I had thought in November that maintaining a raid group in the face of already announced massive TBC changes (gear reset, downsizing etc) was hard, but at least it had a definite termination point, and a lot to look forward to. One and a half months into TBC, we're looking at a situation at least as difficult, with no end in sight.

Lets say you're not a super-elite guild like Nihilum or D&T, but merely (irony?) one of the top guilds on a 'normal' server. You are aiming for 25-man raid progress, and thus have to maintain 30-40+ active raiders. However, due to the way TBC raids are structured, you have to progress through Karazhan first. In fact, since the only 25-man target viable for 'normal' guilds is Maulgar (and Kazzak if you like world bosses), you will be spending the vast majority of your time in Karazhan. Thus, Karazhan raid spots are important in a way ZG and AQ20's never were. The loot is not trivialised by the 25-mans, and neither is the e-peen factor. In fact, players have nearly nothing else to look forward to. Karazhan is ... almost everything. So as officers, there are several choices.

You could run 1 Karazhan raid group and have huge numbers of unhappy people on bench. I would not have thought this was viable, but the other top horde guild on my server seems to be doing this, and getting away with it, so it must be.

You could run 2-3 Karazhan raid groups, and deal with all the associated logistical, manpower and social problems. An A/B team will also form naturally if you do not actively prevent it. A/B team setups are good for getting server/faction firsts (since A team effectively has the resources of the entire guild), but will generate huge amounts of jealousy and drama, with the added bonus of splitting your guild into cliques.

Lets say you choose to avoid the A/B team drama by splitting the guild into 2 fixed teams of roughly equal strength. You will have somewhat less drama, depending on how even the split really was, how close the 2 teams are in performance, and the power of 'the grass is greener' syndrome in your guild. Unfortunately, your raid progress will be reduced, and you will still get 2 cliques.

Lets say you take it another step further, and mix the teams up every week. The clique issue is now mostly solved, except between the raid leaders and MTs (who in my guild at least are in fixed groups each week, since obviously each group needs a raid leader and an MT). In exchange, you have slightly increased manning problems, since people are no longer terribly sure which raid times to come for, and teamwork/re-learning issues since people aren't raiding with the same team each week. In other words, even slower progression.

So now, when choosing which people to fill the raid slots each Karazhan, I have to consider the following factors
1) Which classes/players are needed to defeat the bosses for that night's raid with some semblance of reliability
2) Which players should I choose/not choose to prevent the appearance of an A/B team
3) Which players should I avoid locking into my instance because it would cause problems for the other team's manning
4) Which players do I not have access to because they are locked into the other team's instance
5) Which players should I cycle into the raid because they were left out last week. (assuming non-total underperformers)
6) How much should I allow 2)-5) to dampen the chances of actually getting a new boss down this week?

I also manage the RPP (DKP), so there's also a nasty amount of work each week ensuring that everyone in both raids as well as those who were benched/left out receive a fair share. I believe many guilds dont use DKP for Karazhan, but that would probably result in even greater unhappiness from those benched, and problems getting people to swap in/out of raids willingly.

The current level of drama in my guild is still merely moderate (as opposed to super-low pre-TBC), mostly because drama queens have largely been filtered out in the guild's first year, but the amount of work needed to maintain the current situation is painful, to say the least. Are there actually better solutions to these problems? Even if Blizzard were to 'fix' things, I don't see Karazhan becoming trivial enough to stop being a source of drama in anything less than 3-4 months.

For reference, we have Maulgar down and 1 group got Malchezaar this week while the other got Curator (plus Chess, obviously).

Curious to the size of your guild Zarat, as a month to attune people seems relativly high when things come down to it (unless your relating to TK25 in which I feel most guilds will struggle mainly with the Heroics for everyone rather than the actual raiding), as Gruul attunement is basicly 2 kills and your done, Nightbane is 2 weeks at most to atleast get enough to raid with, 3 if you want a really safe margin of playerbase to choose from.

For my guild which was just coming off of Naxx it was best for us to go with the equal A/B team setup. Originally we tried to do 3 teams but we were spreading ourselves way to thin. So far we have had equal progression from both raid teams.

The first thing you have to do when creating these teams within your officer core is to make sure you add your officers in last. This way hopefully no bias's extend into your group makeup decisions. Then you go down your list of players and look at everything...

- Attendance
- Leadership
- Skill
- Time spent In-game
- Gear
- 'annoyance factor'

Then do your best to split each class up into two groups. As more players get keyed repeat the process for the individual and place him in the best suited group.

As for DKP, we don't award anything for Karazhan.

