It’s been an interesting few months for us since the release of The Burning Crusade. We’ve lost and gained some members. We’ve powered our way from 60 to 70 as quickly as we could while still enjoying the new content for what it was. We waited patiently while a few others leveled paladins for us. And, once we got enough people leveled and keyed, we started hitting Karazhan on a weekly basis and have been running two raid groups per week since our first kill of Attumen the Huntsman back on Jan 29th.

Our overall progress has been a little slower than many of the “hardcore” guilds, but we’ve been doing something that I think is somewhat unique when it comes to Karazhan raiding. Running two groups per week is pretty much the norm for many of the larger guilds, but it sounds like most of them have set raid groups that run together week after week. We don’t do that.

After running 40-mans together for as long as we have, we were concerned about the effect a small A Team vs. B Team mentality would have on the guild. There’s the potential for all kinds of nasty stuff happening, from hurt feelings to unwanted cliques forming and splitting the guild, so we’ve been trying to intelligently shuffle/randomize our groups each week. There is no A team or B team; there’s just End Guys.

When you’re raiding with the same people every week you fall into a natural routine, functioning like a well-oiled machine. As you might expect with raid groups changing on a weekly basis, it takes longer to get back to that point. Initially, you progress more slowly while you learn how to function with your “new” raid-mates and what to expect from them. Overall, though, the guild gets stronger as we get to a point where everybody is more or less familiar with everybody else’s play style and how to get the most out of it in a smaller raid group. In a 10-man, you also learn pretty quickly where you’re weak and need improvement–we’ve all been working on that.

So, it’s been a challenging and occasionally frustrating few months of learning, but here we are. We got around to killing High King Maulgar in Gruul’s Lair back on Feb 25th and, from our first kill of the Huntsman on Jan 29th to our kill of Nightbane on March 1st, we’ve cleared the entirety of Karazhan–all while shuffling our groups week after week. That’s no small feat and I’m definitely proud of what we’ve accomplished as a guild.

Nightbane Down

– Maurd out.