The Dambusters

You might have noticed a new addition to the website pages list, namely the ‘Officers‘ page. This has replaced the old ‘Class Leaders’ page as I feel that was something the guild no longer needs. Instead this page will be maintained and adjusted as necessary as officers positions change with time.

Notably the actual officers themselves have undergone some re-alignment recently. The Warrant Officer position has been redefined by myself as a place where only the absolutely determined officers who prove they have a burning desire to understand and influence the inner workings of the guild and decide to lead by example, put the effort in and take responsibility seriously.

For these reasons, previous Warrant Officers who still do diligent work in their officer roles are now ‘Flight Sergeant’ and former Flight Sergeants/Warrant Officers who’s outlined roles within the guild have dwindled, found themselves back among the general membership at ‘Chief Tech’.

Flight Sergeant is the standard position of officer in the guild where the position demands that a specified role (as detailed at the above linked page) be carried out with utmost diligence. The moment that job lapses then the position comes under scrutiny as in any other successful organisation.

For full details of all the ranks in the guild, click this link.

Congratulations to Debbs on his promotion to Warrant Officer and his assistant in the recruitment department Illiya!

I would also like to thank Díputs in particular for his relentless work around the guild bank. That is by far the most thankless task in the guild, great effort dude!

Hope you all like the new Officers page, keep an eye on it, get to know your officers AND their alts and treat them, and everyone else in your guild as you treat Bigticket… with unshakable respect!

/Salute

From now on, the top weekly activity contributor will receive a cool 1,000g prize on reset day. The player (not including Bigticket and alts) who tops the weekly meter each week will get this reward as an incentive to the Dambusters for your excellent commitment to work hard in the game.

The top contributor will be the character who I spot at the top at the latest possible moment I can be online before reset day. This may be subject to change since I will not always log off at the same times on a Tuesday evening, so if you are close to the top then you gotta make the push and be there at the top before I log out! I may not be able to check the meter right before the reset so get your numbers on the board in early!

I will keep screenshots of the results for anyone who wishes to see them at any time. Take care, happy activity and good luck!

/Salute

Lucky I still have internet access on my mobile phone so I can write on my blog. I have taken time off in the past so it’s no big deal but it was always my choice until now. Living in Saudi Arabia has it’s good and bad points. The bad being that we pay extortionate money for a frankly shocking Internet service to a ghastly money grabbing monopoly with absolutely zero interest in customer service. What good does it do when you workin a ‘customer service’ department but only communicate with grunts and tuts at your customer. Idiots!

I have been told ’24 hours’ wait for a service technician twice now, been waiting since Wednesday lol.

Anyway….
I have thus far failed to Valor cap Bunnyboiler for the first time this year. I have no chance to maintain the day-to-day running of the guild that I usually carry out, watching over the officers, preparing for our raids, keeping track of who’s who regarding alts and ranking etc. Pocahunter and I have done a lot of chilling out, spent a lot of irl gold on needless shopping items such as £115 on a fricking juicer!

We watched some telly but not Game of Thrones episode 3 yet. I’ve played a ton of Gran Turismo 5, bought the lovely Lamborghini Murcielago last night and sooped it up over 800bhp. Racing:soft tyres should be every car’s first upgrade by the way. I’ve even got Gen playing/struggling a little bit.

“Hand-eye co-ordination Gen, it’s all about turning at the right times! Brakes BEFORE the corner and out-in-out to shorten the angles!”

Well the good thing is, our current active officer team are fully capable of running the guild in my brief, enforced sabatacle. With Spyrot at the helm, a role I’m sure he feels humble about, the guild is in good hands. I am deeply gutted about being unable to raid this week but I hope to be reconnected on time to Valor cap Bunny before the reset and be ready for Wednesday night.

I hope I can work hard to get my spot in the raid team back after failing to attend, Gen feels the same.

