We're at a weird hump in our raiding progress. We seem to need to continue to work on balancing out the overall strength of the guild in order to get over this hump. 

Zul'Aman is still something we need to work towards. While any level 70 is capable of entering the zone and fighting, our success will be based on equipping those of us who do not have a lot of Karazhan experience yet. Instead of scheduling Zul'Aman, that's going to be an event we tackle on the fly, based on who's online. There may be a night where we're scheduled for Karazhan, but instead a ZA raid will form up.

In the near future we WILL be running two 10 man raids at once. The raid calendar was a tool I really hoped to utilize for just that purpose, but a lot of the guild hasn't quite yet mastered that tool. We've had it advertised in the guild message of the day for so long, but (and this really blows my mind) the number of players who use it is still really low. We do appreciate everyone who has used it, though!

So we're still going to have to be spending a lot of time in Karazhan equipping ourselves (and hopefully those we're equipping stay with us and won't move on afterwards!). Our focus will still have to be Karazhan. We're going to keep doing our best to help get everyone on the same playing field. At the same time, we need those of you who are really after those Karazhan upgrades to help yourselves in the meanwhile. 

We've got players like myself and Jyggle who've attended just about 95 percent of our raids, leading. Jyggle's been the main healer for most of these raids, and Dreadwind's been the main tank. We may have to start allowing these roles to be filled  by others more often. We will need more of our healers to experience the &quot;brunt&quot; of the healing weight, and we'll need more tanks equipped and experienced with the pulls and pace of raid movement. 

What we need now is for members to do whatever it takes to upgrade their characters. The advice I can give for doing this is using Wowikki to determine what heroic instances have upgrades for you. Run those heroics, as you'll also gain reputation for faction rewards and badges for rewards. Run pugs for your upgrades. The more experience players get in heroic instances, using their classes to their full potential and handling tough CC, the better they'll be for Karazhan. Pvp for upgrades. Limiting yourself to instance rewards for improving your character is crazy talk. Pvp is like practice for improving reaction time.

Our raid atmosphere has been pretty damned pleasant. We handle wipes really well, and it's pretty cool we don't have any real complainers, and no whiners. That sort of patience has really helped us get over some obstacles some nights. You don't find that everywhere. 

We're still recruiting good players, dependable players, players that will help us move on to 25 man content such as Gruul's Lair and Serpentshrine Cavern. What we arn't after are &quot;plz help me pls&quot; players. There's a lot more of those than &quot;How can I assist you?&quot; players among Boulderfist's guild seekers, so we have to be careful we don't overdose. We won't progress much farther if we don't recruit, but we're not helping ourselves if we don't get the right people at our side helping us. 

While we're after quality people of most every class, there are a few we have a higher demand for.  We could use a resto druid, anything that casts sheep, and maybe another holy paladin. We're short on healers. We are not short on tanks. The best way to find these guys will be in those pugs you're all going on in order to get those upgrades to make yourselves more potent in Karazhan!

So, let's push a little harder to get passed this hump.