You do have to be careful though... after a certain level of people in a given class, recruiting new people tends to make established members feel not valued and lose interest in the game. I'm not talking about emo fu gquits--or at least not necessarily--I'm talking about people sad about sitting out of raid *with* other members of their class who feel like everyone would be happier if they weren't a part of the guild.
Underrecruiting is a worse problem but going 100% the other way doesn't seem to be the answer either.
This is true also.
But it is a double edged sword.
Most guilds, probably almost ALL guilds, have a few classes where the players in the class are at or near 100% activity.
If you needlessly recruit into this class, you will magically find those other players no longer at 100%.
The problem is, if someone plays at 100% for too long they will inevitably burn out, unless they are mega-freaks of nature like the minority of raiders that post here (yeah, you're all freaks, especially you, person who posted below me).
Anyway, its give or take. We had 6 rogues at 100% activity for a year through MC... it was fantastic. So we didn't have to recruit until they diminished. However, that being said - when I say "always take an exceptional app" you clearly have to decide if your situation is 100%, or some combination.
2 players at 50% activity is about 1 player... sometimes more, sometimes less... being bloaty isn't terrible, its better than the other way, but overrecruiting can actually cause tenured players to stop - and probably due to the "hey real life is kinda cool" bug. That bug is worse than a TBC bug.
When I went to look at forums of guilds progressing through BT and in SSC/TK, I noticed plenty more applicants of reasonable quality than those in greens/cannot spell which we are getting now.(Those who cant type coherently was rejected outright).
I guess some people will want to join a progressing guild rather than a farm guild because it is more fun learning encounters than collecting free epics.
I think most good raiders, the ones you want because they feel raiding is a challenge, are like that. However, that might mean that as Sunwell approaches, you might get more and more good applicants, as people see that they might get to join in on new content.
Sometimes you just get flat out lucky tough - We are currently working on kael, and just had the bulk of a kharazan farming micro-guild apply at once because ganking the prince for the umpteen time was getting boring. What with the holidays and kael. that is just very nice timing.
We are a pretty small guild and some have been raiding since we did MC. We usually have to cut only like max 3 players. We only raid 4 days and almost everyone has high attendance. But the thing is that we got only 10 attuned healers which usually turns out to be 7 or 8.
We have been looking for a few healers the past 2 weeks or so, attuned or not, but havent really seen any applicants :P we are at 8/9 BT now so we could really use 9 healers and not a feral druid respecced to resto. I think we are kinda shadowed by a larger guild who has already cleared all the content and people rather want to join them. So my question is how should we recruit more healers and possibly some other classes? Theres already a post in the realm forums but it hasn't really worked :P
All guilds encounter problems like this. It is wise to pause for 1-2 weeks the progress in BT/Hyjal, especialy if you cant get correct raid setup for specific bosses (endless wipes are not good for the moral) and attune some new recruits who seem experienced in WoW and have the ability to learn new encounters fast. Experience in pre-TBC end game raids should be counted as Plus no matter 100spelldamage or attack power up or down. Also people in your server that you know of them, should get a priority to test them as you won;t get unexpected behaviour.
We also had this period of scarce attendance or incorrect raid setup. We are a guild who tries to keep number of raiders at minimum, raiding 5 days per week but strictly only for 3 hours per day. And still some people got tired or lost the end fights in SSC/EYE or real life forced them to go inactive for long or even stop wow completely. Yes real life can do that :P
Some guilds disband, some split , some merge.Same for people of wow. Some start another game, a new girlfriend/boyfriend comes in, some just get sick of wow or some get their wife pregnant and get more jobs (like me in 3 months hehe)
You just stay calm and bolster your ranks with experienced players even if not attuned or not max T5 people. BT and Hyjal are there, they wont go anywhere, but your guild can disband if you press too much the people. So calmly bolster your ranks, better go temporarily 1-2 steps behind than falling from the stair
PS There is no magic solution btw, the best thing to do is "advertise" your guild if no applicants appear. Ways to advertise, make some "pugs" for Zul Aman, Karazhan, gruul, or even naxx/aq40 for example. If people learn your guild name, eventualy some will pour in.
No really true, my guild is farming BT/Hyjai for quite sometime and still have problems getting priest recruits on my server,we advertise from 3-4 months ago when we just entered BT and gotten only 1 priest, meanwhile 3 of our priest quitted/fall sick, leaving us running 0-2 priest for raids now.
