Forged Alliance

Group 4 Roster as of 4/21/2012.

Tank Roster:
Amthyst (chest, legs, gloves, shoulders) - high attendance, priority invite
Puttycat (chest, legs, gloves, shoulders*2, head, LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Crawling - DPS/tank spec (comes out of the DPS roster)
Pershing - alt invite
Patoazu - (legs, shoulders, head) alt invite

Healer Roster:
Tsuni (chest*2, legs, gloves*2, shoulders, head*2, LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Xylah (chest, legs, gloves, shoulders*2, head, LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Inori - DPS/heal spec (comes out of the DPS roster)
Hulkheals (chest, legs, shoulders) - alt invite

DPS Roster:
Inori (chest*2, legs*2, gloves*2, shoulders*2, head) - raid leader, mandatory invite (although once we can 8/8, I can bench myself)
Benvolo (chest, legs, gloves, shoulders, head, LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Ancajima (chest, legs*2, gloves*2, shoulders, head, LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Chiefthunder (chest, legs, gloves, shoulders, head, LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Velis (legs, head, LBH) - priority invite
Crawling (LBH) - high attendance, priority invite
Kubix (chest)
Lilas (chest, legs*2, gloves, shoulders*2, head) - high attendance, alt invite
Nautilus (chest) - alt invite
Rhyolite (legs, gloves) - DPS issues

Unaccounted Tokens (chest*5, legs, gloves*2, shoulders)

http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/?c=1v6 ... 0000000000

Missing in action:
Arnold
Vannhellsing
Virou
Draeneisham
Recipe
Drizzay
Ovoxo
Judecca
Pinchepayaso
Ironbro (chest, legs)
Likeabowss (legs, gloves, head*2)
Mexellence (chest, gloves)
Draker

-HP

This is how 10 man raids work in group three and group four. They are very similar in general to how the other two raids are run in Forged Alliance.

*The first rule of 10 man raiding is that the raid leader ultimately decides how his/her raid is run.*

That's me and that's it. Now to get into the 'generally held' policies that make my 10 man raids work. These policies only work because Forged Alliance strives to keep only mature players and kicks people that exhibit what we consider 'problematic' traits.

1) We trust each other enough to loot with 'need before greed' set. That means need for main spec, greed for off spec, and pass if otherwise. No one hits DE. BoEs that are not used as a main/off spec for one of the 10 toons physically present in the raid goes to the raid leader. The raid leader can retain the BoE for someone on his regular roster that is not present (upgrade to improve progression) or donate the BoE to the guild bank (compensation for guild seafood magnifique, guild cauldrons of battle, and guild repairs). If two people rolled at an equivalent level, we trust that the individuals can sort things out if someone truly has greater merit for the item -- e.g., Inori greeded a 1 for an off spec shadow stave, Aezelkvalae greeded a 98 for an off spec balance stave (but he only did it to prevent the item from getting disenchanted), Aezelkvalae would trade the item to Inori without either toon whining to the raid leader or bogging down the raid with mindless drama.

2) We respect each other's time enough that we don't like to wipe due to repeated player negligence. There is a difference between negligence and learning. Lacking basic knowledge of your class (I DPS by chain casting mind flay only) is negligence; lack of preparation (don't know your own hit cap, reforge poorly, not gemmed, not enchanted) is negligence; dying to a boss mechanic the first time you see it is learning; dying to a boss mechanic for the 10th time is negligence. Note that I did not say anything about reading up on a boss fight beforehand -- I'll get to that next.

3) It is up to the raid leader to determine if knowing the strategy for a boss fight ahead of time is negligence or learning. The raid leader sets the tone for their raid. If I am leading the third 10 man normal mode raid and we are bringing in five new people who haven't done the fight before, I will tolerate not having all five people research the fight ahead of time. The five people who already know the fight will just have to bear with the wipes as the other five people learn the fight (it's hard to replace five people at once). If I am leading the fourth 10 man heroic progression raid and we are one person short, I will *not tolerate* someone who has no idea what to do -- I would rather take the alt of someone from Jeff's 10 man group because the nine people who already know the fight logged on tonight to not waste their time. This segways into the last topic which are raid rosters.

