For Officers and Guild Members Alike - How we raid

For the past few weeks, I've been growing increasingly frustrated with our raiding. It is not because we haven't downed bosses in SSC or cleared ZA, but because of how we have been spending our time (or mis-spending it) and the lack of a unified push by the guild. Allow me to put all of you in my shoes for a moment to better help your understanding of my discontent. (Yes this is going to be somewhat of a stream of consciousness funny but to the point rant)

A typical raid means:
I schedule a 25 man raid 1-2 weeks in advance with group calendar. Right off the bat, less than half the 25 man raid will even bother to sign up for the raid. Do NOT be afraid of the -1 dkp for not showing up. It's not there to penalize people who have legitimate reasons for not coming to raids, it's there to keep people from universally signing up for everything in an attempt to unfairly secure the "option" of showing up to whatever raids they chose. I rarely enforce that rule as no one has abused it. I digress.

I log in before or at the start of raid invites. After profuse advertising and pleading with guild members to join the raid, I have constant raid dropping to do a quest or get a portal or for a multitude of other reasons. Members decide not to accept summons and it takes entirely too long to even get to the instance. Long after "first pull" people are still milling around Orgrimmar and Shattrath doing God knows what. Even after everyone seemingly is at the instance, someone always needs to port back because they forgot their reagents, pots, PvE gear, a trinket, a change of underwear or whatever else they can think of. One by one a third of the raid needs to port back, take 10 minutes to get what they need and return to the raid only to have another player need to port back. By now I finally have everyone at the instance and in the raid group, and I can see we're missing a few more players. Even though we're at 21 players, I have made up my mind that we will start pulling at 22 or 23 people, but after assessing the guild roster it is evident not enough people have logged in.

Through much pleading and searching, I locate a few decent PuGs after a few minutes only to find that several raid members decided that it was time to go AFK because we weren't doing anything... Since a few went AFK and we're waiting for them anyway, a cascade of guild members is one by one pulled away from their computer, lured by the promise of better things than loot; things like food, drinks, showers, sex, beating children, and other glorious earthly desires. After yet another half hour of this nonsense, everyone returns only to bumble their way through buff assignments.

Somehow even though I build the raid with 4 paladins in it, I only have Wisdom which has been put on my by 4 different players. I run down the groups, using arcane brilliance which will buff EVERYONE in a group within like a 100 yard radius of me with a 1 hour buff. Yet even after doing this for each group there are still 3 or 4 people scolding me because they were off checking out a neat bug that ran under a rock in the very back corner of the instance gateway and didn't receive their buff. I wait another 5 minutes and then offer the idea of beginning pulls, only to be met with fierce resistance by some paladin who finally decided it was time to offer their services in way of buffs to the raid despite the fact that we've been buffing for the past 10 minutes. This leads me to wonder if perhaps he too found a really really neat bug under a rock somewhere in the gateway to the instance. Once again I ask if we can pull, and now the reply is something to the effect of, "Wait I've been asking who I'm supposed to be tanking/healing for the past 10 minutes and no one has told me!"

This means either someone didn't assign this poor soul to a target, or the poor soul also found a really really REALLY neat bug under a rock by the huge pillar at the start of the instance that was so incredibly fascinating that he just simply couldn't devote the cognitive attention to the tanking/healing officer to receive who they were supposed to be tanking/healing.

At LAST we can finally commence pulling the trash mobs after only the smallest setback of TWO HOURS! "Don't worry Rivalen." I tell myself, "At least you're about to see some epic loot." We hack and slash and don't watch omen and die to stupid stuff and are still confused about who's healing who. We dot CC'd targets and talk back to raid leaders and fall off the pathway into water or fire or whatever. Officers in the raid who actually have a job to do are hanging out with one hand on the mouse and the other down their pants while officers who shouldn't be doing anything but tanking/healing/DPSing are chatting up vent and giving out conflicting orders. By the time we get to the boss, we're in for another 30-60 minutes of down time because we need to explain how the boss fight will go. And let me tell you, there must be a LOT of insects in the world because everyone has their head under a rock while the explanation is going on so that they are forced to ask questions about what was already covered thus doubling the amount of time it takes to explain the fight. Not only that, but some characters receive such fierce blows to the head that their owners suffer amnesia and forget what they are supposed to do for the second attempt thus forcing the raid leader to re-explain large portions of the fight each time we attempt the boss.

I'm sure by now you must be frustrated with reading this. I live this. My point is please prepare for the raid, please be ready to go and on-time, please listen to the raid leaders, please do not try to take over the raid if you are not the raid leader or designated to a job by the raid leader, please listen to assignments and explanations and please please please stop searching for neat bugs during the raid or I'm going to give all your mothers fleas.