In the long run, I think DKP for Karazhan will be more hassle than it's worth. It all depends on your guild though; some people like to work things out and others like to follow a more rigid system. It's hard to say which one is 'better.'

I think for your typical sized raiding guilds in TBC, 2 groups is optimal. Yes, you might have enough people for three but you'd likely be stretching yourself thin and if people can't show up you're left with 3 half-successful groups instead of 2 successful groups.

Pretty much all this was covered here...

Raid spots and leftovers

We have 3 groups, each with officers. We rotate people in for Nightbane kills as we can. So far A and B have killed Nightbane. I did it with B and it was a total nightmare - mostly due to an Australian tank that understandably had many issues with fear due to latency. I've never hated hordes lack of fear ward more than over the last three days. It was total frustration. Naturallly, we walk in and two shot him on the last night of the lock. Sheesh.

Honestly, getting all your actives Nightbane is going to be hellish compared to Gruul/Mag. Keep on your people and make sure that everyone is getting in on Nightbane, even if it means they give up loot farming with your B/C group for a sure kill with your A group.

What's sad is I have a nightbane kill but not a single loot from Khara. Yay?

We're not as far along with Karazhan as I would have liked, since we were a bit late in starting...already we have Maulgar down and have been working on trying to emphasize the 25-man nights as a "guild building" effort.

I can certainly identify with the stuggles here, and it's been tough finding a good solution. We started with the "A team" and quickly got almost all the server firsts up to Illhoof and Aran down to 32% or first week, however there was a lot of discontent in the guild about the whole "A team" issue, and something had to give there.

As soon as we had enough people that it was viable (~33 active raiders) I looked at everyone's signup for the week and composed two pretty equal teams, with backups corresponding to class need and away days. We ended up with trouble with one of the groups in our last day, since we "lent" the other group one of our backups...but all around it worked well.

The group with the raid leader from the original "A team" was out the gates a bit faster, but we tried to give a lot of support to the other team (which had members/officers from the original group also) and help get them through Curator on their first week. All in all, while it has been "bad" for "progression" (we ended up losing "omg servar first" on Aran-Prince because of it) it was much better for the guild to not be having the whole irritation issue with running a single group, or stacked groups.

Ultimately, I think it's better in the long-run to have balanced group and take it slower...as that will help bring your whole guild up to a more even play level for the 25-man content. Given how limited and somewhat poor the progression curve is in TBC so far, I honestly am very unconcerned with progression speed atm, and mostly think that building up the guild to be on a more even field and not get upset/disorginized/jealous of Karazhan drama is probably the more important thing to do.

We tried doing this, and discovered, in short, the problem that Mencius posted elsewhere: A lot of people expect to be able to raid Karazhan in greens and level 60 epics, and that just doesn't cut it. We've had to cut back to one raid to progress as opposed to gimping two raids. It's a fine balance -- I don't want to create cliques, but some people are just not prepared to raid with those who have gotten the gear and done the footwork, as it were.

I took a completely hands off approach and told people it's their responsibility to raid Karazhan on their own. So far, it's worked out pretty well. Slackers and hand-holders (incidentally, the most vocal opponents to this decision) will get left behind, everyone else will eventually get keyed/geared. Trying to enforce groups when people have radically different playtimes will cause more problems than it solves.

We have run into that issue, somewhat. It hasn't hampered progression, though. We had one warrior show up to tank Midnight wearing mostly tier 2 (I was tanking Attumen). He kept dying, so we had to replace him. I felt bad, but there was no other way around it.

I think as time goes on, you'll be able to run two raids more successfully. Some people don't realize how important the gear in the 5-mans is, right now.

We were a small raiding guild going into TBC (~55, just enough to fill out Naxx raids on any given night), and once the dust settled after the expansion, we've found that we have ~30-35 people on during prime-time. But due to wacky class balance (1-2 druids, 1 paladin, 1-2 warlocks v a bunch of wars/rogs/mages), we're only able to realistically run 1 Kara group a week.

For the first week, it was the hardcore that got keyed first, we pushed a quick clear up through Prince in the second? week. Now that we're comfortable with the zone though, when we're doing a scheduled Kara run, we just ask our class channels to decide on a rotation based on their play schedules, loot they want, etc. It keeps a good balanced group, and allows people say in when they go, and at the same time allows us the flexibility of a single raidid for the guild's Kara groups.

Yes, we don't gear up as fast as if we managed to do 2-3 clears a week, but the Kara loot aren't really upgrades from the heroic loot anyway, so it's pretty moot in terms of gear progression.