Warpony

Just a quick question to the guildleaders/raidleaders out there...

How have you decided to handle Kharazan raiding?

As many guilds we're about 35-40 people and want to put Kharazan on an effective farm asap. Handling the encounters isnt the problem, handling loot and the runs is.

My thesis has been to split the guild in two even parts. Design a SIMPLE dkp system (Along the lines of 1p per boss downed, either bidding of flat 5p cost for all items) and let the 2 parts sort it.

Problems would of course arise if 1 side lacked for example healers one week... How would points be distributed to the "guests" from other teams. Tho i think this is manageble.

My biggest concern is ofc the "Us vs Them" feeling that might arise. If one team clears faster, gets better loot or so. How will this affect people?

OBS: This debate might be obselete in some regards... As i see it Kharazan is just the UBRS/ZG of Outlands, and i guess we'll be past it soon enough. But Blizzard might decide to throw more of these 10-mans on us ahead, and i'd like a working system in place to handle it.

So, i'd like some input from others who have gone thrue this.

 

Vehn

The majority of the items we've gotten are either DE'd or "I guess I'd use that in x situation" (which is unforunate as we are all severly undergeared relatively..) type stuff which does not work for a dkp system. We are just rolling basically if we find something we want and not being dicks. We will probably use our dkp system for the tier 4 tokens though.

I see kara as much more difficult than zg was initially, when zg came out just about any decent guild could roll through it once they understood the very basic encounters, other than midnight we haven't one passed a boss we know nothing about yet. Even when you understand the fights they can still be difficult or require juicing (not flasks) to beat and solid execution i.e. curator and beyond. Obviously when we're out of blade's edge and netherstorm quest greens it will be a little different.

 

Maligne

We're running into this problem as well, and as officers have just started thinking about how to handle it (slackers!). Not just for Kharazan but for the heroics as well. They very well might be the ZG's of Outland, but I always prefer scheduled raids to just signing on and doing a guild LFM. We use Guild Event Manager and I'm thinking of just creating a no-limit signup for each night. Then say we get 20 people signed up, the officers go through and assign 4 "teams" which are first come first serve but class need has priority. Not the most elegant, but will probbaly do for now. I'd really love to put together a 10 man super-star team and raid exclusively with them, but that ain't happening, for a few reasons.

Inform your dealers and whores of my credit, and pour me a goddamned drink!

 

Surion

We've run into the same problem and decided not to use DKP for Kara and definatly not for Heroics.

It all boils down to the 'who gets to be part of the ATeam/BTeam scenario.' This is bad enough as it is, but when you add points into the mix, it gets that much worse when the A Team gets to Prince and B Team is wiping on Theater Event.
Also as has been pointed out, not all the loot is that great in Kara, we are saving DKP for the 25 mans and just rolling for now; makes it easier on all of us.

 

Kalince

I don't particularly see a need for DKP in a 10 man instance with 9 classes allowed. There aren't going to be very many conflicts of interest in progression gear. The conflicts of interest would come with getting into the raid. Early going I would rather have the best setup of people so that they all learn exactly how to go through the whole thing then split them up and integrate more people into 2 runs. I would pretty much hold off on any loot system for 25 mans as the 10 man really should just take care of itself for the most part.

 

Phlis

Thats one of the things that seems nice on paper but falls apart in the real world. Even for a 10 man you won't always have 1 of each class, especially in smaller guilds. Having to deal with a raid lockout will add to this as well. Then, especially with Karazhan, the tokens mean that even in the best case 3 people are rolling on the same token. Might be worth it to have some sort of order(tanks first, healers second, whatever), but then again it might not.

 

norg

Given that we know Tier 4 drops from Gruul’s Lair (and possibly Magtheridon too), do people find it slightly illogical to roll in Karazhan but use DKP in those instances? And even if it is illogical, is it necessarily problematic? How are guilds that use upgrade systems and the like thinking of integrating Karazhan loot, given that it is roughly identical in quality to several 25-man bosses? This is the only quandary I have with regards to running Karazhan, and the only thing from stopping me saying “ok fuck it we’ll just roll for good” (which is what our 70s have been doing up until now).

