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Here we are with another guild spotlight. This time we’ll be focusing on <Vodka>. This is one of the more popular guilds on the US cutting edge raiding scene. Some issues that have been touched upon by Vodka were also spoken about with <Ascent>, which brings to light that these are common issues with the entire community. Resounding notes include but are not limited to the TBC Legendary drops, and Raid Stacking. Cutting edge guilds seem to be plagued in some sense for seeing the drops and getting their just rewards for doing what they do best. We speak with Neurotik (Guild Master), Rydya, Drury, Laynd (rogue with a Thori’dal), and Huggsie. Rydya is the recruitment officer and can be seen on our forums for his daily bump.
Links: Wow Progress, Armory, Home Page, Mannoroth-US Forums, Wow-Jutsu
How long has your guild been raiding together?
Well, vodka has been around raiding since the olden days of WoW. A lot has changed over time - but the one thing that has remained constant is vodka being a competitive raiding guild.
Are there any big accomplishments that really stand out as high points in the history of the guild?
We have a few accomplishments to be quite proud of as a guild. We got the world first kill on the Twin Emperors in AQ40 and a world second kill on Patchwerk in Naxxramas. Aside from those, we have also been one of the top 10 US guilds over the last couple years - we were US 10th to kill Kel'Thuzad, US 5th to kill Illidan, and US 4th to kill Kil'jaeden.
How do you plan to push yourselves further in Wrath of the Lich King?
We want to continue to make improvements on our past accomplishments, which is what we were able to do all throughout the Burning Crusade. With each new instance we finished higher and higher in both the world and US rankings. We expect to see the same results in WotLK and we are fully prepared to push ourselves as much as we have to in order to ensure our success. We will be pushing all of our raiders to level as quickly as possible so that we can begin our journey through the initial raid content. We are raising our expectations for all of our raiders and are prepared to actively recruit people as often as we need to so that we always have a full roster of the best players.
What sets vodka apart from other top guilds?
It’s all effort and we work extremely hard. Whoever works the hardest and wants it the most will come out victorious in the end. Skill combined with lots and lots of effort is what allows a guild to be competitive. A lot of factors go into being a top guild but effort is definitely the most important one.
Are you doing anything differently in the transition to this expansion?
The most important thing for us is that we enter this expansion with enough people on our roster so that we never have to slow down during the initial race through content. One big mistake we made when going into the Burning Crusade was not having enough people to consistently fill our raids during the first few months, which lead to some pretty significant setbacks in the opening raid instances.
What are your raid times when new content is first released?
Our raid schedule when working on new content is very rigorous; we raid as much as we possibly can without sacrificing our real-life obligations such as work or school. During the week we will typically raid from about 7pm - 1am, and on the weekends we usually start as early as 4pm and raid until 2am. The schedule is not set in stone and we often call the raids earlier if there is nothing left to work on or if we need to take some time to analyze what we have learned that night and develop a new strategy. There have also been times where we have gone as late as 4am if we are close to a kill and we feel we can get it that night.
What did you think about the gate system used in Sunwell Plateau?
We thought that it was another example of Blizzard's attempt at slowing down top guilds from clearing the content too quickly and being left with nothing to do after a couple of weeks, and it also allowed some of the less hardcore guilds to have an opportunity to clear the earlier bosses before they were faced with the real challenges that the second half of the instance contained. You could look at the gate system from several different perspectives though - it could have been a way for Blizzard to prevent guilds from wasting their time banging their heads against the next boss when it wasn't really killable until you had farmed the previous bosses for a certain period of time, in which case the whole system could be viewed as a good thing I guess. We still think that the majority of people disliked the way the system was used though, or at least people in the other top guilds around the world.
How do you approach a brand new encounter?
