Friday, October 19, 2012

The Unexpected GM

A few months ago, <Zen> held officer elections.  It's a strange system for selecting officers, and not one I'm entirely certain I agree with--it tends to promote the people who are best-known and best-liked, not necessarily the ones who'll do the best job at being officers.  The intent was to select three new officers that would help the guild through what was assumed to be the content-related slump that was the last few months of Cata.

By some bizarre misalignment of the stars, I found myself in one of those positions.  Originally intended to be handling Logistics, an uncertain term that involves scheduling and the-gods-alone-know-what-else, I ended up as the Recruiting Officer.  Of the people I've found since, some have stayed, some have left, and some have vanished outright, their toons abandoned since Mists released.  And the guild slowly but surely began to show signs of life again.

And then, about a week and a half before MoP came out, I had a bomb dropped on my head.  I logged in on Hera after an evening of PuG raiding with my shadowpriest on Moon Guard (Valineria), and found myself almost immediately promoted to GM of Zen.  Login spam, login spam, login spam, login spam, Heraqawa is now the Guild Master, login spam.

It was quite a surprise.  I'd had, up to that point, only about a month's actual experience as officer; I'd been Assistant Cat Herder, helping to raid lead with the Vhelaire Tar'qui on MG, but there's quite a difference between pointing casual raiders at bosses and being the GM of a guild with aspirations the size of Zen's.

But I've managed.  I've had people to vent to, people whose very willingness to listen was refreshing.  We're not over the hump--this week we pugged seven on Tuesday night and five on Thursday night.  We have the start of a very solid core, though.  We're 2/6 in Mogu'shan Vaults, and making steady progress on Gara'jal.  Is it the progression Zen would have managed with the A Core of five or six months ago?  No.  But considering everything this guild has been through, I think it's quite solid work.  A boss a week, with that many unfamiliar people, sometimes missing key buffs?  I'll take it.

And I'll keep recruiting.  We have two tanks, myself and a very, very solid DK whom I just promoted to Assistant Raid Leader.  We have a damn good healer--a Holydin who's going to make me spoiled, because I now will judge all other healers by his standard and so few of them are going to measure up.  We have two hunters, both BM, which gives us amazing buff flexibility, with the nice added bonus that both of them do close to chart-topping DPS, even though hunters are generally close to the bottom of the sims.

I'd like to add to that two more healers--ideally a monk or shaman as the other full-time healer and a priest with a strong Shadow offspec to be our third.  I'd like a strong mage--ours still hasn't hit 90.  And I'd like two melee.  We have two DKs and a warrior in the guild; for all three it's just a matter of gear.

And then experience--experience with raiding in general, experience with running together as a guild.  How people work together is always the great unknown of a guild.  At this point, I think it's very unlikely that we'll clear even half the heroic bosses during T14, if Blizz is being even partially honest about the speed at which they're going to release the content.  But if people work well together and are willing to learn and accept constructive criticism, we'll get all the normal modes down and hopefully get a few of the heroic ones as well.  And if we can head into T15 with a full guild group, I think we'll be poised to do much better overall.

Because no matter how good pugs are, the very fact that they are pugs is damaging to a guild's progression.  They're strangers, attempting to find a place in a culture that isn't theirs and they for the most part have no long-term interest in--being a pug is about immediate gratification, it's about what's in it for me, tonight, this raid.  This is not a bad thing--indeed, these people usually come in very devoted to success because of it, and I've gotten some very helpful strategy tips from pugs.  However, different groups do things differently.  Different strategies, different breaks, different patterns of damage on different tanks, even different ideas of what's acceptable talking during a boss fight.  The purpose of a guild is to get a group of people together who smooth out these differences, making the group more likely to succeed.

Nevertheless, I'm proud of my people, my guild, my Zenners.  The last few weeks of Cata were extremely rough, and I spent much of it as the guild's sole officer (come to think of it, this is probably why I got promoted).  But we're coming back.

We are not dead.  And I will accept that victory--as a place to start.