Help with Raid Roster Rotation - 12-13 Person Roster

[logitek]

Hey all.

So I am looking for some advice from some veteran GM's please. I recently formed a progression oriented guild and we had some issues with attendance and dropped some people. We currently have 13 people which consists of:

Two Tanks (One with DPS o/s)

Three Heals (One with DPS o/s)

8 DPS.... 4 Melee, 4 Ranged. (Two with tank o/s and one with heals o/s)




Obviously during progression we want to bring the best roster to help us get the boss down. This means some people have to sit out frequently or be swapped in and out for the raid.

This is upsetting people that have to sit.



Does anybody have any ideas or insight in how I should handle a 12 - 13 person roster rotation wise?

[Don Vito Corleone]

I recommend one of 3 options:

1) you get most of your raid to level alts and run 2 10 man raids, which could get time consuming;
2) you form 2 raids and let 1 raid do MgV and the other HoF, week after the other way around;
3) again, you form 2 raids and let them alternate, doing all raids with group 1 this week and all raids with group 2 next week.

[Derpette]

Tell them to consider the alternative: 10 man group. Then ask them how often they think you'll need to cancel raid because 1 person can't make it due to (un)expected events. I've been there, it sucks, never again.
To put it in perspective: assuming your raiders have sick attendance, and can come everytime apart from 1 week a year, which translates to 98% attendance roughly. You'd still need to cancel almost 1/5 raids. Assuming 95% attendance from all 10 raiders, it means canceling over 40% of your raids. Yeah that's awesome for the 9 people that do show up.

[Squirl]

Guild Progression > Personal Progression

This mentality is common in high-end guilds. If you're still doing normals, I would not expect your raiders to have this mentality. Find a fair way to rotate every one in if this is the case. Derpette explained perfectly why you need a bench.

If you are doing heroics, your raiders need to grow up and put the group ahead of themselves. That's the only way to get heroics down in a reasonable amount of time.

[Quill]

This is what I have seen done effectively:

- Tell all your members to keep a loot wish list and insist every person keep it updated. I'm not aware of any site or addon that automates this, but if you have any programming-saavy members, this is doable.
- Set predefined rosters 1 day before each raid week, based off the wish lists, for every boss you plan on pulling this week - including who will be in on the progression encounter du jour.
- Have someone with the most powerful computer stream your attempts so your benched raiders can see what's going on. Insist you want them to watch so that they see what to do once they get the call to come in.
- Don't let anyone sit on the bench for the entire night ever, unless you don't think they're truly worthy of a spot in which case you should cut them from the team. Even if you do the same progression fight the whole night, you should sub in everyone at some point. Watching for the entire raid night is demoralizing for sure, especially for someone who does not suck. Losing that person due to their not feeling involved is waaaay worse than taking longer to get a kill.
- Seems like one melee too many imo. I would think you'd ideally want 3 melee / 5 ranged.

Good luck!

[Isotope]

Two 10mans is always a bad idea. You're basically "cutting" 3 people.

I would just have a meeting and just say look our goal is to progress as fast as we can and that's going to be a team effort. We will all get the kills some may just be sooner before others.

How to make it fair is I would sub out a dps for healer on 2 heal fights. One tank fights I would bring in a DPS. It seems like your tanks/heals have a raid spot for sure. After you get a few kills you can start subbing raiders in and out for what each person needs gear wise. If after a few weeks people leave you know who the weak links in your group were.

[Mazar]

We aim for an 11m roster so we can rotate people out. You could try something alomg those lines. Come up with a rotation, those with an offspec will naturally get to fill in more due to the occasional post out.

[Irialx]

Hi, GM of a 10m guild here.

Your situation is tricky. Personally, we raid with an 11 man roster. Our raiders for the most part have very good attendance so you need to take that into consideration. If you are fortunate enough to have solid people I would highly suggest cutting 1-2 people from the roster. The fact of the matter is with 12-13 people you just have too much to juggle if they are all maintaining 90%+ attendance.

Now, as far as keeping a smaller roster the key is hybrids. Every raider in our roster can play 2 if not all 3 specs. This allows for a lot of flexibility if someone AFKs or if there is a certain spec, class, whatever that is better for an encounter. I would suggest keeping your roster to no more than two melee max.

We swap people based on gear needs, and if they have been in on the first kill. For instance, if we are progressing on a boss we will keep the same people in until it dies. The person that sat out will 100% be in for the next weeks kill. This really makes it so that they dont feel left out.

