An Elitist Casual

We just changed from a private to a public application system. Please do not be deterred by the initial lack of public applications.

– Snapshot –
Raid Times - 7PM to 12PM CST, various days throughout the week.
Wanted Classes - Any, though priority is given to hunter/rogue/healer.
Loot System - Loot Council with a twist. Items that provide an overwhelming progression advantage will be Loot Counciled. 95% of everything else is /random.
Progression - Ulduar [Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor down. The Iron Council (last mob) to 20%]. Heroic Ulduar progression starting next week… Get your application in NAO!
Recent Achievements - Server Second [Nerf Engineering], [The Undying] (pre 3.1).

The Naked Fear are the rising stars of Serious Casual progression on Korgath. There are not many guilds like this. There are a few things you want to understand right off the bat about what that means.

What we expect:

- We want you to enjoy raiding for the sake of the accomplishments.
- We expect you to understand what it means to be environmentally aware, and know how to use all of your tools to the betterment of the raid in every encounter.
- We want you to be hungry to learn more, do more, and become better at your chosen roles.
- We expect you to be a mature person who is able to communicate when needed, without being annoying, outlandish, or inappropriate.
- We want to get to know you… learn your name, your favorite beer, and what peices of clothing you fail to wear while playing WoW.

What we do not expect:

- We don’t want you to feel compelled to join every raid (or suffer the consequences!). In TNF, real life takes priority over pixels. We’ll adjust recruitment needs to the attendance of our existing members. Just understand that we are Elitist Casuals, and we will not bring underexperienced and undergeared characters into a progression environment.
- We don’t expect you to be completely selfless. Do what you enjoy. Sit at the AH undercutting/buying out chumps. Altaholic your life away. If you are getting a progression headache, we’ll sub someone in for you. Lead an alt or PUG 10-man raid (as long as it doesn’t pull members from scheduled raids!).

What we will do:

- We will provide an environment where smart and skilled individuals can spend the minimum amount of time in game for the maximum return. We are selfish in that regard… when we raid, we hate wasting time.
- We will provide a tone in progression raids that is more relaxed than your normal elitist guild.
- We will foster the growth of our raider base, both on an individual and collective level. The longer you stick around, the better we all become.
- We will clear Ulduar and Icecrown, and we’ll be the first casual guild on Korgath to do it.

What we will not do:

- We will not berate you in Ventrilo. Unless you are not in Ventrilo. Get the #&$% in Ventrilo! We will require corrections if necessary, but not in a demeaning manner.
- We will not leave you with no clue what you are doing on a fight. Unless you don’t let us know you have no clue what you are doing. Our leadership spends days learning boss fights, so you only have to spend an hour.
- We will not let you raid if you haven’t made those preparations.

Visit our Website. Stay available in-game and on the website; we’ll quiz you from there. If you are a transfer, we’ll want significant WWS parses and a ventrilo conversation as a requirement prior to making any decision. Be Prepared.

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Gaming by Easttuth

The Naked Fear is a casual progression guild on Korgath Alliance. Our raids start between 7pm to 9pm server time, and the raid cutoff time for progression is between 12am and 3am. We are currently progressing on Sartharion + 2 drakes (all other instances clear). We plan to progress quickly through Ulduar immediately when it is released to live servers.

Our raid philisophy is as follows: We have about 15 consistent raiders. They like raids to be run as efficiently as possible. We don’t expect every raider to be available for every raid. What we do expect is that when you get invited to a raid, you are fully prepared. We use a main-spec (need) before off-spec (greed) roll system. This system is moderated by officers in attendance with the intent of minimizing abuse in situations where the good of the guild (read: progression) greatly outweighs individual desires.

