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My guild could probably be considered quite casual these days; we used to raid new content 3 nights a week (2 x 4 hours on weeknights and 1 x 6ish hours on saturdays), whereas we now get in about 3 x 2.5-3 hours on new content during the weeknights, with Karazhan filling up whenever we have people interested.
We started Karazhan pretty quickly/early into the expansion, moved onto Gruul, started getting Mags about a month ago, and have Hydross and VR down in the past few weeks.
Unfortunately our raid force has issues with committment (availability and showing up ready on time), and has for quite a while. With the 40 mans this wasn't a huge issue, as you could often fill in with warm bodies without too much trouble. With the 25's, people are warry of going in short handed (particularly with new content), so there's far too much sitting around being done. Raid form ups at 8 lead to first pulls at 9 due to a tank or a couple of healers being MIA or afk.
To tie this excessive background into the matter at hand, I've been pondering my casual guild's progression, because as we become successful in instances (got Tidewalker to 40% last week) and rack up more bosses to kill/work on per week, the more that 'farmed content' is going to eat into our meagre available time.
As an officer, I've been pushing to get our form up/buffed/pulling time down, and to expand our raid times (preferably with longer raids, as opposed to more of them, where I suspect said lengthy form up times would give us diminishing returns on the night's time investments), but thus far am meeting limited success.
I have no interest in abandoning my friends, but the guild has seen a lot of attrition lately, at least in part due to frustration, lacking progression and burn out. As happy as I am to get fresh faces on board and get back into instances, re-teaching/re-learning encounters repeatedly wears on my desire to remain a steady contributor, and having cut our effective raid time nearly in half has left me with plenty of blessed time for alts, but little time spent doing what I'd actually like to be doing; learning encounters and kicking ass in raids.
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