The Healers' Guild

[Brista]

In pursuit of my perfect guild I'd like to brainstorm another idea

The premise of this guild is that healing is a chore

From this simple premise comes a guild concept

If healing is a chore and we want to be fair then everyone has to heal. That means that every member of the guild must be a paladin, druid, priest or shaman. (there is actually another possibility but we'll not address the dps main/healing alt idea yet)

OK, so first off is this viable to raid with?

Tanks - Druids, Paladins - that seems fine
DPS - all 4 classes with dps specs and gear and mutual buffs, should be fine
Healers - fine

So I think the answer is yes, it is viable

A 25 man raid would look something like this:

Group 1 (Tank group) 2 bears, 2 prot pallies, priest (for Prayer of healing)
Group 2 (melee dps) 2 shammies, 2 cats, retri pally
Group 3 (ranged dps) 2 shadow priest, moonkin, 2 elemental shammies
Group 4 (healing) 2 holy priests, resto shammy, holy pally, tree druid
Group 5 (flexible role) whoever's left with some tanking healing and dps gear, ready to be given different tasks as we need more tanks, more healers or more dps

For loot distribution I'd like to emphasise individual choice. I can see the merits of a Loot Council in a guild where you want to strictly optimise, to min/max everything. However I'm on a server where there are no truly hardcore raid guilds. I've been in two of the top horde guilds and I know the others reasonably well and there are no guilds who don't tolerate cold blood/prep rogues, fury main tanks, people who never herb or contribute, people who pvp whenever they're not in a raid. Which is fine, it's a perfectly acceptable way to play but my point is if you're not min/maxing in most respects why remove individual choice over loot in the name of min/maxing?

So what i'm thinking is this: dkp system with the following priorities:
plate - paladins
mail - shammies
leather - druids
cloth - priests

Further, priority may only be claimed if you have enough dkp to pay for it. So a Priest with -50 dkp to her name could lose out on a cloth +80 spell dps chest to an elemental shammy with more dkp if only those 2 wanted it

The point here is to very strongly protect the dkp economy by avoiding arbitrary priorities. If you have 200 dkp more than the next guy you deserve the item you have chosen to bid for more than he does. We have enough respect for our players to believe that if a Priest bids on an item for its high armour or a Pally wants something for its spell damage they have a very clear plan as to how they will use the item to extend their characters' capabilities. In those examples the Priest may want to survive being focussed in arena pvp, the pally might want to improve her ability as the guild's primary aoe-er.

DKP is deliberately slightly inflationary. I'd like runs to pay out approximately 20% more than the amount spent. I think moderate inflation keeps people spending better than zero sum, it's a real barrier for some people to go negative

Everyone in the guild is expected to gear up for multiple roles. The notion that someone doesn't need an item because they are a healer is ridiculous in our guild - all of us are much much more than just a healbot. Even if you're concentrating your dkp expenditure on tank gear you will still be expected to get the best possible healing and dps gear from non-lockout instances

We want everyone to rotate. Healing is mandatory and there is a healing rota. The longer you go without healing duty the more rota points you gain, when we assign healers we pick those with most rota points. Simple enough. We may also use rota points as a disciplinary measure ie stop talking back to the raid leader or you'll be on healing duty next month. Healing duty or any other raid role lasts a month and is then reviewed. If we are short of willing tanks then we'll have to implement a tank rota too. For that matter if we have more people wanting to tank than we need we would also implement a rota

So for example at the beginning of a month we look at people's preferences. We want 10 people on healing duty out of our 40 raiding members. 3 people have asked to be on healing duty so that is our first 3 healers. 3 have 3 rota points so they also get the duty. 10 people have 2 rota points each so we random 4 of them. We have our 10 healers. All 10 get told to respec before they next raid and their rota points are reset to zero. All other raiders gain a rota point

It should be noted that respeccing will be a much more trivial thing. Since the costs to respec aren't going to change but the amount of money in the economy is going to soar effectively it's going to become extremely cheap to respec. So what if it costs you 60g to respec if you grind 200g per hour?

AOE could be a problem but I think we're probably ok. Consecrate is our primary AOE with the silver lining that our aoe-ers are less fragile than those in most other guilds. Backing that up we have Hurricane, fire totems and holy nova. From raid AoE situations that I have seen personally i haven't yet seen a situation where 6 pallies spamming Consecrate with every other raider healing them would simply be too weak in terms of firepower. Remember that our aoe-ers gain mana from being healed (new Spiritual Attunement) allowing them to aoe longer. Retribution aura, Sanctity aura and Thorns too. Am I being too optimistic here?

OK so what are the strengths and weaknesses of the guild

Strengths
- healers can fully explore all facets of their character, gaining access to loot and raid roles they would never get in a normal raid guild
- every guild member is reasonably capable of killing in pvp and solo pve grinding most of the time. You might dip during your Resto month but otherwise you'll be pretty capable
- pre mades from this guild are going to be really scary. A team even slightly poorer than us won't get a single kill
- joint runs with other guilds are easy to arrange
- if we have enough people for a raid we will never have to cancel because we're short of a particular class. Half the guild can tank, all can dps, all can heal
- we have extraordinary versatility. All sorts of people can pitch in with emergency heals and we have more innervates and combat resses than a standard guild
- we recover from wipes very fast. 75% of the guild can do out of combat ressing and each buffing class has twice as many members compared to a standard guild
- we should be able to manage very high member retention. Our members' only raiding options if they leave are go elsewhere and be a healbot in return for progress or convince some standard raid guild to let you have a specialised tank/dps niche role. If, as I believe, the server is going to be very short of level 70 healers, exacerbated by our creating this guild and "nicking" a load of healers, there will be very few guilds with good progress willing to take on feral druids and shadow priests. Hopefully people will stay for positive reasons of course but if they do consider their options it doesn't hurt that it will be hard to fulfil all the aspects of their character elsewhere

Weaknesses
- everyone bids (rolls) on "your" loot
- we aren't mainstream so a lot of people (including some raiding healers) won't even consider us. It may take time to get to the stage where we can field 25 level 70 players to raid with
- we are slightly sub-optimal for raiding. We have approx 95% of the tanking, 85% of the dps and 100% of the healing of an equivalent guild built from the pick of all 9 classes. (Arguably).
- we lack some useful class skills. Disarm trap, Banish, Arcane Brilliance, Healthstones, Misdirection etc etc

