Are you serious? Only helping the raid leader? I'm pretty sure it also helps the rest of the raid team when they actually get to have a raid when one person is on holiday/ill etc. etc.

Having extra raiders can actually help every person in the raid team. It is very common for one or two people in a 10 man to not be able to show. The alternative to having a roster of 11 or 12 is to PuG or cancel the raid. Cancelling raids wastes the time of every raider who did show up and it breeds resentment on the person who didn't/couldn't show for that reason.

Yes it sucks to be a bench warmer, but to not want to be in any sort of raid rotation is unrealistic.

We run our 25 man raids with a roster of around 30 raiders (and more casual players who will sub in if we need them, they want to be standby and not core players). We often have 2-3 people who we need to sit for the night. We try to substitute fairly. We haven't cancelled a raid in over 9 months and it keeps our guild very stable even in tough times. Very few raid groups with the exact right number of raiders could say that.

I will tell you one thing, I would have quit my raiding group early if I started getting benched (although I wouldn't make a fuss, I would just tell the raid leader that I was leaving to look either for a more permanent position, or for another game entirely).

It never came to that, though. I was one of the tanks, in a raid team that didn't have any extra tanks (so, no way to be benched), but were all tanks took pains to appear on time, or, in the rare case one of us wouldn't be able to make it, warn with at least one day of forewarning, so we could get an alt/PUGger early.