lairpie

This has always been the largest issue for our guild (day 1 of the game, no major leadership changes or mergers ever, so fairly consistent). We've always believe firmly that it shouldn't be a job to play a game, that you shouldn't be unable to hang out with friends because you have a raid. We also felt that even when playing, that not everyone had to raid. We've always had a decent number of people that almost never raided and just pvped with us and did 5 man content, along with a lot of our core raiders that have always been very active in pvp. At one point we realized that almost 1/2 of our 40 man raid had the word marshal over their heads. For reference we killed c'thun and about 1/2 of Nax before the pre-expansion 'who cares, its all useless in 2 months' thing kicked in too hard to progress farther.

We've always said that it shouldn't be a job to raid, but it wasn't ever really true. Our raids were always carried by people that even while defending the idea that it wasn't a job, were every bit as committed as they would be to a job. Pre BC we probably had 15-20 people that were the same in almost every raid, probably another 15 that made 2/3 or so of the raids (so like 10 spots) and the rest people that made about 1/3 of the raids. We completely relied on that core of people that were always there for everything, even to the point of having them swap to alts full time to have people in each role and class that were consistent.

It was always a struggle to balance the need for consistency with the desire for being casual but we had enough people that were voluntarily consistent and 20 good people was all you really needed to keep pace with content release. We killed Nef less than 24 hours before aq was released. We killed cthun just after nax came out, and would have finished nax before the expansion had raiding not died off because of a lack of interest in gear that was soon to be replaced with greens. When 25 man raids were announced we were thrilled. I'd like to say it wasn't true, but i know everyone of our best players thought to themselves about how well we could do with 25 of our best 30 in every night and hardly ever seeing your C and D people in a raid.

Unfortunately the expansion didn't end our problems, mostly because over time that 15-20 good players that were always there has dwindled to may 5 players with 90% or so attendence. We're now around 5 people at 90%, probably another 10 over 2/3s and working our way down from there. Most of that 15-20 that we saw being the core of our 25 man raids are still with the guild, but its been almost 3 years now since I had to run all over the map getting money from people so we could pool our cash for a guild charter. Single college kids have become married guys that have to get up at 6am to get ready for work. Almost all of our original officers are the same, but once we were all living within a mile of eachother, now we span 1/2 the US. We never used to have social conflicts because 2/3 of our RL friends were in the guild, it'd be stupid to plan something for a raid night.

This has led us to having wildly varied success from night to night. One night we'll fly through bosses setting record kill times with no deaths. Doing the same content the same night the next week, we'll wipe to void reaver because we tried to do it with one dps warrior specced prot for the night and 1 feral druid as the only tanks and the damagers just couldn't hold back enough. We killed alar back when only the top guilds had because it was something we could get to easily in one night when we had a good raid, but have had trouble putting together enough solid raid nights in the same week to get time on vashj without completely ignoring the need to gear members by doing gruul, mag, and alar/VR. This forces us to balance the need to gear up our members with farmed bosses, with the need to kill new bosses, and the fact that for the most part you can't get to the new bosses anyway if you suck and kill the old bosses too slowly.

Last week we had 3 really solid nights, group wise, killed karathress for the first time, killed leo in just a couple pulls, sauntered up to vashj thinking we'd be killing her within a week or two. This week we wanted to just ignore everything and just focus on killing Vashj, but come 8pm on night 1, we had a raid that would be wasting it's time to try anything in SSC or TK. We wiped twice on gruul mostly from where people that were casual enough to have only done the fight once or twice murdered healers. We finished him up and called it for the night. Night two, still missing too many people to take SSC seriously including our main NR tank and our paly murloc tank so we head to TK. Killed VR with a dps warrior specced prot for the night and our normal druid tanking after 1 wipe, then alar, again with not the usual tanking setup after 1 or two wipes. Odds of getting any real time to work on vashj, pretty slim.

I think this is a lot different than the discussions of casual guilds where they're looking to know if they'll be able to move from karazhan to ZA, or how hard it is going to be to pick up enough additional people or an alliance to do early 25 man content. This is a guild just slightly ahead of my own and facing the same problems. More specifically its not an issue of everyone being casual, but rather balancing the progression that the more committed want with the freedom the more casual want.

Is anyone in a guild like mine or the OPs where there's a large disparity in raid attendance, and a decent disparity in skill across your raid that has managed to make it into and do much in BT or hyjal?