When the going gets tough...

So, EQ is now 7/14 for h25m.  This week, fairly positive we'll bump that up to at least 8, maybe 9 or 10.

But, I need to back track.

Why is Equilibrium doing this?

I hope most of my raiders read my blog, or at least the few that do, can spread this to everyone else.  Blizzard has decided to completely change the face of raiding for progression teams.  Most of us should know by now that, soon, ten man raiding will be a permanent thing of the past.  Also, twenty five man raiding will be a thing of the past as well.  It is all changing to twenty man.  There isn't anything anyone can do about it.  Blizzard has spoken, so it shall be done.  All we can do is prepare.

And that is what EQ is doing, preparing.  That means we stopped ten man progression completely on both the ten man teams.  It means we shoved everyone into twenty five man progression.  We are doing that so we are prepared for the next expansion (yes, even though it may be well into 6-9 months from now since Blizz posted a fall release date, I'll elaborate more on that later).

So we prepare by being used to twenty five man raiding, since that is going to be the closest to what twenty man mythic raiding will be like.  It means we are testing out how well we use loot systems like EPGP which we've decided to go to, at least for now.  It means we know some people may not want to do twenty five man raiding.

If you don't want to do twenty five man raiding, be honest with yourself.  You won't want to do twenty man raiding.  I get it that some people only like ten man raiding.  I totally understand.  I used to raid twenty five's back in wrath, for a while.  I didn't like it.  I went back to ten man in Cata and stayed that from then on.  Until now.  Because if I want to progression raid, I have to be in a larger group.

So yeah, if you hate large scale size raiding, you won't want to do mythic raiding when 6.0 starts.  And that's ok.  They will have flex systems for normal and heroic raiding where people can do whatever size from ten to twenty five, and those people can do that content.

But if you want to do progression, this is the new future.  And we don't want to be stuck not knowing the ins and outs once it goes live like a lot of other guilds will be.  We don't want to be one of the teams that is frantically trying to recruit more people, or somehow merge with another guild to be able to do mythic raiding.  No, we want to come right out at the start and kill bosses.  Continue to lead.

You can't do that if you are playing catch up.  You can't do that if you are trailing everyone else.  It is a different kind of war.  We have to approach it differently.  This is the only way to prepare.  We need to find out, sooner rather than later, who's actually going to be willing to stay in the new format.  Who's computers won't even be able handle a larger raid size.  Who's willing to adapt to a little different loot format.  All necessary changes that we have decided to make now instead of when it could be too late.  Maybe too late isn't the right way to say it.  When others have already gotten past this point and are just cleaning out boss after boss.



Now...Blizzard calling a fall release.  Yeah, that's a lot of time.  Sure, I'm kind of disappointed at that.  I wanted a summer release honestly.  But this gives us time to really develop a large team really well.  It also gives us time to set up other things, like normal mode teams, ten and twenty five possible.  It gives us a lot more time to make sure we are ready, instead of a very short amount of time.

Could there be burn out though?  Yeah, but there is always the problem of burn out.  It could happen at the very start of a tier/expansion, just as easily at the end of one.  So that's really not a particular problem of a long release date.  It's always a problem, which is why large teams are almost always recruiting.  I sure as hell hope it's at the start of fall, and not the end of it, but ultimately Blizzard is going to do what Blizzard wants to do.

So everyone always has choices, stay with a team, move to another team, take a break, quit all together.  This is going to be the time for a lot of those choices to take place, and we're just giving ourselves as much time as we can to get through those choices and be better prepared for when WoD goes live.  Because that's the next goal.  Sure, we want to clear heroic SoO, but WoD is the real goal.  Being prepared for that.  SoO gets us prepared for that, so we have to do all we can.  Hopefully, each and every person in EQ comes along for the ride!