As you’re most likely aware, this guild has one all important rule: Don’t be a dick. While I feel this should be enough to cover just about everything, I decided to lay down some guidelines to being a successful raider in Winterhearted. Mainly this is going to cover what I take into consideration when sending out the final invites on raid night.

1. Calendar

Those who accept on the calendar invite will be given higher precedence over those that mark themselves as tentative or don’t bother to respond at all. I generally put invites out thursday night for the next week, it’s not that difficult to respond. It literally takes 2 clicks of your mouse.

2. Class mix

Pretty self-explanatory. A diverse mix of classes is still the ideal, both for loot and for buff coverage.

3. Rank

Yes, rank does matter. As rank is not handed out without consideration, it should be a consideration when putting a group together. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you aren’t at raider rank you won’t go, as class mix is still important, and if I don’t let members and initiates prove themselves, it defeats the whole purpose of having ranks in the first place. To not rotate them out once in a while is just as unfair as not taking rank into consideration in the first place.

4. Skill

If you aren’t willing to take the time to learn your class, you don’t belong in my raid. Not only are there multitudes of resources available to help you (elitistjerks.com for one), but there’s a whole guild full of people willing to help you out as much as possible. I know that mistakes can be made once in a while, but consistently missing interrupts and being below the tanks in DPS are not mistakes. As Oscar Wilde said, “Once is unfortunate, twice is careless.”

5. Gear

I’m well aware that some gear is just not obtainable without raiding, so to hold someone out due to that would be a dick move. So I’m not talking about that gear; I’m not even just talking about rep and crafted gear, though I am talking about that a little bit. What I’m more talking about are gear choices: does what you’re wearing, how you have it gemmed, and how you have it enchanted show an understanding of how your class is geared. Are you for some reason wearing PvP gear, and if so, why? If you need help with the aforementioned rep or crafted gear, let us know. We have plenty of people willing to run dungeons to help you get your rep up, as well as the crafters to make you gear. Even if you don’t have the time to get fully rep and craft geared, at least show that you’re making an effort.

6. Attitude

This is a pretty big one. I’d love to just sum this up with “Don’t be a dick” again, but I should probably get a bit deeper into this. A lot of these fights are new for most of the members of this guild, and this will be especially true once 4.2 hits. Wipes are going to happen and patience may run thin. Some people need a little more time to learn the encounters than others, and having a negative attitude will just make this take longer.

Basically, helpful criticism sounds like this: “Maybe if you /setfocus on the boss and make a focus macro, you would have an easier time with those interrupts. Do you want to give that a try?”

It does NOT sound like this: “Why do you fail so much at interrupting? We’ve been fighting this boss for an hour, can you not press a button when you see the cast bar? Is it really hard, or are you just an idiot?”

9 times out of 10, I’d rather take someone with a positive attitude over a funsucker that makes what should be a fun game into a miserable experience.

tl;dr version: you can be an elite player without being an elitist asshole. You are not a special snowflake, and I have zero problems replacing you if you’re just bringing everyone down.