Please weigh-in on the future of the 8K partnership. Should we continue? Should we scale back our involvement with them? I need some feedback here.

There seems to be some confusion. I want to clear this up right now. We are not abandoning doing 10-man Naxx and the other pre-Ulduar 10-man content. We are still committed to 10-man Naxx runs.
The reasons to continue running 10-man Naxx are as follows:

1.) Our somewhat successful trip through 25-man Naxx only reinforces the need to continue doing 10-man Naxx. We got stuck on Thadius, which is a very DPS heavy fight and many of our members just didn't have the firepower to do sufficient damage to the boss before the enrage triggered. The DPS wasn't the whole reason for the failure, but it was a big contributing factor.

2.) We have many folks who got a taste of 25-man Naxx before a single 10-man Naxx boss fight. The 10-man experience will help in 25-man raids.

3.) We have more and more players getting to 80 who will need to run heroics and 10-man raids. The more players who can help to guild them through the 10-man raids, the more successful they will be and the more successful the guild will be in the long run. Ulduar will be there in a few months.

4.) We can't abandon our lower level guild members and join the search of gear and glory for our higher level players. And the focus should be on helping the players, not helping alt toons of already established raiders. The core raiding members are very good and will be valuable resources for our lower-level members as they reach the raiding phase of the game. This is an area where ALL of our officers, myself included, must try to step up their efforts.

I understand this can be a very long process and everyone has their own in-game wants and needs. Please know that we are trying to accommodate everyone's needs, which is getting harder as we gain more members and our resources are pulled in different directions.

All guilds must find a balance between doing challenging content for gear and glory and developing a deep bench of quality players. Ultimately, a deep bench will be better for everyone in the long run, while gear and glory is awesome but short lived. Nobody is more focused on our guild rank than I am, but that is empty if we are not developing a full set of players.

Hey for our 25-mans with 8K we are going to follow the same basic loot rules that we always follow. We will have a loot master and rolls will be based on main spec/the spec you are currently in first, if no takers than off-spec. However, we will have on difference we will be using WoW-Loot as an objective basis for who should be rolling on items. Please check it out, so you know what we are talking about during the raid. We all know this is not a perfect system or looting list but it does help to make certain that the loot will go to the person who will get the most benefit out of it, which helps the group as a whole.

Humelor, everyone's favorite ankle-breaking priest (when you put it that way it sounds way cool. Like he breaks other people's ankles. Like he's an enforcer for the mob.) has asked me about starting a daytime raid group. We have a bunch of folks who play during the day, but are unable join our late night raids, and would love to be able to take a bite out of the raid content.

Humelor is an officer and was promoted to officer for just this purpose to lead during the day and on weekends. I am all for a second raid group during the day. Let me know what I can do to help short of actually joining.

I will talk to the leaders at 8K and let them know we're in the process of putting this group together. Good Luck.

As many of you know, we have established a partner guild association with The Eighth Kingdom. They are very much like us. They have good players and good people. Last week we did a joint 25 man OS as a get-to-know-you exercise. It went very, very well. A bunch of our officers, had a nice talk with a bunch of there officers about expectations and potential issues.

We have established a joint-guild chat channel. If you haven't already please join The8thCrew by typing /join The8thCrew. We will mostly use this channel to find folks to fill in for 5-man Heroics and 10-man raids. But we can also use it to for trade and strategy exchanges.

TONIGHT: Tuesday, May 26 we will begin gathering at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30p.m. Server time for a joint 25 Man NAXX run with The Eighth Kingdom. I am assuming we will start with the Arachnid Quarter and work our way through the instance, this week. Please do you best to be on time and ready to raid, with all the pots and foods and buff gear.

I am very happy to be doing this with the guys from 8K. On a personal note, I will probably not be able to join the raid on Wednesday and Thursday, since I must travel to attend funeral services.