Raiding Crop

If you've been reading along, you know that my guild is at the tail end of switching over from being a mostly 50-70 levelling guild to a casual Kara raiding guild. Casual? I don't really know what it means, but I suppose the general thought is 2 or 3 nights in Kara per week. Not too insane about progress, but we do want to get a nice routine going and see where it goes from there.

We have a reasonably stable team going right now, and seem to be getting 2 scheduled, well-attended runs per week, and then maybe one aborted run that never starts off due to attendance or availability of subs. Our policy is that if 7 of the 10 team members are on at start time, we try to fill in the run from the guild, or if necessary, friends or PUGs.

With some recent member resignations, a big source of some discontent has gone, so there's substantially less QQ on guild chat. Also, with more runs happening, there've been more people getting to go on a run, sometimes getting some phat lewtz, or at least just being included, which is buying us more time to fill out a second team. Alliance Priests on Terokkar, pst Amava por favor :-)

All in all, its really nice to see progress, both in bosses and organization. Being the proactive little busy beaver that I am, I'm thinking of the next steps. Wednesday's Kara run pretty much sparked this in my mind.

No big surprise, but I'm willing to say that Attumen is pretty easy for our core team. We've taken Moroes down, but its really tough, and definitely not a sure thing. Wednesday night we only had 2 healers, so we tried bringing in another warrior to tank some of Moroes' dinner guests while we burned them down.

For this run, we were missing one of our normal DPS members, so we filled in with another Hunter from the guild. While buffing up after a wipe, I take a look at the Violation damage report. I see the other hunter is doing roughly half the damage output that the lead two DPS'ers are doing. Now, I don't advocate fighting bragging about damage meter positions, but there's a clear message here, and we're having a DPS problem.

First off, he's got a Bear with him. A bear. I've run with him a bunch in the past, he had a Raptor for a while. But here's his bear.

Then I inspect. F-ing Riding Crop is equipped. In Kara.

I look at the enchants. A mix mash of good enchants, absent enchants, and wrong enchants. At least wrong for raiding.

The gear is basically a poorly enchanted PvP rig. The guy's got 3k more health than I do.

Now, on to my mental struggle.

We've clearly got a problem here. But the thing the guild does not really have at this point is any atmosphere of invites being based upon performance. And we also do not really have any established process for reviewing gear/spec/performance and providing criticism.

My quandry is in how to begin forming that atmosphere?

If we cleared Moroes, I would feel a lot less concerned. But we didn't. We wiped thrice. Lack of DPS was not the only reason, but it is a big big part of it.

I'd really love to shape the culture such that its perfectly acceptable for me to offer up some ideas for necessary changes to this guy's setup before his next invite, backing it up with WWS report data, without seeming like a dick who's barking unsolicited orders.

So my question is...how can I go about getting that sort of atmosphere in place? Its clear that performance needs to be raised, so I'm looking more for the soft or people side of how to go about setting the expectation that your performance IS being reviewed, and in extreme cases, you WILL need to change or else not get to play.