This week has been an interesting change. It shows that there are a few people who don’t bother their arse when I’m not on, and it also shows the folks who (quite rightly) feel the show must go on. The guild is not all about the GM and hopefully most realise that. If something happened and I was unable to log in for an extended period then I would like to think the foundations we have built here would see the guild continue to prosper.

I actually think the guild will have missed Debbs more than Bunnyboiler/Bigticket this last few days. That famous lil gnome has been in Dubai with Mrs Ebbs watching Metallica!

Meanwhile, keep up the fantastic work Spyrot and your team. I will be back soon 🙂

/Salute

As I have suggested recently, there are officers in the guild who are not fulfilling their roles. The guild is only sustainable as a respectable entity when all the things that make it work are getting done. The roles we require our officers to perform help the guild by taking the work away from what would otherwise all be left to the Guild Leader.

In an organised guild, the Guild Leader needs to delegate those roles efficiently otherwise he/she will just have to do the work himself/herself. That would be possible if the GL has every hour of every day to work on the guild maintenance. I need the officers to do their job well and it’s my responsibility to ensure I have the right people in each position and all are doing the work needed of them.

All our officers are expected to be reading the blog so any current Flight Sergeant who is ineffective in their given officer role have a very brief period to contact me with a solution or a resignation of the officer duty and accept a new Chief Tech rank or it will be forced upon you.

If you feel aggrieved and have good reason for not performing then my door is always wide open and I’m happy to listen to your points. In the event of a demotion, please don’t take the move personally because surely as a Dambuster who knows the guild well, you will be aware that your previous dedicated task must be re-allocated otherwise its simply not getting done. Leaving stuff for others to do is not how I believe officers should work.

I thank anyone in the described situation for your fine efforts in the past and hope that you can assist your successor if required to hand-over the tasks by communicating amicably with myself and the incumbent, if there is one.

To the remaining officers:-

It is with delight that I acknowledge your fine efforts in particular with enabling the smooth transition from Xavius to Ragnaros in the past month. I hope you will continue to do your best for the guild and help us to maintain this great community of characters for a long time to come!

Anyone who feels there is a job you can do within the guild that is currently being poorly executed or is simply not tasked as yet, please contact me. I am always available in game and when offline, you can reach me at Bigticket@dambusters.eu

There are positions awaiting your efforts, give me solutions!

/Salute

Guilds are all about the people within. People who judge a guild on it’s raid progress need to try to grasp a little reality. A well progressed guild could be a solid group of close friends who form a raid team and have the time and skill to complete content at a good pace. Equally a well progressed guild could be one guy’s ego trip to collect the top skilled players he can and drop them into a raid team knowing their individual ability will achieve the guild success to the credit of that GM.

Either of these examples or any variant between could be the case so this is why I am loathe to judge a guild only on it’s PvE progression.

Take the Dambusters for example. We have some tremendous players here and some average Joes. The one common denominator is that we are all part of the community. Whether we raid heroic content, do random battlegrounds together, focus on doing dailies as a group or just hang out and joke with each other in mumble or /gchat, the spirit of the community keeps it together.

Logging in and seeing the usual friendly faces (ok names) and possibly someone you might not have seen online lately, maybe a new member to welcome or even the sad parting when someone decides to leave. The perpetual nature of the guild at it’s foundation provides us all with a feeling of belonging. We belong to The Dambusters. Some might leave for their own reasons but they are usually welcomed back with open arms because although it is hurtful and insulting when people do leave, we do appreciate that people make their own choices and as such, should be allowed to undo the ‘mistake’ they made in leaving. I’ve met numerous relieved Dambusters who were glad to return having found out the grass is not always greener on the other side.

I wish I could single out everyone in person but for today, the name on my mind is Biggooliess!

Our own famous Biggo is now legendary around this guild. From the moment he logs in with his usual (100% sure it’s manually typed such is his way) “Good evening to all” message. That is usually answered by everyone paying attention to the chat box.

