Just a quick question to see how other guilds deal with raiding spots - how do you all decide who gets to go and who doesn't? Do you pick and choose players or do you leave it up to a roll for a spot?

Just curious what's everyone's strategy.

1. Class needs
2. Sign ups
3. Ability

I presume you are talking about Karazhan ...

There are certain roles that must be filled in KZ. You get people who can fit those roles. One main tank. One off tank. Two healers. One off-healer. Five DPS. Sometimes you can combine OT/OH/DPS in one or two players, such as a druid or shaman or pally. Sometimes you can combine OT/DPS in a fury warrior with a shield.

Usually, guilds in KZ tend to be DPS heavy. So, if you can fill your tanking/healing spots, you have a choice on your DPS.

You need to balance between:

1) Progression: bringing low DPS players to a fight that you can't get very far in hurts everybody in the raid. If all 5-6 of your DPS players aren't scrambling for #1 on the damage meters, you won't get very far, and the repair bills will continue to mount up.

2) Fairness: get everybody involved in the raiding process. Keep people excited. Remind them why they want to raid.

3) Melee/ranged balance: Having too much ranged or too much melee will make certain fights much harder. Two melee and three ranged is a very good mix for most fights in the first half of Karazhan.

It depends on how progressed your guild is within the instance in question. When BRL first started Kara we took people based on class balance, and then gear. Since BRL is a raiding guild we can easily assume talent is nonnegotiable and a negligible point; we're all here to raid. If you're talking about a guild who has been in Kara a few months, then perhaps you've begun to rotate lesser geared members in for the easier bosses and treat most of Kara as a loot piñata.

Initially I'd stick to this:

1. Class Balance and Instance Requirements (including spec consideration)
2. Talent of Individual Raider (Within reason to caveat #3)
3. Gear Requirements
4. Insert Politically Correct Measures of Appeasement

It was just a general question as I'm quite aware what classes/roles are needed to run in a raid. We were discussing other possible strats last night for choosing out of a pool of players for Kara and/or any other raid for that matter and I was just curious what ther guilds are doing.

For example, keeping in mind class balance, we have the players that are in surplus for their roles who want to go, do a roll for their spot. We're finding it time consuming before the raid starts and want to investigate other ways of doing it all the while making it fair for everyone.

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Q u o t e:
1. Class Balance and Instance Requirements (including spec consideration)
2. Talent of Individual Raider (Within reason to caveat #3)
3. Gear Requirements
4. Insert Politically Correct Measures of Appeasement

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After a lost roll or having to tell someone they they aren't ready quite yet for the content we're working on that night... We're having problems with point #4.... As polite as we can be, there are still hurt feelings or peeved off people it seems.

:-(

That's why you use the sign ups. If they don't get to go because they didn't sign up it's no one's fault but their own. If you're referring to Kara, I tell the guild, "healers and tanks get first priority, make sure you sign up since that really only leaves 5 more open spots". Rolling narrows your options as a raid leader to choose.

All other things being equal, don't do rolls. Someone has bad rolls for 2-3 weeks and they're gonna get ticked.

Instead, I'd say just schedule it beforehand. Make a list of 10 people who will go (if they're online), then take those. If anyone's missing, fill in with backups. Next week, make a new list, with different people, so that everyone gets rotated in fairly.

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Q u o t e:
Instead, I'd say just schedule it beforehand. Make a list of 10 people who will go (if they're online), then take those. If anyone's missing, fill in with backups. Next week, make a new list, with different people, so that everyone gets rotated in fairly.

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Have you had a lot of success with this method? My experience is that it stops progress dead.

At some point your guild will hit "cutting edge" content. When that happens a bunch of people will realize the truth. They'll know that if players a,b,d,e,h,i,k,and q get together with a couple random players who can follow instructions and have decent gear that they can get past the wall. They'll also know that if only half of them go on the run and they have even one guy with sub-par gear who has difficulty accomplishing his tasks then they're just going to spend another fruitless night with a large repair bill.