 

Uziel

^^ We are doing loot council for tier 4 drops, and roll for everything else in Kharazan. The loot council will likely be based on the DKP from Gruul/Mag, but won't actually be subtracted, etc.

 

Taikero

Honestly, if your guild members aren't pricks you can use a combination of officer guidance and class discussion to sort out loot (e.g. "Alright, you get the first Tier 4 shoulders and gloves, I get leggings and boots." sort of thing). If problems arise in the class, an officer makes the final decision.

With group size being much smaller, including 25 man raids, it's not that hard for people to be courteous.

*sigh* I may be overestimating people again though.

 

◊ Praetorian

Up to the individual leaders of our Karazhan runs. On the run I was on this past week I'm not sure if anyone even rolled for anything -- it was basically all consensus. Loot is pretty easy when you have an even class distribution and so few people.

 

Bubba

We've rolled on all karazhan loot drops so far, with a "cross that bridge when we come to it" mentality towards to the 25mans (though I imagine we will stay with a simple zero-sum with subbing points).

In terms of administering the raids, so far it's just been whichever 70s are up for it (a surprising number of which have been more content to farm rep for heroics/keys/attunements). We generally have around 15 or so at raid start, and we simply take the best raid makeup, rotated to give as many people as possible experience of the place.

I think the biggest issue with Karazhan is not getting 10 people to go, it's having enough individuals that are capable of leading an efficient, drama-free, effective raid. That, more than anything else, I think is the biggest challenge. For a long time now the responsibilities of coordinating the raid have often fallen on the shoulders of precious few, so much so that the shift to suddenly requiring multiple equally coordinated operations at the same time can be a rocky transition.

 

Abbi

We're planning on using DKP, with the awareness that we might need to have a different pool for the 25 mans. As far as signups go, we'll have one big bulk signup, and the raid leaders will figure out who's going on which Karazhan raid when we have 20+ signups. We're a new raiding group and I'm pretty sure that shuffling people around is important for combating the "group A, group not as good" mentality.

 

◊ Kalman

Like Gurg said, it's usually not an issue; on our run, it was pretty much "Anyone want it? Well, fucking take it anyway, you might as well have some shadow gear". With the wider class distro and the higher epics:people ratio (2 epics per boss with 10 people is much, much higher than 3-4 epics over 40 people), it's not really been a problem (there was one belt I probably should have taken, in retrospect, that went to a priest for their shadow set. It'll drop again.)

 

Whiteknight

Honestly, I think the consensus approach is really the best. Given a group of reasonably intelligent folk, consensus will likely be a close approximation to ideal loot distribution too. Or at least a good balance between ideal progression and fairness, depending on the focus of your group.

Any time you have fewer than around 3ish folk actively interested in an item, consensus seems to be the optimal strategy due to the decisions being very easy to make. In 10mans, this is almost always the case. DKP is simply a way to avoid the interminable arguments that happen when you have 10 actively interested people trying to reach consensus on something - something common in 40mans, but probably unlikely even in a 25man raid.

I think we're going to try give the consensus approach a go, even for 25mans. Perhaps a little tough initially, but after the raid gets some gear, a lot of the decisions will become obvious, or a simple decision between 2 or 3 players - with the choice usually being fairly easy.

 

Joy

We just FFA rolled, people weren't greedy and had some basic priorities.

Btw Netherspite was awesome! None of us had seen/known about Netherspite before and that was really fun to figure out. Got him to 10% 4th try but then our OT dced and trash re spawned =(

 

◊ Quigon

Most guilds running Karazhan right now are more likely to be a veteran group full of friends. Often times you get a discussion of the loot instead of just the random /roll. But its only 10 people, so the risk of overlap of need and drama is minimal anyway.

 

Elerion

I think we had four rolls this timer. Two for cloth healing gear (Two healpriests), one for the T4 gloves, and one for the random drop +shadow neck (warlock and shadow priest). The rest was defaulted to someone.

Considering there's absolutely no benefit from stacking your raid beyond two of any class/spec, almost anything except T4 is pretty easy to distribute, even early on when most of it is an upgrade.