Biggo has been a mainstay in the guild ever since the day I picked him up and took him only a short distance from Ironforge to Kharanos on my X-53 rocket mount. For some reason, that moment etched into his mind about the friendly attitude of our guild and his previous wanderings in the game came to an abrupt end. He found himself a place to call home, accepting the guildies for who they are at all times.

Biggo ain’t no end game raider, he’s not a super nerdy techno junkie like most of you young whippersnappers! He just loves to level toons and be part of the conversation. Most nights he is on mumble and his classic cockney wide-boy accent is always interesting. He tells it how it is, how he sees it and never holds a grudge.

People like Biggooliess are synonymous with our social levelling guild and as a person, rather than skilful player, is a shining example to the commitment and social spirit we love in this guild.

He was dead against our realm transfer because he has so much memories, time and sentiment invested in Xavius but you know what? He accepted the guild’s ‘bigger picture’ decision, got his head down and created a new monk. Perfect opportunity for him to try a monk and he wasn’t long in blasting that dude to level 90. His skill is levelling!

To all the Dambusters, use Lee as your example of commitment, generosity and humility. Appreciate the guild you are in!

/Salute

Actually it will continue to be Debbs all over Ragnaros’ face!

Since joining the guild, Debbs the fun lovin, lil evil (usually nakey) gnome rogue has been an inspirational figure of character around the place. It is precisely this type of character that makes a social guild worth joining.

People like Debbs, Trikié and others with a wicked and endearing sense of humour really are unsung heroes of a good guild. Remember that people stick with a guild primarily because of the friends they make there and these guys make it easy to feel welcome in a guild.

Although there’s a lot of fun and frolicks around the edges of that little gnome, there is something serious and thoughtful therein. There is calculated deliberation that goes into what he does in the game which makes his new position of ‘Chief Recruitment Officer’ a perfect fit for him. I have been impressed by his attention to detail while studying the game. He watches what people are doing, what drops people are getting and pays a lot of attention to what is going on around the guild and the server.

Debbs is in close contact with myself and Spyrot because he has made it his business to be attentive to what the guild requires from the perspective of the upper leadership. This determination to pick up information, coupled with his infectious ‘way’ with other Ragnarosians ensures he is fully armed with the knowledge of what the guild require of new recruits. On top of that, that same information he also uses to assure prospective new members about who and what we are as a guild.

Debbs has grabbed his chance after stating to me his intention to become an officer. I offered him the opportunity to prove his worth and he set about the task diligently, without fuss and although his efforts have had average results thus far, the ground work he is laying will pay dividends in the months to come as the guild grows on Ragnaros.

Recruitment is everyone’s responsibility but only one chief can post on the Blizzard forums. That job belongs to Debbs. Any Dambusters out there with additional networking to provide the guild with fresh blood should be in contact with the chief recruiter to ensure he is updated on possible player movements, other guild disbands etc.

He is already the most well known Dambuster around the server to date simply because he just talks to people all the time.

For any other Dambuster who would like an officer role, use the examples of guys like Debbs, Spyrot and the rest by actually making it your personal business to really find out what jobs the guild needs doing and prove you are right for the job by leading by example. Too many people ask for an officer rank in guild but use the position as a badge. These guys of Flight Sergeant and Warrant Officer in our guild are there because they have a job to do. That position can be replaced at anytime if someone is not performing so there are always opportunities for others who feel they can commit time and effort.

Great work Debbs, onward!

