Dear all,
I'd like to consult the collective wisdom of the raiding members of the EJ forum on the subject of transitioning from 10-man raiding to 25-man raiding. Our raid community has run into a few issues and we're wondering how to proceed.

Our situation is this: our raid community, made up of people from various guilds, and very much a casual friendly two-times-a-week (Wednesday and Sunday) raiding community (with some ex-hardcore raider refugees). We have about 20-25 members, not all of whom can make it regularily, and we are actively recruiting (mainly friends and guildmates of existing raiders). We're also on an RP server and damn proud of it *grins*.

We have all of the regular Karazhan bosses on farm apart from Prince, who we finally killed last week, and this week, we tried Gruul's Lair for the first time (on a Tuesday), and we made good progress on the Maulgar fight. However, we have run into two big issues:

1) Loot Allocation.

In Karazhan, up to now, we have had an informal loot council that allows people to roll for loot if it is an upgrade for them. The officers are largely aware of who has what and who needs what, and people are encouraged to be generous. This has worked exceedingly well up to now, but on moving to 25-mans, we're not convinced that the same system can be used.

The two four main options proposed have been

a) to use a formal loot-council,
b) use some sort of DKP system,
c) use a SK variant and
d) use a attendance--to-loot-ratio priority system.

The debate has got quite heated as there are various people in our community who dislike each idividual method, and all four methods have their advantages and disadvantages. So, I am asking, what is the loot allocation method that people have found work well in a 25-man instance for friendly communities like us?


2) 10-man to 25-man groups

We originally started off with about 12 members, and during the first month or so of Kara, this didn't prevent a problem - the same people were raiding and getting upgrades. However, as we're still running one group to Kara, we're now in the position where we could have 20 signups, which means we've had to rotate quite a few people in and out for each boss, depending on who needs what, especially on the Wednesday night inital runs. This has probably led to us sacrificing progress somewhat - our Prince kill was a result of stacking the raid group for that encounter especially. I can forsee us having to split into two groups for Kara, but *how*?

I suppose we could split the raid into two equal groups, containing an equal mixture of people with loads of gear and newer people with less gear, but this would probably mean sacrificing progress for a while. Or we could skew the groups slightly such that one group has better average gear to take out Prince, and one the other has the rest of the well-geared people helping the newer ones farm the place until everyone has equal-ish gear. Both could cause problems, and splitting would require us to recruit specifically some more tanks and priests. Again, I'm wondering, how did people here handle the move from 10-man raiding to 25-man raiding, without losing anyone and without causing unnecessary pain and suffering?

There's a lot of debate on this topic, so I suggest using the search function.

I've always been part of a quite large and "hardcore" guild so we always ran double Karazhan, so I can't help you with that. But on the loot question - we still use loot council and it works well, imo. We haven't had any people complain about it being unfair or biased, so I wouldn't worry about that. What we do is that when an item drops people that are interested should link their current item in raidchat and then the council decides who gets the item. Everyone is equal, so no priorities based on raiding role. Obviously, if we need a specific drop for progress we will use common sense in the matter. It works well and it gears up people equally much. No lewtdrama.

I think the only real answers to both your questions would be "whatever causes least problems for you". No loot system is inherently better than another one, it all boils down to the people involved. People manipulate each other with DKP bidding, and loot councils can play favourites, in short all loot sharing systems can and will be abused to some degree. You need to pick something that is fair enough for enough of your members to be acceptable.

As far as running two Karazhan groups, you will probably want to give all members an equal chance at the good loot, but that can be done either way. Either you run two balanced groups and everyone has the same chances or you stack one team and rotate people around each week for the same effect. The only thing I would advice against is forming a Team A vs a Team B on a permanent basis.

I tried searching, but the search functionality is not that good with numbers.

That sounds good. I have two questions though - how do you prioritise multi-class loot and do you deal with the possibility of under-geared people getting more loot over established regulars?

Well, I'll give a few examples.

We had a recent setback in the guild, so we had to start again from scratch. So, this was the perfect opportunity to have some rerolls to alts.
We had two of those. A rogue and a mage. Severely behind in gear, but they promised to work for their gear. So they came to each new raid with better gear. As long as you do that we were fine with them getting loot.

