Made it to Time! Now what...

[Kromagnon]

My guild recently killed the Rathe and we are going through another round of god kills to make sure we key up all our people.

But as a raidleader, I am coming up against some tough issues. We are a working class guild and we are spread out over 4 timezones, so our numbers are pretty wild sometimes. Some nights we have 60, some nights we have 80+. With Time being limited to 72 and the class mix being fairly important, I see there will be times where we will be over the cap and have to bump unnecessary classes (12 active warriors, hi~) for key classes.

How do you other Time guilds handle raid setup with key classes? Do you set up a rotation for people who get bumped? Do you have a specific setup matrix (i.e. n chanters, x clerics, y druids, z shaman, add tanks and DPS and stir)? How do you handle late arrivals?

In addition, we are going to be sharing Time with another EST/CST guild who are currently on Tier 4. Any tips as to how to best deal with instancing issues? I have to admit I am fairly ignorant of how the instancing works aside from the fact that two guilds can't share the same Tier. We would rather not enter into a rotation if we can avoid it, but we will bow to necessity.

Any guidance you may have on these matters are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Injektilo]

To avoid bumping heads with another guild just set it up with them so you guys split the days of the week. Give them mon, tues, weds and you get thurs, fri sat or something like that so you guys are never in time at the same time. Supposedly with the patch that went in yesterday multiple guilds can be doing their instanced timeB's at once, but i dunno if thats true, as we are the only time enabled guild on Zebuxoruk.

Leave a twink 2 boxxed in timeA to invite late peeps to the raid, once they are invited then can zone into B and catch right up if you dont have 72 already. As for numbers, for the first couple months we BARELY pulled 60 people, attendance was super shitty till we got Quarm on farm status, now we are bursting at the seams. To handle all the people that have magically returned from breaks we boot people by attendance. If someone with 76 percent attendance shows up an hour late and somoene with 20 percent attendance is the lowest person there, he's gotta go wait in A. The people that raid day in and out get precedence in time for us /shrug.

I dont want to spoil things anything else for ya, good luck hehe

[Splaktar]

You pretty much have to get a rotation going. We're the only guild in Time on our server, thank god. So luckily we don't have to deal with it. The Gods aren't instanced, only tier 1 afaik. SoE was asked about making it all instanced and said they are not planning to do it. But they did say they would 're-evaluate' that statement after a few months.

As far as people go... we generally have 50-80 active members online, and about 5-15 applicants. We are also spread across PST/CST/MST/EST and a few members in Europe/Asia. Our raids run from about 6pm EST to 2am EST. What we normally do is 'warm up' raids before Time, so we can wait for a full 65-72 people to be online etc. Then we goto Time. It's rare that we have over 72 people for Tier 1.

There's always late members who show up for like Tier 4, Tier 5, etc... we tell them to send tells to applicants who are on the raid and ask them to give up their spot for a guild member. This generally works pretty well, they know not to ask certain classes to leave (in general), ie: clerics, wiz, etc... Then if there's no other apps who can leave, or there's no members who have to log, it's too bad for them. Basically it's their fault for being late.

Now that doesn't cover the problem of having 85+ people show up for Tier 1... we basically just assign clerics to trials and then tell them to invite balanced groups. Those who are leftover are stuck in a 'clean up' group and DKP is taken in Timea for Tier 1 so that anyone there when it starts gets credit.

I guess it's more of an annoyance your first time thru, because everyone wants to go and be there for guild firsts. But eventually it's not that big of a deal.

I guess I'd say just make sure the most senior/active people make it on the raid and the least active / newest members wait if there's no room.

As for what to do when you can't go... generally we ask people to stay online if they can, in case they are needed. But this doesn't really happen that much... they either go exp, LDoN, or log for RL stuff. Hasn't been a big problem for us.

I'm sure the sharing Time issue will be a major annoyance once another guild gets into Time on our server...