When I went to look at forums of guilds progressing through BT and in SSC/TK, I noticed plenty more applicants of reasonable quality than those in greens/cannot spell which we are getting now.(Those who cant type coherently was rejected outright).
I guess some people will want to join a progressing guild rather than a farm guild because it is more fun learning encounters than collecting free epics.
Well, are you setting a hard 'must be attuned for Hyjal' requirement? Obviously saves time, but dissuades otherwise good players.
From my own experience, if you want good players, you probably shouldn't limit yourself to attuned players. I'll take myself as an example.
I started playing wow again in november. I had quit because I got bored at BC release, but seeing how there's no good other games coming out anyway, I came back. I leveled to 70 on a fresh character, geared myself as fast as possible as a resto druid, and got into a SSC guild directly. When I got in, it was 1/4 TK and 3/6SSC.
My first week there, I got #1 on heal on every fight but void reaver(#2 behind a CoH priest on the melees/tanks). 3weeks later, we're on vashj attempts, I've been promoted to member already(no one else since I'm here has been) and while I have gotten 0upgrades, I still beat most other healers on every fight or close to(besides that CoH priest obviously ^^).
My gear isn't impressive, but playing my char right makes up for it. Obviously, it helps that I'm a healer class and not a melee dps class, I got most of my gear by myself(primal mooncloth tailor, whitemend set, badge gear, S3 jewelry).
However quite frankly, if I could skip the days of wiping on vashj and kael and see the rest of the content before sunwell. I'd be happier. I don't mind wiping, but not on stuff that's 6months old, it feels a bit weird imo.
But there's just no way I'm getting in a BT progressing guild. Because we haven't killed Vashj and Kael. Would I be outperformed by T6 healers? Yea probably. Could I still contribute enough to be worth it spending 3-5hours attuning me for a guild that's low on healers? Most definitely, but it's somewhat hard for the recruiters to find out this, and if I go and tell them I'm not attuned, they will only assume I'm RandomKaraPuggingIdiot #514, look at my gear, see I don't have tier5 either, and tell me to fuck off.
That's why I'm not a big fan of these attunements. Back in vanilla wow, we could take any recruit, bring him to AQ40/Naxx and see how well he performed, based on his gear. Obviously a MC geared tank couldn't tank bosses in naxx, but for trash it was usually enough, and you could easily judge of his reaction time, how he positionned mobs and how his threat generation was, then decide to gear him up or not.
Now you can't do this anymore because of the static attunements based on raid progression. I don't think I really need to do any fight in SSC or TK(maybe kael) to learn how to play when I've done naxx. I have yet to see any fight that required me to actually pay more attention than a zg run back then. I read the strat once on wowwiki, maybe watch a video(but healers videos are pretty boring so I usually skip that), and here we go that's it, don't need any practice. I only have to cope with other people still not getting out raids with bombs(hi geddon) or not being able to kite stuff(hi gluth).
I know that fights have been nerfed since they were released, but in their current state, I'm not learning anything from doing SSC/TK, and the gear upgrades are not THAT great either. I have 1900healing, from what I've seen a tier5-6healer has 2.1k, my mana regen is probably much lower, but I don't bother using mana oils or mana potions because I don't need them in the current content. Stamina gear for najentus? I have the whole S1 set since it's so easy to get now, and it's already fully enchanted/gemmed. And still, I'm stuck on learning vashj, even tho it looks boring as hell(at least from my point of view, I guess for a dps class it's fun).
The point of this rant? I hope raiding progression won't be capped by attunement based on previous raids in wotlk. Then again I believe I remember a blue post saying they were happy with this system. I find stupid that they keep adding new easily accessible items that are on par with raiding gear, yet force you to raid outdated content to be able to raid good content. Between badge gear, S1 honor, S3 gear and ZA haste stuff, is there any point in raiding tier5 but to gear prot warriors?
My gear is almost entirely T5-level. And it's entirely sufficient to get me through to Illidan. But, speaking as a holy priest, T4 is terrible, and the badge rewards are almost as bad. Karazhan gear is good, but only lasts you so far. If you want good gear, you need a ton of drops from T5 content.