/Salute

The lovely Dawn Moore’s discussion on her very helpful priest WoW Insider article from last night really made me think about my own holy priest Bunnyboiler so I decided to reply on the comments section with my own analysis, hopefully some of the insights on the article can help inspire some of our own budding priests.  Here is my comment:-

“I play holy/disc priest on my main character Bunnyboiler @ Ragnaros(EU) and due to the 5.2 disc changes, I have found myself with a gearing conundrum, lemme set the scene…

I disagree with the need to reach haste break points as holy completely, unless all you do is spam greater heal or PoH for some speed on those spell casts. Plenty of analysts push holy priests in the direction of haste caps but in reality, a holy priest is using CoH, PoM (so powerful now with the 2-set bonus and Divine Insight) in addition to Cascade, Renew(the fact it’s instant cast), Power Word: Shield (when there is no disc priest for shield priority ofc) which we can see fill large portions of our entire GCD usage without the need to shorten it as we await CDs on PoM and CoH anyway.
Times of PoH spamming  during heavy raid damage can be augmented by the use of Power Infusion which you mentioned in the Discipline briefing. PoH spamming is only AFTER prioritising Divine Hymn so chances are that a healing partner in the raid will be using their own big CD such as healing tide totem, tranquility etc. during your enforced PoH spammage 🙂

I consider holy as my main spec so I have gone for as much mastery as possible to ensure those millions of tiny little  heals get as much benefit from illuminated healing as possible with the offset of any faster GCD and spell haste benefits that stacking haste would provide.

The info on that holy haste/mastery is different depending on where you look. Yourself, Preach, Noxxic and Ask Mr. Robot all say haste to breakpoint whereas icy-veins and the top holy priests currently raiding push as much mastery as possible at the expense of haste regardless.

The ONLY ranked holy priest in 10 man normal mode throne of Thunder is this guy   –   http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/zirkel-des-cenarius/Rasijel/simple

25 man heroic have a couple of holy priests on the charts   –   http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/korgath/Reesi/simple  AND  http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/korgath/Reesi/simple

…all these guys are currently doing it at the top and they hoard mastery like it’s going out of fashion 🙂

My issue is, now my disc spec is becoming less powerful since I have no choice but to stick with mastery hehe, I guess I’m gonna have to try and grab a 2nd set of gear or only use disc sparingly for a while.

/Salute”

Incase you are not aware, the guild owns it’s own website which is 100% self-hosted and is in no way bound by terms and conditions demanded by the big brands of Enjin, Wowstead, GuildOx and countless others. Their templates may be pretty but they come with risks. To get the best service, you must pay premium subscriptions or be subject to advertising from the host. In addition to this, any content you create using their software belongs to them, rendering the guild powerless if something happens to the server or the account, meaning we could lose all data saved.

I took a decision based on things I read around the web. Our website is only just starting out and I’m a complete beginner when it comes to the design of the thing but it will grow as I seek help and administer the site as we progress. The server on which the website lives is one of the best around where maintenance is done with the equipment running meaning almost 100% uptime. Very rarely will our site go down.

As you can see by the numbers on the chart above, in the short space of time since we switched to our own dedicated domain name and webspace, the number of hits on the website have been impressive considering our niche. We are a very specialist type of hobby site but it seems most of our active members visit the site regularly.

With just under 11,000 unique pageviews in a few months since the stats began, I’m pretty proud. The numbers are increasing steadily too, I assume much is due to this blog which serves to keep our members in touch with what’s going on at the top of the guild. Imagine the possibilities if more people would communicate using the forums!

Give the forum some love Dambusters, get some events started, talk about what happened last night in wow etc. see you on there…

/Salute

The balance of guild online activity numbers and quality of members is a conundrum any self respecting guild leader must strive to control. It’s all very well being a social/levelling guild without too much pressure to actually do much together but we are striving to be something more than that.

People outside our guild see the description as ‘social/levelling’ and dismiss our desire to be organised as if there is no need for guild structure. People on Xavius outside our guild scoffed at our impending realm transfer, wondering why we felt we needed to move the guild when its just a social/levelling guild. The truth is, those people have never been involved with us so they just don’t know what it means to be a Dambuster!

When you’ve been in this guild, it might be a home for life, Then again it might not fill your ambitious hardcore raiding or pvp aspirations but if you really spend time here then have to leave to further your wow experience in other guilds, you really feel like you are leaving family behind.

