I am curious of how other guilds have set up their class and guild balance, and would like to use this thread as a discussion-tool for that subject.
going from 40-man to 25-man raids is a pretty big change to the guilds setup. in my opinion, if you keep your "old" setup you are bound to get some unhappy players, unless you either make the guilds playerbase bigger or smaller. our guild have always been about a small group of dedicated people (hence the name), and through alot of people quitting during christmas season/pre-tbc we have contained that balance at its very limits. it is currently working out pretty good, with the few exceptions of missing 1-2 from a certain class at odd occasions, leaving no chance to get the "upper hand" by stacking that certain raid. it also leaves very small chance of extending our raiding-schedule outside the current one, in case its needed.
this is something ive been thinking about alot recently and i wonder how it looks on the other side of the field, with bigger-than-average (read: bigger-than-"absolutely needed") guilds. how is your average raid-day handled and how do you satisfy your playerbase? how are short-notice changes to the raid-schedule affecting your members? and also, how are these extra raid-events working out?
on to the class-balance issue...
a general thought of mine is that 5 players from each class is pretty much optimal, as that leaves room for occasional "stacking" of raids (for example gruul's anti-melee campaign).
i also have a feeling that bigger guilds are potentially more capable of fast progress, but at the same time risk getting unsatisfied players in the long run. meanwhile smaller guilds tend to have a higher burnout-rate due to requiring almost 100% attendance from most members.
how does your guild setup look like? is there any class that is more/less needed to function at its best?
is there a way to balance/cope with this issue?
Our current guild consists of following (due to insane lack of competent applicants of certain classes):
Our group is definitely on the more casual side than not, and we are having issues fielding 25 people for raiding. That being said, our class balance of raiders is as such:
We're almost always short on healers, and recruitment has been a tougher situation than I expected after BC hit. I had hoped that the trimming down of raiding rosters would fill up the pool of people looking for a guild. That has not been the case however on our server. Honestly I'd over-recruit a bit if there were people available to recruit. Has anyone else been experiencing this dry spell?
As of now, we're still trying to get a couple more druids.
Druids - 3 (2 Tree of Life, one Feral who isn't that active atm.)
Hunters - 4 (All very active. Most out of everything, I believe.)
Mages - 6 (They go on weird spurts, and some nights we still don't have any on. Nonetheless, all good Mages, we took the 6th because of weird scheduling... lol. A couple Frost, the rest are Fire.)
Paladins - 6 (5 of them are 70. The other is almost there. Several Holy, one Protection, one Ret. For now anyway. We'll see how things end up. Our Protection Paladin is doing great, but I wonder how much of a shot he'll have in the 25 mans. I encouraged Ret, but Holy seems to be the strongest tree.)
Priests - 4 (3 Shadow at the moment. Yes, three were originally Holy. GG.)
Rogues - 4 (Good activity. Keeping it low.)
Shaman - 6 (2 of each spec. No lie. It works really well actually. We had one Maulgar raid with all 6 shaman there. Fun times.)
Warlocks - 6 (Technically 7, but one is indefinitely inactive. The others are great. Scheduling and what not makes this work.)
Warriors - 6 (We have a few initiates, but we were seriously lacking in this department. Good warriors are hard to find. Several Protection right now, but they'll eventually fit into the niches. I'm expecting end results to show a couple arms and fury, and a couple Protection (MT/OT))
So that's mainly what our roster is right now. We have a couple other random accounts, but it should come out to something like 45ish, and we actually have 49 I think.
We started our guild for TBC, and we're staying pretty stringent on recruiting. I bent the rules when we went up to 6 of each class, but it has worked out in our favor. Honestly, you recruit as you need, and adapt accordingly. Certain rules should be set though, because if people go inactive, you may replace them.
(I hate to do this but I'm supposed to say "Don't sign your posts - we can see who you are because you filled out your profile!")