Could you heal through to Illidan in only-up-to-Magtheridon gear? Maybe. PvP gear for stam fights, etc. -- but your regen will be horrible, your +heal will be a few hundred points off, and you'll be a whole lot less effective than you would be otherwise.
I'm pretty sure the same could be said for any healer. Primal Mooncloth is good, but it's not going to carry you deep into T6 content. I replaced mine around Boss #4, and haven't looked back. It was a good decision.
As one of the primary recruitment officers for our guild, I have to say that lacking the gear from T5 content really *does* make a difference. It's not like AQ40/Naxx, where you could easily take an undergeared person into the instance and hand them a ton of drops. If I take an undergeared healer into a tough-ish fight like Anetheron or Teron, where we typically run with 6-7 healers, and expect them to keep up, I'm going to watch the raid wipe because of it. So if I had to bring someone at your gear level into those fights, I would have to stack another healer, which is a pain in the butt for me. It's nowhere near as simple as it used to be for gear-ups.
Bringing 1 undergeared app into a 40-man raid on farm content was a breeze. You could easily 35-man those fights anyway, so if they died quickly, it was no big deal; just leave them dead, kill the boss, and gear them up as quickly as you could.
Bringing 1 undergeared app into a 25-man raid on farm content is not quite so breezy. A healer (even in the stam gear to live) on Naj'entus without the regen to keep healing through the fight is useless to the raid, and will let other people die, which starts a chain reaction that could wipe the group. The tolerances are much, much tighter. I know that a few weeks back, we bought an instance and went back for Vashj kill #13 (I think ... somewhere above 11, anyway, which is when I stopped counting). We tried to do it with one more melee than normal, and one more healer than normal. We wiped HORRIBLY. It wasn't even close to being a successful attempt.
The tolerances are tight. Very tight. Striders have to die, and there's an aggro cap. We switched in a ranged dps, dropped a healer, and bam, owned. Easy. But those 2 spots made a world of difference.
To cut a rambling post short ... you would have to somehow stand out from a pack of applicants in order to justify a raid position based on no gear and no appreciable raid experience. Most of us raided Naxx back in the day; raiding in TBC is a lot more individual-based. Everyone has responsibilities, and not doing your job typically leads to raid wipes. It was pretty easy back in the day for someone to skate by on the skills of 35 others ... try doing that today on a fight like Archimonde, and watch people get mad because you're the moron who keeps screwing up and running into Doomfire.
Having an item like a T5 hat or chest means more than just attunement. It means you were an integral part of a group that successfully completed the tough challenges that Vashj and Kael are. And *that* says something about the calibre of player that you are.
(as an aside: topping the meters in a single guild means very little anymore. The last 3 healers we recruited were the "best in their guild" ... and typically came in around 5th on our meters. It's all relative. Being the best in one group only means you have skill, with no indication as to how much).
Certainly your guild has had members leave for one reason or another in the past, perhaps quitting WoW entirely.
Have you considered reaching out to them to see if they'd start playing again?
Why Chris, I'm not sure who you might be talking about...
^_~
But in all honesty, yes, to an extent. Anyone who was playing when we running our last few Karathress/A'lar's I tried to get in and keyed even if they weren't interested in being a full-time raider. But just atm we don't have the time to run full TK/SSCs... We can buy instances cleared to Vashj/Kael sometimes, but it's not as easy to get guilds to take people in to get them keyed so there's not a ton we can do. Perhaps this'll change after we get Illidan down and farmed.
This might sound controversial. Like many others, my guild has passed through shortage of attuned raiders weeks ago, about half way through Black Temple. We have now Illidan on farm for four weeks. Once you are mid-way through Black Temple - probably having stopped going to Vashj/Kael for a while - it is difficult to just go back and attune more people, especially if you simply lack 1-2 players in key classes. You have to use all your resources. We had our best geared feral druid speccing Resto on several occasions when we lacked healers. We had our best Resto druid speccing Balance when we lacked dps or even our Resto shamans. We accepted very casual or undergeared yet attuned guild players to our raids. Fill the spots and make the best out of them. Give the inexperienced or undergeared simple jobs like spamming X player from position Y. Improvise. Don't fixate yourself that you need the best group else you can't do it. You can do it, there is not a single encounter in TBC difficult enough that you can't improvise. We've ran through the whole of T6 encounters with 2 rogues and 1 Resto Shaman, for example - and used skilled DPS Warriors or Resto Druids and Priests instead. On certain occasions, especially farm raids, don't be afraid to use sub-par attuned players to fill spots, especially if they can still provide important buffs (Blessings, Innervates, Soulstones, Combat Rezzes etc.). They will be the last on the healing/damage meter or simply die but as long as the boss went down and you've passed through the night despite attendance problems, everyone is happy. Behind the scenes, recruit and try to find better replacements. But until then, improvise.