There are two issues I'm particularly unsure about

- 1) should we power-gear a main tank? It kind of goes against the ethos of the guild which is to excel in fairness. My experience with a guild that went from Venoxis to Broodlord then imploded was that too much progress too soon hurts a guild as it becomes unacceptable to stall. We also, in that guild, suffered very high main tank attrition. I'm thinking that having a handful of us spending all our dkp on tank gear should be enough for reasonable progress

I'm also thinking if we power ahead to content we can only beat if our Main Tank turns up then whenever he's not available we're screwed. If he leaves the guild we're screwed. If we have several tanks gearing up simultaneously with several more only a little behind then we can always do what we had planned. The guild might be happier for not achieving too much too fast. What you never had you never miss

2) how do we handle crafters? Let me first tell you why I don't find the usual system of nominating one person as main crafter in each speciality satisfactory. First we can lose them. Second I've seen things grow very heated over the employment of their skills. One guild wanted to charge another guild for the services of our expensively geared up Exalted Thorium Brotherhood smith. However our smith wanted a fat payday from the deal. Instead of a compromise this became a flamefest

So let's say that in TBC there is a path similar to grinding up a smith with stacks and stacks of cores from MC. Should we charge him dkp for grinding him to Exalted and afterwards consider his skills as his property, not a guild asset per se? I think the guild should still expect combines for guildies to be without charge but the crafter is at liberty to make a fortune off the open market.

I do think that things like Enchant - Spell Power should require expenditure of dkp. I've generally seen those just given out to some long-standing member and they're an absolute goldmine

[fractaled]

I can't tell if you are serious or not. I'd be shocked if a 25-man could be tolerably done with 4 out of 9 classes.

With paladin, druid, priest, and shaman, you're missing:
warriors - battle shout, commanding shout, sunder, mortal strike, spell reflect
rogues - stuns, dps, and a few debuffs similar to warriors
hunters - pulls, nature aura, aspect of the pack
warlocks - banish, imp buff, health stones, soul stones
mages - aoe, poly, int, nova, spellsteal, fire damage

So I think the answer is yes, it is viable

I doubt it. Take those 4 classes and try to fill out a 40-man BWL:

The kiting strat would be out on Razorgore, so that leaves you the DPS strat... skeptical. Have fun even GETTING to Broodlord (no mages, locks).

[Bolty]

Can't be done. Blizzard has (intelligently) designed many raid encounters to require certain classes or they're practically impossible. You could brute force Onyxia, you could probably take Molten Core, but BWL and beyond? Forget it.

Note: some video of 20 decked-out-in-T3 Priests/Druids/Paladins would not prove the point - they needed the Warriors, Rogues, Warlocks, Hunters, and Mages to get them that gear to begin with...

-Bolty

[Brista]

I can't tell if you are serious or not. I'd be shocked if a 25-man could be tolerably done with 4 out of 9 classes.

yes I'm serious

And yes it has significant game design implications if it works. However that's Blizzard's headache, not mine :P

warriors - battle shout, commanding shout, sunder, mortal strike, spell reflect
rogues - stuns, dps, and a few debuffs similar to warriors
hunters - pulls, nature aura, aspect of the pack
warlocks - banish, imp buff, health stones, soul stones
mages - aoe, poly, int, nova, spellsteal, fire damage

Warriors Battle shout doesn't compare with the amount of extra oomph a shaman gives a physical dps group, commanding shout probably isn't critical if we have lots of healers. Sunder is used for threat and the other tank classes have perfectly effective threat generation. Mortal strike is marginal, I've yet to see a raid boss healing himself where MS was the best solution. Spell reflect doesn't seem a raid-critical ability. Do you foresee encounters that can only be beaten by having a warrior reflect a spell back on the raid boss? Seems unlikely

Rogues Stuns don't work on anything that's a problem in raids. Dps from rogues will be missed but what I'm seeing when raiding is that the worst dpser is doing about a third of what the best dpser is doing. Lazy people, unfocussed people, raiders who tap frost bolt while watching a movie are what hurts dps more on my server. Ymmv. Raid-effective rogue debuffs are very few, In terms of debuffs feral druids and enhancement shammies surely offer more. I'll swallow my words if Crippling Poison and Mind-Numbing Poison work on raid bosses in TBC

Hunters You don't need Hunters to pull. Tanks can pull, or paladins can pull then bubble. You don't need hunters' nature aura, shamans have a totem that does the same thing. You don't really need aspect of the pack anywhere, doesn't kill you to run up the stairs 30% slower

Warlocks Banish will be missed. Imp buff is compensated for by Kings, Fortitude and lots of healers. In any event Imp buff is pretty unreliable as tanks often run out of range. Health stones are a loss but compensated for by our healing power. We have more wipe recovery with 50% of our guild being able to recover a wipe (paladins and shamans out of 4 classes) rather than the standard guilds 33% so soul stones won't be missed

Mages I explained AOE, editing it in after my original post. We lose Poly but thinking again about raiding the main place i've seen poly is Domo and that fight could certainly be done with offtank/healer pairs on 7 off the minions while everyone else not in the main tank group mobs the 8th. By no means easy, poly is certainly a loss. No Mage int buff but overall tons of healing capacity so that's not crucial. No frost nova but so what? i'll bet a pally aoe-er without frost nova has more survivability than a mage aoe-er with. No significant fire damage which a number of things are resistant to or immune but instead we have physical elemental and holy. Holy damage is the least resisted, we are fine for damage types

The kiting strat would be out on Razorgore, so that leaves you the DPS strat... skeptical. Have fun even GETTING to Broodlord (no mages, locks).

My understanding of this encounter was that the absolute textbook core kiting strategy uses shamans as principle kiters. My view of Razorgore is that kiting is a question of skill not class. Our best kiters were a Hunter and a Warrior spamming Demo. We can use Druids to duplicate the Warrior spamming Demo. I've kited this as a Feral Druid with moderate success but that was more about my making mistakes than the tools I had available

[Brista]

Can't be done. Blizzard has (intelligently) designed many raid encounters to require certain classes or they're practically impossible. You could brute force Onyxia, you could probably take Molten Core, but BWL and beyond? Forget it.

Note: some video of 20 decked-out-in-T3 Priests/Druids/Paladins would not prove the point - they needed the Warriors, Rogues, Warlocks, Hunters, and Mages to get them that gear to begin with...

-Bolty

Which encounters?