As for contributing to this:
Warriors (4):
prot - 2
fury - 1
arms - 1
Druids (3):
feral - 1
resto - 2
Priests (5):
holy - 4
shadow - 1
Paladins (5):
ret - 1
holy/prot - 4
Mages (5):
fire - 3
arc/fire - 2
Warlocks (3):
afflict - 1
destruct - 2
Hunters (3):
MM - 3
Rogues (2):
mut - 1
combat daggers - 1
Shaman (2):
resto - 1
enh - 1
32 total. We might pick up another dps warrior, but between 30-35 is a good number, balancing RL needs with pretty high attendance (~80% attendance). Also gives a buffer for long-term trips and unexpected quits.
We run 2 karazhan groups, both of whom can clear it. the majority of sit-outs happen there, but we just swap for bosses that we need, etc.
Last edited by Tempestra : 03/16/07 at 6:24 PM.
Reason: Added in total number.
We only have one or two Karazhan keyed Shaman at this point so that percentage is a bit inflated due to alts etc. but the rest of the numbers seem pretty accurate to me. I think we've got 6 or 7 raids into Karazhan, with 3 or 4 of those clearing it, and one 25-man downing Maulgar with no Gruul kills yet.
I'd say that as the size of the available player pool grows it does dilute the average dedication that people have towards raiding, but we have a big enough playerbase to draw from (beyond our own guild we're in an alliance with 11 other guilds on the server whose members often raid with each other) that people tend to find a run that's a good fit for them; the ones willing to farm for consumables and go for pure PVE specs end up in the raids that progress further, and the people with less time or inclination for that end up in a more laid-back run.
In the MC days we had one main raid until we got to the point that there were 80 people interested in running every week and then started fielding two MC raids a week, and that's basically how things have gone with Karazhan as well; once there's another ten people looking to run it, a new raid gets formed. I think that any issues with the makeup of the raids have been resolved by pulling in healers and tanks from other guilds in the alliance, and there's a pretty big pool of people to pick subs from as well.
i also have a feeling that bigger guilds are potentially more capable of fast progress, but at the same time risk getting unsatisfied players in the long run. meanwhile smaller guilds tend to have a higher burnout-rate due to requiring almost 100% attendance from most members.
This is pretty much the quandary right here. In my opinion, the "small, tight-knit guild" can have the highest effectiveness, but only over the short term. If you look back to when WoW was still in its early stages, the guilds really at the top of the game were the smaller, longstanding crews like CQ and NA. As time went on however, the burnout and overall requirements for maintaining that success become extraordinary, such that the bigger guilds begin to gain the edge due to less pressure on the individuals. Shrinking a guild reduces drama and increases effectiveness due to prolonged levels of teamwork, but it comes at the price of drastically increased burnout due to a constant burden of needing to stay active. People feeling that the raid's success 'depends' on them being there is the surest route to them cracking under pressure.
Our lesson from Naxxramas was basically "Attrition never stops". In BC we took the deliberate decision to pad out the guild specifically to avoid attrition in the long term, at the cost of extra work in the short term. Not to mention we felt it was a healthier approach to sacrifice cutting edge progress for the health and happiness of our guildies. People feeling like they can actually take breaks if they want to are generally happier than those that don't. I don't doubt that if we'd shrunk the guild and cut the guys that weren't in the best half of their class, we'd probably be a bit further in progress, but I'm also sure that the demands upon each of the remaining players would be far greater.
We pad each of our classes up to a point where a threshold is reached in terms of class numbers and activity, such that we will always have coverage for that class, for any raid on a given night. So that can consist of either 5 super active druids, or 10 semi active rogues. The only constant being that they can all play, as I don't believe in telling the guy that has a job that he's not as valuable to the guild as the nolifer if they can both perform to the same level.
We run 2 Karazhan teams a week, and we basically leave raid spots and rotations down to the classes themselves. It can mean that people are swapping in and out very frequently, but it ensures that classes work it out together, and actively communicate about what people are after gear-wise. Sorting raid spots can be enormously stressful sometimes, but if it means that in 3 months time we still have complete coverage in every class, so that we can hit endgame raid content with every option available to us, then that's a price I'm willing to pay.
