[Bulldogslob]

My wife and I have been running the guild now for just about 2 years. We always have spend a lot of time on the game and want to see end game material. Our guild is on a highly competitive realm Kel'Thuzad US. Our progression right out of the box of WoTLK was slow to start but we full cleared 25 Naxx, OS and Maly and were ranked around 30'ish on the Realm. We had a solid 3 to 4 tanks and a great healer crew. Our DPS was also good. Summer hit and everything fell apart. Ulduar came out we made progression to the Keepers and then lost our main tank, one of our main healers and about 2-5 core dps. Summer also resulted in a lot of people not showing up. With the combination of all these things it stopped our 25 man progress dead in the water. We then started to recruit members let them know our expectations and started to run 25 mans again. A month later we lost a couple (boyfriend and girlfriend) Tank and healer which were best geared in our guild. One step forward three steps back.

About our rules and policy's. We were running WebDKP with a silent bid system. We felt that this system was not fair because one week someone could bid all there DKP on a piece of gear and the next week someone win the same item for a minimum amount of DKP. Also the tanks were doing loot council and getting all there gear for minimum prices. We changed the system to zero sum DKP with fixed pricing of item. We do require that people show up to raid and base what rank they are from their attendance. Higher ranks get gear over lower ranks. DKP is still taken from people but DKP doesn't matter if someone is lower ranked. Gear disturbed between equal ranked players go to DKP and whatever member has the most DKP gets the piece.
We have an enchant and comming soon epic gem policy to have the best enchants and gems possible. Our ranks are as followed, Trial, Raider, Core Raider. We use be.imba.hu to judge members enchants. Raiders have to maintain accepted enchants, core raiders have to maintain proper enchants on there gear. Trial members are new recruits and their ranks are frozen for 3 weeks marked in officer not on the date they were brought into the guild. After 3 weeks they get promoted based on there performance, enchants, and attendance. We expect officers to make 100% of the raids, core raiders 75% or above, raiders 50% or above. Otherwise they are demoted for lack of attendance or kicked from the guild.

I went into detail of how we do things to receive constructive criticism of our rules. Once again we are having a problem with healers. We have plenty of DPS and plenty of tanks. Our 25 mans will be stopped again without proper heals. How do we recruit good healers. On our realm there seems to be a lack of good healers or they are all in higher ranked guilds and do not wish to come to a lower ranked less progressed guild. With our rank slipping down to 60 on the realm our name has less and less effect to recruit people into our guild. We have a lot of skilled geared players just no healers or enough healers to keep progression going.

Any help would be appreciated.

[redneck6979]

Dual Spec.....

If you can spare the DPS or a few tanks (pally or drood) have them dual spec into a healing class, you may have to do a few gearing runs to get there healing gear up to par but it shouldnt take to long now days.

[Theotherone]

With all the rules, does anyone acutally have fun? Cause, if people aren't having fun, they ain't going to join/show up. It's a video game, it's about enjoying ones self.

[Bulldogslob]

We already have a couple tanks go healing to substitute for the missing people. Plainly we are just missing heals.

As far as the rules go, really they are not bad. Enchant your gear with the best enchant and show up for raids. We are trying to move to a more hardcore environment when we raid. Besides that I really don't care what people do when we are not raiding as a guild.

I do care when people are online and not in a raid but they are PvP'ing or doing something else rather than being in the raid. We classify ourselves as a raiding guild. We do not want to be a casual guild. So while I understand that its a game, we want people that have the same view as the current officers and my wife and I do, which is be the best you can be.

Thank you guys for the comments so far.

[Theotherone]

Yeah, I understand. Sometimes, guilds get reps for being real hardcore rule oriented guilds that leave little time for players to have some fun too. Once that rep gets out there (ture or untrue) recruiting suffers. Since that doesn't seem to be the case with you all, you're probably just running into the universal healer shortage. On my Realm it's a tank and healer shortage.

As stated, Dual spec is one way to go - pally's and druids. My guild has done that, but we're also leveling alts to fill the gaps.

Cold winter days and nights may also help with the issue.

[Bulldogslob]

Yeah we have a lot of fun, and we are easy going but we do take our raiding seriously. I can't wait till fall!

[Llyrian]

I think that Cider has released a couple useful podcasts on this type of issue. You might want to have a listen to some of those.

