Are you prepared?

Are you prepared? How much money do you put into raiding, is all your gear enchanted, do you carry consumables, have enough cash to repair all your armor four times over?

Sadly, not everyone who frequently raids does.

In most every raid group you'll have the extreme addicts and farmers, and people who don't bother to prepare and expect the guild bank to sort them out. Lame, i know. But not everyone can spend an equal amount of time playing a game. Perhaps they are insanely good healers, or amazing DPS, invaluable tanks or whatever, you name it. The fact remains, you'll always have some people in your raid that are more willing to put an effort into it than others.

Some guilds crack down on such slacking, while others are less caring and simply look at the end result even if this means having to use guild bank funds to keep going.


The extreme

* 3-20k gold in the bank
* Online 15-30 minutes before the raid, and all weekend.
* Knowns which items he needs, and will have enchants and gems ready for when they drop.
* Buffs raid in 20 seconds, knows which buff you need, and will be ready before you ask.
* Read boss strategies before coming to the raid, has all the needed addons and will gladly tell you what went wrong.
* Plenty of reagents, food buffs, potions etc to go all night long.
* Farms in the weekend or before raids for materials and gold.


The slackers

* ~50 gold in the bank
* Online several minutes after the raid was "supposed" to start, and usually leaves early.
* Will roll on anything that looks like an upgrade, or sidegrade just because he can.
* Buffs? Right, let's drink water first. Could somebody make a table?
* Waits for Raid Leader to explain tactics, uses addons over a month old, and wait to be rezzed by somebody else rather than run back after a wipe.
* Generally doesn't carry food buffs, uses potions only when mana is completely empty, doesn't carry more than a few reagents and if others can buff, why should he?
* Frequently asks for guild bank donations to pay his repairs, and usually isn't seen farming. You suspect he buys gold from ebay or his little brother.


Familiar?

Any of this sound familiar? I'm sure it will.
So, how much effort do you put into raiding? Are you more extreme, or more of a slacker?

Our guild has killed Archimonde and the Reliquary of Souls this week. This means indeed, that we can now get to Mother (Check out those melons) Shahraz. For the past month we've been telling people to start farming Primal Shadow, Primal Life, metal, cloth, leather and whatever to make their resistance gear sets.

We managed to fill a raid with 25 people, among which 10 healers. Everyone with ~313 Buffed shadow resistance. Only 1-2 people less. We got her down to 17 or 19% on the last attempt of the evening. She won't be long, and the thread on our forum about her is blooming with ideas how to improve the strategies we tried last night.

But still, 5 out of the 33 people that we expected to be available that night didn't have even a single Primal Shadow yet... Half the raid didn't have their new Shadow Gear enchanted yet when we actually started the fight. Obviously they were left outside, with the intention that these are fixed before the next raid. Even something as simple as Boar's speed can help trivialize the fight. When two players are running away from each other at 8% increased speed, that means their relative speed is 16% faster and are much more likely to survive a fatal attraction.

Good preparation makes half the work, but there will always be some people that wait until the very last minute to finish up. How's your guild doing?