It's also a measure of the skill of the other 9/24 people you run with. It is not fun building a raiding guild up, and getting all of the bosses down only to find out that half of your new recruits can't cut it on something difficult. You work hard and it seems people are working out but none of the content until Sarth3D is hard enough to really figure out who has skill and who doesn't.

Sorry pal, you consistently put out 4k dps, and you helped us progress but you can't seem to avoid a freaking wall of flame, or a shadow fissure to save your life. Adios.

Someone who pulls 4k DPS and dies in the first 15 seconds of the fight contributes close to nothing. Dead DPS = No DPS. This person is dead weight. Someone who pulls 3k DPS and survives the encounter is a useful contribution to the team.

The 3k guy may not have the needed DPS for some encounters, but a dead 4k guy doesn't either.

Numbers aren't everything.

"Numbers aren't everything."

Of course not. My point was that it seemed they were pulling their weight until we got to something hard, and since everything else is so easy it is hard to weed out the poor players earlier.

I'm not really sure it's such a matter of being skilled. I mean, if you can push buttons in a specific order, and be able to react to things happening around you, you can eventually down anything in this game. It just takes effort to learn to push your buttons well.

People that beat the harder instances in this game are not more skilled, other than possibly having better eye-hand coordination.

I would paraphrase PhantomX and say "your members decide whether you are hardcore or not". These problems existed for many guilds in vanilla and in BC.

In BC, my guild didn't have a problem with getting through Kara but got stuck on Gruul and Mag. We had the same problem you describe, only with Kara -- it became our comfort zone that we could always clear. We could fill three groups most weeks for Kara, but after a few months of wiping on the 25 mans, it was hard to get people together for one night a week. We downed them just enough times to keep coming back, but reached a tipping point where we started going backwards. Motivated raiders frustrated by our lack of progress left for other guilds once they topped out their gear, but we always had an influx of new players because we were friendly and all had our Kara epics, so new raiders would get instant gratification. Ultimately we were just stuck on Kara two nights a week and couldn't even get Gruul attempts going. The GL finally disbanded the guild.

I'm telling this story because I'm convinced that player enthusiasm will determine whether your guild is going to move farther up the progression ladder, not the policies that Scott suggests. If half of your players aren't interested, you can't cajole them into progress. If a guild split is in your future, better to figure it out now, while you still have time to regroup or find a new home before the expansion then during the first week of 3.1.