expected of them...but they did not enjoy it nor embrace it. This produced a large subset of players that were often performing at 50% or 75% of their maximum efficiency, and was a sad result of Blizzard's design we had no control over. Flexibility in class role would not come until much later.

There were ten bosses in Molten Core. With our raiders now playing the role cards they had been dealt, if we were diligent, we could get the first three bosses done in two hours. I thought our speed was reasonable, but at the amount of bosses in Molten Core, the reality of making an entire clear in one evening seemed unfathomable. We only had a few hours each week to make our attempts, and because we employed such a wide variety of players across North America, managing multiple time-zones and keeping players focused and awake left us a small window of time to execute content. There had to be a way to increase our speed.

As Kerulak finalizes raid invites,
Haribo announces healing assignments.

The Moment of Clarity

One night, I stumbled across a video uploaded by a European WoW guild called The Axemen, who performed a full clear of Molten Core in 1 hour and 30 minutes. After watching the video with mouth agape, I had a moment of clarity. Immediately, I sent it to my Warrior raid-leader, Ater, telling him we needed to crank our clear times up. He pulled the video apart piece-by-piece and began discussing it with the other Class Officers. The Axemen employed a strategy known as "Chain-Pulling": the raid is in a constant state of pulling trash and killing it...as trash is about to die, tanks are already moving into position to pull the next pack. We began to train our raiders to expect this kind of chain-pulling so that they were not surprised when there was little time to break, sit, drink...breathe. We pulled monsters non-stop.

In order to facilitate this chain-pulling, our healers (having a finite amount of mana) had to come up with new ways of maximizing their endurance. Previously, they could sit down and drink after each pack of trash or boss was killed. Our new chain-pulling methodology removed this as a viable option. As we pulled trash faster and faster, our healers slowly expunged their mana pools until wrung dry like a sponge. This reduction in raid healing cascaded into player deaths, which only served to slow us down further. My Priest officer, Haribo (named after the candy company) came up with the concept of "Healing Buddies" to remedy this situation. 

Haribo's idea was simple, yet elegant. Every healer would be paired with another healer. As we began to clear trash on our way to each boss in the instance, one "buddy" from each pair would perform heals on the tanks and raid, while the other just followed along, doing nothing. Then, as each of the first "buddies" began to run low on mana, Haribo would spam out a “SWITCH!” macro in a channel he created (unsurprisingly named "dodhealers"). This would alert the healers to swap to the other buddy in each pair. Now, the new buddy would assume the role of healing the raid, while the first buddy followed along, slowly regaining mana. This saved us from having to constantly stop at various times between trash pulls while the healers drank and regained their precious mana. With Chain Pulling and Healing Buddies in full effect, we were able to increase our boss kill count from three to five in the first two hours, killing Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas, Garr and Baron Geddon. If it were a particularly exceptional night, we could even fold Shazzrah, a sixth boss, into that two-hour block.

Raids were moving noticeably faster. As with anything you do in life, the faster you go, the greater the chance of making a mistake. Some players simply did not adapt as quickly as we had hoped; either they had computer performance issues that held them back, or they simply lacked the reflexes to respond at a moment's notice to an emergency situation. Players would randomly find themselves face down in the dirt, killed because of a simple mistake. No amount of "better play from other raiders" could help offset this. We needed a contingency plan. Additional research revealed many hardcore raiding guilds were utilizing "out-of-combat battle resurrection". This surreptitious strategy called for certain players to keep a healthy distance behind the core raiders doing the work on the boss. By remaining far away from the action, they would kept themselves out-of-combat, which granted them access to spells normally disabled during the raid. One such spell was resurrection: the ability to bring a dead player back to life. Resurrect spells were disabled in-combat to add a degree of ownership to the raid; simply rezzing the dead over and over throughout the course of the fight meant instantly trivializing encounters, allowing players to sloppily die in fire with no repercussions. Theoretically, it was a valid guard-rail to empower players to be accountable as a team. In practice, unsolvable latency-related issues leading to lag-driven death were not considered for. Out-of-combat battle rezzes were a reasonable-if-slightly-unethetical way to combat infrastructure mechanics for which Blizzard provided no legitimate solution to.

