Welcome to the June WOW meeting. Thank you all for attending this meeting.
I want to thank all of the STC family who congratulated the raiding team last night. While the Raiders were very happy with downing N'zoth, it was wonderful to also have the rest of STC recognize the hard work. Thank you all who contributed mightily to the successful raiding tier. There will be more raiding discussion below.
I do not want to get too deep into the discussion of the outside world, but I do want to recognize that there is a lot of issues and that there is mental, physical, and emotional strain on all of us. As I said in the past, we do not all come from the same backgrounds nor have all the same views. Playing WOW for many of us is a way to get away and enjoy something like others read books or watch movies. Sometimes our strains bleed into the game, and all that I ask is that we try our best to catch ourselves before we say/do something we may regret. Again, we are all welcome to our opinions, and I do not want people to feel "quieted", but I try to keep STC a positive place for Saints to gather and hopefully relieve stress. There are in-game frustrations from AFK PVPers or lag in the Vale of Blossoms, but in binding together and forging forward, it helps to make the bonds of Saints stronger.
I do want to take this time to say to all of you that I hope you, your family, and friends are keeping safe and healthy.
New Novices:
None
Inductions:
None
Officer Induction:
None
Award Nominations:
Finchiala
Duty Award - Awarded those that have proven that they value STC, its Values and most of all her People. They put the extra effort forth and donate their personal and in game time to help make STC what it is today.
Finchiala has been providing several feasts at each raid he attends, quietly trading them to me. Prior to discussion of Vantus Runes for the Heroic Nya'lotha Raid, Finchiala approached me indicating he was prepping runes for when we would need them. After last Sunday's breakthrough, when discussion of Vantus Runes came up, Finchiala jumped at the chance to help out. I am proud to present the Duty award to Finchiala for these reasons.
Raiding:
As I shared previously, N'zoth went down last night on Heroic. This is a very cool achievement. We pushed ourselves as a raid group and achieved something we had not often - an Ahead of the Curve (AOTC) kill in a raiding tier. In previous raiding tiers, some players had to group up with PuG or other guilds to get this achievement. It is very special to achieve it with the full raiding group. The BC's had discussed a Progression Group as a last resort, and we are grateful that we did not need to implement it. And just because it is a bit funny, we had a bad pull that we decided to push through, and that was the pull we killed N'zoth on.
It was a month ago that we killed Carapace and while a month feels like a long time, we did also give ourselves a break with some Gearing Raids.
So where do we go from here? There has been some discussion in Discord about several options. 1. Normal raids for people to catch up. 2. Heroic raids for people to catch up. 3. Mythic Raids to see if we can kill a few bosses. 4. Going back to previous Raid Tiers, even expansions, for some Guild Achieves and some gear (Ashvane Mythic is always mentioned).
All of the above are on the table, but we also need participation. If people want to stomp through some Normal kills while gearing up, Great! If some would like a bit more of a challenge and need higher level gear, Heroic is the choice. Mythic takes a commitment of 20 raiders, no more, really no less who are going to come and learn new mechanics. Old raiding tiers - it depends on the content.
My preliminary thought is running Normal Ny'alotha on Wednesdays and Heroic Ny'alotha on Sundays. This allows us to gear up newer raiders and maybe attack some achieves for the mounts on Normal and then gear up more advanced Mains/Alts who want to min/max.
All of this is dependent on what you, the raiders want to do. Maybe there are some who still want the N'zoth kill since they came back late. There is always the potential to do this, but it will take work. Please speak up and let's coordinate!