 

mavfin

IMO, the fact of there being only 10-25 people in raids will make a huge diff in loot distribution. With only a few exceptions, there won't be a lot of contention over loot. Many times you'll be looking at 1-3 people wanting an item, rather than 5 or 6. In a 10-man, officers on the run can arbitrate if there's contention, but in a friendly guild, there won't be much, and usually 2 friends will agree to roll for it if it's of equal value to both.

Slight derail:

In a 25-man, many things are still going to be only wanted by 1-2 people.

Here's the list (in no particular order) off the top of my head on exceptions. There are other things with some crossover, but not as much as these:

set tokens
DPS (high dam/heal) cloth (mage/lock/DPS priest)
hit/crit/ap leather (feral druid/rogue)
hit/crit/ap mail gear (enhance shammy/hunter)
DPS necks/rings
weaps, depending on what they have

That still leaves a LOT of stuff that there won't be much competition for in a 25-man raid, and even the above items ,you may be talking about 5 or 6 people out of 25, rather than 10 or 12 out of 40. You just won't see 6 warriors in a balanced raid anymore, or 5 hunters, or 6 druids, or 5 of anything, really. That alone will reduce loot distribution headaches IMO.

End derail.

 

Kody

With us it's basically like this: "Hey dude, you want that? No? I'll take it then." or "Pretty sweet item, you want it? Cool, go for it."

The only thing we've rolled so far was the tier 4 gloves since so many of us could use them.

 

◊ Kalman

It also helps that the upgrades in Karazahn are generally pretty small upgrades over the blues; yeah, I might be picking up a stat point or two, or maybe a point of +damage, but it isn't the difference between a 41 DPS weapon and a 55 DPS weapon (especially since it seems like half of our melee DPS are already Aldor exalted and rocking a 78 DPS sword... buncha goddamn farmers, I swear.)

 

warpandas

I'd like to talk about how guilds are managing these Karazhan raids.

For example, in my current guild there is an "elitest" group of 5 who hit 70 first. None of which are officers except for one. Essentially what it comes down to is if you are their best friend, you get an invite. This obviously does not bode well for the guild in general.

I'm sure many guilds are also facing the same problem initially.

Secondly, someone mentioned having an A team and a B team. This is obviously going to happen. However, who would not want to be in the A team. Why not just go join another guild or go make your own guild? How are guilds distributing members or is this actually happening? This is also something that doesn't mean good things for a guild.

 

Mosh

We stack the raid a little bit to ensure one-shotting Moroes, but other than that, we just generally grab the first people who want to go when we form the raid.

 

Dynalisia

Right now our officers and raidleader are cherrypicking people for our karazhan raids to make sure everyone gets some time in, while avoiding the raid becoming impotent as a result. Next week we should start with a dual raid setup, in which cliques and alpha players (as far as they are perceived as such by people) will be spread as much as possible. Generally the class/role requirements of Karazhan limit the control officers have over socially-effective karazhan groups, but when most of your guild understands what is going on and why things are being setup as they are, you should be able to avoid any major dramas.

I really can't wait until max-player raids become the normal way of business again and the guild can function as a single team once more.

 

Kody

We've set up 3 Karazhan raid teams so far - we're going to try to keep them the same for a few weeks so that we can get the learning phases of the zone done with and move on to the farming phases. So far it's worked out really well, the two groups with experience from last week are up to or past Aran, and the group that just started on the zone this week has made it to Curator. We even have some folks organizing a 4th group for this week and beyond.

It ended up for the most part being set up in a way where the first people to hit 70 formed groups with the best balance in mind of classes available at the time, and started hammering away at the content. Our major dilemma how is that we only have one warlock, yet 3-4 groups that will be running.

 

Kiryojo

We have two Karazhan raids going atm (both have Prince downed), but not enough tanks for a third. So we just get 12-15 people per group, and switch in different people if we need a certain makeup for a boss. I guess it works for us though; we had a lot of people go into retirement/etc once BC hit, so we've got a very small roster compared to most guilds.

I definetely think DKP for Karazhan is a bad idea, especially if your guild is a Naxx clearing one. Most of the loot is meh compared to Naxx gear/some level 70 blues (though some of it is amazing). Right now its rolling on an item, with the person passing if they won more items than the other rollers. Works well so far, except for one of the damn rerolls winning like 4 items since no one else wanted em :p

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...ks/Kiryojo.png