Descendants of Draenor clear their first raid
 in its entirety: Molten Core

Bearing Fruit

Employing a delicate mix of improvements, either self-created or shamelessly stolen from other successful guilds, resulted in a dramatic increase in our efficiency. We were able to defeat Onyxia (our first official Internet Dragon!) on November 21st, 2005, and were soon farming her regularly for better weapons and armor. Meanwhile, we continued to clear content in Molten Core, faster and faster each week, pushing deeper into the instance, collecting up the materials necessary to craft fire resistance gear; equipment vitally necessary to withstand the fiery wrath of Ragnaros. Then, on the fateful evening of February 10th, 2006, Descendants of Draenor returned to Molten Core, stood before the mighty Elemental Lord of Fire, and delivered a final, fatal blow, sending him back into the depths of Blackrock Mountain. I almost went deaf with the victorious screams and cries of forty players calling out in digital unison, piped into my headset via our Ventrilo server.

We now not only had a structure in place to facilitate an efficient raiding system, we had proof that it worked: an entire 40-Man raid instance was cleared. We were filled with excitement and pride, and as we strode through Orgrimmar, displaying our weapons and armor from the instance, we began to turn more heads and garner additional interest in our guild. This came at a pivotal time, as we would soon discover (as other raiding guilds had), the difficulty of Molten Core and the next instance, Blackwing Lair, were as different as night and day.

We were about to get a wake-up call. One that would require that addition of a single Rogue that would forever change the course of history in Descendants of Draenor.

1.6. Asymmetric Insight

2nd-in-command of DoD, Graulm, shot next to
DoD's Warlock Officer, Gutrippa

Emotionally Intelligent

As the new year of 2006 rung in, I was at last enjoying the benefit of a fruitful, prosperous guild. The many late nights I'd poured into negotiating guild merges, strategizing takeovers, poaching skillful raiders that were unhappy in their current situations...had all paid off. The result was a 40-Man raiding machine, now making weekly clears of Molten Core, diligently scooping up loot, and acquiring the necessary materials to craft fire resistance gear; items that would be vitally important to the defeat of Ragnaros, one of the four Elemental Lords in the WoWniverse. Structurally, we were rock solid. Per Graulm's suggestions, I had appointed one officer for each of the classes, and this delegation of authority allowed us to ease the administrative nightmare surrounding 40-Man logistics. The officers were sharp, each was an expert in their respective field, and I perceived them to be equals, all contributing to one another as they guided the raid teams down the serpentine caverns of brimstone that lay hidden beneath Blackrock Mountain.

My officers were extremely competent in their respective class departments; part of what made them effective was their ability to understand and convey complex raid mechanics to the team. A simple example of this was the decision behind forcing our melee DPS to attack mobs from behind. Any player worth their salt will tell you why this is so: attacks from behind can't be parried, which improves the player's DPS. Less parrying equals more strikes on the target, and more strikes, therefore, means more damage. However, there was a far more subtle mechanic at work, and when less-than-stellar players tried to defend their incompetence and laziness, my officers would step up and bring out the big guns: Attacks that were parried by a boss caused the boss's swing timer to reset, producing the effect of another instantaneous attack. This "parry-hasted" swing, coupled with a random mechanic in Vanilla raids known as a "Crushing Blow" -- a strike at 150% damage of the normal attack -- could potentially take a tank out in a single shot. It was about more than just improving damage, it was also about implicitly increasing the survival of the tank. Luckily, I had Ater leading the troops into battle, and thanks to his qualities in directing raid-related traffic, the raiders of Descendants of Draenor knew and understood the value of the individual contributing to the greater good.

This WoW-related expertise lay completely at the mechanical level. As players often joke, much of it isn't "rocket surgery". Where things become truly complex and difficult to understand are when one must make an evaluation of a person. It's easy to see why one person's damage is in the toilet, and remedy the situation with a new set of gear or spell rotations; it's an entirely different can of worms to try to predict why people behave the way they do, what their intentions are, and what their hidden agenda is. Some leaders, as it turns out, have an innate ability to read people; their emotional quotient is high and attuned to the nuances of behavior. Others mistake their "reads" of people, unaware of their own cognitive biases. This leads them to falsely blame one set of behaviors as the cause, when an entirely different set of variables are at play.

And this is where Ater the Idealist and Graulm the Realist began to bonk heads.

Khaevil makes a sarcastic comment
about what girls want in WoW

'Til Death Do Us Part

Xorena the Priest and Khaevil the Mage were a husband and wife team recruited into the guild in late October of 2005. A seemingly pleasant couple, their intention was to join the 40-Man raid team and offer their services in our quest to clear content. They were extremely well played; Xorena healed like a champ as mists of holy energy washed across the raid from her lightning-like reflexes, and Khaevil produced stupidly high damage as he let fire fly from his fingertips. They joined our 40-Man roster and continued to strengthen our raiding backbone. Additionally, they loved to PvP together, and found themselves in battlegrounds alongside other DoD veterans who enjoying seeing the Alliance scream and writhe in agony. Haribo and Annihilation, my Priest Officer and Warrior Officer, respectively, often entered Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin with Xorena and Khaevil at their side. To all, it would seem, Xorena and Khaevil were team players and soon to be considered a part of the DoD family.

