About Heroic Dungeons and Raiding

If you are level 80 and are interested in running heroics, or raiding that is great. If that is not what you are interested in doing that is great too. This is a game, and you need to determine how you have fun in it. People who choose not to raid will never be considered less important to our guild. Each person contributes in a different way.

This page is designed to give information to those who are interested in raiding as an end goal.

About Gear and Minimum Requirements

For both Heroic Dungeons, and Raids we are setting some minimum standards for gear. This is not designed to exclude people, and it is our goal to help anyone who needs gearing help. (see the section on how to get gear) The reason for setting minimum standards is simple. Heroics are hard. Blizzard designed them to take a team of 5 people working together to complete. Unlike lower level instances there are no level 90's who can just give you a run. It is possible for someone who is well geared to help someone less geared through, but it is still important that each team member in a 5 man group pull their own weight. This is important in a 5 man group, and exponentially more important in a 10 man raid or 25 man raid. Please strive to make it your personal goal to come prepared to instances. There is a lot of help available in the guild to get you prepared. You need to be proactive in taking advantage of it.

Getting Gear

It seems like a conterdiction saying that you cannot go to heroics without gear when the best gear comes from heroics, however, this is a step by step process. The first step to getting gear is knowing what you need. If you have no idea on your own please visit www.maxdps.com for healers and dps or www.tankspot.com for tanks. If you are pre-heroic, uncheck all the 10 and 25 man raids, and uncheck the items from burning crusade. I reccomend that healers, and ranged dps look at things like cloth or leather or mail even though that may not be the primary armor type they wear. This will give you a good idea of what is available, and it tells you where you can get the things. There are several ways to get gear. These are in no perticular order. You need to determine your priorities on your own.

First is crafted gear, we are fortunate to have at least one person in the guild with maximum level in each profession, and we try to have a good supply of materials. If there is something that you need to have crafted that you would like to have guild materials to help, please contact Bloomyvfd.

Second is gear that you can purchase after developing a certain reputation with a certain faction. Reputation can be gained by doing daily quests or by wearing a tabbard for that faction in either level 80 or Heroic dungeons.

Third is Bind on Equip (BoE) drops. Some really nice pieces of gear drop in heroics. Many of our 80s who are running heroics now have generously donated the drops they can't use for other guildies to use. These are located on the 6th tab, as with crafted gear, contact Bloomyvfd if there is an item that will help you. These items are also sometimes available on the auction house if you want to buy them.

Fourth is quest reward items. Some of these are excelent in slot items. It may be worth looking into getting them.

Fifth is Bind on Pickup (BoP) drops. Some are from heroics, and some from regular instances. You need to be there to get them.

Gear Enhancements

There are many different enhancements or enchants that are available to give your gear an extra boost. Items with gem slots need to have gems in their sockets. There are enchants or items crafted to enhance every slot except ranged weapon, head, and shoulders. Head and sholder enhancements can be obtained by building reputation with certain factions. It is importanat that you take advantage of these enhancements to help you be more effective. If you have questions regarding this speak to Bloom, Booger, or Fire.

Learning to play your class

It is important that you learn to take advantage of the many spells and abilities your perticular class has. You can do internet research to find the most effective use of tallent points and use of abilities (called rotation) or you can speak to Firestaryvfd or Booger who will either work with you or reffer you to someone who can help. An important point: There is no one BEST spec for any class. Some specs do more dammage, and some have more debuffs or other abilities. What is important is for you to learn to play the spec that you choose effectivly in a way that will bennefit the group you are in.

About DPS Meters and posting DPS (Written by Getoffme)

You often see people posting their dps meter (such as recount) in party or raid chats. The problem with this is that although it's important to do your best dps... it's more important to use all of your character's ability's to help the party or raid be successful. Alot of these abilities (such as decursing, cleansing disease, sheeping, abolish poison, disarming etc...) actually lower a characters dps but are much more important than a little more dps. Most ppl playing wow don't understand how dps actually works, and explaing it is kinda difficult but i'll give it a try.....When you are casting a spell on an enemy (whether it does damage or not) u are in what i call (dps average mode) all your damage done while in this mode is averaged and call dps. However if you stop taking action on an enemy u will exit the dps average mode and your dps will remain what it was when u stopped (dot's will keep u in this mode). For example : when fighting a boss such as heagen the unclean in nax, my mage and a shaman are standing on the platform fireing everything we have at the boss, my dps is 2.1k and the shamans dps is 1.8k. Now when it comes time for us to do the fast phase of the safety dance the shaman never fires at the boss but I continuously fire my icelance while moving. When we go back up on the platform after the dance, my dps is now 1.7k and the shaman's is still 1.8k but i have done more overall damage.. This is because i never stopeed attacking so my dps kept getting averaged and i was only doing a small amount with icelance...so did the shaman do better during the boss fight because he did more dps? No....As u can see dps is more complicated than most ppl think...if a hunter casts misdirect or a mage casts polymorph etc. these are combat actions that keep the dps averageing but do not do damage so the average drops....hence the dps drops.. so as u can see doing more dps than someone else does not mean you did better than them, it could just mean that the other players contributed a wider variety of ability's while u ignored everything but spaming attack. Also if someone starts out hitting a boss with all they have then stop attack and just stand there for the rest of the fight their dps will prbly be hight than anyone else's because they were only in "dps average mode" while they used their most powerful cd's.I hope this helps explain how dps works .... (i'm not the best at exlpaing things)

Raid leaders do use dps, along with many other tools to get a picture of how an individual is contributing to a group. Top DPS does not necessicarilly mean the best dps player.

