Shaking up the schedule

So last week, we had a slightly tougher time getting a group for raiding than we usually do. We eventually managed, after replacing 4 people that had to leave, to land a somewhat good group. DPS was solid as usual, as were tanks, but we found ourselves running with only 5 healers.

For Lurker this is really no big deal, and we've done him before with essentially 3-4 healers (one of our 4 died early). In doing Leotheras with 5 healers was somewhat of a feat, IMO, and I was really impressed with everyone involved. Especially considering the fact it was our second-time-ever killing him.

At the end of killing him though, we found ourselves with about 45 minutes left, and nothing really to do. We though about doing FLK, or Tidewalker, but decided that Tidewalker was too much trash to go directly to, and that FLK was probably too much of a strain for 5 healers, especially when two had never been to him before. What do you choose to do? We only raid three hours on raid nights, since most of our raiders have jobs, and families to appease, so we prefer not to push longer than the alotted time, but we knew that everyone was kind of left wanting.

Luckily, we were prepared. As a GM, I do my best to constantly be prepared for such occurances. Have an backburner item, or a funtivity stored up. That way, on those odd nights, you have something to do.

For us, it turned out to be a huge success. We gave old Doomlord Kazzak a shot. We all flew over there, and tried to prep up right in front of him...well, he seems to get a larger aggro radius when there's a large group of people there. We pulled him over and over, it was pretty funny. We got three solid cracks at him, and even got him down to about 25-30%. It truely was a load of fun. It took many people in the guild by surprise that we were going to do it, and everyone was really excited to try a new boss.

That's not the best part though! After we did that a few times, naturally we attracted some alliance attention. Due to the unfortunate nature of them trying to screw us up, we decided to get even. We raided honor hold. First things first..we killed the 5 Alliance that were camping some of our faction near Spinebreaker. It was truely hilarious to see the panic in them as horde after horde landed, and started attacking them. After this we went in and cleaned the town's clock for about an hour. Everyone stayed late, and the laughing and joking on vent, was truly great.

So much fun to be had, so little time. We have some more fun ideas stored up for our guild (and maybe even some others) that we intend to unleash when the time is right.

We learned a valuable lesson though.. Sometimes you need to break it up. Sometimes, even in a casual guild, raiding can grow tiresome. We have no attendance rules, and take many different people each week, but we continue to succeed Sometimes its not enough, though. If you're a GM, and haven't implemented some sort of fun raiding time, you might want to look into it. The team building, and just plain fun of it really has a way of bringing a group together.

Here are some ideas I CAN tell you about.

-Level 1 race across a zone we have no business being in at that level (gold prizes)
-Random draw 2v2, or 3v3 guild tourney in the arenas. (prizes)
-Random Alli town raids (just for fun)

More ideas are to come as we brainstorm. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!