I love this pre-expansion rush especially at the guild planning level. It’s full of spreadsheets and spreadsheets of names, professions, legendaries, and so forth. This is my second expansion rush with this guild as I joined them at the end of Legion. I’ve gone through the leveling with my guild during Battle for Azeroth and now I’ll be undergoing another expansion with them. One of the big differences I’m appreciating in this go-round is the level of preparation our guild is taking as a whole.
Dungeons
The first week of the expansion is to give everyone the time they need to level up, finish out Covenants, and start gearing out their character from heroic dungeons or even mythic 0s if they’re able to do it. However, the next week there will be much more structured. We’ve been assigned into groups. There are 6 pre-made dungeon groups that have been created to maximize armor trading. In my group, I have a Warrior tank, a Ret Paladin, a Mage, and a Warlock (2 plate and 3 cloth wearers). We took the last few weeks of the pre-patch off from raid so it’ll be a good way to get reacclimated to our raiding schedule as we’ve plugged in mythic runs into that week instead.
Legendaries
More spreadsheets here with our roster listing what their initial legendaries are going to be along with which armor slot it will take. This also doubles as our professions listing. Since legendaries will involve various crafting and gathering professions, it helps to have this all in a sheet that’s accessible at a glance.
Raid Defensives
With the departure of our former raid leader due to real-life obligations, our present healing lead will be taking over planning and strategy. I have been voluntold to take over defensive management and healing planning. My guild found my blog and have discovered that I appear to have a knack for it.
There’s this HealCD spreadsheet out there where you can plug in classes and cooldowns for each boss. It’ll generate and export a string that will plug right into Exorsus Raid Tools (ERT) for raid notes. Work has begun to start planning for bosses based on our initial experiences in the raid from beta. We’ll probably throw those out after the first week though.
Guild Housekeeping
Out of everything else, what I appreciated the most was the schedule and expectations that raiders were expected to hit. We had a certain item level that we needed to reach. Important dates were posted ahead of time and what activities we were looking to do (such as Mythic Castle Nathria on the first day) along with alternatives in case certain conditions weren’t met. There are a lot more resources out there and players are arranging Torghast groups as they progress to higher, difficult levels. It feels like an unspoken energy in the air as we’ve just woken up and our looking forward to getting underway with progression and all that.
We’re just under a couple of days now! How has your guild’s preparations gone? Was there any at all or is it more relaxed compared to previous expansions?