Hi Everyone,

As a long time Raid leader, I have been noticing a few very concerning characteristics about our guild and our raids. It seems that every new toon that joins our guild is expecting two things, 1) masses of epic'd out toons willing to help out, 2) a raid spot.

This is obviously leading to drama, because the lesser geared individuals expect T5+ help in there T4 content. The T5+ raiders are down right sick of the T4 content and really don't have the drive to trudge through it.

This situation came to a head recently in a Kara run that was staffed by new guildies and experienced guildies alts. We were sloppy but successful up to Shade. Eventually the alts, switched to mains and still remained unsuccessful.

Anyway we are at a cross roads were the long time, geared, driven individuals are sick of WoW in general or tired of being full time charity reps for the less driven.

In TBC we struggled to push past T5 content because we never had 25 reliable consistent players. We dominated ZA due to a strong core, but had to regularily leave out good players. (ZA being very class specific)

So we are losing top end raiders to lack of availability and boredom and struggling to replace them with anything but other raid guilds rejects.

How can a raid or guild leader help to mend relationships and try to preserve a functioning casual raid guild going into WotLK. Or is the dreaded Mass-Exeduss, and rebuild the only viable solution???

Thats not an easy situation. Its a problem I'm looking at for my guild in WotLK. Here's my take on it... two possible solutions:

1. Take the progressive approach. In this approach you say, look, we are in T5 content. I'm not running T4 unless you are critical to my moving forward. You want to do T4? PUG IT!
2. Take the casual friendly approach - In this case you can help out where possible, but everyone has the understanding that progress will be sacrificed to catch people up.

New people are just that... new people. They can't expect you to bend over backwards for you unless you specifically recruited them to fill a slot. There are millions of badge gear things. PUGs for Kara exist. So do you know.. heroics. It sucks, but at some point people have to accept that if you're behind the curve its your job to catch up.

At this point we've pretty much killed raiding in our guild. People need down time and recharge time before we get back to raiding in 3-4 months.

It's a rough situation, I've been in it...kind of in it now, where I dread running X heroic with Y poorly geared tank b/c raider Z wanted to reroll a tank ( or dps or healer, whatever ). Seeing a raid with 8 of one class b/c it was the flavor of the month back when people were creating alts bugs me to no end, and then the Q_Q'ing over gear for ALTS *grumbles*.

Ok, that's out of my system, back to you.

The good thing about this is it's going to be different with WotLK. 10 man versions of every raid. The difference between gear being pretty minor ( except sometimes the color differences SUCK =P ). You might find you do much better with 2 10 man groups than 1 25 man.

You might find you do much better with 2 10 man groups than 1 25 man.


We have been kicking around this idea, and the big struggle is leadership of the "B Squad". Our strong leaders are also our strong players....go figure. So we can easily push progression with the "A Squad", but then we are left with the "B Squad" getting just pummeled and players stopping raid.

y other biggest concern is that we have 12-15 solid raiders, and someone is going to be left out of the "A Squad". Now most people that qualify for this group understand that there is competition for the slots, but I hate to think "Player Z" would be left out because "Player Y" is just UBER!

Not to float my own boat, but let me give you an example. I joined the guild ~ a year ago. My main is a mage. This is a casual raid guild and non of their mages were pushing +700 DPS consitently. I joined, and cap 1k consistently. I was soon being asked to take the mage roll in runs instead of the "Class Leader" who was then feeling left out. Now the class leader is a great guy with many many toons. He is good at all, but I would say not excellent at any. What do you do with this particular type person? His flexibility is fantastic, he is happy to run any toon to fill the gaps, but obviously being the permenant bench warmer is discouraging.

There is a guild over on Shadowmoon I believe called Retribution. They used to do 40 man raids back in the day. The BC transition was brutal for them, but they got back in the swing of things and took a shot at 25 mans. They did decent, but at the end of the day, its situations like the one you listed that sounded like it killed their progress, but their stance has always been one of if you fall behind, you catch up on your own.

However that being said, they are refocusing on 2 x 10 mans. Everyone knows that there will be an A team and a B team. The A team is the top raiders. The B team is the next tier down. However they are planning an fluidity between the two. If someone on the B team busts their butt they can earn slots on the A team. It keeps it competitive and the B team has more incentive to work as well.

I'm not saying its perfect, but hey its an idea...

We tell people in our recruiting interviews that we do not have a program to gear up undergeared folks for content. The good news is that LK resets everyone to the same level of gear at level 80 when raiding begins, so gearing folks up to start Naxx is as simple as telling them to finish levelling.

For us it is as simple as the first 10 to 80 that want to raid is the A team, second 10 is the B team. There will be some float between the two depending on schedules, but the motivated bird gets the worm.

With people like the guy you described, I'm just honest with them and tell them specifically that I need X class to perform Y function, and if they can't perform Y well, then I can't take them. Then I talk about what they can do to practice to get their skill up. Being straitforward works well.