4) It is up to the raid leader to determine their raid roster. The goal of the raid roster is to have a pool of capable players so that on a given raid night, the raid isn't cancelled due to being short players. I will give you the following 'fictitious raid roster' (note that I think this was the roster at the time of the Al'Akir kill months ago).

Tank Roster:
Shaklin - high attendance, priority invite
Phaul - high attendance, priority invite
Wirhelmina - alt, priority bench

Healer Roster:
Waterdrop - high attendance, priority invite
Sxycoree - intermittent attendance, priority invite
Voldemort - high attendance, priority invite
Mahatma - dps/heal spec (comes out of the DPS roster)
Wirhelmina - alt, priority bench

DPS Roster:
Idravenl - raid leader, mandatory invite
Jalen - high attendance, rotation invite
Galann - high attendance, rotation invite
Jenadaph - high attendance, rotation invite
Mestaar - high attendance, rotation invite
Mahatma - high attendance, rotation invite

Notice the logic in the raid roster. Most raid leaders want to have only two main tanks so that they can gear the tank up faster and have less variation in tanking style on a boss fight from week to week. Ideally, the third tank is either a dps/tank spec out of the DPS roster, or a geared/knowledgeable alt. It doesn't work to have the third tank be someone else's main because that person has to be benched regularly = not fun and they'll quit to find another raid group. Most raid leaders want to have a stable healing corps. Ideally, the fourth healer is a dps/heal spec out of the DPS roster. Note that the entire DPS roster is on rotation -- that's because you have five people all with high attendance. Note that the situation would be different if there were only two people with high attendance and a pool of four people with intermittent attendance -- you'd put the four people on rotation and give the two people that were always there priority.

5) Wait a minute, if the raid leader decides everything, how did you end up with all these extra policies? Even though the raid leader decides everything, the individual roster members have their own individual veto power -- they can decide not to raid. Individual raiders *like* having guild repairs, seafood magnifique, and battle cauldrons provided free of charge, so they *approve* of sending unused BoEs to the guild bank (instead of drama over who gets the BoE to sell it themselves). Individual raiders *like* having a stable raid group so they accept the necessity of raid rosters. The individual DPS who is always there *likes* to not be benched for the DPS who shows up every other week. See how it works?

You may ask, why does Forged Alliance prefer to run three 10 man groups; why not run a 25? Number one: how often do you see 25 people online at once? Number two: 25 people generally forces the guild into a DKP or loot council system = a PITA. Number three: it is very hard to carry someone in a 10 man group -- if one of your three healers is bad, you lose 33% of your healing output; if one of your five DPS is bad, you lose 20% of your DPS output. Almost all loot drama occurs because someone thinks someone else doesn't deserve something. Even if Andy is our top DPS with 19.67% of the output and I'm the bottom DPS with 16.63% of the output (this was from our latest Baleroc kill), we're only 3% apart (even though his DPS is 18% higher than mine).

-HP

Due to the scheduling constraints of the roster members, G4 will be raiding for only one night a week -- Monday nights starting December 12th. Since I posted the roster on December 4th, I figure that one day's notice is too short for people to get their stuff in order, so I'm not going to push us to try to raid on December 5th. If you really have a hankering to raid, you can try the LFR.

I do want to add a second raid night to the schedule for G4. Our best bets are Sunday night (requires the G4 roster to not have anyone filling in for G1) and Tuesday night (requires the G4 roster to not have any alts from the G2 roster). I strongly prefer raiding on Tuesday night. This will allow us to have a little competitive atmosphere between G2 and G4 since we would be working on content at the same time (e.g., who can clear the farm mode bosses faster; who can get a heroic progression boss down faster if we're stuck on the same boss).

Until we add a second raid night, my plan for group 4 is to efficiently work on heroic progression on a single night of raiding. That means people need to be prepared by reading up two bosses ahead of our current state (for example, I expect people to know how to do the first and second boss when we start next Monday 12th). Once we are able to farm normal modes, I will use the following schedule.

Raid starts at 7:00 PM.
From 7:00 PM until time XYZ, we will normal mode clear until the heroic mode boss we killed last week.
From time XYZ until 9:00 PM, we will work on polishing the heroic mode boss we killed last week (if we're still sloppy) or one shot it and work on the next heroic mode boss.
At 9:00 PM, we take a 15 minute break.
From 9:15 PM until time ABC, we will continue working on the next heroic mode boss we are learning.
From time ABC until 11:00 PM, we will normal mode clear the rest of the instance.

