Building and succeeding as a ten man raiding guild can be a challenge. One of the downsides to raiding at this size is that roster flexibility is very difficult to overcome.

Whether it’s a short-term absence or a new spot to fill, ten man groups struggle with roster problems much more than larger raid teams. One healer out can make or break a night, same with any person really. Keeping a tight roster with minimal sidelining is always preferred, as it keeps the maximum percentage of your guild in the raid and comfortable with each other. However things aren’t always perfect.

Overcoming the slow nights can be handled in a few ways. Keeping a surplus on your roster, dual speccing, or revisting content.

Keeping extra seats on your raid roster is going to give you the flexibilty to take people that are the best for the job, however keeping those people around is going to mean benching someone when the time comes that everyone shows up (frequently). Depending on your looting system, a “standby” reward is an excellent way to keep the people on the bench happy while they BG, farm, or whatever occupies them on these nights.

With 3.1 bringing dual spec’ing, it’s much easier to fill holes in your roster in the event that you’ve got a person out. This is going to ease the amount of “extras” you need to recruit. Instead of having to recruit an extra tank, two dps, and two healers, you can say that on any given night you might have two people out. With actual roster composition aside, this could mean that you need to keep 3 people on the bench, tank/dps, tank/heal, heal/dps for an ideal coverage.

The last “option” for overcoming roster shortages involves running old content. As with any farm content, it usually takes less heals and/or tanks to cover the instance and since these are the most common roles to have shortages taking a night off and mowing over some easy bosses can be a way to keep people active. This also provides you with time to get some alts and newer raiders into the action and get them some gear to catch up to your core raiding team.

We’ve got a few patches headed our way. Tomorrow, we are supposedly getting patch 3.0.9. This brings about a few class changes, some spell changes, and a few other minor things.

Now me being a paladin, I am greatly looking forward to 30-minute seals. I don’t know why this wasn’t changed back when shaman weapon imbues were lengthened.

When this came up, it made me think, why haven’t they made Righteous Fury undispellable? I think the largest reason is the position of Improved Righteous Fury in the protection talent tree. Its way too low for the benefit it gives. Making this undispellable would allow ret to have a permanent 6% damage reduction, since they will already be deep in prot for Imp HoJ.

The next patch to head our way, will likely be 3.1. Dev’s have already started releasing information about this patch. Lots of class changes, some bigger things have been announced. Replenishment has been given to more classes. I agree with Josh about the effects this has on raids. In my opinion, if Blizzard makes a buff “mandatory”, it should just be scrapped and baked in, like Blessing of Salvation was, and hopefully with 3.1 Blessing of Sanctuary. If I’m throwing together a 10 man for Ulduar, and I somehow, don’t have one of the 4 classes that give Replenishment in my optimal set up, I’m going to have to bench one of my good raiders simply to fill a buff slot. This goes against Blizzard’s “bring the player, not the class” mentality of Wrath of the Lich King.

Additionally in 3.1, Blizzard has announced Dual Specializations will be delivered. From what has been said by dev’s this will give you two talent specs that are your “permanent specs” and you can switch between these freely, in town and more than likely in the “prep time” for PvP matches. Now they have said it won’t be free out of town, but not prohibitively expensive, since people could just port/summon out of the instance and back to town.

One of the original posts I wanted to write for this blog was a discussion about the different kinds of people that make up particular classes.

I think the two most prevalent cases are tanks and dps. In general, dps accepts damage meters such as recount, are the end all of who’s doing the best, but tanks are a little harder to sort out. This leads to tanks boasting about gear, stats, avoidances, and all other things they might be able to bring to the table.

In a world that is as unquantified as tanking, its often very difficult to match up exact tanks against other tanks, especially when the 3 (soon to be 4) classes have varying degrees of differences. Additionally, most of the fights that blizzard designs, have 1 target to tank, and if there are more, they are often clearly designated as “off tank” style mobs. Trash usually requires more than one tank, but when you get to the boss (read: important) fight the other tanks are sidelined. This causes a bit of an inferiority complex in the additional tanks.

This will be alleviated a bit when Blizzard implements the “dual-spec” system, as dps/tanks will be able to switch back and forth, and the tanks won’t feel like such a lame duck when they are attempting to dps for boss fights.