As a Hunter class lead I feel I must defend my position. In my view the setup is more that you take a responsible member from each class and they become the voice of that class in the officer channel(s). I understand some guilds would be fortunate enough to be able to depend on most if not all members of their raid, I've never had that luxury and I don't anticipate it anytime soon. As raid lead as well, I find it much easier to co-ordinate if I have one officer designated to keep an eye on each class and what they are doing. After a wipe I would rather chase up 3 or 4 class leads in /o than use raid chat or vent to try and figure out who did what wrong. At any rate, things are always going to be different amongst different guilds I guess.

As for raid spot rotations, I don't really have any input I'm afraid, being an offpeak guild doesn't really allow us the luxury of picking and choosing raiders :P.

I think "class leader" for me is a bit more nebulous. It's more of an administrative thing than anything else. They get to deal with applications, for example. But I know our priest channel is fairly collaborative, we'll bounce ideas off each other for everything, we discuss loot that might drop and who is interested ahead of time so we can figure out who it might go to. And we still gravitate toward class specific channels because it's a more efficient way of discussing game mechanics that pertain to your specific class. I don't think the guild or the raid needs to hear every discussion about healing assignments, or a comparison between Trans helm and Don Rigoberto's or what have you. We have 8-9 consistent priests at the moment, and since we all get along well with each other, there hasn't been any problems with people sitting. I'm more than willing to sit for someone and I know the others are willing to sit for me. It all flows from selecting good people to fill your ranks, who happen to play well too, as opposed to just screening for gear/skill.

We've never had class leaders, although even in informal social situations some people take the lead. The hardest head I had to work around was the priest app who felt that he had to detail his entire application through me, letting ME know when he'd transfered, when he was/was not going ot be available, how excited he was to be joining our awesome priest core etc etc etc.

Yes I'm a priest who is an officer. I have three very specific jobs- I moderate squabbles (abuse), I deal with loot (itemization) and I help design/maintain the website. I do NOT deal with recruits because I'm very bad at it, and I do NOT lead raids or even my class because I'm really really terrible at it. I just kinda nodded a few times said "oh that's nice" and tried to redirect the app to the mage in charge of recruitment.

Each class (except druids and priests- druids because there were rarely enough originally to populate a channel. priests because we behave better in public) has their own chat channel. In addition there's a channel for all healers. Each class organizes their own buffs. We've got one priest who does our buff assignments in healer chat- another on backup. Warlocks "call" their curses and soulstones. Mages have regular buff assignments and use their channel for coordinating aoe or insane ignites. Hunters arrange their own tranq rotations. Warriors, generally, divvy up the tanking (Occasionally the raid leader overrides or just assigns it). Rogues call each other fags and pussies and post damage meters (at least that's pretty much all I saw for the week I could stomach their channel... maybe they're discussing the finer points of moder psychology now... but I will never know)

I will say, for pure amusement, regarding the rogues battlecries in German....

One of our warlocks, trying to keep modern, went to download a summoning mod that the other warlocks had handy. However, he clicked the wrong link. We were immediately told in french to please assist by clicking the portal.

We now have summons, international flavor. French, German, English. We almost had one in Chinese, but the warlock couldn't read enough of the mod site to actually find the download.

On a recent warlock app:
"Do you speak a language other than French/German/English?

We need more kilcken."

As for sitting out, all people on the wait list get full dkp as long as they've parked their main at the entrance and can log back over quickly. First come first serve, although we will jump classes for raid balance.

Heyas Seb. *Grins*

I didnt notice anyone else responding to this, so; members sign up that they'll be there, so officers/raid leader can more appropriately judge where the raid will be going that night. Lets you know if 'holy.. stocked raid, we're totally set for x boss we've been learning' or you're stuck with 'eh, missing lot of key players, bad balance.. BWL night'. I think its either more for the larger guilds (more members to the point of where a sign up sheet can help managerial wise) or for more casual guilds, like mine.