Sorry Bolty, I'm just not seeing this. Maybe deep AQ40/Naxx but that kind of encounter won't be where guilds are at at the start of level 70 raiding

The raiding game is designed to build you up to the point where you can beat it. Run MC and you get the gear to beat Raggy, and start BWL. Run Raggy and Onyxia and you get the gear to progress in BWL etc

If you take feral druids, protection pallies and give them lots of MC gear what would stop them beating Ragnaros or Razorgore? If you give them BWL gear what would prevent them from beating Nefarian?

(Bear in mind that a much higher proportion of off-spec gear will be dropping in TBC instances than did in MC)

In other words while a more rounded guild might be able to progress faster I don't see a healers guild being completely unable to progress. It might just have to spend longer farming gear. But that's fine, it's the journey that counts not the destination

Very hard to beat Domo without people who can sheep, I can see that. So we'll use Engineers to turn them into Chickens instead :w00t:

Or something

Give me an encounter that's "impossible" and I'll try to figure out how we could beat it :)

Edit: let me explain a bit better. Might is a super tank set. It's Warrior only. If it weren't Warrior only and you put a Pally in it then a Pally could tank raid bosses pretty much as well as a T1 Warrior, especially with the tanking boosts to the Pally class coming in TBC. That's the itemisation policy change we will see in the level 70 raid instances. Instead of only Warriors getting tank loot 3 classes will get tank loot if they choose it. So it won't be itemisation than stops Feral Druids from competing with Rogues or Shadow Priests dpsing like Warlocks. Now put our hypothetical T1 feral druid in MC next to a PVP blue set geared rogue, the type of dps we had when we beat Raggy and ask yourself if the raid must fail

[Trien]

Depending on encounter designs... and thinking about some existing encounters without the non-healing classes...

Warriors - Itemization aside, there's not a whole lot that couldn't be tanked effectively, though not necessarily as efficiently, by say a well-geared tank specced druid in the game as it stands right now. Who knows if Blizzard will put in certain encounters that take require certain warrior skills though.

Rogues - Poison effects were mentioned by someone. And certain encounters in the game right now do take advantage of rogue stuns, which could well continue into BC. Though you have the pally ranged stun for both sides now. Lack of Disarm Trap would make the Broodlord trip rather difficult. Also thinking of Razuvious, where we use evasion on the pull (or hunter deterrence, but usually a rogue)...

Hunters - Tranq shot. Blizzard seems to stick that one all over the place. Anub'rekan without Aspect of the Pack? Not sure how well that would work.

Warlocks - Banish was mentioned. Whether or not that'll make encounters impossible... depends again on encounter design. Curse of Tongues if that continues to be a factor. Long-duration fear perhaps as well to keep certain mobs out of commission. Lack of a summon won't break the game, but does create a lot of inconvenience if you have to replace someone and you have an hour or two of respawn clearing behind you, if a dungeon is so designed.

Mages - Frost nova is quite useful in a number of places, where you just have to have the mobs stuck in place. Lack of sheep you may be able to deal with, depending on encounter... eg. stunlock/fear the mind controlled player, or whatnot. You lose the frost and fire damage, which may be an issue if encounters are designed with those particular vulnerabilities in mind.

Some encounters will be doable, and I think some would not be, depending on the skillset that is required for each encounter, and whether there are alternate ways of doing it. I can't say I've looked at BC encounters in detail, but given Blizzard's past encounter design, I would not be surprised at there being requirements for all the various class skills in some form or another.

[Lissa]

Which encounters?

Sorry Bolty, I'm just not seeing this. Maybe deep AQ40/Naxx but that kind of encounter won't be where guilds are at at the start of level 70 raiding

The raiding game is designed to build you up to the point where you can beat it. Run MC and you get the gear to beat Raggy, and start BWL. Run Raggy and Onyxia and you get the gear to progress in BWL etc

If you take feral druids, protection pallies and give them lots of MC gear what would stop them beating Ragnaros or Razorgore? If you give them BWL gear what would prevent them from beating Nefarian?

(Bear in mind that a much higher proportion of off-spec gear will be dropping in TBC instances than did in MC)

In other words while a more rounded guild might be able to progress faster I don't see a healers guild being completely unable to progress. It might just have to spend longer farming gear. But that's fine, it's the journey that counts not the destination

Very hard to beat Domo without people who can sheep, I can see that. So we'll use Engineers to turn them into Chickens instead :w00t:

Or something

Give me an encounter that's "impossible" and I'll try to figure out how we could beat it :)

Edit: let me explain a bit better. Might is a super tank set. It's Warrior only. If it weren't Warrior only and you put a Pally in it then a Pally could tank raid bosses pretty much as well as a T1 Warrior, especially with the tanking boosts to the Pally class coming in TBC. That's the itemisation policy change we will see in the level 70 raid instances. Instead of only Warriors getting tank loot 3 classes will get tank loot if they choose it. So it won't be itemisation than stops Feral Druids from competing with Rogues or Shadow Priests dpsing like Warlocks. Now put our hypothetical T1 feral druid in MC next to a PVP blue set geared rogue, the type of dps we had when we beat Raggy and ask yourself if the raid must fail

Nefarian Horde Side, even with tremor totem, if it pulses at the wrong time, Nefarian will run off and eat the healers and DPS.

Chromagus, Flamegor, Huhuran and Magmadar (less so than prior ones) no hunters for tranq shot means you will either lose the tank to a damage spike or your healers will run out of mana and you won't have the DPS to take him down.

Any encounter that needs large amount of AoE quickly, Anub'rekan, Maexxna.

Need for speed boost, Anub'rekan

As Bolty said, after MC, forget it.

[Kevin]

While I think you can do 5 mans and even potentially some of the 10 mans (depending on encounter design) and that this would be a lot of fun, I don't think it will be possible.

Warriors Battle shout doesn't compare with the amount of extra oomph a shaman gives a physical dps group, commanding shout probably isn't critical if we have lots of healers. Sunder is used for threat and the other tank classes have perfectly effective threat generation. Mortal strike is marginal, I've yet to see a raid boss healing himself where MS was the best solution. Spell reflect doesn't seem a raid-critical ability. Do you foresee encounters that can only be beaten by having a warrior reflect a spell back on the raid boss? Seems unlikely

Battle shout, stacks with that the shaman provide. Correct you don't need it, but they aren't mutually exclusive. Shaman, paladins, and druids get nice benefit from it. 300+ AP is not to be sneezed at. Sunder is another huge benefit to physical DPS and it is more valuable for that than for threat. Most raid bosses have 3000-4000 armor. A sunder stack is 2250 armor reduced. That is a significant increase in physical DPS. Druid threat is all based on damage, while you won't need as much threat since you won't have nearly the DPS threat with only healer classes doing DPS, your druids won't do as much aggro as they can with a warrior around.