This is pretty much the quandary right here. In my opinion, the "small, tight-knit guild" can have the highest effectiveness, but only over the short term. If you look back to when WoW was still in its early stages, the guilds really at the top of the game were the smaller, longstanding crews like CQ and NA. As time went on however, the burnout and overall requirements for maintaining that success become extraordinary, such that the bigger guilds begin to gain the edge due to less pressure on the individuals. Shrinking a guild reduces drama and increases effectiveness due to prolonged levels of teamwork, but it comes at the price of drastically increased burnout due to a constant burden of needing to stay active. People feeling that the raid's success 'depends' on them being there is the surest route to them cracking under pressure.
Our lesson from Naxxramas was basically "Attrition never stops".
QFT. We were always a "small, tight-knit guild" in Naxx trying to just stay ahead of the attrition curve. Several times we fell behind, and our progression slowed. As you might expect, guild morale doesn't hold up well against canceled raids where 36 people took the time to show up. With a small guild this can happen at any time - the night before, you can have had 41 people online downing Loatheb for the first time. Attrition also tends to snowball - you get one or two people burning out, and half the guild starts to wonder whether they should bother showing up for the raid tomorrow - it'll just be canceled due to being one or two players short, right?
We purposely let attrition slide to take care of our BC downsizing. It worked pretty well, but we learned our lesson as soon as we started work on Gruul in February. People started dropping left and right - BC raiding wasn't their thing. Progression is too time consuming, low risk/reward ratio, etc etc. We had to do some pretty active recruiting in order to get Gruul down, then lost a few more - nobody was looking forward to having to go through that kind of trouble for another 2-3 weeks.
Now we're certain where we need to be, but lost time on Mag and Hydross due to our initial lack of sufficient "padding". Maybe somewhere down the road a "small, tight-knit" structure will work, but with the current state of BC raiding you just can't predict who is going to burn out, or when. We restructured the guild to make room for a farm team - something we disavowed pre-BC - so that we could proactively recruit sub-ins/trainees. Judging from the lack of success we've had in recruitment, we're not the only guild that reached a slowdown because they failed to predict BC burnout.
So, a small guild? Might work for your raiding core, but you need sufficient backups or potential replacements on the roster to keep you raiding. With the class-stacking requirements in many of these fights, 27-30 raiders online at raid time just doesn't cut it for progression - especially since any random 3 of them might burn out in the next week. It's good that we're left with the people who actually have the stomach for BC raiding, but it just stings that our efforts to stay "small, tight-knit" left us unprepared for the uptick in attrition that kicked in about a month after BC came out.
I will try to tell you from the other side, a large guild. Not the biggest one, but you will see.
At MC times, when everything startet, we was about 60, not everyone fit in one group, but all decent player and willed to raid. So we added another two smaller guilds to ours and ended up with about 130 people. We got one elite group with advanced players, killed rag fast and a b-team of a very random pickeled group, about 5 new faces every raid. The progress was slower, and when BWL was out the itemisation of the second group was to worse to join bwl plus some of the elite group left for several reason (disliking xyz, rl problems, bored of that game etc - you all might know). Elite group grabbed some better players from b-team and discovered BWL, while more and more casual player filled up their tier 1 and got all regular slots an epic or two. They wanted more! More disadvantages ended in try to also get some kills in BWL but failed to casuality of most of the players.
Raidleader wasn't amused to lead and tended to stay in elite group for their own epics. Well, thankfully, ZG appeared. Everyone was able to achieve good gear for little trouble and we had some content to offer for the ones who was willing to raid but not good enough for bwl.
After some more leaves and Nef laying dead on the ground we startet again a second raid per week and filled em up with the alts of the elite players (allmost everyone got a 60 half t1 toon at this time from helping here and there). It worked, we got two raids running killing everything but the discrepancie between elites and casuals growths up until ~ aq came out. More people left, leave us back with around 70. we were able to run with those one perfect aq run, filled up each mc and bwl run with friends and member from other guild. Not everyone was confident, but we was able to handle it by running for them with alts/friends little later until ~ huhuran. But we got a lot of minigroups, where everyone talked on a bad way about the "others" and the atmosphere finally wasn't that nice in the end of naxx, tough.