We use signs up because, quite simply, we never know when casual player x is going to be there. It'd be great if 90% of our guild (especially as we keep our membership smaller than most semi-casual raiding guilds [50-60 active members, usually around 54]) is commonly there for 85%+ of your raids, but some of us don't have that luxury, or, quite simply, the guild isnt a hardcore-ish guild where its part of the guild's principles. Sign ups let us know if people are coming, going, how to best direct the raid before its time for invites, and so forth.

So less that people who arent going to raid while online, perhaps, and more just letting officers know whether or not they'll actually decide to log on in a simple format.

We actually didnt use signups for awhile, and found attendance dropped without them, amongst the more casual members. Signups seemed to give them something to focus and commit to.

Regarding class leads and rotating raid spots...

We use a class lead system; though we didnt in the past. We switched over out of need. We just had too many classes where you either had lack of organization (our healing classes, primarily) or there was a real lack of communication within the class. When we put in class leads, it led to more organization, gave members another outlet for how they thought things should be, and allowed better filtering of good practices for people to use, instead of Idiot Rogue X convincing others the glory that is being a Hemo Rogue.

Its vastly improved the skill set of our raiders, but that may more be because we are fairly casual compared to most other guilds in Naxx, and very few of our 'standard' raiders even read forums. It gave us the ability to put some very basic authority behind the players who knew their class and did their homework, so they could then pass it along. They also tend to manage recruitment for their own classes.

That said, most of our class leads arent officers; just normal members with more responsibility and no real perks other than helping the guild/raid. Though some are (and in my case, the GM/Hunter lead), we havnt seen any real negatives come out of the system once the people who should be removed for other reasons were, in fact, gone.

As per rotating.. only the raid leader has a "guaranteed" spot, but class leads and officers are given heavy preference, but that's more due to the fact they have some of the best attendance/skill of our players, and go the extra mile. But they'll sit out on farm content (often fight for the chance to!) such as BWL, especially if its to get applicants or people who need loot in.

We have had officers/class leads bump players when they get online, but its fairly rare, and only if absolutely required; such as when it allows us to fix a bad class mix (such as being low on decursing for Noth.. decurse-abled officer logs on? Bumping 'someone'..) or other such raid-progress based reason. And we generally only bump anyone who is under-geared, having a bad night, etc. -- we've never had anyone protest about it, because we're fairly open with they whys behind it, and they generally understand, and know we'll try to get them back in as soon as its viable.

We've found most people dont mind being made to sit occassionally, but we try to make sure no one sits more than they raid, or even all that often, though we have no real system for it other than open communication.

Stability of your guild, raid attendance, guild culture, and server population can make some structure necessary or totally irrelevant depending on the situation. My guild, while currently the most 'advanced' in terms of progression on our server, was at about third or fourth before transfers came in, and had to put in some structure to deal with the changes in the recruitment pool. When new people are coming into your guild on a more or less regular basis, especially when your guild culture is changing to emphasize raiding almost every day, rules and procedures are necessary to deal with a bunch of new people you don't know, that don't know you or usually each other either. As said new people are also usually undergeared or inexperienced due to a shallow applicant pool, having someone there to teach them, or ask someone to teach them, how to handle certain situations is important. Classes with many people may need a specific rotation due to odd attendance patterns (our rogues have maybe 3-4 people with 90% attendance and 5-6 with 50%, as well as a few 'non raiders' who come to help out sometimes). We're still developing into a guild where most of the raid is 75%+ on attendance for raiding nights, but guilds where everyone knows by virtue of only adding 1-2 members of a class every few months may not need the structure we do.

Class channels with us haven't really stopped people from socializing as much as they just cut down on spam when classes want to theorycraft within themselves. We do have a specific forum devoted to classes within our member section, but when discussing potential loot that might drop, avoiding the spam in the healer channel (usually reserved for sorting out assignments during bosses) or in the raid channel helps keep things focused.

With TBC our CL system will probably need a revamp, as with a limited number of raid spots being available, the CL having a spot nearly defaulted will cause problems. The grind to 70 and arena/hardmode dungeons holding certain craftable mats may help sort that out, but I'm thinking that we might switch to a 'role leader' system if we have too many people sitting when that rolls around - a healer, tank, and dps leader, or possibly just back to 'the raid leader invites.'