Very few guilds withstand the weathering of time. Players graduate college/high school, move on to more school or get jobs, and even reproduce. They transfer to play with XYZ friend, because ABC server’s economy sucks, or because player QRS made them angry. My guild has gone through this wave several times… and here are ten things you can do to combat it!

If your guild is collapsing, try:

1. Recruiting new members. Go to your server’s forum and post that you’re recruiting. Spread the news through the proper channels. For the love of all that’s Holy Nova (haha, I made a holy priest joke), don’t spam the trade channels.
2. Setting up a meeting to pick new raid times. Lots of people leave because they can’t make raid times, or because they’re more interested in 25-mans than 10-mans. (Speaking from a casual endgame guild perspective.)
3. Setting up a meeting to discuss other problems. Is there guild drama going on that’s causing the ship to sink? Address the problems and see if you can make mends.
4. Raiding with other guilds. Find another small guild and do joint raids with them! It works like a charm (for awhile.)
5. Merging with other guilds. You can have one guild swallow your guild, or the other way around.
6. Asking friends. If you can’t recruit, get a guild to raid with you, or get a guild to merge with you, ask your friends in the bigger guilds if they’d be willing to join your 10-mans. Many of them aren’t saved to 10-man dungeons and will gladly help out.
7. Shopping elsewhere. When saving the guild fails, just shop for other guilds looking for your role.
8. Transferring elsewhere. If your guild sucks and your server sucks, pack your bags and go on a journey. Hell, throw the $50 and try a different faction along with your server change.
9. Leveling a new character. If you don’t want to pay the money to transfer somewhere else, pick another server and start leveling. You’d be amazed how fun low levels can be when you’ve been away for awhile.
10. Playing a different game. I personally can’t wait to level something in the new, shattered world in Cataclysm. If waiting for Cataclysm sounds like the best move, I recommend sitting on your hands and trying out Etrian Odyssey 2. It pairs well with WoW addicts.

Just like a challenging raid boss, there’s always multiple strategies. Sometimes changing it up is the best way to get it down. As someone that has personally tried these options, I recommend them all as a band aid to fix your guild woes – in the order of desperation, even.

Elowyn, Momentum's guild master

I introduced Johannah’s server, Kalecgos, last Friday; this Friday I’ll be diving into a bit more background by taking a look at Johannah’s guild and how a smite priest fits in with a group of endgame raiders.

About Momentum

Momentum is a smaller, casual player guild that has gone through all of the WotLK raids, including Naxxramas, Sartharion, Eye of Eternity, Ulduar, and Trial of the Crusader. While Momentum has done 25-man raids in the past in conjunction with other smaller guilds, raiding has focused mainly on the 10-man setup, with one or two 10-man groups per week depending on attendance. We’re really pushing to increase the 25-man experience more. Most Momentum members are either full-time students or full-time workers–and some, like myself, are both!–so raiding is generally kept to one to three nights a week. Consistent raids are rotated every other Friday and Saturday.

Momentum’s history

The founders of Momentum originally came from the guild N E M E S I S. We broke off into our own guild way back in the days of early Karahzan runs and, for a very long time, had a friends-only recruiting policy (which has since evolved into a “friendly” policy that we uphold during recruitment and throughout the member’s [hopefully long-term] stay.) We based our foundation off of fair leadership and main-before-alternate mentality and continue to uphold this idea. We handled our loot for over a year with a unique Loot List concept developed by the guild master, but as time progressed and Momentum became larger, we inevitably switched over to NRP (Naked Raid Points, which is basically DKP.) Our DKP system honors fair leadership (officers do not get any advantages over other members for loot) and main-before-alternate (alts do not get NRP.)

Momentum raiders having fun.

Why does Momentum have a smite priest?

Because our player base changes drastically week-to-week, it’s common for us to have an overflow of heals for two groups one week and not enough heals for even one raiding group the next. Johannah’s role as a smite priest in Momentum is to fill the vacancy for the fights that could be done with 2 healers, but are more comfortable with 3; smite priests give the 2.5 role that is more advantageous in fights with drastically different healing requirements depending on the fight’s phase. In weeks where there is healer overflow, the smite priest spec grants additional DPS to the raid, and in weeks where healers are sparse, a deeper holy spec is used for full-time healing.