Your fault, mine fault, everyone's fault etc. Maybe we just did to much and had to less organisation potential for this effort, our raidleader burned out and naxx progress stopped at 4hm. Our headshot was the release date of tbc was published allmost everywhere, where any player with lesser effort can get better items (u might have talked about all this, to). Well, only a core of around 30 people left and we tried every week for the last 2 month until naxx to push the others, but it didn't work that well.
It ended up with a divorce, some quit wow, some went to a guild who's claiming the server crown (no offense), well after all we have left a nice member pool for 2 kara groups and 25 man raid content with the people who like each other, knowing us for years and willed to stay regardless any further regular problems.
My experiences from a larger guild:
- lots of dramas
- LOTS of envy
- you can't know everyone until your playtime is higher then your sleep time. Could you remember about 130 people, their gear, knowledge of the content and maybe their toons and equipment?
- by picking people who love the game and are attracted, but no that much a nerd like the most of us posting here we got a good backup for days when then dentists try to knock out all of our regular healer in time, and if you trait them fair, they may will accept that they are 2nd choice because of attendance
- weekend/casual gamer may not fit to end game raiding but was a good base for smaller raids and known content if you a willed to explain it over and over again
- you may outlast every guildleave, even from smaller groups - well geared toons will do the job as good as a pissed main could. Just think about your only declined maintank got 2000$ for his account on ebay and your only backup who picked lots of tankitems fall in love with real live. We had several of this happening, but our mass of players was able to handle it (thanks god we never got a maintank rule, else we may got kicked in our a**).
- Burnout? No problem, take your break and come back if/when you want, several people may want take your place
First off, I loved the AFGM Video's as far back as the BWL one - and I think I watched all the Naxx ones.
My guild is very small and probably middle of the raid progression rung. The main problem we have found is the wants/needs between various players. The Hardcores want this and the casuals want this.
The hardcores have ran all the 5-mans, have their heroic keys, are attuned to Karazhan and want to raid or heroic.
The casuals haven't even been to HALF of the 5-mans, their gear sucks, barely or not even attuned to Karazhan and very far off heroic keys.
Without the casual players, the hardcore cannot go to Gruul's Lair every week and would be stuck forever running Karazhan.
Kind of off topic, but its the same methodoloy when looking at guild numbers - its more of catering to your guild and making sure you have people with similar playtimes/dedication levels.
Especially at the hardcore level, its HARD to find a full raid roster of everyone on the same page at the same level.
I think you are always going to have to aim for 4/5/6 of each class (some more valuable then others) and make sure they all have the same mindset.
"Being a leader is not a position of power. It is a position of service." ~ Barestomper
I think 5 of each class would be something good to aim for if you want to be consistently doing 25-man content for the months to come. It's never fun having to cancel a raid because 2 specific can't show up, so with the success of your guild in mind, IMO, no one should be irreplaceable. As someone else mentioned, burnout and people just quitting/playing less for various reasons happens quite frequently, and good applicants aren't always easy to find, so it's best that you have someone in the guild ready to step up should they be needed. There are also some nights where you just don't feel like raiding, so it's nice to at least have the option of sitting out. Finally, some fights will definitely favour composition stacking, so having the ability to have lop-sided compo could greatly ease learning pains from some encounters.
On the downside, with 45 active players you'll have 10-20 that will be sitting on any given raid, which is a fairly significant number. You basically need people in your guild that are okay with this and agree with the philosophy in order for it to work; we've blown through a few apps in under a week since TBC simply because they were unhappy to spend an entire night sitting out, so I make sure to personally chat with anyone considering applying now and mention in great detail how much sitting will actually be involved. The nice thing about TBC is that there's ample 5 man content and PVP to keep people occupied while sitting out.
Keep in mind that in many raid situations now, individual player performance has a much bigger impact. We learnt the hard way on C'thun that having different people for each attempt, or people only get one night a week's practise really slowed progression. We probably would of been better off with less people and simply skipping the nights we were short than continually going int a having to teach new people - all the while costing a lot of others high repair bills.