Minimum Requirements for Heroic Dungeons

To be on a guild team for heroic dungeons, at a minimum you need to have appropriate gear, usually the best available crafted gear for your class and spec, with slot enhancements. It is possible for you to pick up group with less than the minimum gear requirements, however we strongly reccomend against that. It can lead to a great deal of frustration, and a great deal of repair costs. To facilitate this, officers will give the designation of heroic ready to guildies who meet the minimum requirements. Ideally you need to strive for some minimums based on your job. If you are dps, strive for 1k dps. A tank should strive for 530 defense (540 is ideal, but difficult to obtain without heroic drops), and healers need to be able to effectivly do their job. Gear and performance requirements for raid catagories are at the discretion of raid leaders.

Why You Don't Want to be Carried

It is possible for you to clear nearly all the content of the game with no minimum gear requirement. Many people in the game do this. Basically what it is is having a group that is made of people who are exceptionally well geared with a few people that are both not geared, and not able to do the job they are intended to do. Those unprepared players are carried by the other players, and can get both achievements and gear that way. Being carried while it seems like an easy way to obtain a goal, is not a good thing overall. First, you loose out on the learning experience of working through the problem, and you do not learn to use all the different abilities your class has to help a group. Second, it is a bit unfair to the people doing the carrying if you are not able to contribute your fair share. To try to aviod this in guild runs, priority in team spots is given based on guild progression ranks.

About our Progression

Our guild promotes people following the reccomended personal progression. You can do this as quickly or as slowly as you like. The reason we reccomend this progression is it builds both skills and gear in a way that each step will be challanging for you, but not impossible to do. Following this progression also ensures that you are not being carried through content. The reason we give guild designations are to make it easy to form appropriate level raid groups for people. Each indivual's designation can be found in the guild notes in game. The marked achievements are required to progress to the next guild designation. The designations are a general guidline in setting up groups.

How Spots in Raids are Filled:

After reviewing people who have accepted a calander invite, a raid leader creates a raiding team with priority given to people who have the appropriate guid progression designation getting priority based on class and need in the raid. People with a lower designation can be taken at the raid leaders discretion to fill a specific need in the raid. Consideration is given to progress towards the achievement required to advance to the next designation.

Progression Expliantion:

*H* Heroic Ready

A *H* raider has passed a gear check.

Reccomended Content for a *H*
Reccomended Content
Heroic Northrend Dungeons
10 Archavon the Stonewatcher
10 Obsidian Sanctum 0 Drakes

*R1* level 1 Raid Ready

A *R1* raider has passed a gear check and completed the Northrend Dungeon Hero Achievement.
Reccomended Content
10 Naxxaramas
25 Archavon the Stonewatcher
25 Obsidian Sanctum 0 Drakes

*R2* Level 2 Raid Ready

A *R2* raider has passed a gear check and competed the normal Fall of Naxxaramas Achievement.
Reccomended Content
25 Naxxaramas
10 Obsidian Sanctum with Drakes up
10 Valt of Archavon all bosses
10 Eye of Eternity

*R3* Level 3 Raid Ready

A *R3* raider has passed a gear check and completed the heroic Fall of Naxxaramas Achievement.

Reccomended Content
10 Uluduar
25 Obsidian Sanctum with Drakes up
25 Vault of Archavon all bosses
25 Eye of Eternity

*R4* Level 4 Raid Ready

A *R4* raider has passed a gear check and completed the normal Secrets of Ulduar Achievement.

Reccomended Content
25 Uluduar

Getting a Heroics or Raider designation

If you want to become designated to instance or raid, please follow these steps.

1. Ensure your gear is in order, to the best of your ability. (Please ask for help if you need to.)

2. Ensure that you are able to do your job. You can practice dps on a target dummy to measure it, or practice in some non heroic dungeons.

3. Send an ingame mail (mail please not a wisper) to Firestaryvfd. She will check your gear and achievements on armory and talk to you and arrange a group to run with you if necessary. This is not a stressful thing at all, and there is no failing, if we find something that needs work, we will help you with it.

About PUGing in the guild with people without the designation. You are welcome to do so if you choose, and we certainly do not intend to exclude anyone, however doing heroics with team members who are not adequatly prepared can lead to a great deal of frustration.

Want to be a Raid Leader?

We are always in need of mature, knowledgable people willing to lead raids. If you are interested, let Firestaryvfd know. The process at this time for becoming a raid leader is simple. You will lead a raid with Fire acting as a participant and observing.