So, from experience I simply suggest to use all resources available to you in a shortage of raiders. Cross-realm recruiting isn't very common unless you are top guild, but still advertise on WoR/MMO-Champion/Realm forum/Recruitment forums and you might receive some quality applications. In two months we have received three high-quality applications from raiders who are now core members including one of our current Illidan FR tanks.
Once you have Illidan down and on farm, things get easier as you can dedicate at least a day a week to attune new people to T6 encounters. Post-Illidan fatigue is normal and you will always need some extra muscle to make up for those who take breaks, start to slack or outright quit the game. Once you beat the game, we have found both the necessary time and "standing" to over-recruit and divide the good from the bad. The worst mistake you can make after killing Illidan is take it easy and let your guild start to slowly fade away. Don't. Make a recruitment surge and begin attuning people who seem qualitative. Christmas is coming, Sunwell is still quite far away. You will need it.
My gear is almost entirely T5-level. And it's entirely sufficient to get me through to Illidan. But, speaking as a holy priest, T4 is terrible, and the badge rewards are almost as bad. Karazhan gear is good, but only lasts you so far. If you want good gear, you need a ton of drops from T5 content.
Could you heal through to Illidan in only-up-to-Magtheridon gear? Maybe. PvP gear for stam fights, etc. -- but your regen will be horrible, your +heal will be a few hundred points off, and you'll be a whole lot less effective than you would be otherwise.
I'm pretty sure the same could be said for any healer. Primal Mooncloth is good, but it's not going to carry you deep into T6 content. I replaced mine around Boss #4, and haven't looked back. It was a good decision.
As one of the primary recruitment officers for our guild, I have to say that lacking the gear from T5 content really *does* make a difference. It's not like AQ40/Naxx, where you could easily take an undergeared person into the instance and hand them a ton of drops. If I take an undergeared healer into a tough-ish fight like Anetheron or Teron, where we typically run with 6-7 healers, and expect them to keep up, I'm going to watch the raid wipe because of it. So if I had to bring someone at your gear level into those fights, I would have to stack another healer, which is a pain in the butt for me. It's nowhere near as simple as it used to be for gear-ups.
Bringing 1 undergeared app into a 40-man raid on farm content was a breeze. You could easily 35-man those fights anyway, so if they died quickly, it was no big deal; just leave them dead, kill the boss, and gear them up as quickly as you could.
Bringing 1 undergeared app into a 25-man raid on farm content is not quite so breezy. A healer (even in the stam gear to live) on Naj'entus without the regen to keep healing through the fight is useless to the raid, and will let other people die, which starts a chain reaction that could wipe the group. The tolerances are much, much tighter. I know that a few weeks back, we bought an instance and went back for Vashj kill #13 (I think ... somewhere above 11, anyway, which is when I stopped counting). We tried to do it with one more melee than normal, and one more healer than normal. We wiped HORRIBLY. It wasn't even close to being a successful attempt.
The tolerances are tight. Very tight. Striders have to die, and there's an aggro cap. We switched in a ranged dps, dropped a healer, and bam, owned. Easy. But those 2 spots made a world of difference.
To cut a rambling post short ... you would have to somehow stand out from a pack of applicants in order to justify a raid position based on no gear and no appreciable raid experience. Most of us raided Naxx back in the day; raiding in TBC is a lot more individual-based. Everyone has responsibilities, and not doing your job typically leads to raid wipes. It was pretty easy back in the day for someone to skate by on the skills of 35 others ... try doing that today on a fight like Archimonde, and watch people get mad because you're the moron who keeps screwing up and running into Doomfire.
Having an item like a T5 hat or chest means more than just attunement. It means you were an integral part of a group that successfully completed the tough challenges that Vashj and Kael are. And *that* says something about the calibre of player that you are.
(as an aside: topping the meters in a single guild means very little anymore. The last 3 healers we recruited were the "best in their guild" ... and typically came in around 5th on our meters. It's all relative. Being the best in one group only means you have skill, with no indication as to how much).
