Getting benched in raids - why it's a problem for half-casual guilds

[Hulkovius]

Havent seen any classstack this content at all and in the Hardcore guilds the setup is always different. Everything is possible if u know how to do it right and for casual guilds who has ages to defeat something. This cant be an issue.

[Chucksauce]

I haven't seen any casual guilds benching based on class balance issues. If you get benched in a casual guild, it's because you're not as reliable as the regular team members to show up on time, or you're doing something that is causing the raid team to not like playing with you(low dps/hps/bad tanking/not dispelling/standing in stupid/etc.) and your raid lead doesn't have the heart to straight out tell you that you suck. Maybe because he knows you'll flip shit, or maybe he doesn't know you and doesn't want to rock the boat.

[Ninotchka]

The definition of a casual guild is that you don't bench for performance, you maintain a bench so that you don't have to pug substitutes.

[Inthislzon]

The definition of a casual guild is that you don't bench for performance, you maintain a bench so that you don't have to pug substitutes.

You are mixing "casual" and "bad" here.

I raid 2 hours 5 days. We also don't raid PTR, don't spend millions of gold on getting full crafted the very first day, some weeks we (or at least I) don't cap valors, other weeks we simply don't feel like farming coins, even tho price reduction and pet battles helped there. That IS being casual.

We also clear 10/13 HC raiding like that. And we DO bench people based on performance. Not on "OMG you are doing 0.000000001% less than the max DPS possible with your gear"-performance but on "it's the third time you wipe us on the exact same mechanic" or "You are ~30k below the second lowest DPS for no reason"-performance.

If you feel that my guild is "hardcore" then you have never known what a real hardcore guild is.

[Cavalli]

I think one of the bigger problems Casual Guilds face with benching is actually this scenario, which I think I have seen go down in every Guild I've ever been in. Keep in mind, I haven't raided since Wrath, but I sure get to hear it.

Facesmasher is a super awesome tank that everyone loves and, if you actually knew him, would probably hang out with all the time.
Facesmasher's best friend Critslols is a high dps, super annoying jerk.

Everyone can already see where this is going. 'Well, we can't hurt Facesmasher's feelings and if we bench/excommunicate Critslols he'll leave and WE WILL NEVER EVER FIND ANOTHER TANK BECAUSE HE WAS THE ONLY ONE'

It's more likely for the whole raid to implode and go find other guilds than anyone actually SAY 'Hey Facesmasher, your buddy needs to quit being a jackwad'


No offense to anyone who actually has these toon names, this is just an example, and the player a and player b stuff is...weird to write/read.

[Kutartwo]

I'm the GM of a casual guild. We've started raiding a couple months ago (11 weeks i believe) and we raid 2 times a week for a couple of hours (most times not all people can log on, as we are mainly in our 30's and have families to attend to), and we are 9/12. It is in absolutely no way the best, and I know we can get further, but time constraints and inconsistant raiding comps make for rockier raiding.
But I wanted to point out that I never sit anyone out, except if they just are not up to par (and you all know what I mean, there are just some people out there who are not meant to raid). If you are average or better you get to raid, no matter the class. There are times when people might suggest we bring in another class to make a fight easier. But whats the point? I like the fact that it makes it a little bit harder, it makes my raiders work that much harder to overcome the diversity and to work through hardships and not take the easy road. And I guarantee you it makes them better as players.
If I was cutting edge heroic, yes, I could see sitting people out. But even for semi hardcore, you shouldn't be sitting anyone. It's just a smoke-screen for raid leaders and members to not work as hard to achieve what they need to. So they can go flaunt their achieves and pretend to be the hardcore's that they aren't. It's really kind of pitiful.
I take pride when I get a progress kill on my terms, not cheezing any mechanic. To sit there and learn and change, to strategize new methods to suit our needs, is so very rewarding after that kill. We know we learned from the fights and we learn to better work with each other. And a lot of people that I pug (if a raider can't join) respect that. It's really too bad that most of the people in this game lost that sense of pride, and need to carbon copy cutting edge guilds to down bosses in a way that screams out impatience.
And to those who may think I have an amazing situation with a diverse crowd, here is my 10 core group.
Tanks: Guardian Druid / Prot Pally
Healers: Holy Priest / Resto Shaman / Holy Pally
DPS: Fire Mage / Fury Warrior / MM hunter / Frost Dk / Surv hunter

Not the best comp, but easily doable.