Obviously, they were in instance blues whilst most people were in heroic epics/t4/t5. And although some people did want bits and bobs from SSC/TK we sometimes decided to give the gear to the undergeared people. This might strike as unfair to some, but I don't think it is. Of course we didn't throw EVERYTHING at them, but if people were bidding for a "marginal" upgrade and the person with the least good gear would have gained a massive upgrade from it, we decided to give it to them. For example, Morogrim dropped the sword and both rogues wanted it. It's a kickass sword, the reroller was wielding a blue and the other was wielding a Spiteblade, so we chose to give it to the person rerolling. I mean, granted it would've boosted the other rogue's DPS too, but the boost to the reroller was massive. Yesterday, 1,5 weeks after he changed his character he is nearly in full epic and topped the damage charts on many, many fights.

If people decide to work for it and get rewarded, they are happy and they WILL perform. If people take loot for granted, they will slack and and slack in my experience. You need to have the feel you deserved that piece of loot and if you do get a piece of loot it is a token of appreciation of your hard work and performance in our raids. That's my favorite part of loot council.

On the tokens, it's a little harder and it all has to do with a few things:

a) Only for people who perform and focus.
b) Set bonuses. Some of the set bonuses are just massive. I think of t5 priest here, t5 mage and t6 shaman are all good examples.
c) How good is the piece that people are bidding for. You only bid for your main spec unless no one wants it of course. So people link their items and then the council looks up the item that it gets turned in. Then compared. And so the biggest upgrade is chosen.
d) Will the item be used for a long while? How likely is it to get upgraded for person X vs person Y, or maybe person Z will get the most benefit (no significant upgrades out there)

And so on, in the beginning it might be a little tough since a lot of people will be bidding and wanting loot. Very popular items are tough cookies too, I'm thinking of the Dragonspine Trophy from Gruul maybe and the Tsunami Talisman from Leotheras.

Just make sure the people in the council are non-biased people (and not only in their eyes!) Everyone needs to feel that way. Everyone needs to feel that the people choosing are not going to have a favorite person to give loot to, since then people will start to moan.

Having a large amount of experience with a number of DKP systems, I can tell you that a large, large majority of the time, a zero sum DKP system is the best bet for a new guild. It is blind to greed and manipulation - if you use an upgrade clause on it it will allow people to not feel "bad" about taking upgrades. Make sidegrade/offspec/pvp items free.

I'd been in a dozen or so guilds throughout my 4-5 years in everquest, and the only one that never had loot drama was a zero sum DKP system. I'd been in 2 guilds that literally exploded because of loot councils - you have to do what works for you, but for a guild of people who don't know each other at all yet, having a system where everyone is treated equally tends to help a lot.

When you're just getting started, drama and loot issues should not be beyond a 0 on factors. I know for us our loot system basically left us with absolutely no issues and drama, in fact we didn't even discuss improving it for almost 2 full years.

Zero-sum DKP is good but figure out how you are going to handle progression nights. You will wipe a LOT in SSC as you start out, with very little to show for it. Having a system for handing out bonus DKP for people who show up for wipe nights is helpful. There is a lot of trash epics/vortexes that drop in SSC & TK so those are good incentives as well.

Also as a 2-3 day raiding guild you will have issues with picking what to raid. You can easily spend the entire week wiping on Hydross, Morogrim, etc. You also need to keep the same people in the raid as much as possible from night to night, since many of the encounters only "click" into place once everyone has had enough exposure to the various mechanics (Vashj, etc).

Push too hard and some people will burn out and quit raiding, push too slow and some people will guild jump. No good answers, just things to be aware of.

We do it with a 'Ghost' ie a raider that is on every run soaking points, and then for progression nights we simply award some of the points from the ghost to the raiders who were on the progression night.

To keep it really zero-sum, you can award points to people on progression nights, then at the end of the week subtract points from everyone (not just those that got points).

Yeah thats called incentive DKP - or a percentage of points earned from bosses can go toward a pool, that is distributed on learning nights (its exactly the same thing!).

Anyway, its just one of the things you wanted answered, but I do think it helps you start out - once you get going, feel free to change it to whatever system the guild as a whole feels like having.

I've been having difficulty with this subject as well.

My guild is currently working on Prince in Karazhan, and we thoroughly expect to have him down this week (15% last week, had to call it off due to being well past scheduled end time). By the next raid reset, we would like to be running two Karazhan groups (as it stands, often I, as the MT, am the only person in the raid from one night to the next, and the other 9 spots all swap).

Making this conversion has been absolute hell, though. The transition phase we're currently going through forces both newly-minted members who are eager to raid with us to sit out, as well as forcing me to ask my core team to take a back-seat to newer, less established members.

I'm hoping to satisfy this problem in large part by pushing for early entry into Gruul's Lair, but I'm skeptical about what limited success we might see (this is only our 3rd week in Karazhan, and not everyone's gear is up to par).

