User:Quizzical/Guild Hunting

With the unfortunate promotion to guild leader of my recent former guild of someone who wishes to be an evil dictator, the time has come for me to find a new guild. Incidentally, that is the reason my former guild was kicked out of its alliance. Oh well, as an NFL fan, this is the time to be a free agent.

Credentials
What I can offer is that I'm unusually knowledgeable about the PvE side of the campaigns (not GWEN, and not purely farming areas like Domain of Anguish). At the moment, across I'll characters, I have 28 protector titles and 10 guardian titles. The protector titles are on characters that have done nearly all non-repeatable quests of the corresponding campaign.

The wiki strategies on some of the more complicated missions were essentially written by me. See the October 27 edits to Dzagonur Bastion, November 5 edits to Guide to defeating Magni the Bison, December 20 and January 4 edits to Aurora Glade, December 23-January 4 edits to Sanctum Cay, and January 9-20 edits to Dunes of Despair, among others.

What I do
What I can do for a guild is to answer questions on PvE content. The wiki is a great resource for that, but can't give you direct answers to specific questions in real-time. I have no problem with answering honest questions from newbies, or from people who just haven't caught some subtle detail in tactics. I won't do run-throughs for a quest or mission I wasn't otherwise about to do, though.

The other thing I do is to organize mission runs for whatever mission I want to do, at least if I'm doing it in hard mode. (I prefer to do easy mode with just henchmen and heroes.) I'm shortly going to start on Factions hard mode. I do one set of (about five) missions in hard mode with one character, then switch characters and do the same set of missions again. Repeat until all ten of my characters are through the missions, and then move on to the next set.

When I go to do a mission in hard mode, I'll advertise it in guild and alliance chat (rarely asking more than once for a particular run), and if anyone wants to come, they can. If no one comes, I advertise in all chat, while setting up heros and henchmen and getting builds straight. If no one wants to come before I'm ready, I do the mission with heroes and henchmen.

Most pickup groups that I run do successfully complete the mission, even in hard mode. This is largely because after doing the same mission several times on different characters, one learns the tactics for the mission very well. The exception is if I'm on my warrior, which is my first character in my rotation, so while I'll be quite familiar with the layout from having done the mission at least ten times in easy mode, I'm sometimes caught off guard by ways that hard mode makes the mission different.

Success with pickup groups is also partially an effect of filtering the groups, making sure to check the build and max HP of everyone in the group. My main concern is avoiding people with suicide builds. Everyone has to bring a rez (usually signet) and something defensive and be no more fragile than a henchman. I also check to make sure builds are Pareto-optimal, that is, cannot be changed to be unambigously better. This usually only requires minor corrections, such as when people change skills to use different attributes and forget to change their attribute point allocations.

Some warnings
That said, there are a lot of guilds for which I would not be suitable. I'm primarily interested in PvE, and only infrequently (as in, once every couple months) will PvP. I'm unusually finicky about which missions I'll do at what times, so if a guild wants to get everyone together to do mission X at a particular time, I'm almost surely not going to come.

I don't farm. Ever. (Well, not quite; if I want something that I can certainly get in under 2 minutes of farming, I might consider it, but probably still won't.) I don't farm for gold. I don't farm for materials. I don't farm for Kurzick/Luxon faction. I don't farm for titles. I don't farm for ranks in title tracks linked to skills. The only reason why I get protector and guardian titles is that they are awarded for doing things that I would do even if the title tracks didn't exist. Guilds that are based around farming should not want me.

My quirky brand of humor, opinions, and random chatter does annoy a relative handful of people. It's G-rated, though. I say some off the wall things like, "If Tahnnakai Temple is so sacred, why don't they ever clean it? There are piles of dirt all over the place!", or "Sister Tai says she can rez me if I die.  Just want I want to hear from the monk who is supposed to heal me to prevent that.", or "Destroyer of Hope is obviously a reference to Barack Obama." Some people think such comments are serious and ask why I'm so serious all the time. My experience is that more people laugh than get offended, but if you wish to maintain silence in guild chat, don't invite me.

The type of guild I want
My first, most important, and non-compromisible demand is a guild that allows me to play the game as I see fit (subject, of course, to ArenaNet's EULA, etc.). I want to log on when I want to and do the mission I want to. A guild that demands that I go do some other mission instead, or log on at times when I'd rather not, would be worse than being unguilded.

Next, I want an active guild and alliance. At most times of the day, the guild should have at least a few people on. I'm on (US) Pacific time, so a mostly European guild would be unsuitable. Other guilds in the alliance should likewise be active. I don't expect that people will jump to join my mission runs every single time (but wouldn't object if they did); if people sound like they're reluctantly coming, I'll tell people, if you don't want to come, then don't. The problem is if there's often no one on even to chat with.

Third, the guild and alliance ought to strongly discourage begging. This includes begging for gold, begging for materials, begging for runs to outposts, and begging for runs through missions. Offering to buy (or sell) materials at around market value is perfectly acceptable; demanding for them to be given for free is begging, and obnoxious. Regarding mission runs, asking once if anyone wants to come do some particular mission with you is well and good. Asking twenty times over the course of half an hour is a nuisance. If begging gets out of hand, I likely will tell people to knock it off. If your guild encourages such begging, save yourself a guild fight and don't invite me.

Finally, I wish to avoid profanity, obscenity, and other perverse things in guild and alliance chat. Certain words are generally understood in civilized society as carrying no meaning other than the speaker's wish to gratuitously offend his audience, and I don't care to see them. It doesn't bother me to see an occasional in the chat, and I do keep the filter on. Seeing stuff get filtered on average once per line is a problem, though. Worse is when people deliberately misspell words to evade the filter. I likewise wish to avoid moderately perverse guild names or tags.

Contact information
If you think I would be a good fit for your guild, please leave your in-game name, your guild name, and your guild tag on the discussion page for this page. You can either explain about your guild there, or I can try to catch you in-game. Alternatively, you can try to catch me in-game (most easily via a friends list). My character names are given on my main user page; the easiest ones to type are probably "Quorum Call" or "Quite Quickly", and if you add one character name to a friends list, any other on that account will show up when in use.

For now, I'm in another guild of the alliance that booted my guild. This is temporary (and with the permission of the alliance leader) until I find a more permanent guild. My main objection is that what remains of the alliance is simply too small for someone who believes that grouping should only be done by mutual coincidence of wants (that is, two people should only group together if both interested in doing the same mission at the same time).