Not really true for most BT/Hyjai fight once you have it on farm, especially for healers.
For Anetheron or Teron if 6/7 healers isnt really cutting it because 1 more them is undergeared, just drop a dps and bring 1 more healer. If you have it on farm your dps is going to be way above the required and dropping 1 dps isn't going to hurt. But normally you wont try to bring more than 2 person to gear up, it may start affecting performance.
While you're right on many points, there's a few things that make a difference between your case and mine. First, I'm a druid. Druids don't spend a lot of mana(lifebloom is rather inexpensive, treeform reduces mana costs by 20%). Mana regen isn't an issue now, I don't really see how it could be later unless fights last twice as long, and then I'd probably just need a shaman dropping mana instead of being stuck in a no mana regen group.
2nd, tier5 druid sucks. It just plain sucks. Sure it's better than tier4, but that's not saying a lot. The set bonus are worthless, the stats are not that good. Primal mooncloth is still better, as a set, than 3 T5 on these slots. 2T4 is better than 2T5 on the other slots, because the bonus can actually be used.
My S3 jewelry/cloak seem to be some of the best healing stuff I can get preBT, the only exceptions being gear with no stam at all. The best druid trinkets are blue/easy to get purples. I have the best idols. The only thing I think sucks in my gear is my weapon, I could really use vashj mace or solarian staff. That's pretty much the only thing I'm looking for in current T5 content.
The point of T5 really would be to replace my pvp gear on fights I need stamina, which would probably give me a bit more mana regen. I could use a flask and chain chug orgrila potions instead, and compensate for that.
As for having T5 chest/helm meaning more than attunement, if I ignore the fact I don't really want them for stats, what it shows is that I'm part of a guild that had the skill to kill those bosses. It shows not much about my own skill. Especially as a healer, and especially as a resto druid. Vashj is totally about your dps being reactive and having enough burst to take down everything as it pops(which 3/4 of my guild fail terribly at). Kael, I'm not sure yet so I can't comment.
And lastly about everyone having done naxx. Maybe in T6 level guilds everyone did naxx back in the days. In the current T5 level guilds, there's very few people that were around for naxx, or made any progress in it, at least from my experience. In my current guild, I'm one of the two that did more than anub/raz in naxx. In the guild my friend who's done naxx before was in, he was the only one. In the guild I was in before I joined this one, I was the only one. Not empyrical data by any means, but that sounds about right about what I remember from naxx back then.
If guilds are really having trouble fielding enough people due to the holidays, they should consider taking it easy until January and just doing farmed content and maybe attuning a few people. Of course, a problem arises if potential recruits are out for holidays as well. Most people out due to the holidays do come back, even though a few rediscover real life or discover some other game.
Sidenote: We got over the hump there and downed Archimonde which was a nice xmas pressie really as a single kill like that drastically boosts the morale of the guild so as we go into the holidays it's a damn sight more cheerier now. Still time to focus on finishing off BT after the holidays which will ofc be fun!
As for recruiting we generally have no choice other than to attune but tbh the xmas hols is a good time for that, we wont have a full strength team for BT but we can take alts etc to fill any real gaps as most of ours are ofc well enough equipped by now for SSC and focus on getting the new recruits attuned. Still recruitment really is dire, our last 3 applicants (bearing in mind we're a 5/5,4/9 guild): A 14 year old mage who cant stay up past 11pm (we raid till midnite), another mage who's "killed some mobs in BT" without possibly being attuned, i.e. he thinks that killing Varendris etc counts...and a Hunter who's experience is "Minimal...Kara".
Sigh!
Only benefit now is that as we're the most progressed alliance guild on our server etc it should make us more attractive, moreso after we get over the 4/9 BT stage as well but it's still a pain to have no real reliable stream of recruits. So while it's still a much better position to be in it's still problematic, we'll see how it goes over the xmas break I guess.
While you're right on many points, there's a few things that make a difference between your case and mine. First, I'm a druid. Druids don't spend a lot of mana(lifebloom is rather inexpensive, treeform reduces mana costs by 20%). Mana regen isn't an issue now, I don't really see how it could be later unless fights last twice as long, and then I'd probably just need a shaman dropping mana instead of being stuck in a no mana regen group.
