Guild Size

In a perfect world, you have 25 raiders in your guild, in awesome composition, and everyone shows up to every raid.

This is pretty far from the reality of most every guild.

That said, you need to have more then 25 raiders in your guild. The big question at this point - is how many?

I'll say a reasonable point of division, is if you have 0-5 people on standby, or 5+. I've seen both sides of things, though from a bias standpoint.

In T6, I remember filling all 40 slots of a raid group for ontime, before filtering things down into a group of 25. Pros: We could field any composition of tanks, healers, and ranged/melee DPS, and never were delayed for lacking composition. Cons: Officers spent a decent amount of brain processing getting everyone in for at least some content, and of course, we had people whom only got to raid for an hour (out of three).

Throughout T7 & T8, we've been on the other end - running 0-5 on standby. Most of the time, it works out well enough - we have enough online, have a reasonable composition, everyone that shows raids for all (or nearly all) night, and there is a higher loot concentration.

Recently, however, we've gotten burned having a poor mix of characters online. In one night in recent memory, we were lacking tanks early on (which did get solved when some latecomers logged on), and then lacking melee DPS for the arena part of Thorim. Long story short: we only ended up getting 3/4 watchers, in a week that should have been our first look at Vezax.

Now - through all of this, I've never been the one sat out frequently. I don't assign myself a raid spot, but our tank lead knows I prefer to be in when reasonable, to keep things moving (though I've had some "Virus Test" moments in the past, which my awesome officer base has consistently passed with flying colors).

What I guess it comes down to, is I want to know:How bad is sitting out, when its something outside of your control? If there aren't enough people to form a successful raid, everyone ends up sitting (essentially), so I tend to lean towards pushing officers to over recruit and have people on standby - and the ability to volunteer to sit out on standby I know lets some of our raiders focus on studying/housework/homework while not feeling like they are letting the guild down.