Guild Progression Help Request

[Romulus-Zek]

Greetings!

We have about 30 active raiders btwn the lvls of 66-75.
17k warrior boxed with a cleric
3 other boxed clerics.  No clerics who just play themselves.
2 well played druids and a well played shaman.
1 good paladin (boxed with one of the clerics)

The two other warriors melt like butter in the sun.

We raid three times a week.  Most people have jobs and families so this is pretty much going to be it...and I personally like it this way.  One or two nights dedicated to 1.5 fights. 

The members have a gawd aweful assortment of keys and flags.  Their gear is a mish-mash of all kinds of stuff.  Some people have been to Qvic, others havent ventured out much past the bazaar.  Mine, for example, is a mixture of some of the better 1 grp stuff from DoDh and PoR plus the DoN cultural I made myself and 1.5 epic.

The guild leaders are going to focus this next month on getting Time flags for everyone.  With some assistance from another guild they are doing the Time trials.  I guess the idea is to gear up the lesser geared players before moving on to GoD.  I find these trials very stressful...heh.  And it leaves a lot of people sitting around when they have logged in to raid.

My question is this: 

Is it worth the time it will take to work everyone into Time?  Would our limited time be better spent getting people levels and dodh gear?

How about GoD? 

I am not looking for a shortcut, but more the fastest way to get everyone on the same page.  The officers seem to have the loyalty of the players.  The players seem to be learning although we fail a lot on stuff the first couple times out.  Gear is coming in at a trickle atm...

How would you more experienced players handle this?

Regards,
Romulus

[Pakratz]

I might be tempted to pull up the DoD 1-group gear list, chart what everyone needs, and grind dod missions for a couple weeks.  The gear there is same or better than time.  The beauty is you can do the missions with your best 6 players and swap in 5 gimps at the end for the rewards, thus getting 5 upgrades with about an hour of work.  If you can put together 2 groups capable of handling these missions, all the better.  Samanna's website has a full list of dod gear.

After that, you might want to hit DoN dragon targets (Rikki first) and Shyra.  They'd make a nice raid nite.  Another option would be to have ppl work on ToB access.  It's pretty easy really, tho it does take some time.  In ToB you'll find Qvic level stuff on trash and Anguish level stuff from names.

GoD is a pita.  Getting everyone KT flagged, then doing Uquaa/Ikky4 will be a drain.  And that just gets you into Qvic which has only slightly better than DoD gear.  Progressing into Tacvi will be a another huge challenge.  Its just not worth the effort imo.

At some point you'll be limited by sheer numbers.  The logical next step would be MPG trials for anguish, but you really need 40+ for these trials and anguish itself.

[Timberghost]

In GoD, I just can't see you doing Uqua without having a bunch of decent quality tanks to handle the adds from the various traps.  There are some times that you'll have 6 mobs in camp at once and each person that dies spawns a ghost add you need to keep busy.

You might be able to get done through Ikkinz, but without more tanks than you mentioned it's gonna be tough.

With that kind of make up, I'd work your way through the PoP progression, you can get a lot of it done with those numbers and then when you have more tank mezzers start talking about GoD plus.

[Khauruk]

Imo, there's no reason to do GoD anymore if you have some talented people who are commited, and willing to improve themselves outside of raid nights.

Get everybody in a good suit of DoD/TSS/MPG group trials armor, make sure all melees have at least the best groupable weapons available (Despair atm, or Rime Encrusted Pikestaff iirc) + 1.5, get 1.5s for casters.

Make sure your tanks actually have decent shielding.

From here, you can start farming the heck out of many things - BRM, Zun Mumak Volklana, Tirranun, Ju'Rek (if you have somebody who can get the mission, it rocks), possibly CoDrakes if you have the dps, 2.0 chest fights (doesn't matter that you can't get the orbs, chests have decent loots), Collosus, Ritesmaster Verok, Rampaging Monolith.  From there, start w/ the other DoN dragons, MPG Raid trials, ToB mobs, Shyra, etc.  W/ level 75, and a bit of tenacity, you should be able to get anguish perhaps w/ the help of some friends on the trials.