I’ve developed a personal belief that while smite priests cannot do nearly as much DPS as Shadow priests–and never should–they can provide a continuous amount of healing and DPSing that is much more difficult when dropping and taking on Shadowform, such as Prayer of Mending and occasional Renews, that can help casual endgame guilds push through things like Faction Champions chaos. (And oh boy, were they something else the first week they came out!) Having that extra Pain Suppression during Hard Mode Beasts of Northrend or Mimiron might not be as much of an advantage to “big guilds” that bring the beefy players out of many, many 25-mans, but the hybrid smite priest role has worked for Momentum and has continued to act as a refreshing “half heals” alternative since Burning Crusade and Mount Hyjal.

Momentum raiding nekked.

Does Momentum have other priests?

We have Discipline priests, Shadow priests, and Holy priests. I am currently the only smite spec priest (and I am actually “officially” Holy heals; see healing-overabundance issue above to explain this giant smite blog/experience.) We’re all hearts with each other.

I’m a level 80 Alliance on the Kalecgos server. Can I join Momentum?

Johannah is/I am an officer in Momentum. Feel free to whisper at any time to discuss recruitment. There is no application process; instead, we typically recruit based off of PuG performance in a raid or a 5-man. We’re a very friendly and slightly demented bunch of people that like to make sure we don’t recruit anyone too immature or too stand-offish. We’ve been around for a long time and plan to continue being around well through Cataclysm, so if you’re a casual player that’s interested in seeing if you mesh well, feel free to contact me or another officer!

I understand that there are many guilds that are not accepting of smite priests. That’s cool. Thankfully, Momentum is not one of them.

Kalecgos mammoth riders in Dalaran.

Johannah is a smite priest on the Kalecgos server.

The US Kalecgos server is named after the popular dragon Kalecgos of the Blue Dragonflight; he appears in the Sunwell raid and in the World of Warcraft manga, the Sunwell Trilogy.

When other WoW players ask me how Kalecgos is, I normally describe it as “small, like an everyone-knows-everyone town,” “borked economy,” and “not the best choice progression-wise.” Still, this is the server I started on, and I love the friends I’ve made here. Despite being part of the minority on a PvP server, I thoroughly enjoy the Alliance side and find that the players I’ve been playing with long-term are friendly, amazing people. We have our fair share of people on the other side of the “nice” fence that make you want to transfer sometimes–and we are prone to having more players that don’t know what they’re doing than “usual” from the census I’ve heard from “hardcore” gamers–but I would never tell someone to not roll on Kalecgos. The server needs more people anyways.

Kalecgos has an abundance of Horde and Alliance guilds. The top guild is Misfits (if done by level value). Johannah’s an officer of Momentum, a casual Alliance endgame guild; we’re always recruiting friendly, intelligent, and mostly-mature players for our 10-man raids. We keep saying we’d like to do 25-man raids someday, but we’ve been in a 2 10-man group rut for 2009.

The server is primarily Horde, at a 79% Horde : 21 % Alliance ratio according to Warcraft Realms (November 2009). The server is 29% Blood Elves; Johannah is part of a marginal 7% Night Elf community. We desperately need more Dwarves and Gnomes.

The highest played classes are death knights and paladins at a staggering 15% and 14%, respectively. We have a surprising balance of classes otherwise; even the underdog shaman is 7%, with priests, warlocks, and mages only one-percent higher. The Kalecgos community would welcome any class due to our balance across the server. My guild personally is rogue and warlock starved, and–funny as it is–has room for lots more hunters and mages. We have quite a few active druids, priests, and paladins, though we don’t close the doors to new ones. I’m not sure if we’re an accurate sampling of the Alliance Kalecgos side or not.

For Kalecgos players interested, last I checked, Kalecgos.net offers free hosting to all guilds on our server.