I'd actually argue that flasks instead of elixirs/potions might make sense on any fight with a high wipe ratio, so depending on remaining attempts it might be worthwhile even at the 30 minutes till raid ends point. That said, see my earlier post.

I think a lot of guilds to this point were doing the 3-4 hour raid night, and with the way flasks work and the average trash clear, that's the wrong length of time to be raiding.

Pick a number of flasks you want against a boss on a night that you're going to go full out on him, work out how long trash should take, and then schedule that much time. Don't put yourself in the position of "one last set of 25 flasks for the last hour" every other night because your raid time is 3 hours against the boss.

I definitely have to second the cutting off of old content. I think many people continue running old stuff almost out of habit. How many upgrades are left for guilds farming Karazhan after a month or two? How meaningful are those upgrades? We made the decision to cut off Karazhan from official raid nights about a month ago, when we entered SSC. It was the right decision for us as we were able to use that time to kill six new bosses in three weeks. If we were spending 1.5 nights a week in Kara that would not have happened.

Emphasis is mine.

Every time you wipe, you need to find the root cause and address it for future engagements. If you don't know why you're wiping on an encounter, you are doomed to repeat history.

I should have said for various reasons, it was always a human error. All for naught, we downed him last night and had Prince at 51% in one try.

naught.

Also, grats, getting over an obstacle like that is always a relief.

Thank you. It is, but we're still very uncomfortable and awkward over the fact that it took us 6 weeks to down him. This has prompted a major re-evaluation of how we run our guild. It's a good thing I just so happened to start visiting these forums more regularly, too. I'm learning a lot here.

Relating this to the subject: I do hope to model our guild after Praetorian's example. Coming in with players who have taken the time to do their homework and understand the nuance of the fight beyond that of whatever general description they hear from the raid leader prior to the pull will always provide to be the most efficient way to progress. I mean, if you have hours and hours to spend on each encounter then sure - I'd much rather finish a raid in three hours and accomplish the same feat as 5 hours worth of mindless bombardment. Give myself some time to go on with my day.

Twice in one thread, ugh. And thanks for the support.

We did very well with a 4 day raid schedule (1900-2400) pre-TBC. We downed KT before Christmas and really felt in a true sense that we defeated WoW 1.0.

In TBC things are different but I do not believe it has anything to do with the raid schedule. Motivation is lacking which at least I blame the TBC game design for. That is a topic in itself, but the motivational aspect of TBC is a huge problem for us and basically every other guild I know one way or the other (will not derail this thread with all my thoughts on that subject).