People have left this guild in the past and found themselves returning after realising that, although it is definitely possible to step on and enjoy the benefits of a more dedicated, skill-based group, the thing that matters most and keeps you playing the game are your friends in the guild.

This is why we must really focus on having the right balance of numbers and quality of people around us in the guild. That is why we are not far from what I consider to be a good figure. We accrue over 50% of the accounts(actual people) in the guild to be online in any given 24 hour period which is frankly astonishing considering we have only just migrated and started from scratch with a clean reboot of our population. It’s striking that almost all of our most active members have arrived from Xavius with a few more yet to trickle over in the coming days and weeks. The quality in numbers we have recruited from Ragnaros has only served to enhance our group as most seem to be very friendly, helpful and socially engaged players. These guys have already fitted in nicely and it’s a great testament to the long-term guildies who have this amazing ability to welcome newcomers with open arms.

If we carry on with such an influx of people then the activity would continue to grow but with more numbers comes less familiarity. I think after say 25 people online then there are more likely to become cliques and factions around the guild. Ofcourse people congregate among their closest friends but the more people online talking in guild chat then the more busy the /gchat can become with 3-4 different conversations going on and that just stifles the guild chat. I think a slow stream of quality recruits from this week and beyond will stand us in good stead for a lasting future of minimal drama and a close togetherness which is paramount to any good guild.

You have a leader who understands all this and knows how important that prior planning and control of a population is. This guild will not be a victim of over-population and implosion. Having applications which are fun and informal will be the perfect way to ensure we offset future, inevitable guild departures with keen players who know its important to get on this guild website and really feel the spirit which makes us the unique Dambusters!

/Salute

Two weeks have passed since the Dambusters migrated from Xavius so I feel a summary of the current guild standing is required.

GOOD BASE

Since we uprooted those famously solid guild foundations and re-planted them firmly in the prime location that is Ragnaros(EU), the guild has found itself among some of the big boys of the guild world. It has been daunting to try and integrate with the bloated population here whilst trying to make a name for ourselves considering we are small fry in an ocean of organised guilds. However, very few casual/social/levelling guilds are as determined to do things right like we are. For such a casual atmosphere, we really try to ensure we have a good leadership core who maintain the guild in a manner more befitting a more hardcore raiding guild.

RAIDING

Our progression may be slow with only Jin’rohk of ‘Throne of Thunder’ normal mode down thus far but our only handicap is that people in our raid team have a lot of real life commitments. It might be possible someday to forge a more hardcore team but that day is not upon us yet. A rated battleground team is still on the shelf until someone is ready to commit time and effort into setting that up. Right now, my personal gaming time is spent ensuring Bunnyboiler is as close to the cutting edge as I can get her while we are not yet downing bosses that would upgrade her average ilvl 506 kit.

RECRUITMENT

What a fantastic display of guild commitment shown by the original Dambusters members transferring characters and creating new toons to join us in the new location! This has been augmented by our recent recruiting, providing a steady influx of new members from around Ragnaros. We have made some great friends already who have really enhanced the social experience here.

We are still expecting a few more guildies to arrive from Xavius any time now. This week, the floodgates will slam shut, ending the short period of open invites from around the server. The guild will revert to applications only and new characters will have to be invited by an officer from then on. Alt characters will be welcome anytime whereas new members must apply at the guild website.

OFFICERS

There are still a few officer tasks that need to be maintained on a more regular basis. The forum is dead so I would like more from Egon pushing ideas about talking in the forums. People need to know about them, discussions need to be started. I’m looking for ways to get people interested in going there.

The main raid team didn’t go on Thursday night after downing Jin’rohk pretty easily on Wednesday. We need the raid team members to commit to the team, be logged in early and ensure you are Valor capping each week, doing the new raid finders to maximise your efforts so you’re not being carried by the more committed guys. There’s gonna be pug raiders joining in over the coming weeks and if you don’t put in the effort then these new guys could well fill your spot!

The guild bank is being managed impeccably by Poca and Díputs, keep up the good work there guys.

/Salute