After finishing Cataclysm as the #1 two-night guild in the U.S. and one of the top 5 in the world, we’ve decided to start our second raid group. Our success in Cataclysm has given us an incredible ability to recruit–we’re confident we can fill Group 2 with players just as skilled and friendly as those in our first group.
This is the time to get into one of the most unique guilds in the country. You can find out more information about the new group by clicking the application button on the menu above or click here.
WoW Insider interviewed Full Spectrum’s GM today after the incredible success of our 2-night group. The interviewer asked Oatz a series of questions to determine why Full Spectrum is “the shape of guilds to come.” You can read the interview here:
WoW Insider is Azeroth’s largest blog and information site, covering the latest news, analysis and opinion from all around the World of Warcraft.
We’re honored to be featured on one of the most popular Warcraft sites around. Grats to all our members on helping make the guild so succesful. Here’s an excerpt of the interview:
WoW Insider: It sounds as if you’ve developed a highly tuned recruitment process. What specifics do you look at in potential and new recruits?
Oatz: I’ve always thought that recruitment is the most important aspect of being a GM. Everything is dependent on it. A bad recruitment decision can negatively impact the guild for months.
While we haven’t had any openings for since November, what I look for in an application is someone that fits the guild in three overall categories: personality, skill, and desire for a light schedule. All three are crucial — a new recruit has to raid at the same or better skill level as everyone else, exhibit a laid-back, friendly, and mature personality that the rest of us share, and specifically want to raid no more than two nights per week.
So often I’ve turned down an application that didn’t quite fit in one of those categories. We’ve had applicants with stellar raiding experience that I suspected were only interested in us due to our progress, not our schedule. Or, we’ve had applicants that, while probably great players, were used to the more adult-style humor that doesn’t really exist in our guild. Most guilds would have taken these players in — we chose not to. It’s critical that everyone that joins shares the desire to limit raiding to two nights per week.
Other than that, often I go off my gut feeling whether someone is going to work out. There’s no set requirements. For example, I accepted our current warrior even though he had no heroic experience at all because, after talking to him, I just had a feeling that he’d be a great player. Perhaps it takes time to develop that intuition.
And that’s a wrap! We finished Cataclysm as the #1 two-night guild in the U.S. We’re also ranked #23 for 10-man and #62 in the U.S. overall.
Full Spectrum started a few weeks before Cataclysm and we’ve come a long way since. And we’ve always kept our core principles of a light raiding schedule and a friendly, mature atmosphere. We’ve shown that hardcore, progression raiding on a casual schedule is achievable. Don’t raid 14 hours per week when you can do the same in half the time!
We killed heroic Spine in just 40 attempts. Spine for us was our first real challenge of the tier. Our initial problems were as follows:
We had no mages.
We had no warrior or pally tanks.
Most guild solved these problems by making their raiders bring in alts. After some discussion, we decided not to do that. It just isn’t fun to have to play a character that isn’t you main just to beat the boss. The whole class-stacking that many of our peers were doing was just a little too much for us. Yes, that means we had to delay our kill, but we kept our integrity in place.
Then the Spine tendon nerf came. We still didn’t have any mages, but we were able to get each tendon in 2 lifts.
The other difficult aspect of the fight was not having a block tank for the bloods. The 5% nerf to blood damage made a small, but helpful effect on our tanks survivability. Our bear tank did a good job, though, even ranking #1 for druid tanks on DPS.
