Breakfast Topic: What constitutes raid readiness at this point in Mists?
If you're neatly tucked into an experienced raiding team, you're sure to have raid preparation down pat. Your guild almost certainly provides concrete gearing requirements for each of its raid teams and each step of raid progression, probably down to details such as item enhancements, specs and consumables. Even if you haven't updated those benchmarks for Mists, you're most likely breaking the new ground as a team with some idea of relative strength and value.
But if your raiding team is a newborn Mists-era group, these finer details might still be nebulous. And in an era when motivated pandaren and monks are already grinning happily at the doorstep of your raiding group, raid leaders have to recognize who's capable of picking up the slack of specific gearing or experience shortfalls and who's not.
Has your raiding team set Mists-era gear level thresholds? What about performance standards -- are raiders required to demonstrate DPS capabilities or document healing throughput or mana pools, or is Mists raiding still a brave new uncapped world? Would your team turn away someone with even a single piece of ungemmed or unenchanted gear, or is everyone still patching together a stable armor set? Is there an eagle-eyed officer distributing raid-level consumables and checking to be sure they're getting used?
At this point in the expansion, much of the prep work for raiding is happening individually outside of the raid. Are there dailies and activities your raid team expects raiders to be actively pushing forward in order to optimize their setups? If so, does that work seem more or less onerous than similar expectations in the past? Do you and your teammates feel as eager to dig in?