Edit: Yeah that comment about having bad attendance for the first few months was true for us too. Learning Time is painful and it's likely that a lot of people will stop showing up for Time after they figure out how much you fail/die :P Then you'll be wanting people to login etc... But then once you've cleared it and got Quarm on Farm mode... everyone will login right when Time is due, etc. Again why using attendance/activity is a good thing.

[Krowbar]

The zone is not instanced but all mobs are instanced except tier 1 (maybe even Tier 1 now). If another guild zones in after your guild has cleared time, they'll get their own spawns and spawn cycles.

I heard it only works for 2-3 guilds but we have only 2 time guilds on rodcet so we havent had any conflicts yet.

[Splaktar]

Ah cool, we aren't totally sure how it works as we haven't had to deal with it yet.

I did hear that it only worked for 2 guilds tho, but again, not sure.

[Brodda Thep]

Never realized how many people some guilds have. We rarely break 60 real people in time anymore and have a hell of a time getting 36 for LDoN raids on non-time days anymore.

But for LDoN raids, we give precedence to attendance and give RPP for anyone on-line that is doing adventures if they are unable to raid.

[Krowbar]

Also, we rarely go over the 72 cap. Most of the time it is about 60-65 players plus 2-3 important 2nd boxes (all clerics :P) and the rest are not-so-important 2nd boxes. As people log in, the unwanted 2nd boxes are logged out. Eventually the wanted 2nd boxes or their mains are camped out.

In the rare event that we have 72+ players, the extras wait outside till there's an opening on a queue basis. They get dkp for it if they wait the duration.

(When we were learning time, we also made some latecomers play 2nd box clerics already in the raid instead of their mains because having 18 clerics on a raid just owns. :P)

[Mulberry]

Hello Kromagnon,

Seeing as we are the guild already in there, welcome to Plane of Time :) You will have a lot of fun.

As far as I am aware, some sort of rotation is/or has been worked out. As you also may know, Sol Invictus generally only raids 3 days a week (sometimes 4 on patch days), so I am sure something will be worked out that will be happy for all involved.

[Belanar]

Originally posted by Splaktar
I did hear that it only worked for 2 guilds tho, but again, not sure.

Is working fine for 3 guilds on Veeshan, excepting the odd bug.

[Timmok]

Here is how we do it:

Typically have raid start at 18:30. We give a small dkp bonus for being on time, so we can get started asap and not have to wait for people to trickle in. We typically have 54-60ish for phase 1 trials.

Just before we zone into phase 1, we log attendance. Everyone present in PoTimeA at the point get DKP regardless of wether they are in a group that will fight in phase 1 trials(as long as they are there and available).

We typically have officers inviting the various teams. They pick what they need to defeat their particular trial with minimum fuss, and we havent had anyone whining about sitting out, because they get dkp anyway.

After 19:30ish, once we reach phase 3-4, we will typically hit the 72 player cap. After that, latecommers get to sit in PoTime A and wait, but we still give them DKP as if they were in B. Those waiting typically form a list, but we can and do override that list when we have a need for a particular class. Typically a cleric arriving late will skip the queue and get straight into raid when a spot opens up.

Once we reach Quarm, we will re-arrange for maximum healing/DPS configuration. For our particular roster this typically mean sending a few of our chanters and sometimes a few warriors out, and bringing any late arrival paladins/clerics/wizards in.

Sharing PoTime with 1 other guild is np. The agreement we have with the other time guild, gives us 3-4 days in PoTime each. We usually clear PoTime over two days, monday+tuesday. The other guild on the server typically clears it sometime between friday and sunday(not really sure). Havent been a problem at all.

[Ainian]

Slightly off topic!

We have a Japanese guild on our server who is Time abled, and because of this we very rarely (if ever) see tier one loots.

They do tier 1, but by the time it's our raid time, it hasn't reset yet so all we see is shadows.

BUT! If they didn't raid potime, and we get the loot droppers -- by the time it is their raid later that day, tier one has reset already and they get loot too.

Lose/lose for us.

This needs to be addressed, and the only way I see possible is to enable true instancing Ldon Style.

Rant over :P