[marklar]

The biggest difference between players is usually not if they can play their rotation. Sure, one plays it a bit better, another one plays it a bit worse. But that does, for most classes, not make a big difference. I'd say the margin within a guild is about 5% (with equal gear).

i've seen much, much bigger margins than 5%.

but the real problem (imo) is class mechanics that can make certain parts of encounters irrelevant. warlock portals, paladin bubbles, etc. until these are removed from the game, or made unusable for major encounter mechanics, we can never truly "bring the player".

[lordsphinx]

2) Differences in dps coming from the class are within a guild usually bigger than differences coming from the player.
This is one argument I hear over and over again: You're in a bad guild, you have to get better than the others there. Obviously you won't get benched because you're better than everyone else.
This is, in my opinion, completely wrong. The biggest difference between players is usually not if they can play their rotation. Sure, one plays it a bit better, another one plays it a bit worse. But that does, for most classes, not make a big difference.

I think this is completely back asswards. For MOST players, it really is their play that holds them back. You can see this when you look at logs from the highest tier guilds. A lot of people will say things like "Shadow Priests are terrible single target, we need a buff", but when you look at it there are shadow priests who were pulling waaaaaaay higher numbers in waaaaaaay less gear at the beginning of the tier, so it's obviously not entirely the class. The much bigger difference comes from player ability.

You are more often going to see class stacking at the highest of levels. The first guilds to attempt H Spine, for example, simply did not have the burst capabilities to complete the encounter. This is because they were progressing on that fight way before they were technically ready. They were basically trying to defeat a boss that was tuned for people in much better gear. So, in order to overcome this imbalance they stacked mages for the insane amount fo burst and were able to kill the boss. My group, on the other hand, got to H Spine 4 weeks later with 4 weeks of H gear under our belt. We did not have to class stack, and killed it in 3 raid nights I think.

[shokter]

The real reason for benching players is that the normal raids are overtuned, which coupled with the fact that there is nowhere else to learn the skills needed to raid can mean frustration all round. Example - we had a guy this week, i'd seen him in a HC scenario, had good dps. Brought him to the raid, he did fine on jinrokh/horridon. Got to council and "captain sandtrap" is now how I think of him. His dps dropped like a stone because it was taking all his mental effort to avoid shit on the floor*. There is nowhere to find that out except in the raid itself.

Normal modes are not overtuned. It is not that hard to not stand in sandtraps. Even though they don;t do much damage in LFR people can still practice there if not standing in a huge pool of sand is that difficult for them in normal.

As for the OP...a 10 player guild needs a bench or a RL with ton of friends with alts always ready and wiling to fill in when a player can't show. Managing the rotation is tricky, but it must be done. My 10 guild has been struggling to stay at ~12 players this tier, and lately have lost so many we are down to 10. Being at 10 sucks.

I'm not sure what the OP is decrying...needing a bench, or class balance. PvE class balance is near as good or better than it has ever been. Benches are needed. How you treat the rotation is up to you or your guild, but these are really separate issues.

[unholyness]

Sounds pretty hardcore to me. I can't imagine what a pita that is, and how much time it adds to pulls, but I guess to each their own. Just pray for no lag, or else you're screwed.

My guild is pretty fair about rotations. We don't push content super hard, and we have a fairly light roster (~30 people for 25m guild), so we pretty much limit rotations to a)who needs loot from what boss and b)who keeps screwing up mechanics and/or has lowest dps, but that typically only applies if we're wiping repeatedly to a farm boss, or maybe after the first hour or two of pulls on a new boss.

My last guild, despite being more casual than my current guild, felt the need to emulate hardcore guilds on heroic spine, and attempted stacking burst classes (despite 25% nerf at the time). It was annoying to say the least, because thousands of guilds had killed it before us without having to class stack.

With those kind of nerfs the fights are pretty much trivial, 25% and still class stacking? Sounds like your dps need some help....

Benches have always been a good thing. Even if you are casual, there is always a good player or two mixed in that can only take so much wiping/carrying until they start to rethink casual raiding even with good friends. I speak from personal experience of helping a friend in H DS which we did clear H DW with 25% nerf but it was really hard. In my experience casual raiding is much harder than hardcore raiding, no waiting on people,no watching people stand in shit or do half the numbers they should be for their gear, a casual raider has it extremely hard. Attempting to be casual yet do some good progression is far harder than pushing progression in a hardcore raid.