On a fight like King, I think most can pick up pretty quick - but I'd hate to go to Gruul each week with 4-5 new players which don't know it. We still don't have it with the 30 which have been 3-4 times yet.
The main problem we have found is the wants/needs between various players. The Hardcores want this and the casuals want this.
The hardcores have ran all the 5-mans, have their heroic keys, are attuned to Karazhan and want to raid or heroic.
Yeah that's the main issue for us. Not so much size, but the fact on what curve the progression is on and what the milestones are. Given this we can go from advancing comfortably to chain wiping and back and it's a source of upsets and bad blood for both hardcores and casuals within the group.
It's a dilemma that I don't really see solvable from our side though, because we certainly don't structure our group by "level of commitment to the game" but rather around wanting to play with friends and family.
But it's a huge stretch if you have a bunch of folks in your raid group farming heroics, and another working on their first heroic key and still seeking help with one or the other run to get Kara attunement done. You can't even get them into the same 5-man instance because what is needed or of interest for one doesn't work for the other. A bunch of people did end up getting their Steamvaults fragment in heroic mode, which would be neat if we could do that for more instances.
So on top of the performance fluctuations we see (and are new in this magnitude) we also have the problem that the group feels fragmented and develops jealousies, which certainly doesn't help morale or performance. We also see leavers at both the hardcore as well as the casual end of the spectrum on a larger scale than at any time pre-TBC.
I think over time (when everybody is attuned and keyed up) a chunk of these symptoms will go away. For now the group feels rather fragile though.
My guild is very small and probably middle of the raid progression rung. The main problem we have found is the wants/needs between various players. The Hardcores want this and the casuals want this.
The hardcores have ran all the 5-mans, have their heroic keys, are attuned to Karazhan and want to raid or heroic.
The casuals haven't even been to HALF of the 5-mans, their gear sucks, barely or not even attuned to Karazhan and very far off heroic keys.
Without the casual players, the hardcore cannot go to Gruul's Lair every week and would be stuck forever running Karazhan.
1) Multiple progression paths: Good
2) Single linear progression path: Bad
Blizzard seems to be aware of that rule. One of the big problems is that, while they made different paths for some objectives (like "get epic gear"), they didn't for "accessing content".
"Accessing content" is not a progression goal, according to Blizzard's mindset. The cheese is "get stuff", and content is one path to get to it. So, we get a single, linear progression path to raid content.
The problem of single linear progression paths is that they work best when every person runs the path at the same rate. They're perfect in single player games: you're running at the same rate as... yourself. They're very good in multiplayer non-persistent games: typically, every player keeps pace with the group, because every player in the group plays at the same time in the same game (and they switch games when playing with different players). But they break down, and sometimes very badly, in large and persistant multiplayer games.
The more homogenous your guild is, the easier it is to access content. If you're all playing 6 days a week, you're ok. If you're all playing 2 days a week, it's ok. But it breaks down if some are playing 2 days a week, and some 6 days a week. The design philosophy of content is that you must be as homogenous as possible, and it's expected that the ones who don't fit in playtime are going to migrate to other guilds who fit their playtime... regardless of any in-game friendships.
(In other words, WoW is designed as a gamer game, not as a social game. Your playstyle is more important than your social ties)
Kind of off topic, but its the same methodoloy when looking at guild numbers - its more of catering to your guild and making sure you have people with similar playtimes/dedication levels.
Exactly. The more succesful guilds, in terms of internal satisfaction (not necessarily progression) are those who are homogenous, where people play regularly, on the (almost) exact same schedule. The more heterogenous your guild, the more frustrations build.
