My raid group has faced a very similar issue, but thankfully it has been less of a contentious issue for us. As far as I can tell, everyone is reasonably happy with the course of action that we are pursuing, which is Option 6.

We were in a similar state to the raid group mentioned in this article, in that we took quite awhile to hit our stride. We probably had 6 steady raid members for quite awhile, with almost half the raid changing on a regular basis. We were stuck on Beth'tilac for a very long time, and we had about 10 weeks where the only boss we killed was Shannox because of that difficulty. The week before the FL nerf, we tried Rhyolith for the first time and kill him in just a couple of attempts. The first week post-nerf, we went 6/7.

Once we'd started downing more bosses on a regular basis, our attendance improved somewhat and we had at least 8 consistent players from one week to the next. However, it still took us until the very night before the 4.3 patch dropped to kill Rag. That's right -- we downed him on the last possible day of 4.2. (*whew*)

I think the reason for this is because the Ragnaros fight doesn't have a lot of margin for error. Even though most of our group knew the fight fairly well (or at least the first two phases of it), the turnover that we were experiencing in our last 2 slots was enough to ensure that one or two people were usually dead by the time we got to the second transition. That transition is rough with all 10 people up, but with a dps and a healer down, it become much, much more difficult. It wasn't until we were able to spend some significant time working on Rag with the same group that we were finally able to down him.

Because we had so many weeks with only one FL boss kill, we got a late start on our first legendary. We are a 10-man group, and so the item collection pacing is significantly slower than it is for a 25-man raid. Even though our raid member who is working on the staff has had almost perfect attendance, he is just finishing up collecting his 1000 seething cinders tonight. Hopefully that means we should have our first legendary in about 10 weeks from now.

The whole time that we have been working on Firelands, I've been trying to make the point that the legendary is a team effort and a team accomplishment that will benefit our whole raid group in a substantial way. I've tried to talk about the legendary that *we* are working on, and how close *we* are to finishing it. I think that our raid group has seen it in that light, too. I think that our raid group mostly feels the same way about it, which is great. They know that even though we are continuing to work on outdated content, it will still yield a significant benefit to our team's progress in Dragon Soul when we are able to finally complete it, since it will be a huge dps boost to our raid as a whole. Not only that, but it will be an accomplishment that we can point to with pride.

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