At some point "fair" ceases to matter because "fair" doesn't work. If any 10 or 20 or 25 people can do the job, fine, be fair and try to make everyone happy. But people have to understand their limitations. Some people have better gear. Some people have better UIs. Some people have better skills. Some people know how to get the most out of their class/spec. Some people are experts in creating a new strategy. And when all is said and done, getting the right people = success and getting too many of the wrong people = poinlessness.

Yes, no one wants to be the wrong person, but that's where you need real maturity. A mature person makes a deliberate choice to transform themselves into the right person. Everyone else gripes, complains, and screams that it's not fair.

Set some standards. Take it upon your self to review events afterwards and fix what you did wrong, because the right people will be reviewing the events afterwards to see what they did wrong and they'll see your mistakes when they do it. They're not looking at the records to see who's fault it is, but they are looking at the records to learn from them and they're not idiots.

Who gets to go on raids? Well, if it's AQ, take anyone, and especially those crafters who can use the patterns. if it's MC, take anyone and especially a couple good miners and blacksmiths. But if it's cutting edge content for your guild, for the good of the guild, take the people who can get the job done.

everything being equal, and you can easily sub in one healer for another, or one dps for another without hurting your success rate, go by loot need.

we regularly sub people in for bosses by loot needs, and clear kara at a good pace. as long as people are aware of this style and are ready to go, it's quick and painless and keeps a lot of people happy.

If you are a raiding guild specifically focused on progression and everyone understands that, it's an easy choice: you pick the best geared and most competent people for each role.

If, however, your guild is more casual, and you want to try to get everyone a chance to see the content, it's a lot tougher. I'm very glad I'm not the one doing the group-composition-deciding for our raids, because it can be very hard to avoid hurting people's feelings while still creating a group that's going to make some progress.

We use GEM to sign up for raids, and the day before the raid the group who will be going is posted on the website. We are, of course, dps heavy, and we usually get about 13-14 signups for Karazhan, so some people are left out every week, but we try to get everyone to at least half the raids. We also tune our group a little to whichever new encounter we intend to focus on- the first time we did Maiden, for example, we didn't bring melee dps so that we could have an easier time learning the fight. It's worked out well for us so far, and while we're probably not progressing as fast as we would if we had a static raid group every week, our priority is making sure it's fun for everyone, and luckily we seem to have good enough people that we're not feeling as if we're stagnating, so that works for us.

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Q u o t e:
If, however, your guild is more casual, and you want to try to get everyone a chance to see the content, it's a lot tougher. I'm very glad I'm not the one doing the group-composition-deciding for our raids, because it can be very hard to avoid hurting people's feelings while still creating a group that's going to make some progress.

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This sounds a lot like us and yeah the group-composition-gearcheck-decision making is what's getting incredibly hard as we want to progress at a nice pace, want everyone to have the chance to see content, but don't want to hurt feelings when someone isn't ready at all but wants to come.

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Q u o t e:
We use GEM to sign up for raids, and the day before the raid the group who will be going is posted on the website. We are, of course, dps heavy, and we usually get about 13-14 signups for Karazhan, so some people are left out every week, but we try to get everyone to at least half the raids. We also tune our group a little to whichever new encounter we intend to focus on- the first time we did Maiden, for example, we didn't bring melee dps so that we could have an easier time learning the fight. It's worked out well for us so far, and while we're probably not progressing as fast as we would if we had a static raid group every week, our priority is making sure it's fun for everyone, and luckily we seem to have good enough people that we're not feeling as if we're stagnating, so that works for us.

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How is GEM working out for you? We thought about replacing our Group Calender addon for this one instead but were worried about the sign ups. We don't want people thinking that because they signed up they automatically get to go. How have you been dealing with telling people for certain encounters that they cannot go due to composition or gear?

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Q u o t e:
How is GEM working out for you? We thought about replacing our Group Calender addon for this one instead but were worried about the sign ups. We don't want people thinking that because they signed up they automatically get to go. How have you been dealing with telling people for certain encounters that they cannot go due to composition or gear?

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As far as I know, there really haven't been any problems. GEM is an easy tool to use, and everyone's understood from the start that being in the first 10 names doesn't guarantee a spot- by signing up you're basically saying I want to go and I am available. While the signup lists do allow for overflow, so even though GEM knows only 10 people can go to Kara it will allow more signups than that. As long as you're clear in advance about the fact that the group will be created out of everyone that signed up, I can't see anyone having an issue with it.