We are in a pretty similar situation as Xei's guild except that some of our hardcore players left, some went casual or AWOL, some switched guild, which made forming more than one Kara raid impossible right now. Otoh there are quite a lot of casuals who dinging 70 instantly want to join the kara raids without having sufficient experience or gear. I haven't played my rogue for 2 weeks now yet I am still one of the few having all heroic keys and the kara pre quest. I guess, once my warrior hits 70 I will overtake quite a few of my guildies in terms of progress again. Sometimes I just want to shoot myself because of this situation. I guess our lack of homogenity will cause quite a lot of problems once we get more than one Kara raid rolling. I think Ukerric hit the nail pretty much square on when stating that homogenity will cause more overall satisfaction unless you somehow manage to cater all needs as guild leadership (trying to do this might burn you out though).
Well, imo it's pretty clear that you can't do much decent TBC-raiding progress if you don't have at least 5 people of each class.. which then all at least have an 80% raidattendance.
Because it's pretty obvious that certain TBC raidencounters are just impossible without having enough of a certain class:
Goon Squad is certainly an edge case, but for my Kara sub-group, I think we'd prefer having one person of each main spec, plus 1 extra of that class.
So for priests, I'd guess 3 priests, of which there's 1 shadow and holy would be nice. On the other hand, anything more than 2 hunters might be a bit much to see sign up.
The dilema I am facing in my guild is that I am of the hardcore group and I want to raid. I've bled my eyes out running 5-mans and attuning people and I want to raid - yet still many in guild are not yet up to the raiding level some of us are .. in terms of gear/experience. Lets not forget that raiding is a lot different now, all classes have new talents/skills and mobs abilities and classes roles in groups are very different.
On top of this, I LOVE the people in my guild. I have been with them for such a long time and I really do not want to leave ... I ENJOY spending time in-game with them, but find myself increasingly frustrated at playing as I feel im being "held back" in a sense. I tell myself, and the other Officers, that if we just put in the hard time now to get everyone up to speed it will be the way it was pre-TBC.
However I do not think it will ever be the same. Every raid zone now is another Naxx, where 1 weak link means you wont succeed. I love the people in my guild, but many of them are classified as "weak links" which didn't bother us pre-TBC. We where happy raiding BWL and early AQ40 and taking our time getting through there. We didn't mind the larger learning curve from the skill level of some of our peope in-guild - we knew that if we kept killing the bosses that we could, and gearing up our people, that they would learn eventually or we would just simply outgear the encounter and make it trivial.
Put simply, there is no room for less-then-exceptional raiders in TBC end-game.
"Being a leader is not a position of power. It is a position of service." ~ Barestomper
The dilema I am facing in my guild is that I am of the hardcore group and I want to raid. I've bled my eyes out running 5-mans and attuning people and I want to raid - yet still many in guild are not yet up to the raiding level some of us are .. in terms of gear/experience.
I've tried to explain this dilemma in another thread but it deteriorated in "you don't want to work" flames and counter flames and an immediate lock. All I can say is I sympathize, having the very same situation of not attuning once but upteen times.
I think the observation that TBC raiding is "equal pace" raiding is spot on and is at the core of what's killing our raid group right now. The second thing that is killing us is that it's overtuned and/or there is no MC-type entry content but that's been said here too. Third thing is that a 10-size required raid content is well intended but amplifies all the issues even more. We run 2 groups and after this weekend they are in the process of killing each other because one was very successful and one was ununually unsuccessful with A-B-team flames flying wild. Geez, thanks for the 10-man squeeze. Karazhan should have been ZG/AQ20. Optional with a 3 day lockout. Attunement chain should have been directly for SSC.
Heroic content should have been optional and not been part of any attunements.
Of course reality is different and reality is that it's not going to change drastically.
And that it's currently busting our social network is spot on. That's exactly what's going on and people are leaving at both the casual and the hardcore end of the spectrum.
Last edited by Elsia : 03/19/07 at 11:42 AM.
Reason: Fixed typos, clarity.
The officer panel of my guild saw that BC was going to screw everything up, but we were in high hopes. Near the end of Vanilla, we were the only guild still running BWL and AQ40, we ran out of time on Twin Emps. People were excited in downing this content and pushing as much as we could, I was hoping that it would spill over into BC.
