The following section touches on a number of guild areas that may or may not apply to the
style of guild you are setting up. These are drawn on past experiences running The
Syndicate, which has been around, and one of the lead gaming guilds since 1996. They
are also drawn from lessons learned watching thousands of other guilds rise, and fall,
during our lifetime. Some of these points are definitely debatable and you might be better
served using them as lessons learned or starting points to think about how you wish to run
your guild. There are some right and wrong answers for running a guild but there is also a
large grey area that is influenced by you personally, as guildmaster and the goals you
wish the guild to achieve and the types of people you recruit.
4.1. Setting Up A Raiding Guild
In World of Warcraft, a “raid” is a collection of up to 8 groups of 5 members per group (i.e.
40 people max). Some raid targets require less. Some raid targets will be unwinnable
even with 40 people until you learn the tactics or get the necessary type of gear or both.
A raiding guild for WoW is not quite the same as it was in Everquest, where the concept of
raiding was born. The Everquest designers designed encounters, up through the Planes
of Power expansion, which required increasingly large numbers of players to win them.
Post Planes of Power they began to scale back and limit encounters to a much more sane
number of players. World of Warcraft was in its design and coding phases during the
height of the ‘massive’ raid size push in Everquest. It was going into beta right as there
was a massive backlash against EQ by the players and the Blizzard team clearly saw that
occur and took that into account when designing their raid content. They took the
approach of limiting the number of people to a reasonable size and they chose 40. They,
in turn, balanced all encounters (assuming you know the tactic to defeat the monster and
have the necessary basic gear for that fight) for 35 people. And once you have the tactics
down and pretty good gear, 30 people or less should be possible.
4.1.1. Recruiting Members for a Raiding Guild
So the first aspect of a raiding guild is having the people to raid. A typical rule of thumb is
that at peak time, you will have 50% (or less) of your core raiders available to you unless
you mandate that they be online. So if you need 40 people to raid, you will either need to
preschedule your raids so people know to be online or you will need to recruit 80 to 100

raid capable members. There are several schools of thought in that arena. The first is
that you are better served having 40 or 50 raid people both to limit the number of
members who get left out and to ensure that each one knows their role and perform it
well. The price for this route is possibly not having enough people to raid and each
person is more important so if your key tank or healers can’t make a raid, you could have
35+ other people waiting around doing nothing. The second is that in order to ensure you
do have enough people to raid you really need the higher numbers of members
understanding that you may sacrifice some quality to get size. You certainly don’t have to
sacrifice quality for size but in order to avoid the quality sacrifice you have to invest time to
find the right people. So there is a price to pay whichever route you chose and you simply
need to pick the one with the price you are willing to pay.
4.1.2. Raiding Guild Structure
The first rule of thumb when picking a structure for your guild is picking one that works for
you and your members. But a structure, of some sort, is necessary. Showing up with 40
people to raid with no plan and no clear person in charge is a recipe for disaster. In
addition, having too many chiefs trying to lead the group can also cause issues.
Since raid size is limited to 40 people, anywhere from 1 to 3 people is probably a good
number of leaders to have for a given raid. You don’t need 5 or 10 people to coordinate
the activities of 40 or less raiders. If you do then your raiders are not paying enough
attention and don’t know the basics of raiding to begin with.
A suggested structure would be to have a group of Raid Commanders within your guild.
Those people are familiar with the tactics of the different raids and are capable of
organising 40 people into a cohesive raiding force. Those people need to have patience,
since mistakes will happen. They need to be able to clearly communicate and not just
assume everyone knows the tactics or goals. And they need to understand all of the
classes on the raid and how to deploy them for the best chance of success.
In addition to the raid leaders themselves, there are some other raid roles you may wish in
your guild. While these are not necessarily ‘lead’ roles they can add value to have them in
your structure.

Main Tank: The main tank is the person in charge of getting aggro on the mob and holding
it. Everyone keys off them and assists them for their target. Assigning off tanks/crowd
control tanks to handle any adds is a good idea as well. Your main tank is likely to be a
defensive specialized warrior with as high of AC, HP and resists as they can get. The
more they have then the easier time keeping them alive you will have.
Main Assist: The main assist is the person your members must all assist to get their
target. This person is often not the same as the main tank since the tanks may need to
change targets, midfight, to save the healers. A hunter can do a pretty good job in this
role as they can also mark the target. If a hunter is not your main tank you may wish to
assign a hunter to mark the target once they assist the MA. Its hard to miss a giant
blinking red arrow. The MA is important since attacking a Crowd Controlled (CC) mob will
result in breaking the CC (sheep form… banished etc..)
Main Looter: You definitely need to have a loot policy of some sort in your guild. WoW is
setup with a random rolling method of loot. One typical way to handle raid loot is to use
the Main Looter strategy. The raid sets one person to be the main looter. That person is
the only one that the game allows to loot all corpses. They loot the misc. items and hold
anything that is not “bind on equip”. Those items get rolled on by your members using
whatever rules you setup. At the end of the raid, the main looter calls out all items they
are holding and everyone present rolls on them. This allows you to move faster and not
stop every minute to roll on loot. It also lets people see the sum total of items you collect
before they decide to roll on items so that they don’t take a lesser upgrade if a better one
is available later on.
Healer Lead: Having a lead healer can be an asset. There are encounters where you will
want to do more than just spam heals at the main tank. You may wish to have a healing
rotation of healers firing one after the other to chain heal. You may wish to have waves of
healers that move in and out as mana allows. Whatever the strategy you use, having a
healer lead at the raid, to coordinate the correct healing, will relieve the raid lead of that
responsibility.
Pull Team: Good pulling can make or break a raid. Pullers who bring too many mobs can
kill a raid. Pullers who pull to slow can kill a raid or drag it on far longer than it should go.
Chose your pullers with care and you may wish to have a semi-permanent pull team that

