Loaded Question

So Wichita of ShamRadio (check it out it's cool), posed the question:

What can we do as a guild to do better in Kara?

Our issue last night was pretty straightforward. Gear.

We had several new, or undergeared people in the raid.

People have varying levels of playtime, knowledge of game mechanics (could be called skill). This lead to variations (sometimes large and pronounced) in the relative power of their toons in the game world. Said another way, some toons do more DPS than other toons.

As you move into more and more challenging content, these differences become more pronounced.

There seems to be a problem with the way we are forming groups now. Some weeks the groups have wild success, other weeks the groups barely get their foot in the door. Some people have had "good luck" with groups and seen many of the bosses in Kara. Others have had "bad luck" and have never been past Attumen.

Players still have varying levels of playtime they want to put into the game. The gap between players may lessen somewhat, but the better geared players are better geared for a reason, they've generally put more time into their toons. They won't suddenly stop putting time into their toons. They will continue to better themselves through the content accessible to them, until such time as they realize they all the upgrades for them are beyond their reach.

At this point, we risk that they will either move to a further progressed guild, run an alt, or quit the game.

We know that our groups can handle 1, maybe 2 undergeared players.

We have a pool of players over here who we know are well geared and other pool over there of players less well geared. Do we call the raid off if we don't have 8-9 of well geared players on?

Again, this starts to seperate the guild into cliques and leads to a fractured guild. Then you start to throw class makeup into the mix. We have, for example, 2 active Paladins as far as I know. Me and Sevenn. If we both go in one group, that leaves 0 Paladins for the other.

I think the biggest thing we can do is work to improve the pool of well geared, knowledgable players. This will mean running instances where there isn't a single thing for you in it, and helping those of your class become more knowledgable.