Astralis is looking for you! Guild recruitment

Astralis, a 10 man guild of the Venture Co (EU), are currently looking for more members. I decided to interview the GM, Eldhorn aka Love.

So Love/Eldhorn, you recently left your old guild to form Astralis with a couple of friends of yours. Why is that?
I spent many years in a 10 man guild, before I tried a 25 man. It didn't take long before I felt like 25 man raiding was more about the administrative side than the actual raiding, especially for me who had an officer role in the guild. I did consider stepping down and not be an officer, but that's not really my way of playing since I always want to improve things around me if I feel it is necessary. Not only people and players performances, but I also think about how to make rules more effective and how to make the forums better, and stuff like that. I'm the one who ends up sorting the guild bank, and I was the one who implemented the new dkp-system in my old guild. I usually end up in the background, pulling the strings. But the workload in a 25 man proved to be too much for my enjoyment, and I decided to go back to 10 man raiding.

There are pros and cons of 10 man raiding compared to 25 man. What I wanted to achieve was quality raiding in a friendly environment where focus was on the game itself, and less on putting out fires and mending fences, and I think we are pretty much spot on when it comes to that. All members of Astralis takes care of their own business, learns from their mistakes and just gets along. I could leave for a weekend to visit my parents and watch a guildie play some jazz without having to worry that the guild might fall apart in my absence. What a 10 man guild does lose is the big community where you can get to know a lot of new people all the time, and also some people feel that you lose the "epicness" of a huge raid surging along. Personally I never felt like that, because I prefer it when I feel that I was an indisposable part of what made the boss go down. Without me (like if I'd die early in a fight), it will be noticeably worse off, and I want that to go for each and every member of the team. I don't feel that in a 25 man, unless I play the main tank. By allowing the administrative part to be of less importance, I, and the rest of the guild, can focus more on what really matters to us - having fun raiding.

Enough about you then, what about Astralis? What make you special?
In many ways we are just like a snowflake, we look like every other guild from far away, but we're really special close up. No, cross that out, that's lame. Did you cross it out? Good. Anyway. The basic goal and idea behind Astralis was to find a platform for people who enjoy raiding together to challenge themselves. We aim to complete all raiding content in the game while it is current, simply because we enjoy the challenge. Everyone in Astralis are people who think there is no more fun than trying to get the most out of their class. Eventhough we are proud of our achievements, we still try to do even better. Maximizing our performance is what make us tick. Winning makes our tigerblood boil! No, cross that out too.

We currently raid on tuesdays, thursdays and sundays from 19.30 to 23.30 server time. We don't have an official attendance requirement, but we do want all our raiding members (because we have a couple of socials as well) to enjoy raiding so much that they will be able to attend at least two out of three times. We don't force 100% attendance simply because we're realistic enough to realize that afk does get in the way sometimes, and that is ok. We don't want our raiders to feel stressed out or like they're letting everyone down because they have to attend someones birthday party. Raiding is supposed to be a hobby that you love - not another job. That way we hope that our raiders will always be able to bring their A-game to the raid.

The social aspect of the guild is important to us, and we play many other games together, when we're not playing WoW. For example; CSS, SC2, Shogun: Total War, Left4Dead 2 and Minecraft are games that we currently play and in some cases hold our own servers. We of course do other things than raiding together in WoW, like heroic runs and dailies. The age ranges from 18-35 ish, but what really matters is that you fit in the group - an easy going person who likes to socialize and raid.

Sounds awesome. What do you need?
Our direst need at the moment is another healer - preferrably a priest or paladin. We're currently at 8/13, with Al'akir around the corner. It goes pretty much without saying that we have a forum and a TS server. We've only got three healers at the moment, and that puts a little too much strain on them. Like mentioned, we want there to be some redundancy so that people can attend other stuff occasionally, without everything falling apart. We have been doing well so far, because we've got people who play offspecs, but still feel like we should get a proper healer to fill out our roster. Because of our small roster, we like to see applicants who have and enjoy to play an offspec. It also allows us to easier rotate raid spots if one person can fill several roles. Unfortunately we don't do alt raids, which means you pretty much have to be geared and experienced for our content already, up to a certain degree. We don't necessarily require you to have any heroic kills, but preferrably at least have done all content on normal. We do try to gear peoples alts and offspecs as much as is practical inside and outside of raids, without sacrificing our progress. Farm bosses for example, can often be used to gear up offspecs and alts. We're interested in other awesome players as well of course, but our raiding group is pretty much filled at the moment, and fitting any other role could be tricky.

If this sounds like the perfect guild for you, you can always pm me at astralis.guildlaunch.com (Eldhorn) or whisper me online (also Eldhorn).