Its also important to make sure you are not sitting the same person over and over. Rotate all of your members. Its a little more work, but I would suggest planning a 'sit list' ahead of time to have it better organized. Just remind the people you are raiding with that this is a team effort. Everyone will have to sit at some point. You cant have a roster of 10 people or when someone has to AFK you will be screwed. Again, I do feel 13 is way too much. Just my 2c.

Hope any of my rambling helps. Best of luck!

Edit: In case you are curious of our setup we run with...

-Prot Pally
-Prot/DPS Warrior
-Holy Pally
-Disc/Holy Priest
-Warlock
-Elemental/Resto Shaman
-Boomkin/Resto/Feral/Guardian Druid
-Hunter
-Rogue
-Mage
-Mistweaver/Windwalker/Brewmaster Monk

[Kanath]

I have a lot to say about this topic, but I don't have time to go in-depth right now, so I'll just say this as a generic rule:

Be crystal clear with what you expect from your raiders, and what they can expect from you in return, and stick to these expectations as close as you can. The majority of guilds fall apart due to a lack of clear expectations or other communication of some sort. Communication is key.

Oh, and cut 1 player to start off with. 13 is too many, 12 is good, 11 is better, but also requires more strict attendance.

[clevin]

First, you need a bench. Need one. Good summary of the reasoning above, so I won't belabor that.

The issue is how to fairly rotate people. No system is perfect, but you need to think about two things -

First, are all of the people in a group (ranged DPS, melee DPS, etc) similar in performance? Not just numbers, but raid awareness, deaths, etc. If not, then sit the people who aren't performing as well on progression fights but bring them on farm fights IF the people who got those bosses on farm no longer need loot from them. Obviously, sub them in when the regulars can't make it.


Second, if everyone is very similar in performance then you can either cycle through people in an organized fashion like this:

Week 1: A, B, C
Week 2: B, C, D
Week 3: C, D, E

and so on.

OR,

you can have one of the people with an offspec take over a different role (a shadow priest could go heals and you sit a healer, a warrior dps can tank and you sit a tank). Again, you can do this on farm bosses only or all of them.

There's no perfect answer. Ideally, you want 10 people who have 100% attendance and who all love the role they're doing and can easily swap to an alternate role for a fight if needed. Reality's not like that and in any given week you might need someone from the bench. The big thing is to not make sitting a bad thing "Oh, we sit the scrubs...." and to make it fair.

It's easy to say "Guild Progression > Individual Progression" but face it - what progression minded raider really cares if their guild's kicking ass if they never get to raid? Sure, they need to understand that they might have to sit sometimes but if they're sitting for months or if who sits isn't done fairly, people will leave. On the other hand, people DO need to be OK with sitting as long as it's fair. The tension here is between rotating people and not having them sit out so long that they're raiding every 3rd week.

PS: I'll echo some of the later comments that 13 is probably too many. IF you carry that many because you routinely have 1-2 no shows, that's an issue to address.

PPS: One huge issue for me is RLs who post the raid comp right before the raid. If it's someone's turn to sit, post that 1-2 days prior to the raid. Don't have them login and then get sat. Everyone should be able to see if they are needed for the raid or not. Conversely, people need to let the RL know if they can't make a raid a day or 2 in advance (actual emergencies aside). Also, give benched people partial DKP so they have an incentive to login even if they are being sat.

[Banzhe]

The first issue I can see, is you needing to make it crystal clear to people you take in, that it's guild progression > personal gain, if they can't agree to that you will always have the issue of someone getting annoyed about possibly sitting out.

Second "issue" (Don't know if it is really an issue since your not mentioning anything about it) is the BiS list for each player, that is usually quite good to use when sorting who to bring, obviously not everyone will get the item they want each time and as such there's a risk that someone will get upset about being sat on a boss where there's possible upgrades.., again, it really boils down to the first point about making sure players understand that progression > personal gain.

The two are linked either way, but not everyone will understand, that with progression comes upgrades / BiS items.., and as others have mentioned, don't use off-spec players if a fight only requires 1 tank, or 2 healers, just use the tank with either best survival / dps possibility pending on the fight, same for healers.., if a fight requires raid cooldown's bring the 2 that offers the most chance of success.