2nd, tier5 druid sucks. It just plain sucks. Sure it's better than tier4, but that's not saying a lot. The set bonus are worthless, the stats are not that good. Primal mooncloth is still better, as a set, than 3 T5 on these slots. 2T4 is better than 2T5 on the other slots, because the bonus can actually be used.
My S3 jewelry/cloak seem to be some of the best healing stuff I can get preBT, the only exceptions being gear with no stam at all. The best druid trinkets are blue/easy to get purples. I have the best idols. The only thing I think sucks in my gear is my weapon, I could really use vashj mace or solarian staff. That's pretty much the only thing I'm looking for in current T5 content.
The point of T5 really would be to replace my pvp gear on fights I need stamina, which would probably give me a bit more mana regen. I could use a flask and chain chug orgrila potions instead, and compensate for that.
As for having T5 chest/helm meaning more than attunement, if I ignore the fact I don't really want them for stats, what it shows is that I'm part of a guild that had the skill to kill those bosses. It shows not much about my own skill. Especially as a healer, and especially as a resto druid. Vashj is totally about your dps being reactive and having enough burst to take down everything as it pops(which 3/4 of my guild fail terribly at). Kael, I'm not sure yet so I can't comment.
I don't play a resto druid, so I may be wrong on some aspects here, but I do play a healing priest in the start of BT / MH. It seems to me you are overestimating your gear. Like you say yourself primal mc has no stamina at all, you need stamina for the first 2 (id say 3) bosses in MH, doing those fights with less then 9k hit points isn't too wise, same goes for the first 2 in BT.
A quick comparison between you and our resto druid reveals a difference of 450 healing, 171 mp5, 2300 mana and 2100 hp. Even though maybe the difference per item is small, in the end, those combined differences seem pretty massive.
I don't play a resto druid, so I may be wrong on some aspects here, but I do play a healing priest in the start of BT / MH. It seems to me you are overestimating your gear. Like you say yourself primal mc has no stamina at all, you need stamina for the first 2 (id say 3) bosses in MH, doing those fights with less then 9k hit points isn't too wise, same goes for the first 2 in BT.
A quick comparison between you and our resto druid reveals a difference of 450 healing, 171 mp5, 2300 mana and 2100 hp. Even though maybe the difference per item is small, in the end, those combined differences seem pretty massive.
I'd be interested in seeing his gear. I checked your armory link(at least the one linked from your profile), then checked all the druids in your guild, which took some time, you have an army of ferals lol, and only found one resto that seemed to be geared for pve. I guess it's Hanael, who has a lot of T5/ZA gear. He does have 2k more mana/hp, but his healing is the same as mine, and he only has 30more mp5, and I believe the showed value doesn't take into account primal mooncloth 15%.
He does have 170more out of FSR, but because of lifebloom recasts, you're rarely out of FSR in any given situation as a druid, and I do try to get out when I'm bored. Unless the fight has only one person taking damage the whole time or you're exclusively assigned to healing that one person, it doesn't happen.
Now if I switch a bit of gear around, I end up at 8.9k hp, by only losing 95healing, and I'll admit some of my mana regen. I believe I can compensate this by chain chugging pots and flasking/oiling tho, which was my point in the previous posts. Is it as good as full T5 like your druid? Probably not. But do I really have to farm T5 to get access to T6 content when, by abusing consumables because I have time to farm, I can get very close to T5 stats? It seems like an artificial limit to me.
Now anyway, that was a derail, which was started by me, so I'll stop it here. If you don't think I can do T6 content with my level of gear, that's fine. Maybe I'm overestimating my gear, or liberal usage of consumables, and even if I am, I still find attunements stupid. At least this kind of attunement.
I liked the whole onyxia storyline, it was annoying as hell to do on alts, but it was doable without raiding, and rather fast if you could get guildies to help. The T6 attunement requiring you to clear T5... I don't know. If as you said, my gear isn't good enough for T6, why bother have attunement? Why can't I go there, wipe, and figure I need T5 first?