[MrExcelion]

If you're a guild that benches and you think it's a big problem, be upfront about it with any new raiders you bring in or put on your guild application and ask if theyre ok with it

Generally recruiting for the bench is a waste of time though, either someones core or they're not, few guilds employ a true bench since 40 mans died

[kamuimac]

The main problem which is with benching is that most often in even casual guilds there is some core inside a core raiding team - there is few people who never are rotated and are there for all kills - and there are few dps who got rotate from time to time -and after some time people start to ask themselves hay why in last 2 months i was constantly rotated when players A and B never get rotated and are there for all kills and whole progress.

[Deleted]

we rotate between bosses, how many of each role we need? which classes provide buffs we need or mechanics? who has really good drops from this boss (weapons/trinkets)? who is willing too stand out (for farm bosses: cause already got what we need)? who is willing too skip a progress fight (cause they were already in for many others , while others sat out)?

atm we got 13 raiders for a 10man guild, and while its sometimes much. we often have atleast 1 raider who cant attend often. and regularly people cant attend due too some IRL thing that goes first.
so we often find us with 10-12 people who can attend. the buffer is nice so you arent wasting a raid night cause there just not enough people avaible.

[Deleted]

I think this is completely back asswards. For MOST players, it really is their play that holds them back. You can see this when you look at logs from the highest tier guilds. A lot of people will say things like "Shadow Priests are terrible single target, we need a buff", but when you look at it there are shadow priests who were pulling waaaaaaay higher numbers in waaaaaaay less gear at the beginning of the tier, so it's obviously not entirely the class. The much bigger difference comes from player ability.

I tried to explain that in th OP. Some reasons are wrong with this argument, in my opinion, and I won't repeat them again.

You are more often going to see class stacking at the highest of levels. The first guilds to attempt H Spine, for example, simply did not have the burst capabilities to complete the encounter. This is because they were progressing on that fight way before they were technically ready. They were basically trying to defeat a boss that was tuned for people in much better gear. So, in order to overcome this imbalance they stacked mages for the insane amount fo burst and were able to kill the boss. My group, on the other hand, got to H Spine 4 weeks later with 4 weeks of H gear under our belt. We did not have to class stack, and killed it in 3 raid nights I think.

That is true. Additionally, Spine was overtuned in the beginning - that's why they very soon nerfed the health of the tentacles. Before the nerf you needed class stacking. I don't think it would have been possible e.g. with 5 hunters and 0 mages.

I'm not sure what the OP is decrying...needing a bench, or class balance. PvE class balance is near as good or better than it has ever been. Benches are needed. How you treat the rotation is up to you or your guild, but these are really separate issues.

I agree that benches are needed. As said previously, a 10 man raid with only 10 players (or 25 with 25) is not really possible, except you want to search the tradchannel to fill up your raids. Class balance is quite good compared to where it was. But it could be better, and the changes during this whole addon (except some, e.g. for enhancers - they needed a dps-buff and they got one) don't indicate any will to change that. All what was done till now (and I'm not speaking about the actual PTR, since the big numbers pass didn't hit there yet) were small corrections of a too widespread dps because of different scaling.

About utility: At least there is a blue post now. But somehow they pack e.g. an extreme situational ability, like frost trap, on the same level of usefulness as e.g. a raid-healing-cd like those of the shamans. And that's just wrong.

[Deleted]

I honestly don't see how class balance is any different for casual guilds than for heroic guilds or anything in between. We all know, that "Bring the player, not the class" isn't true and that's why you won't find any sane guild who runs with 4 melee and 1-2 ranged dps or 3 Resto Shamans etc. Cause we all know, that to some extend, we do need to bring the class and not the player.

But lets say that a casual guild (Guild C) is progressing on Normal Horridon and that a heroic guild (Guild H) is progressing on Heroic Horridon.

Guild Casual: Can't bring 4 melee, 3 Resto Shamans and 2 DK's, cause they lack dispels, they take too much damage from the shit on the ground, there's too much movement for them and they lack certain buffs like Spellhaste, just as they don't have big external CD's for the tanks.

Guild Heroic: Apply the same things as listed above, cause they sure as hell can't just go with whatever they want either.

About benching: Only the really good guilds can recruit for their bench. For the rest of us, that's not happening. Even though my guild is capable of farming 13/13 Heroic in one night, we still can't recruit players just for the bench - and why would we? If we recruit a player just for the bench, that person will be way behind gear wise, when we actually need him/her.

Atm we're only 11 players in the roster, our aim is to be 13. We've been 12 the previous Tiers but we want a third tank as well now. That means, that we rotate every single raid. We have players make BiS lists, we check the loot tables, we look at the encounter and then we decide who to bring - also making sure we got all buffs covered. If players can't live with a guild using a rotation principle but want a core spot in every single raid, they're gonna wake up to the real world. Cause in a guild with only 10/25 players, you're fucked every time someone can't attend.

