Raiding on my mind

I was wishing for dual specs again the other day when I dropped yet another 50g on a respec to discipline for arenas. The arenas went sorta ok, we were still getting used to it and two droods and a priest isn't exactly a winning combination. We ended at 1340 for the week. I haven't managed to get Bb in the arena with me yet. Maybe this week. I'm still not sure about doing arenas with a guildie. Well, I guess now Tess and Dani are guildies too :) My evil plan is now complete. Well, as close as it will get.

Val sent me a message from his DK yesterday. He moved his mage over to another server, but I think the grass is greener. I was saying the other day when he was getting ready to leave that he'd consider coming back over to SDS. I encouraged him, but that was before War left. I'm not entirely surprised. I think War's looking for an active raiding guild, not a social one like ours.

I've got so many ideas about jump starting guild raids to try and progress, but I'm not volunteering for a few reasons:

1. The way things have worked is if you plan it, you lead it. I don't think I'd make a very good raid leader. I'm happy to do all the administrative bullshit to get it together to increase our chances at progression, but I'd really rather have Zon or Tran or even Jr lead the actual raid. I'm just not aggressive enough to keep 9 rowdy raiders together.

2. I'm not convinced that we even SHOULD try and do raid progress because of the way our guild has always run. Want to run three warriors and two paladins? Great. Show up with no potions or buff food and broken gear? Oops. Constantly aggroing stuff with your pet or can't control your dps in heroics? Well come raid anyway, you signed up for it. No organized 5 mans to gear people up. No advice or guidance about specs or stats. No looking at dps output or any other kind of stat. Nothing. Changing this would be a fundamental change in the way our guild operates, and I don't know if that's really something we SHOULD change. It would leave people out and I know we don't want to do that. It would also be a lot more work, and I don't know if we want to do that either.

3. From the conversations I've heard about raiding over TS, I get the distinct impression there's another officer who wants to organize the raids. He's been around a long time and his opinion carries a lot of weight in the guild. I don't want to step on his toes, both because I respect him as a longtime guild member, and because getting on his bad side would be very bad for me.

That's my raiding rant. Which is funny, because I didn't intend for this post to go that direction, but I seem to have it on my mind a lot. Personally, I think Blizzard is making a mistake trying to push all PvE players into raiding. It really hurts small guilds and free-agents.