You also lose demo shout and thunderclap. So the druids who already take more damage are taking even more damage. Demo shout is a significant damage mitigator. Thunderclap is overlooked as well for this roll by many, but you could replace that with a shaman or paladin with a thunderfury I suppose, but sitll no demo shout.

Rogues Stuns don't work on anything that's a problem in raids. Dps from rogues will be missed but what I'm seeing when raiding is that the worst dpser is doing about a third of what the best dpser is doing. Lazy people, unfocussed people, raiders who tap frost bolt while watching a movie are what hurts dps more on my server. Ymmv. Raid-effective rogue debuffs are very few, In terms of debuffs feral druids and enhancement shammies surely offer more. I'll swallow my words if Crippling Poison and Mind-Numbing Poison work on raid bosses in TBC

I'm not sure you could do something like the suppression room without a rogue. Never having those traps down? That debuff even with all those healers would be hellish.

Movement speed reduced by 80%.
Time between attacks increased by 400%.
Casting speed reduced by 80%.

All the time while trying to get through there? I see no reason why there might not be something similar in the expansion.

And while distract isn't strictly necesary, it does make some pulls nicer to do.

Hunters You don't need Hunters to pull. Tanks can pull, or paladins can pull then bubble. You don't need hunters' nature aura, shamans have a totem that does the same thing. You don't really need aspect of the pack anywhere, doesn't kill you to run up the stairs 30% slower

Sure tranq shot was a gimmick, but if you don't have it, something like Chromaggus is really going to suck you dry. Yes, all 40 people can heal, but you don't have a heck of a lot of DPS that doesn't suck down the mana supplies as well. Keep in mind that no sunder stack and no battle shout could easily make a cat druid only do about 80% of the damage they do with those buffs so what you see as good cat druid DPS now, will drop (given the same abilities you have now, even adding shaman), no sunder stack alone is 20% more physical damage mitigation for mob in most cases. He would be frenzied + enraged for the entire last 20% of his life. I've seen that combo being up for just 5 seconds get a warrior with over 10K buffed HP and massive mitigation killed even with 6 healers raining heals on him. I'm not saying it wouldn't be possible, but I think it might be harder than you are anticipating. Heck Flamegor becomes difficult without tranq because it now means you are getting the whole raid hit with zone wide fire damage all the time because you aren't tranqing him out of it. Yep again everyone can self heal or get healed but again the more you heal the less DPS, the longer the fight, the more chances for mistakes.

Hunters are a significant portion of the DPS on someone like broodlord too where there is an aggro ceiling because of his fun little single target knockback that takes 30% of that targets aggro away. You get to a point where you can't generate more than the aggro you lost. Hunters are the only class that can zero that out. As mentioned since druids without sunder stacks are facing mobs that mitigate 20% (ore more) physical damage they aren't generating as much aggro as you might be used to with a current bear tank. The DPS being lower compared to a 9 class raid (that the encounter will be designed for if they have aggro cieling fights like that in TBC) means a longer fight and more danger of a mob that isn't controlled. Not to mention that without rogues this fight is impossible because of that debuff you would be fighting under.

Warlocks Banish will be missed. Imp buff is compensated for by Kings, Fortitude and lots of healers. In any event Imp buff is pretty unreliable as tanks often run out of range. Health stones are a loss but compensated for by our healing power. We have more wipe recovery with 50% of our guild being able to recover a wipe (paladins and shamans out of 4 classes) rather than the standard guilds 33% so soul stones won't be missed

Most fights where you want an imp buff on the tank are still relatively stationary. The imp is parked and it's rare that the wariror is out of that range when it matters. But yeah you can live without it. No summons, so downtime if you have to replace someone mid raid just increased some. Again all this can be overcome with better planning and people being more on the ball with prep work and such. Soulstones aren't just used for wipe recovery. They are put on some key people to save combat rezzes too, but yeah I do think with the extra combat rezzes that you have that can be dealt with too.

Mages I explained AOE, editing it in after my original post. We lose Poly but thinking again about raiding the main place i've seen poly is Domo and that fight could certainly be done with offtank/healer pairs on 7 off the minions while everyone else not in the main tank group mobs the 8th. By no means easy, poly is certainly a loss. No Mage int buff but overall tons of healing capacity so that's not crucial. No frost nova but so what? i'll bet a pally aoe-er without frost nova has more survivability than a mage aoe-er with. No significant fire damage which a number of things are resistant to or immune but instead we have physical elemental and holy. Holy damage is the least resisted, we are fine for damage types

I'm not sure something like the Fankriss tunnel with the respawn speed it has would not be pleasent without more poweful AoE. Maybe it could be done with rotating hurricanes, holy nova's, focus fire, and consecrate. But mobile AoE seems quite valuable in there.

My understanding of this encounter was that the absolute textbook core kiting strategy uses shamans as principle kiters. My view of Razorgore is that kiting is a question of skill not class. Our best kiters were a Hunter and a Warrior spamming Demo. We can use Druids to duplicate the Warrior spamming Demo. I've kited this as a Feral Druid with moderate success but that was more about my making mistakes than the tools I had available

Yeah, razorgore kiting won't be an issue. Anyone with the skill can do it. I've seen vidoes where mages were the only kiters. I've kited as a druid, a warrior, and a hunter. And I've ended up kiting as a paladin from heal aggro. No biggy.



Another general note that I don't have enough experience with is that I would still be concerned about some of the DPS burn encounters. You get a bit of a taste of that with Chrommy with the 20% engrage he does, but it's not as critical as some of the Naxx encounters burns you have to do. I think you over estimate the amount of DPS that can be done. I've harped on the huge value of sunder for DPS already. You have extra healing, but you need extra healing. Even the best geared druid tank will take more healing than the equivalent geared druid, they do not have as much mitigation. Paladins won't be able to match warrior mitigation either, they don't get the same talents and I still don't expect them to get the itemization for mitigation as good as warriors either.


I just think you might have overlooked too much. I think you vastly overestimate the DPS of the raid too. And with more encounters being designed to prevent people just outlasting everything and eventually DPS'ing the mob down, which is what this guild pretty much has to do, I'm not sure how far they could get.

[fractaled]

Which encounters?

Sorry Bolty, I'm just not seeing this. Maybe deep AQ40/Naxx but that kind of encounter won't be where guilds are at at the start of level 70 raiding

Have you been to BWL?

