"Keying" a guild for Zul'Aman

[Marleigh]

My guild just recently finished off our last boss in Kara. But we still aren't quite farming the place. A number of us have gear that's suitable for Gruul's, but we don't have the manpower for a 25 man raid.

ZA is likely going to be our next level of progression. But I'm well aware that even our A-team is likely to have troubles in ZA.

So my question is, how do I handle those guildies who want to run ZA, even though they aren't even close to being ready? Mind you, this is a pretty casual guild and when you start throwing around things like gear requirements, you are likely to get some hurt feelings.

However, my thought was to build some structure around this using Violet Eye rep. Like Exalted with VE gets you "keyed" for ZA. Revered, plus 6 pieces of Kara gear or the like gets you a key. And so on.

We post sign-ups for our Kara raids each week. I can't post a ZA signup since we only have about 11 people capable of even looking at the first boss. How should I manage this while not splintering off this "A-team" and making it appear as if this new content is only for us to see?

Anyone having similar issues?

EDIT: An additional thought might be to use relative stat levels for Healing, Damage, Defense etc. But what would those levels be?

[Lavache]

im right there with you :( i have a bad feeling that a lot of people will end up hurt regardless of how this goes. we have people that need karazhan gear. they are good people and players but lack the gear to be as effective as they could be. there is a 4 page thread on the guild forum about it right now...

[Armstrong]

It helps to get your guild in the right mindset ahead of time. (Kinda late now if it's going to be out in 2 days...)

We've made it clear on our guild forums and to people who asked about ZA that until we've downed all the bosses in there ZA groups will be formed based on gear and spec. Some people will be expected to continue to run Kara to finish gearing up. There's no point bringing toons in an instance that they're not ready for. When you do, everybody just spends more time wiping, nobody gets loot or sees a boss die, and in the end everyone leaves with a bad experience.

[Imi]

There are Resto Shamans in my guild with over 3000 +healing raid buffed, but almost zero mana/5. Is this shaman better geared than another shaman with 2000 +healing but 300 mana/5?
No, just focused differently.

Which shaman has 3000+healing? I'd like to look at their armory as i just swapped mains to a resto shaman.

[Bruizer]

So my question is, how do I handle those guildies who want to run ZA, even though they aren't even close to being ready? Mind you, this is a pretty casual guild and when you start throwing around things like gear requirements, you are likely to get some hurt feelings.

Take them for a one-off run there so they discover for themselves that they need a bit more gear first? Could serve as a motivator to keep running Kara a bit longer as well.

[Sangi]

Take them for a one-off run there so they discover for themselves that they need a bit more gear first? Could serve as a motivator to keep running Kara a bit longer as well.

This. We found that we had to do this for our guild for Gruul's. There was a lot of pressure from people to run gruul's starting from our first prince attempt to when we downed him the next week. The officers knew we weren't geared so we made a run that favored those people that were calling for Gruul's the most, most of them under geared. Needless to say we didn't get High King down. The cries of doing Gruul's have stopped til we get more gear.