What we have: About 40% of our raiders are serious casuals. About 5 individuals are what I’d consider elitist casuals. Leadership likes to theorycraft, strategize, plan, and do everything in their power to help the guild become successful. The remainder of our raiders are occasional attendees, but still very competent folks. We have 10-man raids during the week. We have a 25-man raid on Thursday and Friday (typically) that could use another 4-8 attendees. The PUGers we choose to bring with us are usually competent, but we’d prefer to keep loot in the guild, in the hands of members, our friends, from whom we can expect loyalty and future progression attendance. We have consistent, mature guild leadership, and solid, smart raid leaders. We have a few members that have been in the upper echelon (top 100 US) of hardcore raiding guilds during end-game Burning Crusade. Changes in available time and gaming as a priority in real life have brought these individuals here. All things considered, we have the foundation of a great casual progression guild.

What we need: Priests of all forms (shadow preferred). Ranged DPS in general. One consistent rogue. People who use all of their tools to the greatest benefit of a raid. Other classes as well, as long as you fit into the preceding category. Casual raiders that enjoy good company. Skilled raiders that don’t have enough time to hang with a hardcore schedule raiding guild.

What we do not need: Retadins and DK’s, unless you are casually amazing and bring a decently geared alt that can sub in for 25s when comp matters. Melee DPS in general. Anyone that plays 8+ hours per day and expects the same from the raiding core. Better than you attitudes. We mean it. The leadership will know who’s good based on WWS, WMO, Recount, and a plethora of other tools. Attitude will make you a pariah almost as quickly as general sucking. No matter who you are, our raid leadership probably hates the failboat just as much as you do.

What we will become: We are a casual guild, and always will be. That said, we have an extremely skilled raiding core. We will complete our raiding roster with skilled players who are able to progress through new content at a moderate pace via research, strategy, preparation, patience, and practice. We will become an end-game raiding guild who achieves their goals through smart play, not brute force (i.e. Excessive time spent). We will foster an environment of learning to raise willing and able individuals into skilled raiders. We will be the premier seriously casually serious casual progression raiding crew and still have time for a bubble jacuzzi party after we’re done.

Visit The Naked Fear website to apply. Seriously.

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Gaming by Easttuth

“If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” - Sun Tzu

Being a raid leader, I have to remind myself of the direction I’d like to take a raid when working on progression. This is a quick attempt to explain both some prerequisite basics and the theory its self. Every raider is responsible for the following things…

Prior to the raid:

Being prepared to raid as long as possible with as few interruptions as possible. This does not mean ignoring real life. This means being repaired, having consumables, updated mods, and being attentive and proactive in preparations for the raid. Be the first to the instance, be ready to help summon, be ready to start before that ready check is made.

Bring prepared to bring as much to the raid as possible. This doesn’t mean you hand out consumables to the other raiders. This means you have your own consumables, your gear enchanted, and you have considered and worked toward accessible upgrades outside of the scope of the progression raid.

During the raid:

Preventing damage to others.
DPS, this includes interrupting abilities that can be interrupted, and keeping debuffs on as many mobs as possible.

Tanks, this means making sure your positioning is such that you don’t endanger others with your target’s abilities, and making sure you don’t overtax your own tanking ability in multi-mob encounters.

Healers, this means decursing damaging abilities, shielding or putting up damage reducing abilities before known damage spikes. These things go a long way toward making a difficult encounter manageable.

Avoiding damage to yourself.
DPS and Healers, this means always recognizing what is doing damage to you, understanding how to avoid it if possible, and acting on that knowledge in the future.

Tanks, this means gearing yourself with the understanding of the encounter. Different tanking strategy and gear works for certain scenarios. Even if it means swapping out one peice of effective health gear for one peice of avoidance gear, that extra 2% of dodge could mean a lot less incoming damage in AE tanking situations. Alternatively, that extra 2k health could mean the difference between an unlucky hit and an unavoidable spike combining into a kill or a near-kill.

Recovering from damage.
Most DPS classes have at least one ability that they can use to cheat death. Do not assume healers or tanks will save you! Treat your role in the raid as if you were soloing within the constraints of the encounter strategy. No one’s role is to be a corpse.

Healers, helping the raid recover from damage starts before they take it. It is your responsibility to understand who will be taking damage, when, and why, even before they do. This is the basis for proactive healing.