learns the dungeons… learns how to work with the different Main Tanks… learns the
speed their raid can handle incoming mobs… learns to communicate with the Off Tanks to
handle adds… and that can ensure they don’t kill your raid repeatedly with bad pulls.
Practice does make perfect when it comes to pulling so don’t just send anyone out to pull.
4.1.3. Raid Tactics
Blizzard has repeatedly said that he secret to winning WoW raids is in the tactics. You
cannot "zerg” them by throwing warm bodies at a target until it is dead. Not all encounters
are straightforward ones where the main tank gains aggro and the healers heal them and
everyone else wails on the monster while it stands there blindly hitting the main tank. The
encounters are varied and some are complex. So raid tactics are key.
Blizzard has also said it is likely you will die your first time or first several times until you
learn the tricks of the encounter and master the tactics. Once you know the tactics they
have also said that you should be able to win the fight with less than the max of 40 people
that you can bring.
So raiding is all about the tactics. Pay attention. When do the adds spawn? Does the
mob do different things at different health percentages? Are certain resistances needed?
Where should you position your tank? Where do you position the raid? Even if you lose
the fight, if you learn something then its not a waste of an effort. If you repeatedly rush in
and die and learn nothing, then don’t even bother raiding. Learn, especially from your
defeats and refine your tactics as you go. Tactics are the key.
Communications
Communications for a raiding guild are critical. This is a natural extension of tactics being
the key to success since if your guild doesn’t know the tactics, it isn’t relevant if the raid
leader is an expert in them. You need to pick raid leaders who can clearly communicate.
You shouldn’t expect your members to magically know their role in a raid tactic until you
have told them or shown them. There can sometimes be a fair amount of elitism among
the top end raiders where they assume that since they know something, everyone else
must know it else they are stupid n00bs who can’t raid. In reality, you will have a lot of
very skilled people in your guild that haven’t yet learned or fought an encounter. They will
know how to play their classes well and how to work within a raid well, but don’t yet know

their classes specific role for the new raid you are about to embark upon. Communicate
clearly and effectively to them and you will save yourself many headaches.
You should probably setup a guild posting forum on the web somewhere. Use that to
communicate raid dates/times as well as raid tactics. Use that for people to ask questions
about their role and encourage open discussion. Discourage people belittling members
for asking questions and foster an atmosphere where people like to ask questions and
learn. It's far better for them to learn a tactic on your posting forum before the raid than
during the raid when they can screw it up and end up killing everyone.
Ensure, during your raids, that your raid leaders are clearly communicating what is going
on. Sometimes your leaders may get discussing something in officer chat or in tells and
forget there are 35+ other people standing around not hearing anything and wondering
what is going on. You need to keep them informed not only so they can be successful at
the raid but also so they aren’t bored. If your raids are boring engagements where most
members stand around in silence for 90% of the time punctuated by short intense battles,
you will soon fine people going to other guilds where the overall raid experience is more
entertaining.
4.1.4. Do Other Guilds Matter To You?
No, they should not matter. WoW is an MMORPG but the high end content is almost all
instanced. That means you exist basically within your own world playing your own high
end game and what other guilds do has no bearing on you and your guild unless you let it.
You shouldn’t feel like you have to “keep up” with other guilds. Progress at your own
pace. Kill the mobs you wish to kill. Learn the encounters and have fun doing it. A good
amount of the fun of gaming is learning how to overcome the puzzles and challenges. If
you feel like it is a footrace between you and other guilds then you will lose site of the
“fun” aspect and the game will become all about getting to see certain pixels before
someone else. Remember this is gaming and it is completely irrelevant how much or how
little another guild achieves. They cannot take your kills. They cannot prevent you from
killing something. They cannot slow your progress. They cannot train you. They cannot
block your progress by hogging a key spawn. It is a game of instanced high end content.
Find the pace that suits your guild’s style and don’t waste any time or energy worrying
about other guilds.