One of the problems that my guild had in BC and I’m sure we weren’t alone, was making the transition from 10 man to 25 man raiding. From my observations there were two ways to get there:
1. Run one Karazhan group. Get through as fast as possible, then dive into Gruul’s Lair and wipe for a month or so.
2. Run two Karazhan groups. Take a little longer to get through Kara, but be better prepared when you start Gruul.
I’m sure there was some massive guild out there that ran 3 or 4 Kara groups a week, but we didn’t have that many people. We went with the second plan. But we ran into some problems that I think we’ll see repeated in LK. When you have two ten man raids doing an instance each week, you have to make a choice. Do you want to progress quickly or make sure everyone feels like they’re getting equal treatment? If you want to progress quickly, you stack one raid with your best people so it will progress quicker and learn the content faster, and you put everyone else in the other raid and let them stumble through some fights and get geared up. If you want things to be equal, you balance your raids and make slower progress, but no one feels like you’re picking on them.
I don’t really care if I hurt someones feelings so of course we went with a stacked raid. We called them the Progression raid and the Learning raid. Some of the people who weren’t allowed in the Progression raid were horribly offended and quit the guild. They sucked, so no big loss. For the record, no one who quit the guild over being placed in the learning raid ever progressed past Gruul. I like to keep track of our former guildies, so I can use their failures to point out why it is a bad idea to quit a raid guild over stupid shit.
We cleared Kara in six weeks and were looking to start Gruul. This is where we ran into problems. To support a 10 man raid we needed about 12-13 people. Any more than that and people were sitting out more than they wanted. Any less and we were too short to raid. So between the two raids we had about 25 people. There were still a couple weeks where due to absent raiders, only one raid cleared Kara. Once we got ready for Gruul, we ran into two problems.
1. Not enough raiders - 25 people were plenty for 2 Kara raids, but it takes about 30 people to get started in 25 man raiding. You are always going to have a few people absent, due to real life stuff, and there are always a couple of whiners who can’t handle wiping all night while you learn new content, so they stop showing up or mysteriously lose link and never return.
2. Raid balance - A starting kara raid is 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 dps. Once your all wearing great gear, you can drop a healer, and eventually even a tank. Hell I’ve tanked half of the bosses in there with an elemental shaman in T5. But when you first finish Kara, you’re using the 2-3-5 build. So two raids means 4 tanks, 6 healers, 10 dps. Your extra 5 raiders are probably a mix, maybe another tank or a hybrid like a feral druid, a couple of healers and dps. So let’s say you have 5 tanks, 8 healers, and 12 dps. That’s fine for High King, you can always stick extra tanks on Olm, but when you get to Gruul, you have three tanks sitting in melee range blowing everyone up and not doing any damage.
So every guild goes through this annoying month, where you have to recruit more healers and dps, and your tanks who worked so hard to get you through Kara find themselves getting sidelined. I have a player in my guild who started out playing a tank, did a wonderful job, but wasn’t getting in on as many fights as he wanted because there were three tanks who outgeared him, so he switched to a healer. He did an awesome job healing, but we’ll be losing him come LK, because he wants to tank again, and we’re full up.
So what is the root cause of these problems? Blizzard can’t do math. You start out doing 5 man instances with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps. Then you go to ten man instances where you need 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 dps. So unless one of your dps magically turns into a healer, someone gets replaced. Then you switch to 25 man raiding and things get really fucked up. They put in just enough trash pulls and boss fights (Al’ar, Fathom-Lord) where you need 4 tanks, so you keep them around, but they get rotated out a lot, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to be short healers once you switch to 25 mans.
So why didn’t they follow a much smarter progression, and make end game raids 20 man instead of 25? 5 x 2 = 10, 10 x 2 = 20. You’d still have extra tanks, but I’ve found most tanks willing to switch to dps and back as needed. Plus, then I’d have five less people to piss me off. Instead of angryraidleader.com, maybe I would have named the site slightlyannnoyedraidleader.com.
12 responses so far ↓
1 Fur // Sep 21, 2008 at 2:12 am
I really liked how Blizzard was trying to introduce more flexibility to the healing classes, even though they didn’t do a really good job at it. It shows, at least, they know that this happens… but I doubt they want to change their numbers and rework every heroic raid’s boss fight to accompany such a change. Nevertheless, the difference in numbers here at least keeps the cycle of members flowing a little bit: there’s always someone who feels a little out of place and will move out without too much drama; I myself left my guild after being sat out for a few weeks in a row only a month ago. The constant, slow, steady stream of change there keeps the pond from growing stagnant. And, as I’ve seen too many times, stagnant ponds of guilds tend to get a strong amount of internal tension and eventually erupt into a mountain of drama… my own server had 5 old, top-content guilds just get torn apart by this recently.
2 Tarios // Sep 21, 2008 at 4:29 am
Your articel is written great but you make a mistake. And i think this is the most problem of the WoW Community.
You only think in Tank / Heal / DPS rolles.
True! There are only theses rolles but a warrior can run in 2 rolles. He kann tank and he can do DPS. Better exempel is the Paladin and Druid, he kann Tank, Heal and DPS!
The only thing you have to change is the gear and the talentpoints.
So here comes the mistake!