Tanks, understand the flow of damage, and how to mitigate spikes. Steady damage on a tank is expected and easily healable. Spikes kill. If you work to recover from these spikes as quickly as possible without any additional risk, the healers will thank you.

Dealing damage.
Now, this is the last (and most fun) part. DPS’ers, coordinate your own abilities such that they make maximum impact on the encounter. Save 5+ minute cooldowns for heroism burn. Use 1 minute cooldowns and trinkets religiously and in combination with other abilities that provide maximum burst damage. Cooldown management is a huge part of a good damage dealer becoming an exceptional one. Tanks, your threat is all-important. Healers, you too can help in the clutch! If something needs to be dead right now, if no one is in danger of dying, your 1k DPS could be the difference between a kill and being overrun by the enemy.

The practice of and focus on these concepts, in this order, means that there will be several phases to progression encounters.

1) Learning the environment - This is the identification of dangerous situations in the fight, and planning around how to remove them.  Progress to the next phase happens when each raid member understands what can hurt them, why, and how to avoid it. These attempts will often end with (seemingly unexplained) insta-deaths or otherwise unhealable damage being taken (awareness wipes).

2) Learning the encounter - This is the understanding of the flow of the fight. When is DPS all-important? When is mobility necessary? When do the tanks use abilities and positioning to minimize the damage they take? Are there special tasks to be done that need practice? All of this gets done here, as well as perfecting damage avoidance techniques. These attempts will often end with the healers running out of mana (atrophy wipes).

3) Stepping up to the challenge - Ok, now everyone should know how to stay alive. If any one raid member is consistently taking more damage than the others of their role, they are a liability. Everyone knows how to accomplish the tasks the encounter provides. If someone continually has to be reminded of a task, they are hindering the raid. Now, we have to extend our healing capacity and expend our DPS capability over whatever time period the encounter will take, in a manner that causes a kill. There are peaks and valleys in both DPS and healing requirements, throughout any encounter. Recognition of these causes efficiency. These attempts will either end with the healers running out of mana, or the DPS’ers running out of juice before an enrage (or other DPS-critical timer) one-shots the raid (efficiency wipes).

4) All of the above culminates in a kill-shot where tanks prevent and negate enough damage to themselves and others, DPS’ers stay alive and burn the boss down before enrage, and the heals are conservative and effective enough to outlast the damage the encounter provides.

In practical application as it pertains to the guild I am in now (love you guys by the way), this means that I don’t care what kind of numbers anyone puts on the DPS or Healing meters until everyone is staying alive long enough for it to matter. As a casual guild, we did a hell of a good job learning the Sartharion and 2 drakes fight quickly enough that we probably could have downed it in a few hours with a person or two in mostly blues, one that had never even been in OS before. In our progression, we need to remain focused in that learning an encounter and understanding everything that is going on around us is infinitely more important than anything else. In Ulduar and beyond, if we truly know the fight, everything else will fall into place.

Filed under:
Gaming by Easttuth

Here’s a quote I came across today regarding styles of leadership, taken from 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. It is originally quoted from Eric Steven Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

Having been brought up in a serf-owner’s family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.

As we start fleshing out the site, my hope for ElitistCasuals.com is to be able to exchange ideas with other like-minded gamers, and this quote seems to tie in as great advice for the leadership of raiding guilds of all calibers.

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General by Easttuth

A new gaming hotspot just had its Grand Opening in Ft.Worth! It’s called Hypergamez, and it has both console and PC gaming bunkers. If you are looking for a place to chill out, or a fun environment for real-life meetings with online friends, go check it out. www.hypergamez.com

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Gaming by Easttuth

These people make me chuckle. All of these armchair commentators on their ad-laden agenda-filled blogs throwing around SK-100 stats as if they tell the whole story in and of themselves. Take a quick ratio of (top-100/total) and you get a representation of which PvP classes are either too powerful or have a higher proportion of skilled players playing them, and which classes are either not powerful enough or have baddies playing them.