All, except Graulm.

Graulm expressed concerns to me early on regarding Xorena and Khaevil. Their intentions were not with 40-Man raid team, or with progression at all. He had already sized them up, and confirmed his beliefs with another Officer, Annihilation -- another guildy who possessed the innate ability to read people. And to them, Xorena and Khaveil read like a children's book. The husband / wife team cared little for 40-Man raid progression, and were only there to collect loot for their personal benefit in PvP. As soon as they acquired what they wanted, I could expect to see their priorities shift...and not in favor of the raid team. My default modus operandi was to try to see the good side of the situation, to artificially inflate the pros over the cons, but Graulm stayed firm: it was a mistake to move forward with them, and I needed to cut them loose.

Severing them from the raiding artery was a huge risk, it meant the possibility of the the raid team bleeding out. I raised this concern with Ater. His assessment was much more idealistic than Graulm's; he saw the "good" in people, and was loathe to make judgments on observations of behavior -- especially ones in a game which cloaked us all as good guys or bad guys. He had a very supportive mindset and was sympathetic towards all players, giving them a chance in Molten Core that most raid leaders would shy away from. Even though it went against my gut, I leaned towards Ater on this decision, and allowed Xorena and Khaevil to stay. I believed them to be valuable contributors, and that minor PvP-related preferences would not get in the way.

Kerulak mediates loot drama with Khaevil while the raid
continues to clear trash in Molten Core

Double Standards

The husband, Khaevil, was an excellent, professionally-played character, and one of the top damage dealers in our raid. Unfortunately, he was absolutely awful as a human being. He was extraordinarily disrespectful and rude to both players in my guild, and players in other guilds. This, of course, upset me greatly. Descendants of Draenor was founded on being different in that we weren't going to be a bunch of foul-mouthed shit-talkers like every other guild on the server. We were going to make an concerted effort to be a little bit better. Yet, Khaevil's treatment of players went against everything I wanted the guild to stand for. And I sat by, letting the behavior continue, lying to myself and convincing myself "it wasn't that bad" and that if people built up a thick-enough skin, we'd be able to carry on. If I ever doubted my decision, I fell back to Ater, who showed me the light, and confirmed my bias. Thus, Khaevil and Xorena continued on in DoD, creating an unhealthy double standard that others would soon take notice of.

Graulm grew increasingly frustrated, eventually to the point of breaking. He'd had enough of Khaevil's disrespectful attitude, and was tired of me ignoring him, instead favoring this "new, fantastic Warrior" as my go-to person to solve all the guild's problems. I can imagine he also grew disgusted with my disregard for upholding the guild's ideals at the risk of sacrificing raid progression. As the weeks turned to months, he withdrew increasingly from the officer spotlight. He contributed less to guild management, which I can only assume was due to the fact that he felt whatever he would bring to the table, I would simply snuff out by contrasting with Ater's stance. Eventually, his position as 2nd-in-command of DoD became nothing more than a title in the guild roster, and by the fall of '06, he packed up his stuff, and walked away. It was a huge hole to fill, both in officership and in 40-Man progression. 

The party did not end there.

Graulm pictured at the base of Blackrock Mountain
in full Tier 2 (Felheart) Warlock gear.

Cleaning up the Mess

Five months after Graulm left Descendants of Draenor, I took Xorena into our Ventrilo server one evening and gave her and Khaevil their walking papers. I’ll never forget how horribly upset she was; devastated is probably a good way to describe it. She was emotionally distraught, crying in Vent, trying to find a way to negotiate the situation, to see if there was any other recourse. There wasn't. They had to leave. The ejection left me physically exhausted; I wasn't prepared for her response. It was tough to take. The best part? Not only had I lost a core Priest and Mage out of 40-Man progression, I had sacrificed my 2nd-in-command in the process. I hadn't listened to him; I hadn't taken his concerns seriously enough. It was important to stay true to who we were as a guild, and that was more important than a boss kill. I couldn't make "allowances" for players, based solely on their damage meters; it was a double standard that would eat away at the core of the guild. And by ignoring the problem, I simply made the situation worse -- instead of losing two players (which I would have lost either way), I also lost the person that started to teach me the basics of leadership. I avoided the situation because I thought it would go away; that maybe perhaps some other officer would eject them on my behalf. I learned fast that nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to be the enforcer of the rules, the bearer of bad news. Nobody wants to hear a gal plead with you in Vent while choking down tears that there must be another way to solve this issue. 

