The Things we Balance

Life is a balance. We balance our work lives and our personal lives. We balance academics with extracurricular activities. We balance beer with hard liquor (some of us, at least).

WoW’s obviously no different. With that in mind, I wanted to pose some things to think about. These are questions that most guilds and officer teams will find themselves in. Not regularly or often, but they’ll do happen.

Progression vs Gear

Time needs to be managed with precision. With 9 hours allocated to raiding, it needs to be used effectively. Going into this week, we were only 5/6 with Heart of Fear coming out. The intel and opinion we had from other players and other GMs was that the first two bosses of Heart of Fear would be easy. Our options were to go into Heart of Fear and try to get two bosses down quick or fall back to the Vaults and secure additional weapons and trinkets. Elegon still drops fantastic weapons and trinkets. For whatever reason, we’ve always had a problem when it comes to acquiring weapon upgrades.

The flip side of that argument? If we secure the kills, it helps us with our overall standings. In the long run, this helps us with attracting quality recruits.

Besides, rumor has it that Garalon is serious business.

Learning vs Stacking

New players and recruits need a chance to crack the lineup. They need to have a basic understanding and exposure to a boss so that they can get their feet wet. Not only this, there may come times when a regular player can’t make it and someone from the bench needs to be activated. Do we bring in the recruits and risk maybe a few wipes so that they understand what the mechanics are? In the long run, this is almost always the better option. Experience time in the raid is always a plus. On the other hand, if you’re on a limited raiding schedule, would you rather blitz through the farm stuff as quick as possible by stacking the raid?

Every wipe on farm means less attempts on the harder bosses for the week.

There are other types of balancing questions and acts that we regularly answer. But off the top of my head, those two are the ones that come up. I find that those two topics generally face the most disagreement. You can make strong arguments for both sides and it’s not always easy to answer it. It depends on what stage you are at an expansion and what the guild goals are.

As an aside, we’re hurting on ranged DPS at the moment*. If you’re looking around for a new guild for 25s, check us out (and that invitation is open to healers and other roles/classes).

So desperate that I switched over to Shadow.