Tuesday, May 26, 2009

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.

4 comments:

Isisxotic said...

Sitting out isn't a bad thing, as long as it's not the same people being consistently benched. That just leads to resentment.

Personally, I would rather be sat once in awhile knowing my 25 guildies are having fun and gearing up, than sitting because the raid was canceled due to lack of people. We've had raids canceled recently for lack of people - it's not fun.

I guess my suggestion would be to have a goal of 1-5 people sitting, and to use dual specs as best possible to get the raid composition you need.

Bruski said...

g out is annoying, but it's not so bad if you earn a bit of epgp, or dkp for being available, and also if you know the odds you will sit two nights/weeks in a row is very low.
It's wise to look at who sat the previous week and make sure t bring them.

HP said...

Our guild is still having problems with consistent 25 people that also perform. I am glad you don't seem to have the performing problem which is much more annoying than the attendance issue... I think guilds tend to be in flux all the time unless every 25 of those raiders can guarantee they will always be there on raids all the time....

Unknown said...

I'm certainly becomming more open to Dual Specs in a few situations. I still worry that we'll end up with good players that perform poorly in unfamilier roles, but I've seen good things from the situations we've had to pull people into so far.

We do aware DKP for those on standby, at the same rate as those in the raid. And I can't think of any situtations where one person is chain-sat.

As far as performers go - lose the sub-par players as soon as the roster allows. They drag down raids, and swamp the personal responsibility fights with fail.