People avoid conflict for a reason.

And so, with the guild down an officer and two core raiders, I learned my lesson about double standards and vowed not to let it happen again. I discovered in practice that it was one of the hardest rules to enforce in the context of WoW. We would ultimately go on to gain a multitude of expertly played individuals over the course of many years of raiding, and some of them had horrible personalities. It took every ounce of energy to keep the roster filled with players able to rotate into spots that were left by players we ejected due to shitty behavior; it simply wasn't realistic, to be honest -- it became a full-time job. And it weighed heavily on my mind those months we worked on Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. I didn't give up. I was determined to see us succeed, at whatever the cost. My hope was that I would be able to continue to turn to Ater for advice, while tempering it with what Graulm had taught me.

Yet, the unanswered questions kept me up at night. Why did Ater put good faith into people that so obviously backfired? Was Graulm right about his assessment, or was there a far more complex set of circumstances working toward the Husband/Wife team being forced out? As my time with Ater continued on, he would prove to me he had far greater insight into people than I.

And thus, my training began.

1.5. The Idealist and the Realist

Kerulak holds his healing position during an Onyxia (40-Man) attempt.

Leadership Emerges

After only a few weeks of absorbing The Final Cut, we had become a fully-staffed 40-Man Raiding guild, and were executing bosses with extreme prejudice. We had a lot of ground to cover; Vanilla had already been out for nearly a year, and Blizzard was hard at work in preparation for the next tier of raid content, The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj. For us, it seemed a lifetime away, since two raids and 18 bosses stood between us and that next tier. Luckily, our roster had finally reached full capacity; a talented, eager set of players that were determined to raid. It was during this next year that we experienced a multitude of wins and losses, of tragedies and victories, and ultimately gave me my first real lesson in what it took to maintain a successful raiding guild: beware the double-standard.

I remember flying out to California in late October ‘05 to attend the first BlizzCon, and while I took the stage in the voice competition, busting out an impression of Deckard Cain from the Diablo series, the Descendants of Draenor raid team was back home, executing boss kills in Molten Core, earning us both credibility and gear. We also broke ground in a separate one-boss raid, Onyxia’s Lair, and began working on killing our first dragon, a raid that would ultimately take weeks and weeks of practice. I met a few of my guildies in-person at BlizzCon that October, and it was a cool feeling to be able to finally put a real-life face to an in-game character. WoW was, after all, a social experience. If I was going to keep Descendants of Draenor on the winning path, I would not only have to embrace my character’s role and responsibility in raids, I was going to have to learn more about the people behind the characters. Then, I could be certain they would work well together as a team.

During the next several months of raiding Molten Core, I noted that there were a few personalities we gained from The Final Cut that had tremendous leadership potential. One Warrior in particular had an extremely commanding presence about him. His name was Ater. He had offered to pick up the leadership reigns of Molten Core, having driven his own 20-Man Zul’Gurub raids throughout the week. Like clockwork, every three days (the reset timer for old 20-Man raids) he would rally the troops, taking the very best of the guild, and plow through the instance, with his sights set on killing Hakkar. Few guilds at that time had a Hakkar kill under their belt, and Ater felt that it was a reasonable accomplishment to work towards. It wasn't that the raid was necessarily difficult, but 20-Man Zul'Gurub fell into an awkward category in those days.

Kerulak snaps a picture next to Ater within Molten Core

Rewards Match Effort

Guilds of 40-Man raiding size were focused on much more challenging 40-Man content. To them, a raid that was half the size also meant half the challenge -- and rightly so. Those 40-Man raiding guilds that chose to tackle Zul'Gurub "as a goof" ended up wrecking the place. Gurgthock and his Elitist Jerks artificially increased the challenge by leaving nearly all the priests alive while killing Hakkar, causing the Blood God to gain a series of buffs making him nearly invincible. Without inflating Hakkar's difficulty, it wasn't worth their time. Zul'Gurub's rewards matched its effort, and in those days, the piddly blue items couldn't hold a candle to the gear that dropped out of a 40-Man raid. 

