Officers’ Quarters: Merging for mythic

This week’s OQ covers guild mergers, better tools for raid leaders, and helping a guild leader who has given up on recruiting.

This sounds like a good solution to the situation. You won’t be the first or the last guild to merge in order to run 20-player mythic raids.

Some advice to help the transition:

• Compromise is the only way this can work. One guild can’t get everything they want while the other guild’s players have to deal with it. In some cases you’ll have to work out a middle ground. If the other guild isn’t open to compromise, don’t bother.
• Talk about expectations prior to the merger. Which guild will absorb the other? What policies are different between the two guilds and which guild’s policy will be enforced moving forward? You need to figure out all the important logistics: filling raid slots, distributing loot, handling conflicts, choosing the order of progression, recruiting, and so on.
• Prior to the merger, it’s a good idea to have an “exchange program” where one officer from each guild raids with the other guild for a week to see how they do things and to assess their “raiding environment.” A raiding environment can differ dramatically from guild to guild. One guild’s environment may be draconian, with voice chat strictly regulated. Another’s may be loose, with voice chat full of jokes and personal discussion. One guild may skew toward keeping chat clean, while another may be R rated. The clash can really throw people. You’ll have to reconcile these environments. The officers and raid leaders will have to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not for the combined group.
• If possible, appointing officers from both guilds will make everyone feel like they have a voice among the leadership.
• After the merge, be patient. Raiding is stressful. Sometimes you want to snap at people because it feels like they’re wasting your time. Try instead to identify and correct problems without emotion. One argument early on can blow up the entire merger. Besides, yelling or angry blaming only makes people more stressed and thus even more likely to make a mistake.
• Try to stop thinking of the guild as us and them. Focus on common goals.
• Emphasize what you have in common. Envision the new guild as one cohesive team, and encourage others to do the same.

If all goes smoothly, it’ll be easy to forget that there were ever two guilds. If not, well, it was better to try and fail than just have everyone go their separate ways.

Good DPS is still vital — and you can even skip mechanics, such as the third ship versus the Iron Maidens, if your DPS is solid enough.

That said, I agree that BRF is a mechanics-heavy raid and raid leaders need to use everything at their disposal to help their team succeed. The columns have their uses, but they can only do so much. Many addons such as DBM and GTFO can help you and your raiders, of course. wMarker can help with column management. However, it sounds like you’re asking whether the game needs more tools in the base UI.

In the comments to your question, someone mentioned the Augmented Virtual Reality (AVR) addon. It allowed raid leaders to draw whatever they needed right on top of the game’s environment. Then everyone with the addon could see those marks. Blizzard quickly nixed AVR because it gave raid leaders tools that were far too powerful.

Raid bosses are far more complex than they used to be and the base UI tools have not really evolved to compensate. Is there a middle ground between the base UI and AVR? Would AVR itself still break the game? I’m not sure. I think Blizzard is playing it safe when it comes to raid leader tools. If they give us something that makes strategies too easy, they’ll eventually have to take it away. Players will be upset. Blizzard likely thinks that it’s better not to risk it.

They did give us more column colors this expansion. So there’s that…

Regardless, the best tool is effective verbal communication, both between pulls and during encounters.

It sounds like your guild leader is burned out. At this point you might need more than one person attempting to recruit. If you guys want to keep raiding together, it’ll have to be an “all hands on deck” situation. Everyone needs to pitch in and take some time to look for players, post ads, talk to people, etc.

In the meantime, I highly recommend using the new LFG tool to fill in missing players with PUGs. It’ll keep your current raiders from getting bored. It’s better than not raiding at all. You might also meet some people who want to join your guild or raid with you again cross-realm. If your raid leader lacks the motivation to do this, someone else will have to step up.

/salute