Do your guild make your own tactics? (Even though you are casual)

[Torinogut]

Hey all!

I am in a casual guild. We rarely read tactics and like find out fights on our own.

Doing things this way has really opened my eyes towards this game, and made me enjoy raiding again. I was actually on the verge of quitting when I joined my current guild. So I wondered are there more casuals out there like us? I wouldn't call us pro, but serious casuals?


I realize that this is something most/all hardcore guilds do, going on ptr etc. Mostly interested in casual guilds here.

[Krypper]

Sometimes. Usually me that's trying to get people to deviate. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't.

[Saikred]

My guild has a rule for new content that we don't look anything up beforehand and we learn the fights ourselves, at least the first time we see it.

We're a casual guild who raids twice a week in the 25mans and as much as we feel like in 10 mans.

Cleared 6 (I think) bosses in 10man ICC and 5 in 25 man, and have also done ToGC10.

We're a guild who's not bothered about server firsts or even raiding hard until a boss is down (Hell it took us about 3 months to down Yogg Saron).
And it's great


NOTE:
We're also the oldest guild on Dragonmaw EU, formed the week of release and still going strong.

[Nudi]

I don't raid, so I really can't say anything about this..
I'd just like to point out that I think it sounds like a great thing to do, really.. must be pretty fun even though it might be quicker to just read tankspot or whatever..

[Izenhart]

We get the strategy from <insertstrategysitehere> and then rework it based on our raid composition, both for gear and average IQ of the raid.

[Neichus]

My own guild walks an intermediate line: we like progression but we like seeing things new. We're 10man exclusive.

We usually look up the basic mechanics of various abilities, but not the strategies or positioning to deal with them. So for instance, a few weeks ago I looked up the abilities for Lana'thel and from the basic layout could tell that we needed to be spread out (due to blood bolts) but not too spread out (Pact of the Darkfallen or whatever it's called). The whole bite mechanic seemed somewhat self-explanatory, but there were some wrinkles we discovered. We devised a basic positioning scheme using the circle in the middle of her room, telling linked people to run to the middle. We used up all 15 of our attempts that first week but figured out a lot of details that helped us get her quickly the next week.

The main reason I pursued this strategy as the guild/raid leader wasn't primarily for the "new stuff" idea so much as the inapplicability of strats to our guild. In my experience as a 10man exclusive guild, all the strats are written by 25man guilds who are usually able to assume optimal buffs, balanced class composition, and a higher level of gear. None of these things are remotely true for our guild. When we were working on Sarth10+3D I read a lot of strats and we tried them and failed; they usually recommended things like 2-healing it which just wasn't feasible with our level of gear/expertise. After banging our head against the wall trying to get somebody else's strategy to work, we just did what we thought was best with 3 tanks/3 healers/4 dps and we were able to claim a Sarth10+3D kill pre-3.1. Since then I've taken all posted strategies with a grain of salt.

[Gerina]

we read up on some ideas for strategies and the abilities and then make up our strat based on that

[Endler89]

Well my guilds plan is simple i'm raid leader do what i say. I make up my own strats based on who we have and who can do what. If you can't adapt in my guild at this point i know it and don't ask too much extra out of you, but for the most part my strats work better for my guild than any guide i've seen. I came up with a festergut strat that i love and gotten pugs to use it. We wipe more often then other guilds but its always fun for me and people usually enjoy my raids so ill take it.

[Elrin]

I lead a 10 man only casual raiding group (casual in playtime...1 raid night a week) and normally I read up on boss abilities/etc and then let the team know what to expect. Beyond that, we make it up as we go and that's worked out pretty well for us so far (we're one of the very few 10 man only guilds to kill Yogg-Saron on our realm).

I don't like the idea of going in blind because we simply don't have time to learn -everything- ourselves. We adapt tactics to our group.

[mypally]

We are kinda casual, and never read strats for 10, then using what we know, we make our 25 man strats based off it

[Raunoman]

We take raiding seriously but we are by no means hardcore. We raid 25mans 4 days a week for 3 hours at a time, we can't stay focused for any more. We read strategies we can find and adjust them to fit us. Some of us have more experience/brain for the game and raiding mechanics in general, and it's usually a handful of players that can adjust the strategies for us.

Atm we get up to Putricide with ease, but have only had him down to 8% when a tank died.
We kill Princes rather easily, but have had no tries on Queen yet.
I suppose it's easy to wipe at Valithria in the end but we nearly had her last night when we tried her out for about 2 hours.
This is all in 25man of course.

[montypython]

in my guild (10 man) we have 4-5 attempts goin in blind (no knowledge of the fight)
if we have no success we then read wowwiki/wowhead about abilities then try form a strat if this still doesnt work then we watch vids.

so far were 5/12 icc

own tactics used for deathbringer and festergut,
have had tries on blood princes with own tactics no success yet

for marrowgar,deathwhisper and gunship just use normal tactics weve seen in vids

[Wani]

We now start with 10-men raid before going to 25, so pretty much, yeah. It was kind of fun on Sindragosa ("We might need another tank to clear that nasty debuff") and an absolute blast on the lich king. We wiped on him continuously, but instead of that "WHY DID YOU NOT RUN TO THE MIDDLE?" that would have followed a wipe despite hours of explanations, everyone just burst out laughing when we all fell to our deaths.

[MrMcFlurry]

We tend to take a rough tactic built from knowledge of what the boss does (when we figure our tactics, it's normally too early for tact sites to have their stuff up)

And then refine it and determine our own little tricks here and here to help out. Most of which is common sense and so on