Ask WoW Insider: How do I get off standby?
by Mark Crump 
Mar 7th 2008 at 9:00AM
Welcome to today's edition of Ask WoW Insider, in which we publish your questions for dissection by the peanut gallery -- now with extra snark and commentary by one of our writers. This week, reader CS writes:A number of months ago the old guild I had been in for nearly 2 years broke up due to varies reasons so I found a new raiding guild.
They are decent raiders, not the top raiding guild but a strong one still and our raid leader is good but I find myself on standby alot still.
If the reason is because of my lack of experience with high end raiding or something else ok but how can I fix the problem if they wont tell me that there is a problem?
It's because when you sign up for a raid, you're forgetting to give the raid leader a little baksheesh,
Seriously, the only solution is to attack the problem head-on and talk to raid leader. I was all set to t
How about you, oh others left on standby -- how have you gotten off the kids table?
Got questions? Don't wait! Send them to us at ask AT wowinsider DOT com and your query could be up in lights here next week.
Filed under: Raiding, Ask WoW Insider
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Callandra Mar 7th 2008 9:13AM
Three possible reasons you aren't making the cut: (1)You aren't as good as other raid members. (2) Raider leader doesn't know how good you are. (3) RL doesn't want to offend anyone in the 'core' group so you don't make the cut.
Re: 1&2. Research your class mechanics, min/mix your gear/spec, research the fights you'd be attempting, farm consumables etc.
Re:3 Good luck. There isn't much of a solution besides respec'ing to fill an needed hole. Run heroics, gear up and try to shine.
Almost as important as knowing your class is knowing every OTHER class and their mechanics, abilities, stregnths etc. The best players in WoW are well versed in all classes and understand what their limitations are.
guesswho? Mar 7th 2008 9:22AM
just /gquit imo. there are way too many guilds out there to be sitting on the bench hoping for the best. especially now with all the attunements being lifted.
Orin Mar 7th 2008 9:27AM
#1 thing to avoid, and this is coming from a raid guild officer who deals with it all the time. DO NOT bitch and moan to the officers about how you don't like being on standby. All it will do is make them angry. Sure, they want to rotate people in and out so everyone gets to raid, but it's a lot more work than you think to try to balance the schedules of everyone in the guild.
If you want out of standby, work with the people in your class that you would normally rotate with. Work out a schedule to figure out who can reliably raid on each of the guild's main raid nights. If you all keep track of who needs an upgrade from each boss, who has the most dkp, who has the most time in the raid each week, etc. Then as a class you rotate eachother in and out of the raids without making life hard on the officers and raid leader(s) who are busy dealing with other issues.
metallikop Mar 7th 2008 9:44AM
I've been reading this site for quite a while, and this is the poorest article I've seen in weeks. Uninformative and the writing is horrible.
Zali Mar 7th 2008 10:05AM
I've been reading this site a long time as well, and you have got to be the biggest jackass I've ever seen post on this site. Nothing useful to say, nothing constructive, and you have added nothing to the discussion except a level of immaturity normally associated with the second grade.
I believe that most of the discussion on todays Breakfast Topic re: what = a bad player, is centered around people like you. People who bring nothing to the table except a bad attitude and a laundry list of QQ, such as "U all sux" and the ever popular, "Am I the only 1 who knows how to play this game?"
Get a life.
This is a topic to start a discussion. Obviously you are just a discussion board newbtard.
There, now that was well writen and informative. I hope you learned something.
wyrd Mar 7th 2008 5:16PM
Not to disagree on the comment about him being a jackass, but calling him the bigest jackass is a bold statement with some of the trolls who like to lurk on this site.
metallikop Mar 12th 2008 10:15AM
"How about you, oh others left on standby -- how have you gotten off the kids table?"
This sentence makes no sense.
"Seriously, the only solution is to attack the problem head-on and talk to raid leader."
"raid leader" should be capitalized or use 'a' or 'the' before to detonate that raid leader is not a proper noun.
"Marcie has answered the question better than I could."
Poor, little, reference to who Marcie is, or why she/he is more knowledgeable.
Why even write this article in the first place if you're going to say that you don't know, then tease up a story on your own site? Granted, I understand the necessity to make visitors aware of the better content on the site, but teasing up good article with a poor one doesn't exactly do it justice.
Also, I'm no message board newbtard or whatever you called me. I was in a rush and didn't feel like going in to full details. I'm not trying to play a grammar Nazi but this article was rather atrocious.
Tolrye Mar 7th 2008 9:47AM
In general i agree with #2.
If your leader isn't telling you what the problem is, go somewhere with a competent leader.
A good leader will get you into rotation just so you can know the fights, having bad back-up is worse than having no back-up, your leader should know this.