Best of luck with it all

[oberetta]

Your comment that certain people sit most frequently caught my eye. I gather you are struggling with changing your guild's focus to be that of 10m progression but you have some friends, maybe long-time guildmates, that want to participate but are not of the caliber of the other 10 or 11. This is where Kanath's advice comes in: have you set clear expectations about the type of progression you want and the level of personal performance you expect of each person? For example, do you expect every dps to always be at least at the 75% rank limit in WoL (arbitrary number) but some of your raiders struggle to ever come close, let alone persistently exceed that? Set the clear expectations and it will help the roster sort itself out in an objective, impersonal way that is much easier for everyone to understand and for feelings to not be hurt (or not hurt too much). It is easy for a longtime guildmate to say "I want to progress hard core too" and until you give them a clear yard stick, it will be hard for them to grasp why they arent part of the core team.

The other comments are also correct that you are very melee heavy. Before you implement any yardsticks, you should honestly assess your roster and determine if the yardstick will backfire...if your ranged are the problem, you dont want to kick them and have a 100% melee raid. Define your expectations clearly and start recruiting if needing to fill in the bare spots that the expectations create.

Yes, it is a little work but creating a progression-oriented guild full of high performing players does not happen overnight. Start the process and continue to evolve the roster as you can.

[otaXephon]

My 10M guild has a 12-14 person roster at any given time. We have a healer who sits for a majority of the 2 heal fights (and rotates back in if another healer doesn't need anything) and 2 DPS who float. If we're doing a single tank fight, we have a tank who will sit for an additional DPS. We generally do not have problems swapping people in and out and it's usually the DPS who volunteer to step out. Everybody in our guild performs at about the same level, however, so the main reason we rotate people in and out isn't because they're not performing, but more because they don't need gear from a certain encounter.

[Gogan]

Lots of good comments. I'll echo the comments from Ayita and Derpette.

Capable hybrids are critical in 10-man guilds. If your hybrids aren't capable (due to gear, experience, etc) of seemlessly swapping specs, you're going to have trouble managing the roster rotation fairly.

Near 100% attendence from everyone is also critical. If you raid 2-3 nights a week and someone can't make 1-2 of those days, they need to be demoted to "backup" status.

11-man roster is definitely the sweet spot. 12 is doable. 13 is nearly unmanageable. We tried 13 in Cata and will never do it again.

With all that said, we maintain a Suicide Kings style sit list. Whoever is at the top of the list sits for the night and then their name goes to the bottom of the list. As long as you have capable offspec tanks/healers, this shouldn't present many problems. We make exceptions, of course, if 2 healers or 2 tanks are due to sit in the same night. We also don't sit our raid leader during progression fights.

As you noted, some raid compositions work much better than others for certain fights -- especially during progression. We do our best to make whatever comp we have that night work before swapping people out, though. Gotta give people a chance to learn the fight and come up with some creative solutions. After wiping for an hour with a sub-optimal comp, it becomes pretty clear to everyone who should sit and why, and those people will be much more understanding and accepting of the situation. In fact, it may spur them to improve themselves or research alternative strategies so they don't have to sit on that fight in the future.

FWIW, we're 6/6, 4/4, 4/4 normal modes and just starting heroics, raiding 2-3 nights/week for ~3 hours each night. Our roster composition is:

- druid tank
- prot warrior (with dps offspec)

- mistweaver monk
- holy paladin

- windwalker monk (with tank offspec)
- shadow priest (with healing offspec)
- ele shaman (with healing offspec)
- dk
- mage
- 2 warlocks
- hunter

[Halaberiel]

We have 14 raiders, we sit out whoever is lowest DPS/healing or takes the most damage for tanks (we have 3). If people don't like it they can leave, because this is the only way you can run a progression orientated guild. If people want to get spots then they just need to perform to a better standard, it's as simple as that. No major problems so far, we've always had a relatively large roster. Everyone gets spots on farm, depending on the loot they may need.

[Isotope]

@Gogan: Your type of set up may work for a casual styled guild but a guild that wishes to progress it won't work. Every group has a top dps and a top healer, and a bad dps and a bad healer (using bad in relative terms to the rest of the groups dps/hps output.) If you're trying to push for heroics you can't say sorry #1dps your turn to set for #7dps. That does your raid as a whole a HUGE disservice.

Again it works for your guild as you're just now starting heroics but you will begin to see that on some fights (Gara'jal and Elegon) having your number 1 sitting the bench for number 6 will throw away a whole raid night.


Halaberiel has stated it the best. If you want a guaranteed raid slot, preform better then the rest. If you're pushing you want the 10 best in the raid, not 8 best with 2 sitting out.