You mention abusing consumables to make up the gear differences, but I know I've been in Council kills where our fully kitted T6 druids running resto flasks and chain chugging mana pots every cooldown are asking for innervates and shadowpriest group swaps. While people survive double hits flamestrike/wrath/consecrate or whatever with barely 100hp left after popping healthstones. Some fights in T6 content are simply going to really tax your gear levels and it takes some serious improvements to make them comfortable. Illidan P2 is similarly taxing - if you don't have enough hp to survive barrage while simultaneously having the mana regen to put out top HP/s, you won't be pulling your weight.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, I've taken a lvl 1 reroll through the absolute bare minimum of dungeon runs for attunement straight into BT/Hyjal and been able to kill reasonably hard content. (for example, we killed Illidan with him in the raid the second week he was attuned. He has a screenshot with single-digit /played and the illidan loot box open). Our first illidan kill required us swapping a half-blue geared resto shaman in because we needed the healer.
It really comes down to motivation. With creative group adjustments, and swapping in and out for fights that are easier/harder for your group, you should be able to perform fine and your group will be able to compensate for the liability represented by PMC gear. You simply have to find a group that is willing to bet on you and invest in your progress. This typically requires them being absolutely sure you're not going to turn out to be a waste of time. The weaker your gear the larger the risk, so the more likely folk will be pulling out the 'you have weak gear' card and using it as rationalization for saying they're not willing to take the risk at all.
Gear is so utterly inconsequential compared to skill, except for a tank, and even then I'd rather take a skilled t5 tank over an average t6 tank any day of the week, and twice on thursdays.
For a healer, one of our best healers through t5 and up to killing archimonde wears almost entirely pvp gear for pve - including the CC-breaking trinket. Did it stop him from outhealing "pve-geared" players with over 100 mana/5 more and +200 more healing?
There are no gear checks that cannot be easily surmounted with gear available to anyone, only raid stacking and stupidity checks.
It's possible to clear all of BT/hyjal with a t5 tank or two and everyone else in a reasonable level of kara/t4/some t5/some pvp/some ZA etc. gear. All the excess mana regen a healer gets, for instance, simply means they don't have to conserve mana whatsoever. The only thing that's hard to surmount without gear is a lack of stamina - which once again, falls to easy-to-get pvp gear.
While you're right on many points, there's a few things that make a difference between your case and mine. First, I'm a druid. Druids don't spend a lot of mana(lifebloom is rather inexpensive, treeform reduces mana costs by 20%). Mana regen isn't an issue now, I don't really see how it could be later unless fights last twice as long, and then I'd probably just need a shaman dropping mana instead of being stuck in a no mana regen group.
2nd, tier5 druid sucks. It just plain sucks. Sure it's better than tier4, but that's not saying a lot. The set bonus are worthless, the stats are not that good. Primal mooncloth is still better, as a set, than 3 T5 on these slots. 2T4 is better than 2T5 on the other slots, because the bonus can actually be used.
To be honest, in my opinion stamina is the most important stat untill a certain point for majority of t6 encounters. It's far from optimal to run winterchill, aneth, azgalor, archimonde, nej, supremus, teron, bloodboil, RoS etc. with low stamina. T5 gear, even if not very desirable from a restoration point of view, is a way better raid gear than t4 crafted items, and that also is true for all other caster classes.
We actually had druids in primal mooncloth that ended up switching their entire gear just because of stamina before setting foot in MH. My guild even lost 3 months of progression because of a serie of issues that started with the lack of proper stamina on al'ar.
I agree with Valen. A good friend of mine plays a priest in our raid. His durability in fights that feature RSTS or straight area effects is night and day compared how it was when he was still sporting crafting stuff. The only class still sporting a lot of crafting stuff are our mages. And their soulstone/rebirth consumption is way beyond every other class.
Also there are indeed fights where even with innervate, chainchugging and resto flasks the healers will get to their limits. If this is coupled with multiple random effects like it is on the council encounter, primal mooncloth won't do you any good. Of course this is a point of progression where you will almost certainly have picked up some T5/T6 level stuff (or even ZA gear) having more stamina.
If you cannot break certain levels of stamina in T6 content, you will be a liability. Your margins of error will dwindle down to zero. Which is the main purpose for taking a more stamina oriented approach: to create safety margins, if random factors decide against you or somebody makes a wrong decision.
Just to follow up on my comments earlier, we're in the process of inviting 4-5 healers. None of them have vials but they all seem to have a pretty good knowledge of their class and are motivated to see this content. Bit of a risk but we'll be attuning them all at once and then trying to plow through the rest of the T6 content (on Archimonde currently). Considering that our 100% resto shaman and resto druid already have every piece of gear they could want from every boss we currently have on farm I doubt that the new recruits gear shortage will be a long term hinderance.