I mean of course there are things you should do, check your character against IMBA for a 'feel' of where you should be. Check out class forums, see if you are doing anything really whacked. Ask yourself "can I navigate an elevator w/o dying?", "am I trying to Sap undead?", what I mean to say is, if youa ren't completely off your nut, this sounds like a leadership problem.
Toetar Mar 7th 2008 9:49AM
The reason the poster was on backup is that he just joined. No matter how good you are there are other people that have been in guild longer. Unless the main raider you would replace just stops showing up or wipes the raid ever week your going to stay on backup. If you get into a raiding guild that far into ssc/tk or higher your going to be backup. Even if you were in a better guild and have better gear than everybody else your going to stay on backup until somebody quits playing the game or you get to fill in when they can't make it. Don't join a guild unless you are going to get a raiding spot or you are going to be next in line. Next in line is not bad people qiut playing all the time. There will always be somebody that gets a new job or has a kid or gets married or has a schedule change or starts doing bad in school and has to focus.
Saryel Mar 7th 2008 10:02AM
I'm really curious what class this person plays. If I had to guess I'd say hunter or rogue. Some times there's just too many people playing a certain class, and alot of the time most of them tend to suck so when you find good ones you stick with them.
Angus Mar 7th 2008 10:04AM
My wife and I were in this situation.
We left the guild.
Joinging a guild we thought would be a good match we found it started bleeding out.
So now do we go to another guild? We would look like guild hoppers doing so. Our first guild got taken over by a-holes and as officers we got our ability to fix things stripped so we left in protest. Second guild was amazing. The GM and her husband had to quit WOW. We join the 3rd guild at it was the one where they had their core group and weren't going to let us in.
Sometimes the bigger problem is how do you find a guild that works as advertised? We see raiding guilds all having horrible raid times for us, or really horrible people (1st guild a holes moved on after they had gotten their kara gear with that guild, making it so the guild wouldn't be able to make 25mans).
If this person is in a similar situation a new server is about all you can look at.
guesswho? Mar 7th 2008 11:16AM
TBH nobody cares about guild hoppers. If they did there wouldn't be 100 new guilds (at least on alliance side) spamming trade channel daily for recruitment.
In fact it being in a guild us no longer required as you can solo your way to epics or arena with a few friends and now you are on par with top raid gear.
It is simple supply vs demand. Raiders are in short supply and high demand. If you want to be in a raiding guild and can devote the time you won't be backup for long.
guesswho? Mar 7th 2008 11:16AM
TBH nobody cares about guild hoppers. If they did there wouldn't be 100 new guilds (at least on alliance side) spamming trade channel daily for recruitment.
In fact it being in a guild us no longer required as you can solo your way to epics or arena with a few friends and now you are on par with top raid gear.
It is simple supply vs demand. Raiders are in short supply and high demand. If you want to be in a raiding guild and can devote the time you won't be backup for long.
Krick Mar 7th 2008 10:05AM
How many raid groups does the guild have? My guild has three at the moment. When I joined the guild, I was the tank that made our third group possible. If there's enough decently geared people on the sidelines, maybe your guild needs to start another group.
...
Krick
http://www.tankadin.com
theRaptor Mar 7th 2008 10:54AM
Hardly anyone starts extra 25 mans. You *need* to run extra kara groups when you are starting out because you need realistically 30 geared raiders to do 25 mans. You don't need fifty raiders for anything.
Chriasas Mar 7th 2008 10:09AM
Depends, if it's a 25 man, perhaps talking to the raid leader about the rotation is the way to go. If it's 10 man, make sure the raid leader is ok with it and look into forming a new 10 man group. Our guild seems to be adding a Karazhan Group a month, and after 2.4, interest will be very high.
Neil T. Mar 7th 2008 10:09AM
The guild I am in at present has a rotation system; everyone who is online at the start of the raid is counted as 'attending' (whether they can raid or are on standby) with priority given to those who have the highest attendance over the past 30 days, and to those who are most in need of loot (the class leaders asked on the guild forums what loot players need from bosses on farm status). It works quite well, and provided you turn up regularly and don't act like a jerk, you get picked often.
Exceptions are fights where shadow res is needed - those that have shadow res gear already get priority.
As for the player in question, best thing to do is politely ask an officer. If there is a reason why the player keeps getting benched then it's best if it's out in the open. Part of the reason I left a previous guild was because I kept getting benched - the reason was that my gear wasn't good enough but no-one bothered to tell me this until I said I was leaving.
Salty Mar 7th 2008 11:19AM
The big one is the chicken and the egg. Many people have complained that they can't get into our raids because they don't have the gear or they don't know the fights. But how can they get the gear if they don't get to raid, and how can they know the fights if they've never been?
