stop-the-bleeding
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Officers' Quarters: 7 ways to stop the bleeding
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. The good news for raid leaders these days is that so much help is coming from patch 5.4, if what's on the PTR is any indication. Flexible raiding could be a lifesaver for guilds who stalled out in today's challenging normal modes. Virtual realms could inject new blood into every realm. The Throne of Thunder raid should see an across-the-board nerf from the patch, too. With all of these changes on the horizon, what raid leaders need to focus on right now is holding on and keeping their teams intact. The bad news is that no one knows when the patch will drop. We are likely at least six weeks away from 5.4, and probably longer than that since Blizzard has new systems to test and a new raid to tune. This week's email comes from a raid leader who isn't sure he can make it: Hello Scott, I am the current Raid Leader of a 10 man raid guild that considers ourselves to be progression-focused, semi-hardcore, or whatever you want to call it. We raid 3 nights a week for 3 hours a night, keep logs of all our runs, and really push to be successful. In the past, this worked out fairly well for us, as our guild maintained a top-10 place on our server according to wowprogress.com all through tiers 12, 13, and 14. However, since the release of MoP the members that made up the original progression team have been slowly bleeding away for one reason or another. At first, these losses could be absorbed by the extra standbys on our roster as well as a few people that swapped from our more casual 2-night-per-week team. Eventually we had to start recruiting out of guild in order to fill our raids each week. Generally speaking, for each player we lost the replacement we found was of a lesser caliber, whether it be in skill, gear level, or dedication. With the release of ToT and the difficulty of certain bosses (Horridon for example), our progression has begun to seriously stumble.