PoTime - great place to gear up w/ a couple runs, and has some very nice clickies.  Not necessary imo, but not something to avoid.  Just don't let it monopolize you, as it can be readily bypassed nowadays.  I would definitely not bother w/ all of PoP progression, even assuming you can do 3-4 fights a night.

GoD - I might go up through Ikky2 anyways.  Chain BPs for yoru chain melees rock there, good shields for all, ranger elfshoe, swizzle stick for your warriors agro weapon to go w/ 1.5 (best you'll get for a while), plate greaves from ikky2 rock the house).  Ikky3/4 might have some worthwhile loots, but nothing really stuck out for me.  Uqua, etc,...well, I don't think you really need to bother too much with that.  It takes a reasonable amount of time, and the rewards aren't really that great w/ the advent of TSS.  Pre-TSS, I'd say go for it...but now, it's no real big deal.

Work on recruiting some as well...if you can get yourself another 10 good people, things get a lot easier.

[Khauruk]

Add Chailak/Feratha to intial list, and RSS King/Queen for later.

Other advice:

Box army - encourage botting.  I don't know your class distribution, but I'd strongly encourage people to box toons.  Examples - botted bard for resists, wizards/mages for easy peasy dps (possible rangers as well, though their archery dps will never really improve), clerics, buffbots/utilibots.

Spells - get people their DoD spells/discs, and PoR ones (as needed).  These really help, especialy along w/ Gift of Mana that every caster should have.

Focus effects - work on them, even if they're mediocre ones, they still really help.

Grinding - don't "let" people simply grind for AAs when they have a whole group.  Spell missions, trials, gear quests, etc,... are all out there, and will make a huge difference for your guild w/ getting started.  Time needs to be made the best of, and grinding doesn't help much when similar AA exp is available elsewhere, w/ loads of other rewards.

Mod2s - work on these.  70.4 hard for melee accuracy aug, mpg trial rewards for all mod2s.  DoDs for accuracy, avoidance on gear, PoR quest stuff, and tss quest stuff for the same.  These enhance survivability and dps greatly w/ no raid time.

AC - get your tanks AC!  A goal for a lvl75 casual balanced tank is around 2.7k+ AC now.  Work on AC augs, etc, etc, etc,.  With botted clerics, you can't afford for tanks to need lots of healing, or to have heal spikes.

AAs - everybody should have all defensives posthaste.  With limited healing, these will be used constantly.

Resists - DoD resist clickies = godly.

Offnights - many 24 man missions can be handled w/ "subpar" groups of people, esp. at lvl75.  Use these to your advantage, and get some of these fast things out of the way.  Do most of 1.5 fights then also, imo. They're fast, many can be done w/ 1-2 groups.

Speed - make the most of your time.  Get people moving around fast, scouting for targets fast, raid leaders (make sure you have more than one competent) should be fast at getting things accomplished).  When my old GL retired we ended up getting maybe 50% of the things done in a night because the others didn't go so crazy fast, and didn't keep people moving at a frenetic pace.  Work on speed - ooc regen should make wipes take minutes now.

MGB - save mgbs for heals.  Don't use on buffs.

[Romulus-Zek]

Good replys.  Thank you.

Recruiting is slow but yeah, I think we want to add more but add people that are more serious about progression, and that takes some time.

With the tanks we have there are really only two or at most three groups that are capable of doing anything substantive.  The up and coming tanks dont really play enough to get where they need to be raid wise.  Imo.  One might, he's newer.

We have some who really shouldnt be in the guild given their level, number of aa's, their supposed raid experience etc.  One surmises they didn't level their toons from scratch, if you know what I mean...they don't even know if they have KT flag and they are wearing Qvic bp...go figure.  But overall the people who do play seem fairly committed.

I am going to send the officers over here to see these responses.  I think they are pretty well thought out and seem pretty much inline with the way we are moving.

Thanks again,
Romulus

[Khauruk]

Add T'Shara in The Nest to list of possible mobs.

Qvic BP = Inktu'ta or Txevu drop actually.