Give me an encounter that's "impossible" and I'll try to figure out how we could beat it :)

Get to Broodlord, just *get* to him.

[Xanthix]

I am of the opinion that just about anything is possible in-game, so I won't go quoting boss encounters that would be difficult. If you can't kill a boss, you can always skip him or work on something else until you find a trick that will work.

I mean these are the forums where I read about crazy things like beating Diablo 2 without assigning a skill point, or with a melee sorceress, and such.:)

Therefore I think honestly the hardest part of this would be finding enough people serious enough about the game to want to do min-max raiding with an interesting limitation, but casual enough to be okay with not using their raid ID's to explore the most content and make the most of their time.

What you could probably do, though, is build an alt-guild for people with max-level alts who want to try something fun and challenging, and take on 2nd-tier content. This way you're also not trying to take on the bleeding edge stuff with four classes when people still don't know how to beat it with 9. Even if you work on BWL and Naxx with 25 level 70 healers, it could be fun and very interesting.

[Xanthix]

Oh one more point/clarification. While this could be a fun experiment, I wouldn't base it off the assumption that healing is a chore. In a given play group you will find healers who love healing and would be as reluctant to spec for damage as a DPSer would be to spec for healing.

So I don't know about the idea of forcing people to rotate specs and roles, but otherwise it could be fun.

[fractaled]

yes I'm serious

Your glib responses make me seriously question how much raiding experience you have & your knowledge of class abilities/game mechanics.

- Sunder is an armor reducer as well.
- Mortal strike is useful on bosses that heal (think Ebonroc).
- spell reflect is a base skill, I assume it will be critical in some fight down the road... take priest's MC for example, coming out of BWL I'd have guesses it would never seriously be used in a raid, but then along comes Razuvious

- rogue stuns are more becoming more useful (I think Blizzard made a mistake with MC & rogue utility)... Sartura is a good example of where they help

- hunters pulling is nice, I think you underestimate it (I've done MC & BWL in under 2:30... a good hunter pulling is crucial in MC).
- aspect of the pack is useful in movement fights... i.e. Twinemps

- warlocks park their imp & phase shift it = no range worries on 95% of the fights (Ossirian is the 5%).

you cite your "healing capacity" as a fallback quite a lot, if 75% of your raid is required to heal to compensate for your other weaknesses, you're going to be compounding your weaknesses

It depends on what you want to do with this healing guild. If you want to run 5 and 10-mans, you'll probably be able to do that. If you want to run the 25-mans, you may be able to run over the "MC equivalent" (if there even ends up being such a thing). As soon as Blizzard designs an encounter that requires a Warrior (or a Warlock, Hunter, Rogue, or a Mage) you're SOL, and the premise of your guild falls apart.

[MongoJerry]

Which encounters?

Sorry Bolty, I'm just not seeing this. Maybe deep AQ40/Naxx but that kind of encounter won't be where guilds are at at the start of level 70 raiding...

Give me an encounter that's "impossible" and I'll try to figure out how we could beat it :)

Group 1 (Tank group) 2 bears, 2 prot pallies, priest (for Prayer of healing)
Group 2 (melee dps) 2 shammies, 2 cats, retri pally
Group 3 (ranged dps) 2 shadow priest, moonkin, 2 elemental shammies
Group 4 (healing) 2 holy priests, resto shammy, holy pally, tree druid
Group 5 (flexible role) whoever's left with some tanking healing and dps gear, ready to be given different tasks as we need more tanks, more healers or more dps

Simply put, you don't have the dps to win difficult fights unless your raid is vastly overgeared for the encounter. Gone are the days when you can take as long as you want to kill a boss as long as you can keep your tanks and healers up. The new raid encounters -- end of AQ40 and most of Naxxramas -- require sufficient dps to kill things within a certain set time limit or else your raid is toast. You can forget Patchwerk, Gluth, Thaddius, Loetheb, Maexxna, and Gothik for these reasons. You would probably have difficulty on the Twin Emperors as well, unless your guild was already Naxxramas equipped. Same with Phase 2 of C'Thun.

Then, you'd have trouble on any encounter requiring massive aoe. The third phase of Nefarian would be difficult to do while depending only on mana-hog holy novas and the pitiful shaman and paladin aoe spells/totems. Plus, without warriors available to aoe taunt and shield wall, those who do aoe will quickly die one by one. Gluth would be impossible without strong aoe's. Ouro would be very difficult without strong aoe's to kill the little bugs -- and you don't have the strong single target dps to make up for the lack of aoe's. Killing the little spiders before the web sprays each time when fighting Maexxna would be very difficult without aoe's or very good single target dps.

Speaking of shield wall, you won't have it, so your tank is pretty much going to die on the first berserk web spray from Maexxna. You can't last stand+lifegiving gem on the second web spray, either. Your tanks won't be able to shield wall when Patchwerk goes berserk on his last 5% of life, either.

You won't have the benefit of battle shout, sunder armor or curse of recklessness, which will reduce your already feeble melee dps even further. Speaking of which, your physical damage dps will be pitiful, which means that you're basically out of luck when it comes to killing the magic immune dead side of Gothik's room. (Word is that enhancement shaman are actually decent in the beta, so this group's physical damage dps could go from pitiful to mediocre).

You won't have the imp buff on your tank, making encounters dicier, or curse of shadows/elements on bosses. You won't have soulstones or healthstones.

You won't have hunters to be able to tranq shot bosses like magmadar, firemaw, flamegore, chromaggus, and gluth. Without that, you're basically toast on those encounters, unless you are again way overgeared for a particular instance. Have fun wiping on trash due to a lot more bad pulls without hunters there, too.

You'll lose a lot of crowd control. Sheeps and/or frost novas are useful against Domo, Gothik, Noth, Nefarrian, Ouro, Anub'Rekhan, and in the 20-mans, the panther, snake and tiger bosses. Hunter freezing traps can also be useful. The occational encounter where mobs can be banished could get dicier, too.

With no rogues, you'll lose a ton of dps. Plus, you'll lose a lot of ability to stun Sartura's and Anub'Rekhan's adds (admittedly, paladins can do some of this) and kick silence the prophet or the mother bug in AQ40.

But ultimately, the main problem with your suggestion is your guild's premise:

In pursuit of my perfect guild I'd like to brainstorm another idea

The premise of this guild is that healing is a chore.

