As a fairly new guild who merged from two old ones we've found ourselves with alot of over populated classes. As much as we would like to just kick the least active ones it would cause alot of disruption just after the merge and all the healers proved themselves to be competent healers at patchwerk.

The problem: only 6 raid spots and 9 priests. Some more active than others, some can attend every raid but one etc.

Only one priest should attend every raid (the class leader). And we raid 5 days a week.

Kicking isn't an option after only being merged a week.

Ive tried tried looking for an thread but can't seem to find one. If anyone can offer advise, a thread or their current rotation it would be helpful.

(great forum btw, really helped with patchwerk)

Stolen from my guilds forums

Works pretty well. Ensures reserves actually show up if they are needed and that low attendance people have to miss out the same number of raids they can attend as high attendance people.

We also use floating spots for some classes. ie: Instead of 6 priests and 5 paladin slots, you could have 6 priests, 4 paladin, 1 floating healer spot. We tend to rotate which class gets the floating slot depending on the number of reserves and what the raid requires.

http://wiki.subcreation.net/warmath/...d-attended-dkp

This seems like a decent way of rotating spots fairly.

My first piece of advice would be for your guild to decide on a name and then pick a realm to play on.

We simply have a list of everyone in a given class and a pointer.
The pointer moves N spots along the list after each raid.

When our raids were heavily oversubscribed we introduced a sitout point system. Every hourly log that a player is sitting out earns them a "sitout point". At raid start, we would prioritise getting people at the top of the sitout point list into the raid group.

So you're worried that discussing how to keep the mjority of people in a guild happy would warrant a kick from your guild? If anything you've come to the right place for help as a lot of people here play in very large guilds. Of course, you'd want to follow the forum rules...

He meant fill out your profile.

Edit: Beat me to it. :(

I like this earned/attended idea.

A quick explanation on how my raid tries to handle rotations:
We simply try to rotate our slots as fair as possible. Normally, at least the class leader/officer should have a decent knowledge about his class members (e.g. people shift working, so they can raid every dayone week and nearly not at all the other), on which we try to setup a "fair" lineup. Also, we encourage people to talk and try to switch with someone lined up (from their class) if they, for some reason, really want to be in the raid.
Additionally, if you're not lined up, but decide to be ready for jumping in to replace someone, you'll be set on Standby (that's how we call it ;P), and you'll get 50% of the raid's earned DKP (by going Standby, you agree to have your hearthstone set to the next inn and to be reachable via TeamSpeak, ingame chat, IRC, phone, whatever - you'll have to message an officer at the beginning of the raid if you wish to be on Standby).
If you're on Standby, you may send in some declared trade goods (Stonescale Eel etc.), to get full DKP, but only (!) if you're on Standby (we're trying to prevent people heavily buying DKP this way).
Everyone is pretty happy with that as far as I know, we use to get a nice amount of trade goods that way and people won't fall behind on DKP if they're willing to be ready/farm.


Uh, and, cool guild name norg ;P

Points for subbing are a key element in keeping everyone satisfied.

After that, with the aid of your class leaders, simply take the best people for the job at hand. If a player isn't performing at the level you expect, then replace them with a sub that you think can.

We don't have any standardized system, but instead it's up to all the class leaders to make sure that their spots are filled for each scheduled raid (4 raid days/week).

For mages, I make a thread in our mage forums each week, where people sign up which of the 4 days they can attend. On Monday/Tuesday I go over the list, and post a schedule showing which mages will be raiding which day (we have 6 mage spots, so I try to get 6 mages and 1 reserve incase someone doesn't show up for whatever reason). I keep track of which mages have been rotated out, and basically just rotate alphabetically so everyone in the long run has an equal amount of sit out time.

I've come to the (pretty obvious, heh) conclusion that people really don't have a problem with sitting out raids, as long as they know a couple of days in advance, so they can plan something else.

That's his way of asking you to fill out your profile, which you should probably do. The EJ folks don't like it when people don't fill out their profiles, and the Hand of Justice seems to have a pretty high proc rate on this forum, if you take my meaning.

The thread is a valid discussion certainly, but without a completed and accurate profile you're going to be permanently banned by the end of the day.

Yes, I understand that some people might have sensitive questions and prefer anonymity when asking them, but if you want that, go to the official forums or look elsewhere.