Recruiting - you can also look at a guild "alliance" of sorts.  I don't ever really see it working on Luclin, at least nothign lasting.  But, if there's another family guild who you know has some hardcore casual players looking for more, but not willing to move on...well, perhaps you can just let it be known that they're welcome to come along.

Perhaps there's another dying raid guild out there....it seems there's often a couple out there.  Perhaps a merger could be worked out.

Public raids - you might be able to run one public raid per week, and use that to try and lure a few people in.  I see it happening fairly often, but don't know how well it actually works.  At the least, it gets some brand recognition out there for you, and some good will/rep.

What I outlined would be for a guild looking at raiding seriously.  If you're looking for a more relaxed thing, check out heroesofluclin.com.  They've been around for a while, and kept their news pages up pretty well.  Granted, they have a lot of people, but it could maybe give you a thought on what path you could expect to follow.

Also, look on thesteelwarrior.org for posts by Flinthas.  Former guild leader of mine, and we were in a similar situation - 24-30 on for raids, lots of bots, etc,....

[Nusa]

Is that 30 players plus boxed toons, or 30 player toons including boxes?

Sitting around? If by "Time trials" you mean the first stage of Time, more than one trial can be done at once, with 18 people per trial. In fact, it's pretty much required to do two at once in order to meet phase 1 time limits.

I get the feeling you don't really know what's involved in becoming Time flagged. You can either do the entire PoP flagging process, or you can get alternate time flags by tagging along with a flagged guild raiding Time (phase 3 is where the flags drop). The former is very time consuming, but the latter is certainly worth doing, if you have a guild willing to take you along.

That's not to say other expansions aren't good places to get gear, but Time is hard to beat for getting lots of gear quickly. A full time run start to finish is going to drop about 45 pieces of loot.

[Hinthi]

You are in an interesting situation.  What other targets are you hitting other then 1.5 stuff?  If you can get people 85% in to time and then flagged for time that is not a bad way to go because clearing time drops so much loot.  Most of it will go towards gearing up your low end toons.  And you have to gear them up otherwise once you hit mobs with real AEs they are gonna get raped.  Ideally they should do DoDH and PoR missions.  But honestly they probably are not going to.  If you have to go through PoP flagged then it is questionable. 

GoD is a pain with its flagging or stuff but it is a great wakeup for your clerics.  People will get drop and it starts to wake them up and get them on the ball.

Certainly start working on the DoN progression.  A lot of the 69 spells/abilities are nice and the 200 hp/mana bonus for beating Emoush is worth doing.

All the other ideas are good, it sounds like you have a good thing going.   Good luck in moving forward.

[Shieara]

Couple other targets you could do with your numbers:

Ragewind drops decent loot and is totally weak, like a 2-3 group mob.  Might also look into Titanothon who is in the same zone (Devestation).  Titan only drops one loot but it is 300 hp quality.  Couple other options are the Colossus in Arcstone and the Furious Jailor quest thing.  Oh, and we used to also kill General Veronhar(Undershore) and Grokui the basilisk(Stoneroot).  You'd have to look at their loot to see if it's worth it for you.  I liked them because I found their scripts amusing.

Another thing we did was do the one DoDh mission as a raid, umm, 70.4 I think it was.  We got like 30 people loot when we did it.

Anyways, this doesn't really answer your post from above, but they are some ideas on stuff to kill. 

[Helspawn]

My guild is sort of in the same situation except we don't really bot much but numbers are on the low side.  I'm getting tired of Ikky runs with some rewards but not really enough for the amount of time.  PoP?  We gave up on that long ago since the rewards don't really match the time sink required.  OoW, PoR, and TSS seems a better alternative.  Along with DoN which we are now doing tier 4.

[Romulus-Zek]

Just thought I would update peeps...

Time ended up being a pretty good idea.  We have cleared it three times now and will probably do two more full runs.  Thats a lot of loot.  Although it did not hold much in the way of upgrades for me, I have passed the time parsing fights and I see people getting a lot stronger.

Weve done ikkinz 1 and 2 and I got a new offhand  8-)  I think they want to do GoD all the way.

Raiders up to about 40 on a good night...big improvement.

Thanks for all the info here.  Take it easy...

Romulus