Wait a minute, does that mean we'll only kill one heroic boss a week? No. My goal is to have us polish any heroic mode boss we kill so that we can reliably one shot it every week. At that point, that heroic boss is moved into the farm status and we will select a new heroic mode boss to work on.

Since we are only raiding one night a week, we have to make effective use of our time. My baseline determination for reading up on the fight is everyone having watched the Learn2Raid video for that boss. I will also install Mumble on my Mac. That means that I can talk between pulls (to clarify the strategy), but I can't talk in the middle of the fight (which I hope untrains everyone from being so vent dependent).

-HP

Updated G4 roster 12/13/11.

-HP

Updated roster 12/20/11. Removed the G3 roster since that group is doing Firelands with whoever we can get on Fridays.

Note that G4 has just enough people that we can run on Tuesday night without using any alts. There are a few caveats.

1) Diartemis can only raid until halftime due to early work. On Monday night, this is okay since Jason can bring his alt hunter in for the second half of the raid. However, if we were to raid on Tuesdays, Jason can't fill in at halftime since he's raiding with Jeff's group. We may have to settle with 1.5 days of raiding if we don't have a substitute for Diartemis on Tuesdays.

2) Due to the holiday season, it is hard for me to get a sense of raid attendance since a lot of people have things coming up. I would like to have our third tank be a tank/DPS spec and I'm strongly favoring Gabe (Judecca/Goldrinn) for this since he has tanking experience. We didn't have any luck so far recruiting a third healer, so it looks like I'm stuck with it.

3) Since my plan is to have the second raid night be Tuesday, we can 'share the bench' with Jeff's raid. In other words, I expect to see twenty people online on Tuesday night. Let's say that Jeff only has nine people from his roster show up on Tuesday, but eleven people show up from the G4 roster. We can have one person from G4 raid with Jeff on Tuesday+Thursday. On Monday, if not all ten people from G4 show up, we can have the person who missed Jeff's raid on Tuesday run with G4 (or just take an alt).

We'll see how things shape up after the New Year since I need more attendance numbers.

-HP

From what I can tell, the G4 roster is at eleven heads (not including alts). I will set up the calendar invites for Tuesdays starting on January 3rd.

-HP

Updated again on 12/22. We are now at twelve heads, so I moved the innaugural Tuesday raid up to December 27th. Due to the continuing holiday season, the Tuesday 12/27 and Monday 1/2 raids may have attendance issues. Please use the in-game calendar to indicate your availability. If I have to cancel a raid, I'd rather do it earlier so people can make other plans for those nights. Thank you.

-HP

Updated again on 1/1. We're now at thirteen heads on paper. Due to the holidays, it is hard for me to gauge how many people evaporated (perhaps they're playing SWTOR now), so that 13 may actually come down.

-HP

Updated again on 1/19. We're at eleven heads on paper. I'm hoping for high raid attendance so that we don't have to push the roster to twelve or thirteen. More people on the roster = guaranteed raids, but more benching = PITA. With only one spare person, we should be good to go since cycling one person out when everyone shows up isn't the biggest deal (and if we can 8/8, I can cycle myself out and get some time off).

-HP

Updated on 1/31. I took all the alts off the roster to make it easier to read.

-HP

Updated on 3/4/12. We now have exactly ten people on the roster. Since the raid has been moved to Wednesday and Monday, we can use G2 alts if people are flaky. I'd still like to get a resto shaman or holy paladin so I don't have to heal, but we may be able to push on by having Bobby and Eric learn to two heal the encounters.

-HP

Update on 3/21/12. That list of missing in action raiders just keeps growing. Also revised to note that Jason (Amthyst) can't raid past 10 server (due to time zone + work). That should be fine since heroic progression can be worked on from 7:45 to 10, and then normal mode clear from 10 to 11.

At present, we have two recruits (protection warrior, survival hunter) that would push the roster to eleven. Not shown is Robert's shadow priest alt who has been filling out our roster regularly.

-HP