The best suggestion I can give, having to survive through this phase myself, is to make sure the rewards are very tangible to people. When you have to ask someone to sit out for a raid, make it very clear that they're going to have a guaranteed spot in an upcoming raid, as well as once you have 2 groups fully operational. Make sure everyone understands that while you're making this move from a single Karazhan raid to two separate ones (and simultaneously, to 25-man raids), there's a lot of pressure that needs to be handled, and you need the full support and backing of your crew.

My guild has been tremendously supportive of our goals, and I fully expect that we will successfully launch Kara group 2 next week, with Gruul's Lair soon to follow. For most people, that would be meaningless - on our server, we will be the third guild to ever drop Magtheridon, if we get there.

Huh, a topic I actually feel qualified to answer! My guild started doing Karazhan in early March, and pretty quickly moved to two groups. We've killed Gruul and are working on Lurker and Magtheridon at the moment. I think a lot of this stuff will vary from guild to guild depending on your overall ethos.

1) We random roll in Karazhan, and use an SK List in 25 man raids. I like SK because it's easy to maintain, it's casual friendly, and it gives hard and fast rules for looting to help avoid any drama. We just do everything off of one big list. It's kind of zero sum for dummies.

2) In all honesty, I started running two groups in Karazhan probably before we were ready, but there you go. We've gone with the philosophy of even groups and slower progression. Everyone signs up on the website, and then the officers make up two rosters. New or weaker people go on the first night with a handful of the geared, experienced folks.

I've been very proud of our slow but steady tandem group progress. I think on our best week we had one group clear Karazhan, and the other kill everything except Nightbane. The even gearing helped a lot when we moved into Gruul's Lair.

Maulgar really is about having a well geared tank, a well geared mage tank, and a lot of coordination. We went the week after our first Prince kill and got him down on the 6th try or so. Gruul is a different matter....

What we've actually done thus far, to try and simplify things somewhat, is assign each person to a Karazhan team. Each player's public note in the guild specifies which team they're with, and the raid leaders for each team have anywhere from 10-15 people to draw their raid for the night from.

The split in terms of experience/gear is relatively even, but we've also tried to keep our original 'core' group mostly together, while adding a second group of more recent recruits and more experienced people.

I'd agree that ZSDKP is very workable. SK is not as good a system from many points of view, but if people are wary of DKP (not uncommon on an RP server, and believe me, I'm speaking from experience) then SK is not an awful alternative.

Our group, which was pretty similar to yours, started out with 2 Kara runs. We originally tried to rotate people between the two runs. This didn't work well at all, and a couple of months into it we went to two distinct teams. One had a fixed 10 man roster, and one rotated everyone else through. The fixed roster cleared very quickly after that; the other roster was not too far behind.

We've since adjusted the rosters so that both groups are on rotation; we also added a third Karazhan run made up of a) people who were applying to the group, b) people who didn't want to chew as much glass, and c) a couple of newcomers, one of whom organized that run. This gave us the margin necessary to build a solid Gruul/Mags run.

In your case, I'd recommend gritting your teeth and splitting evenly. Two separate groups will work; you'll lose a bit of progression but a steady group means you get to know each other better and that helps progress in the long term. Recruiting healers is never bad, cause you can never have too many healers.

Are you sure you need to recruit tanks? You really only need one MT for Karazhan; you'll find that a DPS warrior with a few points in prot or a feral druid can OT everywhere you might want an OT. It's also possible for a paladin to spec prot/holy, be a good healer, and OT Karazhan fights. If you wind up with four full prot warriors to support two Karazhan runs, you'll either have to leave some of them out of Gruul runs or sacrifice DPS.

We switched from zero-sum to a wishlist about 2 months after we made our guild, and honestly while some people have cried occasionally, the system has been very good for us. Our problem with ZS is that people were passing small upgrades(morogrim wand, etc.) to save for t5, so we were sharding lots of potentially useful gear.

Now we shard very little and for the most part, people have gotten the items they wanted, barring of course the good stuff which refuses to drop.

Really, in a perfect world, zero sum is the best system, however, you will find that it only works when people are willing to take any upgrade or you are willing to let upgrades shard due to hoarding. In the end, there are many functional guilds that use many different loot systems. Just go with whatever the most people are comfortable with.

I suggest you just do a vote-off. Start with all 4, then cut to the top 3, then top 2, then the next vote gives you a winner as to what system people want.