When we first approach a new encounter, we typically just throw ourselves at the boss a few times without any real plan just to see what is going on, which may sound silly, but during each of these attempts we are observing as much as we possibly can and recording as much data as possible so that we can begin analyzing it more thoroughly in order to develop a strategy. Once we have collected some information about the encounter, we can then determine what type of damage output we will be dealing with, which will then answer the question of what type of healing we need to counter it, and then we can move on to things such as positioning, what the best type of DPS is going to be, and what tanks will give us the best results. Once we have all of that figured out, we can begin testing different iterations of our strategy to see where the flaws are and then work on resolving them. Eventually we will have a strategy that will work long enough for us to see if there are different phases to the encounter, and determine whether or not there are any types of enrage timers or anything. Once we have that information, we go back to our original strategy and figure out how to adjust it so that we can deal with anything new that is introduced to the encounter in the later phases. Eventually we end up with a well rounded strategy that we are confident will work for us and then we begin doing reps over and over until the boss is dead.
Do you have any in-house mods you use on new content?
At the moment, no. With everything put on the PTR in advance the timers get put out reasonably quickly. The only time we used our own mod recently was for Kalecgos on the PTR because we wanted timers for portals. Several of us are programmers and if we need mods written we can do it, but the spread of the mod community now is ridiculous in terms of how quickly people get things out.
How much interaction, if any, do you have with other top guilds in developing strategies for brand new encounters?
Our interaction with other top guilds during progression is limited to just discussing the basic, already well-known mechanics of the fight and joking about the frustrations that we have had with various bosses. In terms of strategy development, we do not collaborate with other guilds when creating our strategies; we create them based off of our own raid group's input. The only exception to that would be if a top guild releases a video of them killing a boss that we have not yet killed, then we will generally check out their video to see if there is anything that we have blindly missed up to that point. Although with videos, the chances of you watching another guild's video and seeing something drastically different in terms of strategy are very slim, most of the time you will see the guild implementing roughly the same strategy that you are trying to use, and it just comes down to executing the strategy properly.
From what I understand, you had a fair amount of experience in the beta as a guild. What sort of experiences did this give you?
Yes, we were very fortunate to receive a guild invite to the WotLK beta, and we would like to thank Blizzard for giving us the opportunity to help test out their upcoming expansion and more importantly, their entry-level raid content. As far as the beta itself goes, we got our guild invite a bit later than some others did, so we decided to just create premade level 80 characters since we did not want to waste more time waiting for everyone to level their own characters up and struggle with the server lag that most people in the beta can relate to. We copied over premade characters and ran as many 5-mans and heroics as we could to quickly replace the PVP gear that they gave you to start out with.
Some of our members (namely Lup, Myrael, and Phobophile) ground out professions from scratch and we'd like to give props to them for doing so. It allowed us to have gems, enchants, flasks, and everything else necessary to raid and test whatever we wanted including the heroic versions of encounters like Sartharion with 3 drakes up. The dedication of our raiders to achieving our goals - even in a beta environment where a couple months later everything is wiped - really helps out a ton and shows just how driven we are. In addition to those individual contributions, every raiding member ground out a full PVE raiding set in a few days. It was pretty amazing to see how driven everyone was considering we were in 100% PVP gear and every aspect had to be leveled/ geared from the ground up.
We then started running the 10-man versions of the raid instances each night, and finally cleared all of the 25-man versions as well. The 10-mans were fun at first, but naturally felt a bit too easy to most of us and got boring rather quickly; however, they will definitely provide a lot of opportunities for less hardcore guilds to still experience the content that the top guilds are doing, and the loot is not a whole lot different either. When we got to the 25-man instances, they felt rather easy too, but the Malygos encounter was a lot of fun to learn and it should be a great encounter for most guilds to learn when the expansion goes live. Hopefully Blizzard introduces some more encounters like Malygos in the future that require the raid to do things that they don't normally do during boss fights.
How quickly do you anticipate you will clear tier seven content once the expansion goes live and you begin raiding?
Assuming that the difficulty of encounters have not been scaled up to the point of being impossible and that there are no really rigid gear checks in place, we expect to clear the tier seven content within the first week that we begin raiding again. We cannot say exactly when that will be, because we can only approximate how long it will take for our entire raid group to reach level 80, but we would like to get back into the 25-man raiding game within the first two weeks of the expansion release and we will probably manage to clear the 10-man content the first week of release.
You've had incredible luck with Thori'dal while you were left lacking on offhand glaives. Do you like the way legendaries were implemented in Burning Crusade?