Some people *like* healing. People like me like the intensity that comes with watching over an entire fight and keeping everyone up rather than targeting a mob and squeezing the trigger until its dead mindlessly over and over. Other people like dps classes where they target a mob and hit the same two buttons repeatedly. I don't understand the fascination with that, but apparently a lot of people like that. The premise of a good guild should be to find some people who like to tank, some people who like to heal, and other people who like to dps. If you start off your guild with an attitude that healing is a chore rather than an intense pleasure, then you're missing out on a great deal.

[Brista]

OK let me provide a little more context

I play on Scarshield Legion (EU), a rppvp server that launched in January. I play Horde

No one in our faction has killed Cthun or the Eye of Cthun. No one on our faction has killed a boss in Naxx

So if we could "only" do up to and including Twin Emps that's progress equal to the top Horde raiding guild on our server

I just left that guild. I helped them get the Twin Emps kill and helped them try Instructor Razuvious

We have approx 15 Horde raiding guilds on our server. Most of them stuck somewhere in ZG or MC

Now let me tell you a little about server culture

Our skill levels are generally low. We had a big problem in raids with aggro managment. We had to gkick someone who simply couldn't grasp that landing an Aimed Shot before the tank had even hit the mob was a bad idea. I recently wiped in Strat with one of the best geared Warlocks on the server. He simply couldn't grasp that stealing the aggro then tanking the Baron on top of the casters was a bad idea. I was tanking (supposedly). It was exasperating

The faction's best players are the healers. Healers learn not to go afk during fights. Healers learn a lot about aggro - the hard way. We also have some super tanks although too many of the server's tanks are the "hit one mob till it's dead then pick another mob" type

Also, inherent in the guild design, is a lot of practice and understanding of different raid roles which can only improve people as players. Spend a month raid healing, then a month raid tanking then a month raid dpsing and you will have a very good understanding of raiding. Better I think than if you spent 3 months doing one role

So if this healers' guild has the potential to clear MC, ZG, AQ20, Ony and BWL then we also have the potential to match all but our faction's three top guilds for achievement

That's fine as far as I'm concerned

Now turning to the objections made so far

A lot has been made about lack of dps. Healer classes generally do poor dps because of itemisation. Not only does feral gear simply not feature in MC but also healers are usually encouraged not to spend dkp on it. Comparing the dps of a feral druid with MC gear relative to T1 Rogues to the dps feral druids will be able to do with the low end level 70 raid gear is not valid. TBC brings in off-spec dps gear and this guild would support people in collecting it

I've raided with a lot of very lacklustre dps, rogues who wouldn't know a Mongoose if one bit them etc, and I simply am not seeing that a crew of motivated hybrid dpsers with decent gear would be unable to match a crew of variably geared dps classes with motivation ranging from very focussed to watching a movie

TBC is interesting because it allows for wildly varying raid dps. One raid might include a Survival Hunter and a Discipline Priest, in fact 25 different spec permutations so as to stack as many of these little +5% raid damage buffs as possible for an incredible total output. The next raid might have people mainly with cookiecutter or pvp builds who lack those talents. If there is raid content available for the second group of people (and it's my guess that there will be) then the first group will find it trivally easy

Next I find it ironic that Sunder Armour's AC reduction is being touted here as a raid-critical ability. I've only ever been asked once to maintain Faerie Fire (which does the same thing) on mobs while raiding. In fact I've felt shy about using it in case I get told off for wasting mana when I'm meant to be healing. When I was raid tanking as a Feral Druid the Rogues never bothered to Expose. Now suddenly AC reduction is raid-critical :rolleyes:

You guys have convinced me about the Suppression Room (unless there's a spot by the gate out of the aura maybe?). For us this would therefore be a Plan B encounter (see below)

I'm not convinced Nefarian would be impossible. It's AOE intensive but Blessing of Protection is very useful. Paladins also get another AOE to use just on Undead/Demons for Phase 3. We've had red/blue spawn and still beat Nefarian despite the huge hit to AOEing that combination gives. Unlucky class call would hurt but we probably have the versatility to cope. I think the main thing for us would be gearing up the paladins with lots of +spell damage but I'm sanguine about the possibility that we may take longer to gear up our people to the point where we can beat encounters than other guilds would. You mentioned Horde, Lissa, please bear in mind that in TBC the only distinction between factions is racials which are pretty trivial

Tranq shot is a big loss. I think our strategy woud simply be to take the pain. So it would be a matter of us needing more gearing up than other guilds need to beat certain encounters. It's not critical on Magmadar, we've beaten him with a guild fresh to MC without Tranq shot (killed Luci first raid, Hunter who got the book wasn't available second raid)

On AOE: as I understand the game mechanics: crap level 70 spell + a ton of +damage approx = great level 70 spell + a ton of spell damage since most of your oomph comes from the +damage gear. I'm wondering just how good several pallies aoeing with heavy +spell damage gear would be. i'm unconvinced that it's unplayably bad

Plan B: if we can't beat an encounter without a certain class we have 2 options. The first is guesting in a few people of that class. So if we needed Rogues to beat an encounter fill the raid with 22 guildies and invite 3 Rogues that are friends of people in the guild. The second option is a joint run, sharing loot and progress with another guild

So if, hypothetically, we could complete all of BWL except Broodlord we could just sub in 3 rogues for that fight clearing the rest of it with the guild. I don't think we would have trouble finding people who want to come

I'm not so far convinced that this is such an awful idea that it's unplayably bad. I also think it will be very popular on my server, a lot of people playing these classes have given up raiding and just do pvp since they are frustrated with not being able to kill anything

If we ended up with a schedule where we run MC and the 20 mans solo, BWL with 3 guest Rogues joining for half an hour then leaving again and AQ40 and Naxx with a partner guild that would be fine, in fact that could exceed what any guild is capable of on my server

I'll go do some reading up on the Beta raids and quests forums. From what I've gathered so far about Beta instancing a major change is that aggro is harder to manage (which suits us: 2 tank classes, one mail class and a class with Fade). What remains to be seen is how many encounters are designed with the intention of requiring a specific class and to what extent we can find creative alternatives to those requirements

My view of the current raid game is that there is a sharp player skill curve. MC is a gear instance, pure and simple. Decent tank or two and a few decent healers and the raid can plough through it. BWL is an instance where if you don't play well you die. AQ40 and even more so Naxx are instances where if you don't play well everyone dies

It could of course be the case that Suppression room type encounters are going to be the standard in TBC's end game raiding in which case the idea doesn't work at all

I would guess that TBC will maintain something like the same skill curve and that there won't be too many class dependent encounters in the early raid game simply because if all the members of that class are idiots your guild can't beat the encounter. I think it will get more class dependent and more min/max dependent as a guild goes deeper into the end game but I think it would be very interesting to see just how far we can get

If we get midway while developing a guild full of people who have the confidence, gear and player skill to handle diverse hybrid functions in a raid that's good enough

Some people *like* healing. People like me like the intensity that comes with watching over an entire fight and keeping everyone up rather than targeting a mob and squeezing the trigger until its dead mindlessly over and over. Other people like dps classes where they target a mob and hit the same two buttons repeatedly. I don't understand the fascination with that, but apparently a lot of people like that. The premise of a good guild should be to find some people who like to tank, some people who like to heal, and other people who like to dps. If you start off your guild with an attitude that healing is a chore rather than an intense pleasure, then you're missing out on a great deal.