Current Numbers:

Hunter and priest?! Whatchoo doing up there? Statistics can be interpreted in many ways. The only thing for certain right now is that Unholy DK’s are OP, and are carrying their most complimentary healer, the holy paladin, along for the ride.

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Gaming by Easttuth

About Me

I am a self proclaimed elitist casual. If you’ve read at least Part 1 of the series, you’ll understand what I say when I’m using my elitist energies to reach out to others like me.

In WoW, I’ve been frustrated by social casual guilds. I’ve lead a serious casual guild focused on progression. I’ve climbed the hard-core ladder.

In my past, a game called Dragonrealms honed my love of MMORPG’s. My most recognizable online persona is likely “Easttuth”, a name which I’ve used for characters off and on in nearly every MMORPG imaginable.

Everquest - Easttuth the server 2^nd max-level enchanter on Fennin Ro (Dragoons of Asterlazindril, Seekers of Norrath, Silvan Rangers… anyone?). I sold jewelcrafting pieces such as the high demand “Sapphire Necklace, Ruby Ring, and Ruby Earring” for exorbitant process on EBay before IGN was born.

Asheron’s Call – Easttuth the tri-spec mage on Thistledown, 2^nd in command to Mythrandia if anyone remembers him. Well Mythrandia turned out to be a douchebag, but that’s another story. SplitPea ruined the spell research game, and just as I had broken 80% of my seed myself, and I was well into my 6^th rank spells at that point. The countless hours I spent building that spreadsheet.. oh the agony of having a little program tell me all my taper combinations at the drop of a hat. Easttuth lurked around at the bottom of dungeons farming timed bosses for high value drops… to sell on EBay. I actually sat on my ass in my apartment for months on end doing that. Wow.

Anarchy Online – Easttuth the diplomat or whattheheckever, played long enough to figure out that after a bugged death I looted duplicates of bags I already owned out of a recovery machine, and figured out how to duplicate items using said bags. Flying around in my 14 mil credit “Flight of the Navigator” machine and selling tokens by the hundreds on EBay was cool until the account was banned.

Dark Age of Camelot – Easttuth the server 2^nd max level Healer on Percival. This started my graphical multiboxing days (Healer/SM/RM/Sham). I’d sit in AG in Emain Macha spamming 4 different AE’s on the door flattening anyone that tried to run through. Single-handedly clearing the Goborchend spawns after that damn Rune of Mana or whatever the overpowered as hell ability was that came out with ToA. Good times in that game with Sargen, Bombarta and the crew from Twilight Mourning, Fist of the North, etc.

Lineage 2 – Solo 5-boxed Giants Cave and above. First max rank clan and leader of first official clan alliance on Erica. I quit before any expansions, the game got too boring too fast.

World of Warcraft - Well, that brings us to WoW. I just dinged 30 IRL, have a wife, 2 kids, and a great career. I am a frustrated gamer that’s been burned by bum leadership and broken committments, and I’m just a little too good for the time I spend playing. You wouldn’t believe how much it pisses off 16-hour-a-day players to be beaten in the DK leveling game (Mine’s Ghouldan, first Alliance DK to 80 on Korgath) by a casual that took off 3 days of work specifically because he wanted to accomplish something he’d never done before. (Guess what guys, it’ll happen again with the next hero class. You are not prepared.) And then the same DK with worse gear and a support spec mathematically proven to be sub-par DPS beats ¾ of the guild DPS’ers on single-target boss fights in his first Naxx raid ever.

It really, really, pisses them off, especially when he rerolled from the most skilled PVE Resto Shaman in the guild (Kotton, you were already on pally, stfu).

Well, now you know more of my story (and my ego) than is healthy for you. If you are still reading this out of hate, then try for once in your life acting like an adult and start up a conversation so we can work it out chika-boom style. If you are reading out of love, then I love you too (you know who you are). If you are just eerily enthralled, then drop by again soon. Maybe we can do lunch.

-          An Elitist Casual

Filed under:
Gaming by Easttuth