Our people also tend to be pretty mature about sitting out for a week. They understand that we only have a limited number of available tanks and healers, so those people are pretty much necessary to the raid. And when we announced that we wouldn't be taking melee dps for learning Maiden it was done in a nice way- not "Sorry guys, you're screwed," but "We really want to focus on our strategy for this encounter this week, but I promise I'll get you in next week Mr. Rogue."

Edit: I realized I should clarify. We're not switching people in and out in the middle of the raid based on what encounter we're headed to- just if we're still learning something we may optimize the group for that particular fight for that week. We've since brought melee dps to Maiden with no problem. :-}

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Q u o t e:
Just a quick question to see how other guilds deal with raiding spots - how do you all decide who gets to go and who doesn't? Do you pick and choose players or do you leave it up to a roll for a spot?

Just curious what's everyone's strategy.

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Picking a lineup for Karazhan is really hard, it's the thing I like the least about it. 25-person raids are easier.

Our priorities go like this:

1) First I satisfy specific promises made to people who have gotten bumped in the past. If I tell someone "you can go next week" when they get bumped, I will absolutely honor that promise.

2) Minimum gear and skill standards. Particularly in farm-status fights, people don't have to be the best or best-geared, but they have to be able to meet our minimum quality standard. Usually this isn't an issue.

3) General class balance (having enough tanks/healers.) Without this the run can't happen.

4) Having appropriate CC or special class abilities for the fights that come up. This is not viewed as critical, but usually just "nice to have," particularly for farm status stuff. (One of the most fun moments in Karazhan was our first time figuring out how to do Moroes with no priests or hunters in the group.)

5) Spreading around the chance to go. Like many guilds we have more DPS than slots, and since we want everyone going to 25-person runs, we want everyone to get geared up. It does us no good to run Kara if nobody in the group needs any drops.

In Kara in particular, once you have a couple great healers geared up, running with two healers and an extra DPS can help get more people in and make the fights go faster.

It's not perfect, people still occasionally get upset, but it helps that people know that if tonight's not their night, they'll most likely get a chance another day.

BTW, while it all depends on the player, people can often work through performance issues. We've had at least one DPS player go from struggling to outdo the tank to topping the charts with assistance and coaching from their class leaders, but that can't really happen unless we get them in, see what they're doing wrong, and try to help them learn how to do better.

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Q u o t e:
How is GEM working out for you? We thought about replacing our Group Calender addon for this one instead but were worried about the sign ups.

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Also -- we use GEM and it's fantastic, BUT it can sometimes have problems where it loses events, people see a different signup order than the leader does, (which establishing those priorities I indicated has helped), and sometimes time display gets screwed up for some people. Also, it's not that friendly to people who play on multiple machines because it expects to have a person's GEM data file available whenever they log in.

The solution to the last is to run GEM only on one computer.

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Q u o t e:
4) Having appropriate CC or special class abilities for the fights that come up. This is not viewed as critical, but usually just "nice to have," particularly for farm status stuff. (One of the most fun moments in Karazhan was our first time figuring out how to do Moroes with no priests or hunters in the group.)

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Ooh, that sounds like fun. We've never had a priest for Moroes, but always at least two hunters. I've always found that succeeding in less-than-optimal conditions is way more exciting, especially after hearing "We can't do this without a priest" for a couple weeks. :-}

/tangent

sorry continuing your tangent hehe...

We had a epic Oz fight there other night... For some reason half way through all our DPS classes wiped and we only had our tanks and healers left... We ended up downing Tin Man and the Crone with just us lowly low dps people. I don't think I ever spammed smite so fast in my life. That to me was more satisfying than having a solid easy fight. hehe

sorry let's continue lol...

Because of the amazing success we had with Kara, we followed a similar model with TK and SSC (we still do Grull's as a guild PUG).

We first looked at a solid raid makeup (35 players - yeah I know too many I will get to that) and slotted classes/specs in and not players. We then shared this info with the guild along with a proposed raid schedule and let them know we would be going to a static group for raiding and that of they were interested in being part of the group to send a note to Mok on the website.