You ran through kara and you equip all your tanks with tank gear, but you dont need it. For the most bosses in kara you only needed a side tank (with blue Quality / Heroic Gear) not with the full kara tank equip. So better make this.
2 Tanks, one of it the MT , one side tank who roles only on the DMG or heal Gear.
So the most people have to know, okay we start Kara, please Tank for us now, BUT in the next part of the raid, you will switch to DPS / Heal. Get some epic gear for that!
just my 2 cents
3 Aramirloth // Sep 21, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I agree with your post in most cases but about the “progression raid” to kara i have to disagree.
I’m sure you made your decision purely on the skill and gear each player had at that time(or atleast that you think you did).
The problem is though what if you have 14players good enough for “team A” and the same extra 4 of the good players always get stuck with “team B”? I’ve seen that happen alot and then it’s not just the deadwheight you loose, but you sudenly loose players you’re going to need come 25man content.
The reason stuff like that happens is because raidleaders/guildleaders are human(well atleast some of them are) too, and like the rest of us they prefere sertain people over other even though they are equally skilled and geared players.
Thats the one of biggest problem a raidleader faces imo, to be fair to the others and rotate players as needed.
4 MathInLA // Sep 21, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Thankfully, in theory, any tank besides a warrior can transition to a healer and/or DPS, and quite a few DPS can bridge to be healers. Of course, it means going off the spec you know and love (unless you’re a feral tank -> dps, in which case, you’re probably doing quite well anyway) and regearing/co-gearing.
This is why the fact that there’s been no movement on that vague “have two specs” thing Blue was talking about back a ways irritates the -heck- out of me. Especially if you can have those specs transition in an instance, Blizz can have all the pretty little fun “aren’t we clever game designer” fights they want, if the warrior can suddenly go from prot to fury and the pally can flip from prot to holy or whatever. Not to mention for someone who’s got a solid job, you can flip to your PvP or grinding spec with less hassle, but that’s a different point.
My fiancee had a pretty good point– if it was meant to be a gold sink, treat it as a gold sink like a guild bank. Let people buy alternate specs for 100g/500g/1000g/5000g or whatever. It’ll help pull some of the flood money out when whatever dailies come in at endgame start pouring in, and it’ll reduce a lot of the hassle as per above– and allow for by-God experimentation with specs.
5 admin // Sep 21, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Response to Aramirloth…
We always rotated 2 or 3 of our best raiders into the Learning raid each week to help teach the new guys. It was actually more fun to run with the Learning Raid than the Progression one. Much more relaxed. That’s why when the people that eventually quit kept referring to it as the ’stupid raid’ or other fun names we loved to point out that the guild master and 2 other officers were in the raid this week. So they’re stupid for wanting to help you?
6 errgf // Sep 21, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Why the hell did you take two prot spec’d tanks to kara? That was stupidity on your part. Arms/Fury warriors, Retribution Paladins and Balance/Feral Druids can off-tank, even with shitty gear.
LOL.
7 flubear // Sep 22, 2008 at 12:54 am
shouldn’t the maths be like
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5-man heroic
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
2 tank 2 healer 6 dps = 10-man raids
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
1 tank 1 healer 3 dps = 5 man
5 tank 5 healer 15 dps = 25-man raids
so feral druids / moonkin / protection pally / tanking warlocks / tanking mages / tanking hunters could be make up the raid =)
flubear
8 admin // Sep 22, 2008 at 5:07 am
I would love it if raids balanced this way. I hate how many tanks get guilds to 25 man content, then get left behind.
Yes, I am pretending you weren’t being sarcastic.
9 Gaiwyn // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:11 pm
“I like to keep track of our former guildies, so I can use their failures to point out why it is a bad idea to quit a raid guild over stupid shit.”
This statement wins. I hope that with the expansion we will see a change of game dynamic when it comes to raiding. The optional 10- and 25-man raids in the same instance is something fresh and will prove to be interesting for both guilds and raid leaders alike.
10 Elliptic // Sep 30, 2008 at 12:40 pm
If you look at it from simply a “this is the bare minimum we need,” then sure, but let’s look at this realistically.
Since 10 mans only need, well, 10 people to show up at the same time you can easily schedule them with few time conflicts. However, 25 mans necessitate 25 people’s schedule to mesh, which is more difficult than 10 people; the difficulty, in fact, goes up as a factorial. So realistically the break down would probably be 3 groups of 10-12 people in each team of 10 mans.
At the end that leaves you with about 30-35 raiders which is about what you want for 25 man content if you don’t require 95%+ attendance. Let’s say you have 28 raiders that are 95% attendance, those last two spots in 10 mans can be filled by alts, or good casuals in the guild that just want to help out.
In terms of 10 man content, in WotLK, you’ll probably have 2 warriors tanking, a paladin tank, 2 DKS, and a feral druid those three groups. As was stated above you can easily convert some of those tanks to dps.
Furthermore, with the changes to spellpower you can easily convert druid, priest, and shaman healers from dps ->healing or vice versa. The flexibility that WotLK is bringing will most likely alleviate most of the problems.
11 Andy // Oct 6, 2008 at 10:15 pm
It would be even better if I can spend 500g on a spec that will let me flip flop between 2 different builds on the fly.
Tell me that shit won’t be bad ass. It will fix so many issues with personnel.
12 moo // Dec 12, 2008 at 3:34 pm
remember when we needed 40 people?
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