A Fresh Start.

Well, with eight weeks until Wrath of the Lich King and raid sign-ups steadily declining, I've been looking more and more to my plans for Wrath of the Lich King.

Chaotic Divinity has been my home in WoW for better or worse for three years, from fresh lvl 60 hunter to lvl 70 tankadin. However, over that time my priorities have shifted. Whilst I'm still interested in a casual approach to raiding, I find the situation as it stands in CD a little too casual. People can sign for every raid or no raids and it doesn't matter. With a membership of over 50, we were routinely struggling to get 25 off the ground. Even when we did, about half the group were generally unfamiliar with the encounter.

We needed a stricter approach to attendance and a tighter group. Sadly I couldn't do either of things whilst keeping the things in CD which were so attractive to some members.

The first ray of hope came at the start of the summer, when it was announced that the WotLK Dungeons would be switchable between 10 and 25-man mode. Suddenly it would be viable to take a tight group of 10 regular raiders all the way through the endgame.

After that, the idea sat at the back of my mind. I'd mention it in passing to folks who reacted postively enough to the idea, but i didn't have an idea about how best to proceed. I thought about setting up an unofficial "group within a group" inside CD, but that would have been unfair. I then considered turning Surprised Survivors into a raidguild. However there's a few people who either wouldn't want to join the group I was thinking of, or who I wouldn't want in that group. Even though I've been GM for most of it's life, I just didn't feel I had the right to kick people out of their home.

So the only option was to make my own Guild. I discussed the matter with a few guildies and we decided to set it up and make the announcement if and when CD finally decided to shut down raiding before Wrath of the Lich King.

As it turns out, that happened tonight. So I've now transferred Ulushnar to his new guild, the Smart Casual Raiding Company, and we've begun the process of recruiting new members.

Pre-TBC we won't get much more than a few ZA/Kara runs and maybe a few Achievement-chasing old-world raid runs after 3.0 hits. The real goal however is to hit the ground running in Wrath with a group that'll be ready to knock on the gates of Naxxramas relatively quickly.

If it all goes to crap now, I've no-one to blame but myself.