And yet, guilds that didn't boast our size or dedication to raiding simply could not put a random group of players together to do Zul'Gurub. Short of the first two bosses, High Priestess Jeklik and High Priest Venoxis, Zul'Gurub's 20-Man breadth remained out-of-reach for most casual players; any player even able to catch a glimpse of High Priestess Marli or beyond was considered a sharpshooter.  As a result, Zul'Gurub often went unfinished on servers. Vanilla's meta-game of gearing for raids was paradoxical in retrospect: To make any kind of raid progress, one required raid gear, but the gear wasn't available unless you raided. This design acted as an artificial gate to prevent casuals who had no business setting foot in a raid from even bothering. The flip side, however, was that getting your foot in the door meant exploring every option, finding any hidden tip, tactic, secret, strategy, or obscure loot that would augment your play just enough to keep it together for that first boss kill -- ones that ended with nearly the entire raid face down in the dirt. This artificial gating design of Vanilla WoW drove some players to push themselves to the absolute limit.

Ater was one of those players.

Ater was determined to execute Zul'Gurub in its entirety, since it was the only reasonable content he had a shot at completing during his membership in The Final Cut. He didn't care about the gear, regardless of its inferiority to Molten Core, he cared about the accomplishment. I heard it in his voice over our guild Ventrilo many nights -- that passion and hunger to complete content, just like any dedicated gamer who's focused on beating a game. His passion for gaming, and demonstrated leadership via Zul'Gurub, led me to hand him the wheel in our 40-Man raids as well, and it wasn't long before I promoted him to an officer rank, sitting alongside my existing DoD officers. But with his promotion also came dissent. Ater, while liked by many in my guild, held philosophies that clashed with others I put in a role of responsibility. Unfortunately, I had to bear the brunt of that fallout on my shoulders alone. 

Hanzo's alt, Oxanna the Tauren Druid, acts as
Guild Bank during Vanilla

The Basic Building Blocks

My 2nd-in-command was a Warlock named Graulm who had brought his EverQuest guild experience to the table, helping me lay the foundations for all the basics a guild would need. I originally met him in Stranglethorn Vale, while playing my Mage, Elephantine. We struck up a conversation, helped each other with a few quests, and continued to chat and assist each other over the next few weeks. During my assimilation phase, I stalked and harassed him to throw in the towel with his existing guild, and tried to make him see "the one true way". He fought me at first, but I eventually managed to sway his opinion. Once on board, it became clear his EverQuest guild-management experience would play a vital role in my learning process. While other guild members were focused on questing and clearing 10-Man Stratholme, Graulm was busy laying a foundation for Descendants of Draenor. The guild lacked structure, and leadership was essentially only an extension of the /ginvite command. He aimed to resolve that.

One of the first orders of business was a guild bank, which Graulm directed me to set up early on. Back in Vanilla, it was comprised solely of a series of alts holding items in bag space, since WoW wouldn't actually introduce true guild vaults until the first expansion. My alts, therefore, were used to store guild- and raid-related items, ferrying things like Gurubashi Coins around to players as needed. Graulm pointed out that there was more to this than purely convenience; it ensured that the management retained leverage over the guildies. He reasoned that it would keep them in line, so they would remember who was in charge; storming out of the guild in a tantrum of drama would mean walking away from earnings they themselves contributed to. An implicit psychological attachment to raid tokens would keep people loyal. Ownership, as it turned out, was a powerful motivational tool.

Graulm also identified a key flaw in my guild's forums that he felt needed to be addressed: we lacked an officer-only section of the forums. Managers needed to be able to go behind closed doors, and discreetly discuss the management of the guild. Often, this meant engaging in conversations about how to handle certain individuals. It wasn't appropriate to speak in public about the disciplinary actions surrounding a particular player in the guild. Graulm showed me that, like a business, the guild had a responsibility to conduct itself in a professional manner. Being respectful toward one another goes both ways, he reasoned, and if I was compelling the guild to follow my moral compass of treating each other with dignity, it had to start with leadership setting the example. I remember vividly the day I locked the non-officers out of a section of the forums; panic ensued. What was I hiding from them? What were we planning on doing that they weren't allowed to know? Graulm eased my anxiety. This response was expected, and was par for the course.

These basic building blocks of a guild structure may seem like common sense to seasoned guild leaders, but back then, I was but a babe in the woods. Thankfully, I was able to get Guild Leadership 101 from Graulm, and provide enough structure to conduct ourselves in a semi-coherent fashion. Up until that point, Graulm had been acting as the little man behind the curtain to which no one paid attention, but he himself knew intimately the role he played, and his value directing traffic on my behalf. And there was no one to question his authority by proxy, since he alone pulled the strings; I simply danced on his behalf.

So, you can imagine what happened when another influential leader entered the stage, one with a difference in opinion of people than what Graulm held. The effect was not unlike trying to push two magnets together. The positives didn't want to play nice, and neither did the negatives.

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..