Yeah you're absolutely right

But I think it's just my poor explanation rather than something inherent in the guild design. There's no need to label healing a chore or denigrate people who like to heal. I can just re-write that bit to accentuate the positive, to portray us as Healing +. I'll need to reword the rota section, scrap the rota points system, and I should stop assuming that we won't have enough willing healers.

We'll better be able to allocate raid roles once we have a guild up and running

[Monkey]

You also lose demo shout and thunderclap. So the druids who already take more damage are taking even more damage. Demo shout is a significant damage mitigator. Thunderclap is overlooked as well for this roll by many, but you could replace that with a shaman or paladin with a thunderfury I suppose, but sitll no demo shout.

I'll be back to add more, but Demoralizing Shout == Demoralizing Roar, so you don't lose that.

[Delc]

The things that would make it near impossible to get far are tranq shot, disarm trap, and a good way of handling fear. Even getting past magmadar would be a huge challenge. The problem is that blizzard has designed put in a bunch of gimmicks to require certain classes.

[Brista]

The things that would make it near impossible to get far are tranq shot, disarm trap, and a good way of handling fear. Even getting past magmadar would be a huge challenge. The problem is that blizzard has designed put in a bunch of gimmicks to require certain classes.

Quite so. As Bolty implied, in a sense it's intelligent game design to prevent players doing precisely what I'm considering here. I'm just not convinced that they've got it right

Now what if we liberalised the initial concept to permit alts from the proscribed classes? You still have a duty to heal if it's your turn to but could play your Rogue the rest of the time. That might be something to consider further down the line

In any event level 70 end game is a long way off and this would certainly be a guild that would rock in the 61-70 levelling game since the odds are that if you have a guildie who wants to join you for an instance you are set for tank and healer, which is the hard part of forming any 5 man pug

I'm still positive about this idea. If at the worst we will have to partner with someone for our progress raids while handling our farm raids alone, that's fine. If we do partner with someone then they won't be dictating to us what loot we're allowed to roll on or what role we play

Regarding Fear a blue posted regarding the new Priest racials to state that Fear would be much less significant in TBC end game (can't find the link, it was stated after player complaints about Draenai getting Fear Ward)

[fractaled]

So if we could "only" do up to and including Twin Emps that's progress equal to the top Horde raiding guild on our server

You wouldn't be able to.

Also, inherent in the guild design, is a lot of practice and understanding of different raid roles which can only improve people as players. Spend a month raid healing, then a month raid tanking then a month raid dpsing and you will have a very good understanding of raiding. Better I think than if you spent 3 months doing one role

This may be true, but there are other ways to get that knowledge (play an alt).

So if this healers' guild has the potential to clear MC, ZG, AQ20, Ony and BWL then we also have the potential to match all but our faction's three top guilds for achievement

I doubt we'll see another MC (dirt simple encounters). You wouldn't be able to clear BWL. ZG would be twice as hard (AoE fest). Moam would be tough.

Next I find it ironic that Sunder Armour's AC reduction is being touted here as a raid-critical ability. I've only ever been asked once to maintain Faerie Fire (which does the same thing) on mobs while raiding. In fact I've felt shy about using it in case I get told off for wasting mana when I'm meant to be healing. When I was raid tanking as a Feral Druid the Rogues never bothered to Expose. Now suddenly AC reduction is raid-critical :rolleyes:

The reason for this is two-fold. Back when there were 8-debuff slots, it probably didn't make sense for FF to take one of them. It's probably worth it with 16 -- it will always be up with 40 slots. I'm pretty sure that Expose doesn't stack with Sunder, and that unless you get talents to improve it (often not gotten), it's not as effective as Sunder. And people take 5-sunders for granted because it's always up. The AC reduction probably results in 20% more melee DPS. Even a "healing" guild would notice that on their cat druids/shammies/pallies.

Tranq shot is a big loss. I think our strategy woud simply be to take the pain. So it would be a matter of us needing more gearing up than other guilds need to beat certain encounters.

Easier said than done. You can't just take 20% of your raid and make them heal through the extra pain. That 20% is 20% less DPS, which means the fight goes longer, which means you're OOM.

Plan B: if we can't beat an encounter without a certain class we have 2 options. The first is guesting in a few people of that class. So if we needed Rogues to beat an encounter fill the raid with 22 guildies and invite 3 Rogues that are friends of people in the guild. The second option is a joint run, sharing loot and progress with another guild

No idea where you'll find 3 of X class for one boss encounter on demand. Don't forget instance lockouts. And if you're doing a joint run, presumably you'll be healing since that's all you have. And yet healing is a chore, so you've doomed yourself to do it all the time. Also, it's unlikely that this other guild will be the "anti-healing" guild and only have the classes you need, likely limiting you to taking a minority of the slots.

[Kevin]

I'll be back to add more, but Demoralizing Shout == Demoralizing Roar, so you don't lose that.

Heh, silly me. Good call. Considering as mentioned I've kited with a druid on Razor and used demo roar, as well as been the MT in smaller instances and used demo roar for the same reasons...

A lot has been made about lack of dps. Healer classes generally do poor dps because of itemisation. Not only does feral gear simply not feature in MC but also healers are usually encouraged not to spend dkp on it. Comparing the dps of a feral druid with MC gear relative to T1 Rogues to the dps feral druids will be able to do with the low end level 70 raid gear is not valid. TBC brings in off-spec dps gear and this guild would support people in collecting it

When I talk about DPS, I'm talking about druid DPS, when that druid is in the best possible DPS gear for that stage and played extremely well vs a rogue or hunter or mage or whatever other DPS in close to the best gear they can get for that stage also played well. Druids are still only 90% of the DPS of those other classes at best. I'm also talking about paladin and shaman DPS (I've done all of MC, BWL, and through Twin Emps alliance side, I've done all of MC, and we are working on Nef Horde side as well as all of AQ20 and ZG both sides) with those people geared as best they can. Paladins and shaman can sometimes crack the top 10 on a damage meter. I'm not just theorycrafting. I play in guilds that are very friendly to alternate specs and where the people can and will gear for that "alternate" roll in front of their "primary" roll.

