Guild Drama: A Treatment Plan

Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to contemplate the structure, dynamics and success of certain guilds...which, of course, leads to the question "What makes a guild successful?" It seems to be inevitable that guilds have drama - there is no way around it. However, a guild is marked by how it addresses and deals with the drama. Drama intervention, by necessity, occurs on multiple levels - GMs, officers and even guild members are crucial in dealing with the situation.

There are, also, different types of drama, and each must be dealt with accordingly.

"Bad Day" Drama: Sort of self-explanatory - someone has a bad day and simply is easily stirred up, etc. I find the best way to handle this is a combination of patience and talking with the person privately - allow the person to vent to you in private will often diffuse the situation. Also, trying to create a lighthearted situation in the raid can assist in calming folks.

"Sensitivity" Drama: Some folks are sensitive to just certain subjects/words or whatever. This is one of the more difficult types of drama to deal with, requiring careful treatment, understanding, and a lot of patience. At times the "sensitivity" relates to specific situations or words. When dealing with Sensitivity Drama, the key is to identify what has triggered the sensitivity. Until you are able to identify the cause, it's nearly impossible to know how to begin dealing with it. Again, the key is to spend some time (preferably in private) talking with the person, encouraging them, mediating, etc. Often, the key to diffusing a situation is showing the person that someone does care.

"Drama Queen/Troll" Drama: If a guild member is prone to repeated disruptions of this sort, the easiest (and perhaps the wisest) course of action is /gkick. The motivation behind this sort of behavior is generally singularly to gain attention through the disruption of normal guild operations. Troll drama is designed to change the topic of discussion from your normal focus/topics to whatever the troll has put forth. The Troll-style drama spreads rapidly through the ranks, as it is generally designed to do. The repercussions can be devastating - often it ends with multiple guildies upset, angry, frustrated, disatisfied, ultimately causing a mass exodus (whether en masse or a steady trickling of departures). While most of the other forms of drama are easily dealt with (and worth the effort to correct), troll drama should be ended the moment it begins before any damage can be done - which general means /gkick. Hand-in-hand with this, however, is the importance of training your guildmates how to react when this sort of thing does (hopefully rarely) occur. The best course of action is NO reaction...do not provide the troll what he most desires - attention.

Rage Winterchill

Last night we decided to make a quick foray into Hyjal for a change of pace. The fact that we had two pally tanks certainly helped the decision along. Most of us had read up on the fight a bit.

The interesting thing about this fight is that rather than fighting your way through trash to the boss, it comes to you in waves. Think Black Morass - except all in one spot. If you kill a wave fast enough, you have time to take a drink before the next wave comes along. If you don't, then you'll be overwhelmed by adds (nasty ones at that). Another interesting thing is that it's a very good fight to have your PVP trinket equipped. Rage has a number of abilities that you'll want to trinket (or shapeshift, when possible) out of. One of those abilities is his ice bolt - it does 4250-5750 frost damage AND encases the target in something much like an ice trap - except that it does an additional 2500 damage every second. While I was able to shapeshift out of the frost nova he often did, I couldn't shift out of the frozen tomb...hence the trinket.

So our first attempt(s) went like this:

Wipe on trash wave 6.
Kill all waves of trash and wipe on Rage at around 34%.
Boss kill!

Woot! He's dead!

We'll be heading back to Tempest Keep and SSC the rest of this week. The plan is to return to the fights we haven't seen in a while (in particular, Al'ar, who we haven't attempted since our first kill of him) and get these bosses to the point of truly being on farm. Then we'll start focusing on Vashj and Kael.

On a totally separate note, at the end of the raid, I found myself pulled suddenly (and without notice) into the officer channel. I was stunned...WHAT DID I DO?!? I even blurted that out, I think. And suddenly, I had 3 or 4 officers saying "You're in TROUBLE, Essy!" Argh. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what it might have been... Well, I found myself drafted. No longer can I listen to someone and then say "well, have you talked to an officer about it?" C'est la vie.

Bye Bye FLK!

We are now 5/6 in SSC (and 3/4 in TK). Vashj and Kael are the only ones that have escaped our wrath!

Leo Down!

Well, Leo is officially dead! It was a rough night, but after wiping at 3% on our first attempt when Leo enraged, 2 stupid wipes, and then wiping twice in a row at 1%, we finally got him down! Hooray!

Today, after the reset, we went back in and killed Hydross, Lurker and Tidewalker in quick succession. (YAY!). Then we got our first look at Fathom-Lord Karathress. There was a bit of confusion at the beginning of the fight and some of the misdirects didn't go off. We tried two or three more times, but it was near the end of raid time, so we decided to knock off for the night and come back tomorrow, rarin' to go.

On a side note, if you remember my post The Guild from a while back, the guild that was formed when some folks split off was also heading into SSC tonight as we were going in. The second we were inside, suddenly /1 (the local channel) was flooded with spam and unnecessary comments, clearly trying to distract us and/or get a reaction. My reaction was to move that channel to a separate tab in Prat (I love Prat!) that I easily was able to ignore. It's sad that people can't just walk away and focus on building a guild instead of tearing down another.

Tidewalker Washed Away!

Serpentshrine Cavern, Zangarmarsh
April 30, 2008

This just in! Distant Beliefs has downed its third boss in SSC. On its first night ever facing the incredibly ugly Morogrim Tidewalker, Distant Beliefs has sent him to his watery grave. The members of the execution team were seen laughing over his dead body before heading off to make Leotheras the Blind its next target.

ZA Progression

Well, last night, we downed the first four bosses in ZA, anticipating returning tonight to work on the Hex Lord Malacrass. And work on him, we did. I lost track of our attempts, we had two druid healers and a holy pally. Two rogues, a dps warrior, a mage, a warlock, a shadow priest and a pally tank.


Finally, after several tries getting him down to anywhere from 12 to 30 percent, we killed him! He dropped Dagger of Bad Mojo and the Staff of Primal Fury. Deressy ended up with the staff, as the other druid had the (better) badge staff, and seven more badges (2 for the kill and 5 for the quest).

We took a couple of runs at Zul'Jin afterwards, with our best attempt of the 3 getting him down to 43%. Not bad for a first run at him, having done no real research.

Earlier in the evening, though, we decided to take a look at the Sunwell trash - just for fun. What disaster! Well, not completely...we cleared out 3 pulls worth and picked up 3 epic gems and got a nice bit of humble pie! It was fun though!

Recent Acquisitions

Deressy finally completed the final quests she needed to get the title, Champion of the Naaru! Woot!

In addition, last night, she picked up the one thing she *really* wanted out of ZA: Mojo.