Inspiration

At the time of writing this, there has been a single mythic raid boss killed on Alliance-Saurfang, several months into the tier. Conversely, on Alliance-Frostmourne, there are over a hundred guilds with 7+ mythic bosses down, and 10+ Cutting Edge guilds.

Until Blizzard chooses to fix this server imbalance by giving us all free server transfers for the remainder of the expansion, we’ll be doing our best to keep the fun happening with community raids.

These are players from different guilds and servers who might not be willing to pay the hefty transaction fee to transfer to Saurfang, but can be relied upon to show up and help us put bosses in the dirt. The progression for Sanctum is what we’ve achieved with a raid team largely comprised of people we’ve just met.

Of course we’re more than willing to accept new guildies, but the priority at this time is just to keep raiding happening on the server.

We raid Wed-Thu 20:00 to 23:00 server time (Sydney Time) and for non-progression content, we don’t have any special requirements. As long as we’re not wiping, we won’t look at combat logs/gear/etc, so if you’re completely new to raiding, or got a fresh alt you want to try out, give us a shot.

You can start by signing up to our discord (there’s a link in the sidebar) and posting in the Recruitment and Guests channel. We’ll be looking forward to hearing from you!

As I write, 9.1 is less than 48 hours away.

For the upcoming raid tier, we’re going to focus on building up our casual and social guild roster. We’ve noticed that when a guild that is based around raiding stops raiding for the break, it’s pretty lonely in here. Some of our players have gone to other games and it’s possible they won’t come back.

So for 9.1, we’re going to take a step back from hardcore progression raiding, and focus on normal/heroic progression. We’ll be taking more pugs and socials than we would for our regular raiding. It’s our hope that this will give us the player and class flexibility needed to give our mainspec raiders the chance to take a night off from time to time to avoid burnout, and maybe some of these casuals might make their way to core team members in time.

But that’s a long way from now. If you’re reading this and you’re raid-curious, check out this link to get an idea of what you’re signing up for, and if you like what you see, hit me up in Discord for a raid spot.

Our Raider 101 training course is still underway, but it’s been on hold while I’ve focused on the X-wing Team Championships. I’ve another four weeks at least to go, and then it’s back into raiding once again. Until then, good luck, and good hunting!

The gradual attrition of raiders has meant that the guild is unable to progress in the current raid tier. As a result, we’ve decided to step back from progression raiding until we have enough players to make it happen once again.

In the mean time, we’ll be focusing on training new and beginner players to become raiders. We’ll be running casual and community raids on Wednesdays from 20:00 to 23:00 each week. The emphasis is on relaxed fun and player enjoyment – you can bring a character that just hit 60 and as long as we’re killing bosses, nobody will bat an eye.

I’m grateful to all the players who stuck around in the last difficult weeks.

Team Murloc: 9/10H

Team Mawrat: 9/10H

Both teams are 9/10H – the race to AOTC is on!

Both teams are looking to expand our teams with quality DPS players. If you’re looking for a home, now’s the time to sign up!

It’s been busier than usual at Inspiration. As well as writing the raid guides for Castle Nathria, we’ve also had an entire guild merge in with ours. As always, the best source of immediate information is the guild discord.

We recently implemented basic security on the discord. When you join, you’ll have very limited visibility. Post in the ‘recruitments-and-guests’ channel your character name or what guild you are in and we’ll promote you to a speaking role.

Now, on to the main news.

Night Shift of Caelstrasz have worked with us on a few raids and a LOT of mythic keystones, so it just seemed more efficient to all be under the same guild name. Subsequently, Night Shift has merged in to Inspiration.

A lot happened in a short time and players were not given much notice. So I’m using this post to update them.

1 – Night Shift’s raid team, their keystone and social players, have migrated to Inspiration.

2 – There was an issue with the guild bank while the two guilds worked out the banking policy. This should have been resolved by the time you are reading this. This mainly impacts Inspiration guildies who suddenly couldn’t access tabs they were used to – if you can’t touch something you should be able to, let us know so it can be fixed.

3 – There have been changes to the discord ranks. Your discord rank should reflect the following:
Not in guild – GUEST
Has toon in guild – SOCIAL
Has expressed interest in raiding – TRIAL-RAIDER
Has cleared trial rank – RAIDER

If this doesn’t meet what you expect, please let an officer know so we can updated it.

4 – We gained new officers and demoted others. We will continue to update the leadership positions early into 2021 as we work out what the guild actually needs now that we have three raid teams and a lot more players to look after.

5 – We now have three raid teams. They are:
TEAM MURLOC, Wed & Thu 20:00 to 23:00
TEAM CANDLE, Fri & Sun 20:00 to 23:00
TEAM MAWRAT, Fri 22:00 to 01:00 & Sun 20:00 to 23:00

Note Team Mawrat’s hours are not completely set as they have not commenced raiding, and are for now running alongside Team Candle. Keep an eye on the raid-mawrat-discussion channel for more information about raiding hours.

Finally, I apologise for the lack of notice. The guild merge was somewhat of a rush job; we were approached in the morning and executed it in the evening, while trying to assemble a raid with roughly 15 extra players. Some mistakes were made and lessons learned – if we ever do absorb this many players again, we’ll be sure to work out the details first, then advise the guild, then make the changes.

We’re very glad to have our new friends from Night Shift aboard and we’re excited to see what we can do together in the years to come!

We’ve replaced the Nya’lotha guides with Castle Nathria guides, and we’ll update these as we improve our strategies on the bosses. Good luck, and good hunting!

I received feedback from a number of guild masters from other servers that the WoW Community model that I was trying to execute was fundamentally flawed – nobody would be looking for a WoW Community named ‘Inspiration’. I was advised to start a website that was clearly for the Community.

So I did.

Our current website, inspiration-raiding.net will now be primarily for Inspiration. The menu link at the top of this page will now link to the other website.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, the Saurfang Alliance Raiding Community is something I was working on that ultimately resulted in Inspiration being created as a guild. The objective was to provide a talking space for guild and raid leaders to help coordinate our raid strategies and manage what was becoming a very precious resource – raider availability.

Much of that danger how now been averted with the merge of the Nagrand and Caelestrasz realms (Welcome!). However, I wanted to proceed ahead with the project because it was a vision I wanted to realise. It will either work, and be a helpful tool that guilds can rely on later, or it will be a total dumpster fire that I can walk away from, relieved that I got to try it out.

Either way, I’m sure in the process we’ll get to meet some new friends.

While you’re running keys or dungeons in Shadowlands, please feel free to direct any players you meet to saurfang-raiding.net, and ask them to update their guild 🙂

While we’ve taken a break from raiding until Shadowlands, we’re using this time to finish setting up the admin side of the guild. We’ll be clarifying some of the guild rules/officer roles, and taking care of all the boring back end stuff that raiders and players don’t have to bother with, but needs to happen for this ship to keep on sailing. In the mean time, here’s a special treat.

Ziry∀lex has done it again!

I’m looking forward to editing these into a boss kill video soon. If you’re looking for some of your own artwork done, pay her a visit at Twitter or Instagram.

Arguably the first, most famous strategy guide I ever made.
The giant horse is Nightmare Moon (My Little Pony) and the little soldiers are from Dark Souls: The Board Game. The markers are random components from X-wing: The miniatures game.

We managed to kill Vectis on the last night of raiding, which was a huge triumph for the team.

This was before I’d purchased Camtasia, and it’s saved in pdf format.