Usually their frustration stops at the expression of audacity and think the ball is in the officer's court to answer. But the solution is spammed all over the application, the raid forums, the policies and rules, guild chat, personal tells. Frankly, if you can't answer "what do you do with an arcane orb?" "what do you do with a flame patch?" "what do you do when Thaladred sets his gaze on you?" "what do you do when you get wrath?" my raid leader really does not want to invite you, especially because the answer to every single question is two words: "run away!"
We've been through our learning experiences and expect new players to put in the minimal effort to catch up. Please DEVOUR the WoWiki article for every boss we go against, study for it like it was your Cisco/Microsoft certification, watch every video on the first page of search results on youtube then post some discussion on the forum so everybody knows you've done your reading. Nobody knows you've done it unless you communicate it.
Complaining that your gear is too low is just a cop-out. Lots of relatively undergeared folks could get into our raids and perform well with only best-in-class instance-drop blues and the odd crafted piece. This is the easiest thing to fix with the time you spend complaining on the forums or waiting outside the 25-man instance. Many of the raiders have gone through that, and are looking at your armory profile saying "why doesn't he just run (blank) for (blank piece)?" If you're a hunter, upgrade that Terokk's Quill to a Sonic Spear, farm BM for the Hourglass. Download Atlas Loot Enhanced and stalk some pieces. Open up wowhead and go to Items -> Armor -> Mail then use the filter for gear with agility on it. Find a nice upgrade, find out where it drops and hit LFG.
Your guild is not strictly obligated to run you through instances - though they may - it's your responsibility to make sure you're raid-viable, waiting for your guild to do that for you only shows the leech mentality the raid leader is using as a criteria for NOT bringing you.
Have a personality, be vocal, communicate. If we don't know you're there, why would we ever bring you to a raid? Almost every time, a warm body who isn't too shy to use voice comm, participate in forum discussions and chat specs and fights is going to get a spot eventually regardless of their gear. Because communication is the biggest barrier to progression. If you're lowest on the damage charts or the weakest healer or tank and haven't said a word in chat or vent, you'll probably be replaced after 1 or 2 attempts. But if you're discussing the problems on vent and dropping indicators that you're aware of the fight mechanics, you're a person we can expect to learn and develop.
Another big thing about raid guilds is feeling them out. A lot of it has to do with the maturity of the raid group (not by player age, but how long have they been running together?) as well as the frequency of hours. If you come across a very tight guild with a lot of very long-term players and short hours, it will be very difficult to get a raid spot.
When a tight-nit guild is working along a progression path with few hours, they need to maximize learning time and minimize trivial bosses. That means 1-shot, one-night kills on farm bosses and the rest of the week dedicated to learning. On 1-shot nights you need to bring in your best players since a wipe or ongoing problems will set back your learning time, and on learning nights you need to bring your most consistent players because you want them to have the experience and you want your subsequent learning nights to have continuity and incremental progress.
In guilds with a larger raid base and more frequent hours, rotations are more plausible, gearing up new raiders is less stressful, there is plenty of time to revisit farm bosses. However, learning new fights may be tougher because you will tend to have to re-learn fights at least twice so incremental progress is more difficult to sustain because of fluid raid compositions. Either way, with raiding, more hours is generally better for players. But that schedule or philosophy isn't for everyone and there's plenty of argument in both directions.
Mirina Mar 7th 2008 11:42AM
IMO, the /gquit answer was pretty spot on. When people guild up with us, we're usually pretty upfront (I think anyway). If you're a friend of a guildie, and we have no use for your class in our progression, you are told right at the beginning that there will be no raid slot for you, so don't ask. If you are fine with wearing our tag and not getting into raids (unless we are short raiders--doesn't happen often), then you can stay. Otherwise, we recommend that you look elsewhere for another guild.
We have 1 core team--it's roughly 30 people, but it's the group that raids. To get into that group, you have to shine. We've guilded people to fill roles, and they've under-performed. We remove them from raids, tell them why they are not raiding, and we go on the hunt for other players. We do not have a 2nd or 3rd string group. Either you're good enough to make the core team, or you don't raid.
If the guild does not have secondary raids running, and there's no chance you'll be able to swap out with your class guildies, the best bet is to move on, and look for a guild that can put you to use in their raid team.
A Man In Black Mar 8th 2008 5:12AM
Be honest and straightforward about why you've been changing guilds lately.
"We left our first guild because it came under new leadership, which turned out to be a bad fit for us. We left the second as it disbanded, and our current/most recent guild is a good bunch, but we just don't particularly feel needed there."