Somehow I ended up in charge
I have been promoted to Druid Class Lead for my guild, and at least half-time raid leader. It’s strange to be responsible for so many decisions: who goes to the raid, what bosses do we skip because we have a group that cannot do it, who gets what if we have drops.
Aside from those little concerns of the raid, what should I be doing now that I have power and authority? While it would be satisfying to gkick a few people, I don’t think I have the ability to do that, and our ethos as a guild doesn’t support that sort of behavior. We’re casual.
I am definitely going to be trying to forge our diverse troops into a raiding force. Unfortunately, we don’t have people consistently showing up for our Karazhan raids. Too many of our dpsers respecced to tanks (which we didn’t need) or don’t do enough dps. Some of that problem is with gear: if they showed up for Kara that would be ameliorated. Some of it is with Skill, and that’s a harder issue.
The role of the Class Lead, as I understand it, is to be the expert and guide in preparing guild members for raiding. This is critical moving into 25 man content, or ZA. I don’t care how good your gear is, if you are an enhancement shaman stacking stamina gear and casting lightning bolts while using 1.8 speed weapons, you’re dps will be too low to be useful. If you’re a retadin and spend the whole night on vent waxing rhapsodic about how great ret dps is, please be above the tank. As things stand, ret dps still needs to dps, or go home.
Skill can trump gear, to a certain extent. A player who knows how to use their class to the fullest can overcome deficiencies in their gear. I’ve seen blue-geared shaman out-dpsing epic mages. I’ve seen green/blue paladins out-heal epic paladins. We don’t need to train theses people, just help them get the tools, the gear, they need to excel.
The ones who, no matter how many epics we hand over, cannot keep up, they need to learn, quickly, or we need to look at our priorities in raiding. We cannot progress without people performing their best. The people who can do that need to be at the core (hopefully they are the entirety). How to handle the rest is where the raid ethos and the casual guild ethos aren’t meshing right now. If we get into Gruul’s, and our DPS needs to do an average of 500+ dps, someone only doing 300 is a hindrance if there is someone else for that slot.
But how to get this agenda supported by the remainder of the leadership? What’s the hook? We have five or so people gearing up all their alts as the core of our two Karazhan raids. Most weeks we can’t get ten people from our guild into a raid, let alone run two entirely separate raids so we have, not just the character base, but the player base to move forward.
Matticus had this tweet:
95% of guild problems can be solved with a gkick. The remaining 5% can be solved with recruiting.
I think this problem is more the other ratio, but we do need to clean up our raiding ranks and make a more clear direction for people to earn spots in a raid. And we need enough people online to fill the spots with people who can do the job.
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