We've bleed a bunch of people, some quality and some crappy, with a bunch of drama coming up. Pre-BC we put up a thread on how the officers thought we should handle raid invites, DKP, and such in BC. The members posted with questions and comments and everyone seemed okay with it. Until they had to sit out for a couple of Karazhan raids because we didn't have the tanks and heals for two runs. Frustration with the situation brought up some harsh words and our mage and rogue reps left. Even as recent as last Wednesday a member was going to quit if he didn't get into Karazhan. (This wasn't public knowledge to the rest of the guild, it wasn't a threat or anything like that)
We had 25-30 people who would show up every night and 15-20 that would be on and off, and it worked fairly well in vanilla WoW. We thought the 25-30 would keep showing up and 2 Karazhan runs would work well, but reality turned out otherwise. We really tried to keep everyone happy and keep things fair, so much so that we are have yet to down Aran because we keep bringing in the average skill people. They are slow to react, get killed by Blizzards, put out par DPS, and generally can't keep up with our better members (many of which are officers which caused some "elitism" drama) On a side note, is hunter DPS absolute shit now or am I missing something?
Our current breakdown looks like this:
Warriors: 4 (3 Prot, 1 DPS)
Warlocks: 3 (1 is low attendance, priest reroll)
Shaman: 1 (Elemental, this guy does insane DPS)
Rogues: 3 (+2 lost to attrition)
Priests: 4 (2 are low attendance)
Paladins: 2 (+1 lost to attrition)
Mages: 3 (+3 lost to attrition)
Hunters: 5
Druids: 3 (2 ferals)
We could've run 2 Karazhans, especially before the attrition, but people don't have the attendance to make it consistent. All attempts at recruitment have been in vain, and I blame most of it on the "small" guilds. There are a lot of little and low tier (no Nef kill) guilds that have the people to do Karazhan and are progressing. But what is going to happen when they full clear Karazhan consistently and realize there is no where for them to go? The same thing that always happen, guilds will ally, merge, bleed, and fall apart.
I think a couple months down the line when the smaller guilds hit the 25 man wall, we will start getting apps. Until then the best I can do is try and work individually with our feral druid who is reluctant to tank, hunters who do minimal DPS, and try to quell the emotions of the few members who don't listen to reason.
I don't think that a "big" guild is necessary in BC, but it certainly would've helped in the transition from Vanilla to BC. The top guild on Garona, Lunaris, has downed Kazzak, Doomwalker, Gruul, and Nightbane. It seems like every couple of days I see one of their members walking around unguilded. The big hardcore guilds will come out of this fine, smaller more casual guilds are going to see a lot of drama and player bleeding. Frankly I don't know what I can do personally to better my guild's situation.
I tend to agree that a bigger guild will be better than a smaller guild. By having more people available, you'll be allowing your members to not burn out as fast. With the exception of a select few, raiding 6 days a week for 6+ hours is not reasonable. Also, by having a larger guild, you are able to stack raids, which is obviously needed for some encounters.
The problem with a larger guild is more people to manage, great risk of issues, etc. However, if you're able to keep those to a minimum, you will succeed. The biggest thing is being fair. Often times, I feel that its worthwhile to sacrifice ease of content to keep people happy. While not adding much of a burden, you're able to keep a guild content. Bringing slightly more melee for gruul is an example. Allowing everyone to see the content is important, in my opinion. A good way to ensure this is setting up a rotation for raids.
Right now, there are about 50 people in my guild. We are filling raids and don't have too much excess with sitouts. Things are going good.
Right now most of the 40 man setups are ideal for TBC. We're still using our old 40 man crew (with a few additions / absences) and find that it is the bare minimum in order to compete with other guilds because we have the ability to swap in and out players. Yes some are rubbed the wrong way when they don't get invited to every raid, but I would like to think there is a sense of understanding.