Also, recruitment before fall or before summer is often a very useful way to offset this kind of missing players. Take a preventative method.

To get to the crux of the question: How do you recruit good healers?

Run 5 mans, learn who preforms well. Often excellent players exist in in very small guilds who only play casually because they dont have a reason to raid. Finding those players sounds like one in a million, but theyre out there.

Beyond that, poaching, or getting lucky, try to recruit before the seasons shift.

[bludwork]

Less rules, more recruiting imo. If you want to be a competitive raiding guild, you should always make sure you have members to field a raid. People who can show up > people who show up randomly, you pretty much want to build a raiding crew, of raiders .. I'm speaking from experience btw but focus more on getting raiders who can raid and less on the loot.

Your guild is not an epic vendor, you do not solely exist to give out loot or gear up someones toon with the shiniest epics. Find a set of loot rules that work, dkp or council etc and stick with it. As long as you can find that magic 20-30 people who buy into that you can sustain your raiding guild and get some progression going.

[Fleshcraft]

My girlfriend and I have also been running our own guild for just over a year. (Crimson :: Horde :: Gurubashi). We have run into similar problems but have had a fair bit of success in keeping raiding going for the past 14 months.

I had a couple questions and maybe some suggestions.

How many days a week do you raid?
Are the bulk of the people who leave the guild just quiting the game? or moving on to another guild?
How many "core raider" positions do you have?
When you are not recruiting, how many people are sitting out every raid?

My guild runs a 3 day raid schedule. Because we only raid 3 days and want to clear all content we expect everyone to make all 3 days. We run with a raiding roster of 28-29 raiders. This means that only 3-4 people can miss a given raid which does happen during some holidays but we have a good selections of "friends/members" to choose from on most nights.

My suggestions without reading any answers to the above questions would be to keep recruiting until you have 27-28 people showing up to every raid. This way, if you have 1 or 2 people leave your raids don't stop all together and cause a chain effect or gquits.

I'm sure most guilds have had similar problems this summer. We decided to take a summer break of 1months, to give longtime members a chance to do other things. It's hard to expect people not in a top 5 guild to raid constantly for years on end.

[hola_adios]

Personally, I would never stay on a guild with a loot system as yours. But this is just personal.

As someone said, pre-emptive recruiting is a good idea right before summer/Christmas.

And I would listen to some of the postcads from Cider.

[Bulldogslob]

We raid 25's 4 nights a week for 4 hours a night. The rest of the week is 10 man raids which are optional to go to. We only lost the 3 people that are not playing anymore. The others just move on to other guilds, guilds that are usually not as good as ours according to progression websites like wow-heroes or wowprogress. I believe that we have a bunch of casual players that we are trying to push hardcore rules on them since the guild was originally a casual raiding guild. We have had our rules but never really enforced them in the past. This past week we are now enforcing our rules and people are starting to show up and get their enchants done like we want. The officers, my wife and I all want to run the guild hardcore. This is one of the steps we believe is necessary to do this. The rules are not that hard to achieve but definitely separates the casual player from the hardcore players.

We have three levels of raid ranks, Trail, Raider and Core Raider. After we enforced the rules of attendance and proper enchants according to be.imba.hu we were left with only 4 Core Raiders, and 3 Raiders. The rest of the guild was pushed down to trial and the members not geared for the content were put at Non-active which don't get raid invites. This was done on the 23rd of Aug. Since then within days we are getting people properly enchanted and more attendance is happening. Last night we had to as suggested above move some main specs to healing specs, which worked we filled our raid and downed the first boss in CoS 25. We also had great progression on the 2nd boss in ToC 25. We have also recruited several new healers and the spirit of the raids have improved.

Overall all of your posts have helped us and we seem to have things going much better now. It is amazing how just one person can really change everything in your guild. It only takes 1 person to bring down the spirit of the raid.

We are still on a long journey to success but we are making it there. We are on a highly competitive realm US Kel'Thuzad. Our rank right now according to wow-heroes is 34th which is not that bad on our realm.

Our biggest thing we are making sure we are doing now is to really talk to the people that want to join the guild. Before we just invited people. Now we talk to them in vent and make sure they understand what kinda guild they are joining and what we expect out of them. Even though recruiting is down, when we do get someone we know they are here for the right reasons and not just to be casual.

I have not heard any of Cider's postcads which I will be looking for right after I post this.