World Of Warcraft Guild Progression List

Confessions of a Guild Leader: Just when you thought the drama was over...

Of course, the reality is that there's never an end to drama, is there? There's only degrees of it. Heh. And I suppose that's what we do, as guild leaders, we manage drama. I mean, we manage people.... but what we're really managing is their behaviors. We want everyone to be on an even keel, treating each other in a decent way, with a nice level of harmony, yes? Do you ever get to the point where you just want to blow your top at them, just once, just to really drive home the fact that they're being jerks and THEY are the problem, not you? Well, I did, finally. I mean, blow my top. Let me tell you the story.

If you've been following my column, you know that we've been dealing with having too many raiders for a single 10-man raid but not enough for 25s, and that half of my raiders are more experienced and geared and successful at killing raid bosses than the other half. I've been leading two full raid groups for most of Cataclysm, one of which is more progressed and the other which was trying to catch up. Then Firelands opened. I pooled our raiders, went in and tested the waters, and then assessed our situation. We had 12-14 really ready for Firelands and another 12-14 that were a mix of close to being ready and not quite ready to handle it.

As fortune would have it, I had a newish member that had fast become a very good friend and whom I had just promoted as an officer. He was willing to split off the not-quites and take them in for a couple of weeks of tier 11 bosses (the pre-Firelands Cataclysm raids) and then move them into Firelands, and let me take the other group and start our progression. I checked and double-checked that he understood what he was getting himself into, since he was one of those top dps who could have been on my progression team otherwise, but he assured me that he was more than willing to help them get some gear and tighten up and it would be fun to do it.

The first three weeks went beautifully for both groups. My group killed three bosses in Firelands and got good work done on two more, both of which should fall this week or next. His group swept through the tier 11 content, getting a lot of gear and having a ton of fun. No one fussed about the split, and everyone seemed happy and excited. By the end of the third week, his raid wanted to move into Firelands and was starting to get antsy - they could clear every boss in about four hours, so they felt ready. Firelands is the next step in linear progression.

Gearing up in the progress guild - Eminence Gaming, A WoW Community

I was always concerned about how other people gear up during progression period, since I find the way most people threat gear to be very wrong result-wise. In this post I’ll cover most of the major things I use to gear up effectively. Note, that it might not work perfect in your situation, because different guilds use different loot system, most of which have major flaws. But it should give you the basic idea to use and adapt for your case.

The goals of progress-oriented gearing up are:

Gear up asap during progression to speed it up and let your guild kill bosses faster Maximize gear until the next content patch to be as prepared as possible

First of all, lets cover the basics of gearing, which all of the hardcore know and use.

Each stat has own “weight” for different classes (specs), which is called DEP – damage equivalency points or how much dps will give you 1 point of some stat. For example, for elemental shaman with my gear (~375 ilvl) has roughly the following values:

Hit rating – 3.5 Intellect – 3 Spell Power – 2.33 Haste – 1.7 Mastery – 1.33 Crit – 1

This is how you choose how to gem. If you have yellow socket and 10 Intellect socket bonus, you just compare DEP values of 40 int (pure gem, no bonus) and 10 int bonus + 20 haste + 20 int from gem. Which is higher is the proper gemming. DEP values change depending on gear and can be evaluated through simulation programs.

You should know two basic things about DEP:

It is not accurate. Simulations are made for Patchwerk-style fight, so they are different for “real” encounters. Also, different simulation tools provide different results. You should think by yourself which stat value will be higher on particular fight and adjust accordingly Despite being inaccurate, this is pretty much the only way to (at least  somehow Apart from ratings upgrades, higher item level gear provides more of the main stat (in this case, Intellect). And main stat is a lot better, then any rating: check DEP value – Int’s DEP is twice higher then of the highest stat – haste. The other thing is that you can reforge worst stat to better one and on top of more main stat you will get ratings benefit as well, since higher item level gear has more of the total amount of rating. Normally you want to calculate DEP values of the items (after reforging), but if you want to keep it simple just pick highest ilvl item and reforge it properly.