One thing I should mention. Systems like wishlist/loot council are exceptionally bad when you can only kill a few bosses, and in fact, even dkp will struggle with that to some extent(though it is much more impartial in this situation). However, we have found that especially for the BT/hyjal lists, having 14 bosses to choose from makes for some very diverse and optimal lists, and tends to streamline the system very well. In effect, what I am saying is that no matter which loot system you use, the more you kill the better it will function.

This is exactly how my raid group got by dual Karazhans. We were kind of spread thin (talent wise, not numbers) We pushed into Gruul's Lair early, and dropped to 1 Karazhan run. This let new players get geared, and older ones get new content.

About a week or two later we dropped Maulgar (VERY tactical, not a huge gear requirement). Gruul dropped the next raid, but he's far more gear based.

Long story short, if you have 25+ people, and at least 10-15 are well geared in Karazhan, and the rest are in some epics heroic blues, you should be able to drop Maulgar.

Hey,

it's funny since my guild is undergoing the same attempt at transitionning from a single karazhan to 2 teams in preparation to Gruul's.

I can totally see what you are talking about. We've completetly cleared karazhan for like 3 or 4 weeks now, but we are still short on many players to even be able to roll out a second team. In the meantime most of our most experienced/geared raiders are making room and rotating with other players so that everyone get a taste of it.

To answer your questions:

1) after trying different things, it's not going to be a surprise, but loot council is what is working best for us right now in karazhan.
We are trying to make it as fair as we can, but there's the occasionnal bitching which we try to keep under control. The sad thing officers had to realize is, no matter how hard we try, there WILL be drama over loot. Again, since most people seem not to see the bigger picture, the only relevant metrics they can follow are cold hard math. But karazhan being a 10 man, there's usually a very small overlap of classes/players for a drop.

However, we are in the process of implementing a DKP with incentive for whenever we start making some 25 mans attempts. We don't want to award people who hopped on the gravy train over the more dedicated players who put the efforts in learning the place.


2) we are in the same position as well. On some nights we have barely enough players online to get a single karazhan going (the guild is mostly casuals, with some hardcore vets). We have been trying to recruit in preparation for Gruuls, but it's coming not as fast as we would have liked.
In the meantime we are trying to set up 2 teams, with eventually the necessity to bring alts to fill whatever spots that need to be. From what I have personnaly seen, it's not <that much> the gear you wear that will break the progression. You can wear blues and as long as you know what to do, you probably will end up doing way better than a less experienced player with better gear.
If you manage to have enough experienced players in both of your teams, you should not experience a huge step back in progression with the second team.

I think all comes down to watching over your raid performance and looking at who is underperforming. Most of the time you'll end up discovering players that have a very poor gem socketing strategy, little to no enchants. It's just a matter of talking with those players, usually it goes just fine, they need to be made aware of how big a change that can bring on the table over a 10min boss fight.

Know your guild, know your people, and talk to them.

Multiple Kara raids:
I think running multiple Kara raids is almost required as you make the transition to 25 man raiding, especially for more "casual" guilds. This is so for two reasons:

1. A "hardcore" guild could probably down Gruul in 5-man blues; a casual guild really benefits from overgearing the fight.
2. A "hardcore" guild might have a pool of ~30 people they build raids from; a casual guild will perforce have a much bigger pool since attendance tends to be lower.

Put that together, and gear is important, you'll need a lot of gear, and the best place to get gear is downing Kara bosses.

I've heard horror stories from guilds which have static Kara teams; the way we do it is to run a single signup thread for Kara, and then form as many runs as possible. Our priorities are to make the raids viable and even (most important), and after that to rotate around as much as possible and to try and make sure people who need loot get in. We've occasionally had weeks when we knew that we could have 1 stacked raid which would fully clear Kara, or 2 balanced raids which would struggle with Prince or Nightbane; we've always gone for what would maximize the total amount of loot dropped (which is, 99% of the time, to form multiple balanced raids).

In retrospect, I think this has helped us a lot, and I'd advise any other guilds currently considering 25 man content to make a 2nd (or even a 3rd, depending on average attendance) Kara raid a huge priority. If that means recruitment drives or a temporary stall in progression, that's fine - you're going to see that anyhow, so might as well start now. Basically, I just don't think a casual guild is going to ever be able to leap from "1 Kara raid downing Prince" to "1 25 man raid downing Gruul" without passing through "2-3 Kara raids downing Prince". (Or, at least, not easily.)

So to summarize and answer the original question: Yes, I'd try to split into two raids ASAP. I'd also recommend making them as balanced as possible. It just doesn't make sense to have the "A team" getting drops they don't need while the "B team" is struggling to down bosses. Trying to get an even mix will maximize the loot which drops and (this is the important bit) the loot which is taken.

