Hello, I'm an officer in a guild that's probably on the more casual edge of hardcore--Gruul down, Kara cleared, heading toward Magtheridon and Serpentshrine soon--and I'm wondering if I could start a discussion on what the appropriate size and composition for a raidforce is.

The broad answer, of course is "As large as is needed, and no larger" because a larger raid force means experience and gear get diluted over more individuals. But it's important to always be able to field the players you need, as well. We have a number of people--say 20 or so--that we can count on to be on nightly or nearly nightly. Then we have the rest of the guild, whose attendence percentage varies widely.

To compound the issue, we have fights like Magtheridon and High King that require 4-5 tanks, and fights like Gruul that punish you for taking more than 2. The number of healing classes you need also appears widely variant. To run 2 Karazhans, you need 2 MTs, 2 OTs, 2 warlocks, 2 mages... and since you don't want to halt a whole run if one of these individuals has a computer failure, you should really assign more than this to each.

Underrecruiting leaves the guild frustrated, struggling through with a noticably poorly-composed raid. Overrecruiting leaves valued players sitting at the sidelines more frequently, leading them to feel less valued.

I can't say that I'm happy with the strictures placed on raids in TBC... it seems like we need a raidforce almost as large as vanilla WoW, but with less ability to bring all those players in. But perhaps I'm not looking at this from the right angle. What are your thoughts?

My guild is in the same situation right now - often we have enough on, occasionally we can't get the people we need and its frustrating. I'd say take a good sample of raids, perhaps 2-3 weeks' worth, see what classes you lacked the most often, and fill those spots with new members. Come back in another three weeks and see how you're doing. Repeat until attendance is solid and you have a bit of overflow.

Alot of this is addressed here:

Guild setup: is bigger better?

My guild is in roughly the same position as the original poster's.

Really you can roughly calculate how many people you need based on an estimated attendance rate. Say you raid 4 times a week, and you expect people to make 3 of those days. That's a 75% attendance rate. Hence to fill a 25 man raid 4 times a week you need approximately 33 active raiders.

You can further extend this logic on a class-by-class basis when determining how many of each type of class to recruit and also start factoring in known attendance rates.

Typically I have found that main tanks tend to have the highest attendance rates, possibly due to the high level of competition for their jobs plus the fact that they are inherently masochistic. You will also usually find the occasional fanatic DPS'er or Healer, who has 100% attendance.

Part of the problem is that with 33 active raiders, you are probably not going to get enough people to run 3 Karazhan farming sessions and will have too many people show up for two 10-man sessions. I have found it useful to keep a few "casual" players around who are, for lack of a better word, filler. They don't come to the main raid content, but substitute in nicely for farm content. It allows your more casual player to have some fun with raid content that should be pretty easy for his team, while allowing the "dedicated" raiders to still have enough manpower to make sure gear is being farmed at a reliable rate.

I suppose one concern I have is the appropriate composition is going to depend somewhat on the strictures future encounters place on us. For example, we have typically had 1-3 warlocks available. This has occasionally been a minor problem, since it is rather difficult to defeat Aran without a warlock and even more difficult to defeat Illhoof without one, and as we use 2 to handle the demon adds during High King, but typically it hasn't been a major issue.

However I hear that there is or was a minimum of 4 warlocks for Magtheridon. Most strats I've read for Hydross call for two Feral OTs. It will become harder and harder as time goes on to recruit players to help with our raids if other requirements become known.

Ah, thank you, I'll certainly peruse that as well. I skimmed these forums for something addressing this topic but I didn't see that.

I don't really agree with this. Even with the absense of feral druids at least two arms/fury warriors can be fit into a gruul raid without problems. Sure, they might not outdamage a warlock, but they should be ab le to beat hunters and rogues if appropriately geared. On the magtheridon fight all but one of the tanks can without problems have a dps specc. The adds have pathetic damage and you get quite a head start while the raid kills other adds. One healer can easily soloheal even a dps-specced warrior tanking.

I don't really believe in changing your raid setups for different bosses, unless you are trying cutting edge raiding individual skills and gear is much more important than exact class balance.

We have 1 feral druid right now. My issue is not that finding another tanking druid somewhere who wants to tank would be hard, it's that as we get deeper in to these instances, the penalty for not having what they're after increases.

Stuff like Maulgar, where you need one mage to mage-tank is fine. Spec doesn't matter there. You just gotta have 1 mage. Anyone could have 1 mage. Requiring 1-2 of a given class for an encounter is cool and good, as long as spec doesn't matter. Even if spec does matter, requiring one of a given spec isn't a huge deal.

But 4 warlocks? 2 Feral Druids? When you can't just invite someone in, you have to run them through 2 raids... eventually 3 raids and 3 heroic instances, assuming their faction is high enough and they were Kara keyed when you invited?

I'm sure we'll get through it somehow, but the process just seems very unstreamlined and frustrating.

Where in Karazhan do you need two tanks ?

Moroes for starters.

you need 2 tanks on huntsman, moroes, romulo and julianne, netherspite as well as several trash pulls unless priests like to tank arcane watchers. now not saying it has to be 2 warriors but u need 2 people that can take the damage whether it be feral druid or prot paly whatever you want