For the fights where STA is a concern in the short term, using STA food and flask of fort before getting kings seems to do wonders for STA values. None of these new guys are in all greens so I doubt that won't cover any deficit they currently have.
I don't really see a "healer shortage" as much as a resto shaman shortage, Alliance-side.
Even an undergeared resto shaman will be snapped up amazingly fast assuming they have the slightest amount of talent. A geared one can write their own ticket, even ignoring attunements.
Right now we have 8 healers: 3 priests, 1 druid, 3 paladins, 1 shaman. I'd love to switch a priest for a shaman, but I have to take what I get, and we've actually (somehow) sustained 6 healers from C'thun to now. Well over a year, and the same 6 healers are still making 95% of the raids. So I took a priest (when it meant I got a good lock too - married couple) and I took a resto shaman because ... shamans are awesome.
If you want a good disc/holy priest ... just stick your hand out the window and wave it around. You'll smack two or three up side the head. If you want a good paladin, same thing goes. Resto druids are harder -- good druids have always been difficult to find. But shamans are the hard ones.
We have this problem too. Currently we have 4 shamans, 2 of them resto. We are actually thinking of getting our Enh Shaman to permanently respec resto, his gear is probably better then most recruits we can get. Specially seeing as we have been recruiting for resto-shamans since we started SSC all those months ago, and only gotten one application. Getting a Enhancement shaman seemed just as hard though, so we are back to square one again
I also sincerely believe that the one recruit resto-shaman we got saved my guild from disaster, he is one of our most reliable healers and trying to find someone to take the attendance-pressure of him is beginning to look like an impossible task. (The other shaman is a re-roller who have been with us since day one)
As was mentioned previously in this thread, my guild would be able to drop down alot of gear levels just to get a stable resto-shaman into the guild. Looking at our 2 shamans gear it wouldn't take more then 2-3 weeks of MH/BT to get a recruit into proper gear, the TK/SSC clear would get him some gear aswell. It's just a shame this wouldn't work out for most classes, a tank can't avoid getting shred to bits by just being skilled, same goes for a mages or a rogues dps.
I do see our healers as generally skilled, it's normally the lack of resto-shamans that gives our healing a good kick in the knees. The only healers we have recruited since Magtheridon is paladins and that one resto-shaman if my memory serves me right.
The resto-shaman problem have forced us to accept another holy priest, we had 2, now we have 3. As a raid leader I would love to change this to a resto-shaman, but that seems impossible at the moment. Specially with the whole "Christmas-crisis" we see now, with exams and the like.
Well, if you aren't looking for a new MT who has to tank the really hard hitting stuff, having one raider with subpar gear (or even two) won't matter for the farm content. We had our fury warriors as well as a protection paladin tanking Hyal trash with pure Kara tank stuff and it worked if the protection warriors kept an eye on them, if they had too many mobs on them.
For dpsers: most fights in T6 aren't that balls to the walls that you need every ounce of dps. If you have an applicant in kara stuff than can be geared quickly, take him, if he knows his stuff. We have a lock whom we recruited while working on Illidan. Even with a mix of Kara/PVP stuff he posted pretty good dps on his first raids and he is able to improve his gear pretty quickly. I have no doubts that once we enter Sunwell in some months he will be constantly within our top 5 DPSers.
To reiterate it: the only position that is really depending on his gear is your MT. Everything else can be compensated (and even a T4-5 geared tank can stand up to most of the Hyal/BT bosses). Vertical recruiting is hampered by the attunements, not by gearchecks.
What's probably also causing people to not apply is the redicilous raiding times of these guilds. I mean any working class guy with a few social items on his agenda can't meet 5 day raiding from 19-00h and be expected to have all the consumables with him. These players can still be highly skilled but you won't see them in high end guilds because they don't throw away real life for a game. My guild has a 2 day raid schedule that runs 20:00 to 23:30. Never going over 0:00 and we are at Kael now. Ofcourse we run unofficial stuff on the other days but hardly anything that involves 25 men content on a regular basis.
There are skilled players in our guild but they don't have the time to raid so much. Most social skilled raiders are between 18 and 30 and generally got a job. U can't combine a job with a heavy raid schedule and have rl friends. U will be out of business in a month.
12/07/07, 11:41 PM
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