I feel bad for the rogues in guild though. There is a genuine effort to get all the rogues in raids, but we typically will put in mages/shadow priests before them. Surprisingly even with this balanced setup with enough to raid almost any time, we have still had 1-2 nights where we simply didn't have the right class composition to do a fight. Also, karazhan can be a real mess due to the fact that we have only run a max of 3 karazhan's at the same time - usually only 2
We were a tightly-knit group in vanilla WoW, running Naxx and making it to Sapphiron before TBC release, dominating the Horde raiding game on our server for 2 years. During that time we ran with a grand-total raid roster of 55-60 people, expecting at least 80% attendance from everyone. Once TBC came out however, a lot of our officers and class reps and hardcore raiders simply quit the game. They were burned out from so much pressure and hard work over such a long time. Others decided they didn't want to raid anymore (and continue to play the game). Now we're down to about 40 active raiders, which is barely enough in practice to run 25-man raids. Gruul has been a big problem...he's everything we hated about certain Naxx fights (LOATHEB AND SAPPHIRON COUGH COUGH COUGH) and the risk/reward ratio is so crappy that there's no real drive to take him down. We one-shot Maulgar every week, fight Gruul for a while and then go off to do heroics and whatnot.
Kharazan has gone okay. There was some serious drama when the two groups we've run since the start had wildly differing performances, but I've figured out how to split the raids such that they work out about the same. Both groups kill Nightbane and everything else in KZ without a problem, though I do get an earful every Tuesday night from the 6-8 people who don't get put in the starting KZ raids.
Kharazan has gone okay. There was some serious drama when the two groups we've run since the start had wildly differing performances, but I've figured out how to split the raids such that they work out about the same. Both groups kill Nightbane and everything else in KZ without a problem, though I do get an earful every Tuesday night from the 6-8 people who don't get put in the starting KZ raids.
I'd be interested in how you handle distribution between the two KZ raids. DO you try to keep a core of people in each group, or just randomly assign between 2 parties of 10?
We have similar problems at present, our two KZ teams seem to be turning into 2 seperate cliques with precious little rotation.
1. hard core raiding guild. You've killed Gruul and are in SSC/TK, grats! You might burn out farming consumables, but hope is on the way in 2.1.0.
2. raiding guild. Your guild got deep into Naxx pre-TBC. You've got all your heroic keys and are revered or better in Karazhan. Your guild maaaybe kills Maulgar (never 1 shot) but wipes on Gruul for hours. You've run heroics dozens of times and have nothing left you really want with badges, except maybe FR gear. 10-15 people in your raid are very good and learn everything in 1-2 tries, the rest are good friends but always seem to die on Aran, Maulgar's whirlwind, etc.
3. PVP guild. You only raid to get gear to PVP. Grats, TBC is awesome for you! Keep on trucking with arena. There really isn't anything beyond Karazhan that would be better than arena/PVP gear for you. Hope you are a warrior, paladin, shaman, rogue, or hunter though.
4. casual guild. Most of the people in your guild are < 70, I doubt your even visiting EJ if your #4.
Most of the people on this forum are #1 or #2. If your #2, frankly the best thing to do right now is just play casual until Blizzard sorts out raiding, or just stop playing for a few weeks/months. If your exalted or near exalted with everything, have a lot of the attunements out of the way, etc all you are now doing is waiting around for guild drama to set in, the eventual gquits, the recruiting binges, etc. Better to just step away for a little while as guilds reform and merge while Blizzard slowly tweaks the raid encounters and keying processes. 2.1.0 will probably fix some things and break many others, causing more drama until the following content patch.
I'd be interested in how you handle distribution between the two KZ raids. DO you try to keep a core of people in each group, or just randomly assign between 2 parties of 10?
We have similar problems at present, our two KZ teams seem to be turning into 2 seperate cliques with precious little rotation.
Drawing up weekly rosters can help you with this. Take the two most active players from each class and split them into each team. Go down the list for each class in terms of activity and balance it out, as well as balancing out the roles (e.g one team having three priests, the other having three druids).
Ensure your officers are evenly split across the teams, so that leading is not an issue. Then on a weekly basis, shuffle things around a little bit to address any issues that arise, particularly people's activity levels. We started off with one team completely clearing KZ and the other struggling, but after a week or two of adjustments and tweaks, both teams clear the place without any problems at all.
03/16/07, 10:19 PM
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