And people don't notice sunder armor because it is up all the time. I'm not saying that you can't get away without it, I'm just saying that if you don't factor it in to the lost DPS you are over estimating how much DPS you will do. And yeah FF is nice but is only number 3 on the armor reducing list. Rogues expose doesn't stack with sunder and isn't as good so it doesn't get put up. But you look at what the top end guilds do and yes, sunder, FF, and CoR are kept up because of the DPS increase they provide. And agian yes there are new skills in TBC that make this not matter as much.

And yeah for MC it doesn't matter. MC could be beaten with 1 tank, and 39 healers on just the DPS of the tank if you want to wait that long. But as others more experienced have mentioned, you're going to have to plan B more than you might think. And I don't expect encounter design to get any simpler in the new instances.


Again I would like to see this idea work, I just don't think it can. I'm one of the people that will take pretty much any 5 we get into a 5 man. I've pet tanked strat and scholo with my hunter, I've done Baron and Lyceum (level and gear appropriate) with only a hunter and the druid who was the only one with heal spells, for AoE. Some of the most fun I have is getting 5 man groups with odd combos and figuring out how to beat stuff, and when I say level appropriate, it means that the whole party is 2 to 5 levels lower than the highest level mob in the instance, so for example SM Cathedral wouldn't have any over L39. You would do SM library at L30-33. I've taken 5 pallies in live strat.

But again there are raid fights that are simply, "you have enough DPS to kill this guy in 15, 5, 20, 3, whatever minutes or you will die because they will start hitting people for 18,000 damage or whatever." I don't expect stuff like that to go away and I'm glad. Because as mentioned, many DPS classes get really really bored and feel they don't matter in a place like MC, because well they don't. The DPS the tank does, given enough healing is enough to eventually win the encounter. But also as mentioned that starts to change even in BWL and moreso in AQ40 and Naxx. Fights can be lost simply because your DPS was not pushing as hard as they could and that is with DPS that is significantly better than what you will be able to bring to the table even with the changes. So having tank and spank and then DPS burn, and then AoE heal fests, then CC heavy, etc encounters is good. It helps make sure every class gets to be in the front for a bit and Blizzard does more and more of that as the game matures, and I just envison limiting your options more and more will be harder to do in the raids. Though not 5 mans, I expect 5 mans at least on normal difficulty to be defeatable by lots and lots of combos.

[Brista]

When I talk about DPS, I'm talking about druid DPS, when that druid is in the best possible DPS gear for that stage and played extremely well vs a rogue or hunter or mage or whatever other DPS in close to the best gear they can get for that stage also played well. Druids are still only 90% of the DPS of those other classes at best. I'm also talking about paladin and shaman DPS (I've done all of MC, BWL, and through Twin Emps alliance side, I've done all of MC, and we are working on Nef Horde side as well as all of AQ20 and ZG both sides) with those people geared as best they can. Paladins and shaman can sometimes crack the top 10 on a damage meter. I'm not just theorycrafting. I play in guilds that are very friendly to alternate specs and where the people can and will gear for that "alternate" roll in front of their "primary" roll.

This is pretty much what I feel. And I don't see 90% as a problem

Let's have a look at the mathematical comparison between the guild I'm envisioning and a guild based on the dps I personally have experienced and beat raid content with

15 hybrids and priests on dps averaging 80% of a well-geared focussed rogue = 15 *80 = 1200%

compared with
3 well-geared focussed dpsers = 300%
6 moderately geared pvp spec dps paying attention @ 75% each = 450%
6 half-assed guys with Carrot trinket watching a movie while they play @ 40% each = 240%
Total from the dps team = 990%, which is 210% less than the hybrid dps team

And please don't tell me we can't beat MC/BWL with such a team, I've been doing it all year

But you look at what the top end guilds do

Actually I'd prefer not to

Of course Death and Taxes etc don't play like what I've been describing. Of course we can't match them. But who plays like them out of the general WoW population? Less than 1%? Less than 1% of raid guilds? Certainly no one on my server

And yeah for MC it doesn't matter. MC could be beaten with 1 tank, and 39 healers on just the DPS of the tank if you want to wait that long.

This guild would increase dps over the average raid dpser that I've been playing with. No one is planning to simply out-last encounters. The aim of the guild is to spend longer in progressing through the encounters so that everyone can gear up in 3 different roles. By taking longer our dpsers will be very well-geared for the content

But as others more experienced have mentioned, you're going to have to plan B more than you might think. And I don't expect encounter design to get any simpler in the new instances.

Maybe but bear in mind WoW is primarily designed for mediocre players. If you want to market a product to millions you can't expect 140+ IQs, high motivation. Seems to me one of the themes of TBC is simplifying raid content, reducing raid size, encouraging hybridisation so that more players can handle more roles. Just because 60 end-game raid content has consistently raised the bar does not mean all 70 raid content will be aimed at players with the skill to handle Naxx. Stuff like Mind Controlling the adds in the Razuvious fight is extraordinarily skilful, this isn't going to be the new content standard. They want more people raiding

And what poor players who aren't willing to put in anything over the bare minimum can conquer this putative Healer's Guild certainly could

Again I would like to see this idea work, I just don't think it can.

It definitely can work to some extent. Two questions though: how far can we go? and can we keep our members enthralled and motivated?

I'm fairly sure we'll be able to beat 5 mans and almost all 10 man content. I'm fairly sure we'll be able to beat some 25 man content but not all of it. I'm fairly sure that it's specific class skills that will trip us up not dps. Raid instances are stacked so that raiding equips you to go to the next level. We many need to get 50% of our dps equipped to move up a level instead of the usual 20% but that's just time. If we spend enough time farming an instance we will match the dps of guilds who run it twice then move up a level

I have no idea whether people will stay motivated, indeed whether they'l even stay, period. The deal is slower raid progress in return for freedom of role and the ability to collect a variety of gear. Some players will like the deal and some won't but in the end I suspect success if we give this a try will be about the usual issue of drama management rather than games mechanics