Officers’ Quarters: Alt raiding is a privilege

Raiding with your alt is not a right — it’s a privilege. Today’s OQ covers finding the right amount of healers in a flexible raid, inviting co-workers to your guild, and disagreeing with your officers over alt raiding.

You’re right — flexible raid sizes makes the right number of healers a complicated question. You can look at other guilds’ successful attempts on a logs website who had a similar number of players. Look at how many healers they used and try to replicate it.

But that may not be the right answer for your own raid. In practice, try a boss with as few healers as you think you can manage. Then ask a healer that you trust whether they think the fight is doable with that number. You’ll have a pretty good idea after a few pulls if it’s not, because you’ll see what the health bars look like. You’ll see people getting killed due to lack of heals instead of standing in bad.

You also need a trustworthy healer to tell you if the healing is too easy so you can reduce your healers by one. It’s easiest for a healer to assess this, since they’ll notice that they don’t have to do as much as they normally would to keep everyone topped up.

As players master an encounter, fewer healers may be necessary. Making fewer mistakes usually translates to less damage and a shorter kill time.

Also, some fights in this expansion, such as Kromog, tend to go far smoother with more healers. So it’s not a static number — the optimal number will vary from encounter to encounter. Ideally you want two to three DPS who are comfortable switching to a healing offspec when the raid needs it.

I’m not quite sure I see a problem here. If you don’t want to talk about work, then you can tell people that. When someone brings it up to you, just let them know you’d rather not discuss it in-game. You’re under no obligation to do so. I think anything beyond that would be an overreach.

Others may want to talk about work once in a while. After all, that’s the one thing (aside from WoW) that you all have in common, so it seems like a natural outcome. I don’t think you should try to micromanage what they can and can’t say to each other. As long as the discussion remains appropriate, I think it’s OK.

Honestly, if you’re this concerned that inviting people from work will ruin your enjoyment of the game, then I would say don’t do it. Keep your gaming and work lives separate.

This is a decision you can’t undo after you invite them — think carefully whether it’s what you really want.

You’re not justified in asking for a raid spot, because there is a specific guild policy against it and you know about it.

That said, I’m not sure why the policy applies to normal BRF clears, if those clears are just for tier pieces and non-heroic raiders. It seems like it would be a good opportunity to let people take a break from their mains, assuming (1) they are adequately geared and competent as you claim to be, and (2) that they don’t need the tier pieces that you’re specifically farming for. Being forced to raid the same raid zone on the same toons multiple times per week is a recipe for burnout, as the Crusader’s Coliseum era taught us. I don’t particularly agree with your officers in this case.

So, my advice is to ask your officers if it’s possible to relax the alts policy on normal runs only. Keep in mind, however, that alts present several issues for officers and raid leaders, such as

• How will bringing alts affect our loot policies?
• Will we retain enough tanking and healing, and have an adequate balance of ranged and melee DPS, if we allow alts?
• Will we have enough players with geared offspecs who can switch to a tanking or healing role when we need them to?
• What ilevel and experience level will we expect before an alt is eligible to raid?
• Will we have to worry about people expecting to bring their alts to heroic runs?
• What about the alts of non-heroic raiders?

And the list goes on. As you can see, alts cause complications. Some officers don’t want to deal with those complications, and that could be the case in your guild. Yes, this is a common policy.

As I said above, alts are a privilege, not a right. Raiding with your alt is a service that a guild can provide, if and only if the officers are willing. Until they are, you may be stuck looking outside the guild for alt runs.

/salute