5.2, Raid Rosters, and Expectations.

Patch 5.2 is most likely going to drop next week or if not next week, then extremely likely the week after that. I have fielded a few questions or answered side queries that are rather similar and to better address the topics, they are summarized here.

5.2 and ilevel requirements
You have almost certainly noticed the scaling requirement of ilevel for entry or success in LFR or normal mode raid instances, respectively:

LFR: MSV (460), HoF & Terrace (470), Patch 5.2 ToT (480)
10m: MSV (470), HoF & Terrace (480), Patch 5.2 ToT (490)

What is less intuitive is the encounter difficulty tuning which has scaled up since Cata. (You can find a link about that at: link.) Which has an impact on you depending on your raidcraft. If you tend to over-perform your raidcraft (raid awareness and performance throughput - hps or dps or tanking), you can get by with lower ilevel in normal mode and if you tend to under-perform your raidcraft, you need more ilevel and gear to compensate. Which is to simply say that some people may need 490-495 ilevel to effectively contribute to downing a boss in 5.2 raid and some may need 500-505 ilevel to effectively contribute to downing the same boss. Plan accordingly.


Raid Rosters
As we said several weeks ago, in order to be effective and efficient as a guild in downing content in the new 5.0-5.1-5.2 tier 14+tier 15 available content, we are forming rosters not only based on committed availability but now also on performance - raidcraft.

You can expect Wabbyt's Ronin Dragons to pretty much stay in tact as a roster. Same for Bear's Ronin Bears (we are going to need to add another hunter or rogue to the roster).

Gray has secured enough critical mass of interest in having a Wed/Fri group that starts earlier and ends earlier that that roster will add a few more people and likely recruit remaining positions where we do not have enough raiders with committed availability for those times and the required raidcraft. This is essentially the same Ronin Tigers with a schedule change and minor roster changes. Gray will lead the Ronin Tigers.

Doomwombat will pick up the full role of raid leading the Fri/Sat group and will consolidate the members of the Ronin Tigers that cannot transition to the new schedule under a new group's name (TBD). At this time, depending on how many people we have on hand and how many we are able to recruit, there is a very high likelihood that this will not flesh out into a full ronin raid group until a few weeks into the new patch content and will be initially mostly a pug/social group.

Expectations
We are committed, of course, to supporting all raiders or people interested in raiding to being able to raid; however, the 'new normal' encounter difficulty tuning means people have to step up their raid craft, or expect to be pugging / LFRing until their raidcraft is at a suitable level where they can be an effective contributor to downing a boss.

On progression fights, by very definition, there is no room to carry anyone. Everyone has to be a contributor.

Manage your expectations - if you have been dying frequently and forcing the raid to burn its only battle rez, or dying after the brez has been burned and preventing a kill due to insufficient dps, or you have been forcing mana pools to empty out due to taking far too much unnecessary damage, or your healing has forced the group to 3-heal 2-healer encounters, or your tanking is not where it needs to be, expect to be pugging / LFRing until your raid craft improves. This is not done to be mean nor to exclude you - it is done so that the group can have a chance of progression.

Simply put, if you are performing reasonably within range with others in your role, expect to raid in the guild groups. If you are performing below the reasonable grouping of others in your role and they are doing an encounter that is challenging the group, expect to sit it out and make other plans.

Blizzard has said they fully expect many guilds to still be clearing tier 14 in order to stack enough gear on their raid members to have a shot at downing bosses in ToT (patch 5.2) - they have purposefully tuned 5.2 harder than 5.1. If you are having difficulties clearing Terrace or HoF content, PLEASE manage your expectations so that your group is not assuming you are going to skip tier 14 and just start clearing content in tier 15 (which is basically what most guilds did in Cata - skipped BWD, BoT, Tot4W and went straight into FL and DS instead).

As a benchmark, my group - Ronin Bears - will still be doing tier 14 in the first weeks of Tier 15 release. Yes, we will also go 'see' Tier 15 content each week as appropriate to gauge how close we are to clearing it, however, we have a present estimate of dps needing to be about 75-80k a piece in order to get to 110-120k a piece with the +50% buff.

You have probably noticed the trend:

• for MSV full clears, you want to be doing over 50k dps
• for HoF full clears, you want to be doing over 60k dps
• for Terrace full clears, you want to be doing over 70k dps
• and from the PTR, for ToT, you want to be doing over 80k dps

Manage your expectations. Either you are performing reasonably at par for your class in your role or you are not. If your group has an opening that night and they have challenging content to do, they will almost certainly bring a pug that can effectively contribute instead of someone in guild that is significantly under performing right now.

For those of you that have been raiding for years, this is nothing new. However, over the past 3 months we have seen a fair bit of expectation that people are raiding regardless of how they performed the previous week because of the guild tag. Please discard that thinking. To be clear, going forward raid seats are filled with performance and availability, guildies first, then non-guildies - but always with performance and availability first.

To join any of the raid groups, contact their raid leader.