Originally Posted by
Kissme
Do one quick clear of it on normal so that you have a personal guild time for how long it takes to farm. This time will decrease with gear a repetition, so use this as your max time going forward.
Factor this into your raid times and then do your farm run after progression time. This allows you to work on new raids or heroic modes of old raids while still increasing your gear threshhold each week. If you ever hit a point where no one needs gear from the place or where the gear gain is inferior then you can easily drop it from your schedule, but until that point gearing up will also have a complimentary effect on your progression and on morale if progression stalls.
The reason to do the farm run after the progression is that people will usually stick around a little longer if necessary to clear farm content, but will often leave if progression stalls, so doing farming at the end of the week means you'll always have people staying to clear, while leading with farming sometimes (especially in casual groups) will cause people to occasionally "have something come up" and bail when time comes for progression. The other advantage is that if you're short people early in the week for progression, you can still usually clear farm content and then progress if everyone shows up the next day for "farm night", whereas if you lead with farm content you might not have people show up after.
Yes, this is cynical, but that's my experience from more casual raids, especially as WoW aged.