I understand that this policy may chill some otherwise useful discourse, but we feel that the benefits of requiring people to be forthright about who they are when making their posts outweigh that loss. No level 1 alts here.

i give DKP to anyone who is on-time and available for the raid (and lets me know that!), regardless of whether they're actually in the raid when it starts. we rotate people out based on class needs for certain fights and who needs what loot (if there's only one person who needs a set token, we make sure they're in for the bosses who drop it...i already have 6 extra hybrid shoulder items sitting in my bank).

in order to get dkp for bosses, those people have to remain available in case they're needed. this doesn't mean online and standing at the zone-in, but we have to be able to easily contact them and they have to be able to get on if we need them.

How do you handle the fact that farm content tends to be bunched up, and that EVERYONE wants to play farm for a chance at their item?
You many have gathered from Arawethion before that our guild is only 4 nights/week and this week was our first sucessfull go at "get all the farm bosses down in the first two days of raiding", and now we're left with 2 new content nights on Gothik, which inevitably means fewer people will be on.
In other words, would you modify your systems (pointers, sitting out points etc) to accomodate for new content nights, or would you let the system work and hope that your player base understands sitting out on farm occasionally is for the greater good?

And how do you accomodate partial nights for stand-bys? If they've sat out half the night, do they get half the points? 0? Can people in the raid leave, then join stand-by?

Pick your target at the start of a raid, tell people to bring consumables for both possibilities :)

As for DKP incentives and such for spots, I get more annoyed at missing the new stuff mostly not that I lose DKP. I play to see the new stuff in the game, not to look fancy in Org.

Generally the Class Leaders and Officers are first in and last out, unless they're genuinely not needed. The Priest/Shaman/Druid CL's will always have a spot on the heavy healer dependant fights, where you want your best level of coordination. You can then rotate them out with others on the tank and spank fights where you don't really need more than DPS and a Skull icon. Always keep the raid at the top of the list of priorities - getting Timmy the shaman in might be fair, but if that means benching your healing maestro that keeps everything running smoothly, you're not actually doing your raid any good.

Also, not every class requires a high level of coordination. If you tell the rogues to kill stuff, generally they should not need any sort of direction in order to perform that task.

As do I, but as wielder of our Ateish shards, I don't really have the option of sitting out for farm or close nights. Sharing my account is not an option (for a variety of reasons, not the least of which involves all our gold/Frozen Runes :O ) for farm night and I play the game (same as you) to see the new content, not the old.

And to be clear, we don't dock our version of DKP for non-attendance provided they are in our queue channel (everyone in our guild knows how to spell "queue" after missing out on a night's worth of points at least once :P ), but I anticipate needing a rotation beyond "Jimmy is a great [insert class] and has been around a lot longer/more active in the past month than Dean" because we are specifically trying to over-recruit from the dying guilds around us.

we give full waiting dkp for anyone who cant come because of not enough spots, assuming that their hearthstone is at the zone of the instance we're raiding that night. with our guild, it's first come first serve when raid starts (usually about 20 min before nominal pull time). A year ago or so we had rogues in a situation where we'd have to /random for the spots. that was an unhappy time.

This is exactly what we do(except we don't use DKP.)

Small sidetrack, but are terms like 'sign up for the raid' weird to anyone else? I've never 'signed up' for a raid. I'm guessing this is normally used by guilds that don't require you to raid if you're online during raiding hours?

Our officers give full attendance and dkp to anyone sitting out, they earn the same credit as anyone actually in the raid as long as they can show up asap if we need them, most folks go play alts but stay on vent. As far as rotation goes, it all depends on the fight. The officers are pretty fair about getting folks in and out, and if you're up next for a loot drop, you won't be sat. When folks need to be sat, most classes work it out themselves, though attendance is usually the deciding factor if it comes down to it (unless you're up for loot)

In addition to sit out points and giving people who are on-time priority over those that are late, we have a two rank system in our guild, one for "members" which is basically "active raiders" and the other being "does not raid" for those that only come on once or twice a week. There's restrictions of course, and we have it detailed somewhere as to what it takes to fall or rise, but in generally members have priority to get into a raid over DNRs, and they get loot priority with the assumption that the guild will get more benefit from being able to use the item more.

If we have too many members of a certain class, we leave it up to the class leader (if they're on) as to how to best handle it. In a few cases it has turned into a popularity contest, but a majority of the time it's based on attendence, performance, and who needs the loot the most (and in case of cross class tokens, who has chance to snag it away from those other classes). Other than maybe 2 or 3 individuals (who caused more problems than just this), the system has worked well. We've been using it since the release of BWL.