Rotating is part of being in a guild imo - regardless of the reason. You contribute to your guild by not being a cry baby about it, assuming the rotation system is actually somewhat fair.

Sure, Iron Qon becomes much easier with 2x Demonic Gateways but you don't need 2x Demonic Gateways to kill it. My point is, that not many fights require X class (Heroic Lei Shen prolly with Gateway and mass grip) but other than that, it's about adapting. We've been raiding the majority of this Tier without a single Paladin in the roster. On Heroic Megæra we've had nights with no cc for the adds other than Ursol's Vortex, that's not cool I tell you. But we chose to bring our Spriest who did more damage than our Mage at that point, even though the Mage could RoF the adds.

Again, benching due to setup shouldn't really be an issue, unless your roster is retarded in terms of the classes you have. Which also makes loot distribution easier btw.

[Deleted]

In 10 man guild benching is a real problem... Our 10 man which is slowly progressing ToT HC has faced the situation many times. We don't have very large roster, so we can't swap classes in and out as we please. Since it's very difficult to maintain hc-viable offspec, many times we're forced to use same players on farm bosses they can't get any gear from, while other players are benched because they don't have viable offspecs to take on another role for the fight.

[Deleted]

In 10 man guild benching is a real problem... Our 10 man which is slowly progressing ToT HC has faced the situation many times. We don't have very large roster, so we can't swap classes in and out as we please. Since it's very difficult to maintain hc-viable offspec, many times we're forced to use same players on farm bosses they can't get any gear from, while other players are benched because they don't have viable offspecs to take on another role for the fight.

What sort of setup do you have, since it's that hard even on Normal farm bosses to rotate players?

[Deleted]

What sort of setup do you have, since it's that hard even on Normal farm bosses to rotate players?

Ah, meant mostly HC bosses on farm, nobody really needs anything from normal expect and odd minor upgrade from here and there. Basically we have healers and ranged dps fully decked out and would like to rotate tanks and melee around more. Too many plate users.

[braeldiil]

Normal modes are not overtuned. It is not that hard to not stand in sandtraps. Even though they don;t do much damage in LFR people can still practice there if not standing in a huge pool of sand is that difficult for them in normal.

As for the OP...a 10 player guild needs a bench or a RL with ton of friends with alts always ready and wiling to fill in when a player can't show. Managing the rotation is tricky, but it must be done. My 10 guild has been struggling to stay at ~12 players this tier, and lately have lost so many we are down to 10. Being at 10 sucks.

I'm not sure what the OP is decrying...needing a bench, or class balance. PvE class balance is near as good or better than it has ever been. Benches are needed. How you treat the rotation is up to you or your guild, but these are really separate issues.

Eh, not everyone needs a bench. My guild has 10 "core" raiders, and that's all we use for progression. The members of the core may change, but we never have more than the 10. It works great for us, too. Since I joined, the longest run we had was from early firelands (3 bosses down) to clearing dragon soul. We did all of that with the same 10 raiders for every progression kill. We had the occasional fill-in, but those were friends who weren't there to contribute, just to collect gear. Effectively, we were 8 or 9-manning the fights. But probably 90% of the time we had the exact same 10-man crew for every raid.

We've had a bit more turnover this expansion, but nothing that crippled raiding. Four raiders have been a part of the team since early Tier 11 (when I joined). Three were returning raiders who joined the team at the start of MoP. The remaining three spots have moved around a bit - some Cata raiders who left, replaced with friends (both returning and new) and some recruits. We've lost more raiding time to vacations and holidays than we have to raiders who quit.

It helps a lot that we have a fun but professional approach. Most of our departing raiders give us what is effectively "two weeks notice", where they let the officers know they're leaving soon and let us line up a replacement before they vanish. That way, no one burns any bridges - the raid team doesn't miss a beat, and if the player decides to raid in the future they can probably find a spot - see 3 of our core above. Heck, we've turned over the guildleader, all the officers, and the raid leader twice since I've been in my guild without ever missing a beat.

[Deleted]

Ah, meant mostly HC bosses on farm, nobody really needs anything from normal expect and odd minor upgrade from here and there. Basically we have healers and ranged dps fully decked out and would like to rotate tanks and melee around more. Too many plate users.

Yeah okay, makes sense then. But still though, that's not about balance issue, that's just the same old story of ranged>melee^^