As for recruiting...try to get by, if at all possible, with 1 MT per raid and 1 OT (feral/fury/whatever) per run. Always keep in mind the mix you'll need for 25 man raids; if you don't need four MTs, try to avoid using them in Kara. Or for another example, stacking holy priests may make Moroes trivial, but in the long run, you'll wish they were resto shammies - so learn to get by with 1-2 priests per run.


25 man content:
More generally, the leap to 25 man content is pretty damn hard. We downed Maulgar before Prince, and then ended up stuck on Gruul for 3 months as we slowly geared up, sorted out class balance, recruited, had people respec/reroll, and generally got our act together. Gruul is something of a road block, and you need a pretty large pool of raiders with solid gear, who are reliably able to dodge shatter, and who basically know what they're doing. Probably doesn't sound like much of a hurdle for some, but it was one for us, and it took time.

Due to guild principles (we're very casual) we can't/won't tell someone "your spec sucks, and until you respec something that looks like a monkey didn't pick the talents based on the icons, you're on backup". So...we make gentle suggestions, and always post WWS parses after each raid, and highlight what works and what doesn't, and keep an eye out on people with poor/missing enchants and gems and encourage them to fix that. Slow? Yeah. Frustrating while we were wiping to Gruul week after week? Yeah. But in the end, it worked. Gruul is clearly on farm now, we're now working on harder content, and we didn't have to compromise on our guild culture.

Ultimately, you've got to ask yourself what you want out of this game.


Loot:
As for loot, you can make any system work, and you can abuse and exploit any system. Still, not all loot systems are equal, and as most others have done, I'd recommend a fixed-price zero-sum (FPZS) system. You can tweak it a lot to fit your guild but with a pretty "default" ruleset it more or less works. Even so, no loot system is perfect and its very important to have your guild culture support your loot system.

Some have mentioned issues with people passing on minor upgrades; the way we've dealt with that is basically peer pressure and guilt trips. Sounds silly perhaps but it works very well for us - people are highly encouraged to take an item if they think they might use it rather than let it get sharded. We also encourage people not to focus too much on DKP, but to basically just play the game and bid if they'd use the item. More generally, I think that's the easy fix for any loot problems a guild runs into; if that isn't enough to fix it, then you've probably got more serious problems than a broken loot system.

One thing we do which is probably suboptimal is use the same DKP system in both Karazhan and 25 mans. It's worked fine for us, but it's a decision we made without a lot of thought early on. I think /random in Karazhan would work just as well (and maybe better). <shrug> Not a huge issue either way though.

My former guild (I've since switched from Alliance to Horde) started with a Loot Council way back before ZG existed. Loot Council was fine for UBRS and LBRS, but once we were getting epics from ZG, MC, BWL it created a lot of animosity because people assumed that the members of the loot council were play favorites. So, we switched to SK (Suicide Kings - WoWWiki, the Warcraft wiki) which work amazingly well. The big problem came when we had to learn new bosses and needed to build up rep for the guild. There wasn't a way in SK to reward people for their hard work. So we eventually switched to a DKP system. That was nice for about three months until the casuals got left so far behind in points they stopped trying to attend raids because they assumed (wrongly) that they had no chance of getting new gear. Eventually, with TBC, we started using ZeroSum DKP with a LeaningDummy and GuildHelper accounts that earned points for learning bosses and helping the guild in general. We'd move points out of the DKP account to people that had earned them.

So far, it seems to have helped smooth things out. Additionally, it has helped mitigate the human factor where people assume that they're being singled out and treated unfairly.

This thread seems to be evolving into a discussion on good dkp systems, which I fully support. I am the leader of a guild just now working to progress on Gruul(aka the fabled "casuals").

We run two karazhan groups doing weekly full clears, and so far we've used a modified roll system which has officer influence on major drops such as tier pieces and Prince/NB.

However, we want to move into some form of dkp for 25mans when we start doing more then just High King Maulgar. We've tossed around Zero Sum dkp, and anon-bid dkp, but any more suggestions are welcome.

And to the OP, I feel you're woes of trying to push a guild into 25mans on a server whos farthest progression is just recently working on Vashj.

Vashj... I wish. There isn't a single guild Alliance-side on The Underbog with Magtheridon down.

On that subject, here's my list of links to threads on DKP: Alternate DKP System?

Basically there are a lot of options and while there are wrong choices, there's more than one right choice as well.