We were very clear with people that we would be looking at the following:

1) Ability to make raid times

2) Gear (while we did not look for uber gear, we looked to see if the gear was:

a) Appropriate for spec

b) The very best the player could have considering what they have had access to

3) The desire to come prepared, with pots, reagents, gear sets and so on

4) The ability/desire to read up on fights and watch videos before heading in to dungeons/bosses

5) The desire to push end game content and be willing to be a productive member of the team

Once we had all of the info we selected the 25 core raiders and filled some of the additional 10 spots with "alts". The 25 are a static team and as long as they maintain an 85% attendance over a 6 week period they will remain part of the raid group. The remaining selected players, what we call raid alts, will be rotated in to the group periodically whether needed as an alt or not to allow them to learn the fight and get some gear. It is not our intention to have these alts ride the pine - they are very much active members of the raid group and we expect them to be able to hop in seamlessly as needed. At anytime one of the core group can no longer maintain attendance they will be rotated out and depending on the situation will become a non raiding player or an alt for the core group.

So why the decision to move to a static group?

We ran static Kara groups and saw what a difference having the same core group can make in progression. While we are not a guild that focuses on progression, no one likes to spend night after night wiping on the same bosses. After 2 years of re-explaining the boss fight each raid night and “being the jerk” as Mok so eloquently put it saying who was and was not coming for the evening and struggling to get the bosses down with our motley crew (who we love dearly), well, it wears on you. TBC requires (as has been said again and again in this forum) a more focused raid group, the days of 15 warlocks in MC are over and we look for more structure in the raid group. We also saw an interesting trend in TBC, many who were much more causal found the format of end game and the way we scheduled it, easier to play in – thus we have players who were ready to step things up a bit in raiding.

What of our more causal folks who still want to raid?

We are a guild made up of real life friends, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, parent and their children and so on and there is no way we can forge ahead w/o bringing them along with us at some point. Many of our players have busy lives, they are not lazy looking to get drug through, they jst do not have the time some of our other players do. We want them to raid with us – we already miss them dearly from being cut down to 25. At the same time – I do not want to being these players along to wipe all night – where is the fun in that for anyone?

So – we have some casual players who are stepping up to lead some raids, they are taking turns and approaching the runs in a pretty causal fashion. Last night was their first Kara run (it is a guild PUG) and it ran at the same time the core group ran in TK. We are still fleshing things out – this weeks marks the first of the new format and I am sure we will hit some hitches along the way. As we continue down the raid, our plan is to grandfather our more casual players into the dungeons the core group has cleared by having some of the core raiders run with the causal players – once they are up to speed then they will take over the reigns of the run.

We will from time to time still bring a more causal player with us on those odd nights when we are missing in classes we are limited on our core alts and we will still run Grull’s and soon Mag as a guild PUG. Our players will always have the opportunity to opt into the core raid group should a core alt spot open up – people lives change and some raiding in core now may find they no longer can and some not able to now may be able to in the future – it is the beauty of our guild – we remain flexible and make great use of our resources which I relate directly to the quality of players/people we have guilded.

The above will not work for every guild – but I hope perhaps I have been able to offer a starting point for some thought around what might work for guilds out their facing the dilemma of staffing raids in TBC ;)

I fill raids using these criteria:

1. Role balance (i.e. # of tank/healer/dps) and sometimes class balance for certain fights.
2. Satisfying a reasonable minimum gear requirement (level 68-70 items that are appropriate for spec).
3. Attitude/preparedness.
4. For the harder fights, experience is taken into consideration.

We rotate new people in for the easier fights that the experienced people already have the loot from. We're a small guild that emphasizes the social aspect of raiding over progression, so our veterans are fine with sitting out during certain fights so the newbies can get experience/loot, and vice versa the newbies understand that they should see the earlier fights before moving onto the more difficult content. We don't clear bosses as fast as a hardcore raiding guild would, but we have fun.

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Q u o t e:
Because of the amazing success we had with Kara, we followed a similar model with TK and SSC (we still do Grull's as a guild PUG).

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FYI: Added a link to this post in the forum index: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=113701369&postId=4427712425&sid=1#11