We certainly have had incredible luck with our Thori'dal drops and still horrible luck with our offhand warglaives. We disliked the way legendaries were implemented in the Burning Crusade. The random drop approach that they took with the warglaives and with Thori'dal simply left things way too open-ended for guilds that had put so much hard work into clearing the instances first and then left with no other choice but to hope and pray every week that the dice would roll in their favor. One guild could kill Illidan and get a warglaive on their first kill, and then kill him a month later and get another one to finish their set, and another guild could kill Illidan fifty times and still not be any closer to completing a set. The system used for the Atiesh in Naxxramas was by far a better approach - every time you cleared Naxxramas you knew for a fact that you were that much closer to completing a legendary. The beauty of that system was the fact that it directly rewarded every guild who could farm the instance week after week. You knew that each week would get you closer to finishing off a legendary for someone. You also had visible progress to measure after each raid by counting up the number of splinters that you had in total, which is something that we think a lot of people enjoyed. One of the major flaws in the random drop system was that you had no way of determining how long it would be before you were rewarded with a legendary, and this led to a lot of disappointment from guilds, especially those who had been farming the instance for a very long time with no luck on drops.
How closely do you monitor individuals' performance in raids? Do you ever meticulously do you go over each person in, for instance, a WWS report?
We usually monitor our raiders' performance very closely each week, especially our applicants. WWS reports offer an excellent way to review how well (or how poorly, in some cases) someone is performing in raids and they provide very detailed information that can tell you a lot about a player if you know how to interpret it. We have a guild account on the WWS website which allows us to host all of our reports from each raid week so we can go back and review them whenever we want to. For our applicants, we pay very close attention to how they perform from one week to the next during their trial period and we also offer plenty of criticism to them via our forums so that they are kept aware of how they are doing, what they are doing well, what they need to improve upon, etc.
Do you personally like the changes to buff stacking and raid composition?
We do not like the changes at all. We think that it is an interesting idea, and that it will certainly help a lot of guilds who struggled due to lack of raid buffs and poor compositions, but Blizzard has went a bit too far with the homogenization of buffs. Before these changes, knowing how to set up groups properly and making sure all of your raiders were receiving adequate raid buffs was just as important as having a roster full of exceptional players and a solid strategy when working on a new encounter. With these changes though, just about any raiding guild out there can throw together a 25-man raid of whatever classes they have available that night and still end up with a pretty well-balanced group in terms of raid buffs and debuffs. The changes have essentially taken yet another element of difficulty out of the high-end raiding game and brought things one step closer to the casual-friendly raiding environment that Blizzard seems so determined to create with this expansion.
What methods do you use to publicize the guild and to find potential recruits?
In the past we have never been too big on publicizing our guild much, aside from the obvious attention we get from being a top guild and putting out videos and such. For recruitment, we've maintained recruitment posts on various forums, as well as keeping a recruitment post up on our website to inform potential applicants of what we are looking for. We plan to make some changes in this area of our guild for WotLK to allow us to shed some more light on our guild and help with recruitment; however, we are unable to disclose any more information about this at the moment.
Is there ever any shortage of new people to fill in holes?
Sometimes there can be. Mostly it's not about finding enough people - it's about finding the right people. We have plenty of apps every day. However, most of them don't meet the criteria of what we look for in an applicant.
Being a top guild, do you ever get applications that really make you wonder if the individual realizes what sort of guild they are applying to?
Of course—Most of our applicants are like that. The lack of proof reading coupled with horrible grammar is a big turn off. If you can't spend the time to put a nice application together - we're not really interested in trying to decipher it or waste our time on it. It's very easy for people to look at all of the top guilds and see all of the bosses that they are killing and all of the cool items they are getting from these kills, and then convince themselves that they can do what we do. Most people who apply do not realize how much we put in to raiding in order to achieve the results that they see.
Is there one single issue that stands out as something that needs to be fixed for the high-end raiding community?
One of the problems is that things are getting geared towards PvP way too much. There has been a lot of balance around PvP and the effects of the PvP balance affect PvE too much. An example would be Lifebloom being so good in PvP that it was nerfed, but it did not necessarily deserve a nerf in PvE.
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