A Tribe Called Zerg

[Darknark]

NOTE: Big surprise, Turbine decided to not follow what they said they would be doing and decided to "re-link" this forum account to me, I lost access to the "Gordy" account, and am now having to re-bump my prior posts. Yay.


A Tribe Called Zerg (referred to as “Zerg” and “ATCZ” in this post) is a guild for everything from endgame raiding to zerging TR’s. We are a relatively small guild consisting of rather ‘close’ members.

Note: We have stopped using Ventrilo and are now using Mumble. If you need to get the new info please contact us. And, no, I am not going to go through these two posts and change every instance of Ventrilo to Mumble.

Recruitment Status: Currently looking to expand our active roster – if you are interested it is highly recommended that you read everything here.


About Us:

Please note that this is my attempt (with help from guildies) to explain what it is that we do; in reality this is not something that can be entirely explained, but rather must be experienced firsthand.

General Mentality:
We are ‘goal oriented’ individuals who attempt to find and maintain a high, if not the highest, level of efficiency while playing. We do have ‘lives’ and understand that real life comes first. Some of us with more limited play time have more incentive to zerg.
We view most content as trivial and easy, not because we are ‘that awesome’, but because it really is easy. Having the perfect party and a full group are not mandatory; the game is easier than many of its genre.
We do not believe in the ‘perfect party’; sitting around for a bard for von6 is no fun and finding ‘tanks’ isn’t either – our response is to adapt: remove the bard from the equation and/or make characters that fill multiple roles (in this example: with tanking as a primary or secondary focus).
We have a strong dislike of drama and do not have real loot rules.


Play-style: This is something that is apparently not well understood by the majority of the server. We feel that by drawing attention to this point, in particular, we could significantly increase the number of “Pugs” that enter our groups.
Our play-style incorporates ‘multi-role’ functions and self sufficiency with speed.Self sufficiency is stressed in all situations; just because there are eight Favored Souls in the party does not mean that you will get healed. Emphasis is put on speed when leveling as well as when running raids (though, admittedly, less so in raids).

The majority of us play casters (FvS/Cleric/Sorc/Wiz/Arti) and as such are required to watch our SP expenditure as well as our SP regeneration. As such, we try to incorporate ‘passive torcing’ into everything we do; we will usually have those classes tank trash and bosses. We like trash mobs that use melee and ranged attacks. We do not like to kill these mobs. A player does more damage to our group than any monster in the game when they come into our group and begin to: kill non-caster mobs, cast CC, or blur/displace others.
We do not enjoy, or even want to, micromanaging people; we would prefer to let them play how they want – so long as their playstyle does not have a negative impact on ours. We would like it if more people understood the flow of gameplay in the manner that we conduct it. Frequently, we let random people in our groups, give no instructions, and just do that quest leaving everyone welcome to do what they want. Some people prefer this and find it liberating; they get to have their first experiences with raids be one of action and intrigue instead of one of following orders. Other people think we have enormous attitude problems and that we don't care about their feelings because we don't hold their hands.


Some examples of our play style:
Overall – Kill caster mobs first – do not ever cast blur or displacement on us. (Cloud spells are included in this).
eVon6 - People solo islands, do not attempt to "help" them and attack the djinn. This makes it impossible to accurately prep a djinn. Wait, at the start, until they are done.
ToD – Part 1, Do not attack/kill dogs – Part 3, Do not attack/kill orthons
LoB – Do not kill assassins, do not attack the assassins in any way.
Master Artificer – Avoid killing cannons unless told to do so. Do not ‘agro and kite’ the green titan.
Chronoscope – Do not hold, dance, kill, or otherwise incapacitate the trash mobs in the boss fights.
Specific to melees – try and become more self sufficient (heal scrolls and silver flame pots, healing amp). DDO is not “DPS DPS DPS”, DPS does not matter when you are dead and being self sufficient reduces the likelihood that you will be dead. Get –threat% gear.
Specific to Paladins and Rangers –Getting a Torc and conc-opp as well as maximize/emp. heal/quicken is highly recommended (silver flame pots and heal scrolls are still recommended as well)


To recap: “Untrained” players negatively affect the group, killing non-caster monsters often negatively affects the group. Melee/ranged monsters and self healing are good and positively affect the group. Crowd control, unwanted blur/displace, and ‘crying’ are bad and have a large negative effect on the group. Drama is extremely bad (read: will not be tolerated).

Also note that multi-boxing is a fairly common occurrence in our groups; we are quite often “shortman” when we run raids. We do this due to the randomness inherent to pugging and because we do not always feel like investing effort into the repeated explanation of our play style.


Schedule:
We really don’t have a schedule; we run whatever we (guild) want to run at a specific moment in time. Time zones for members range from GMT-8 to GMT+8.
We run the majority of the raids on a semi-regular basis (i.e: multiple runs per timer interval); this is a great place to begin joining our groups.