Do you call the raid before it even starts?

Zul'Aman. Not for the ill of heart, or for the blue of gear.

Our two best geared and most experienced raiding healers were unavailable for the raid, so we went with a reasonable guild holy priest, reasonable friendly resto druid, and a pretty entry level guild holy priest.

Clear to Nalorakk. Do quite poorly. Once. Twice. Three times.

Ok, what's the deal. Seems like the healers are out of mana very quickly. I'm no expert on healing gear and such, but I figure I'll take a look see.

A quickie inspection of the entry level guild holy priest shows generally blue gear, with a couple PvP epics. This is expected, what with him being relatively entry level to raiding.

However, a wise man once said "expect the unexpected"....

1) Empty Meta Gem slot
2) Grand total of one (1) enchant
3) Riding Crop equipped
4) Medallion of the Alliance equipped

So I ask on voice if he's wearing his PvP set by accident.

No, these are the only two trinkets I have. I haven't really worked on this guy.

ZOM-mutha-f'ing-G

After ensuring my hand was no where near my mic activation button, a brief outburst of ranting the likes of which R. Lee Ermey the Gunny Sgt would approve of.

Clearly, this toon should not be raiding ZA. Barely even Kara. Just on principle.

Me and the GM discuss via whispers and after the raid, give a little pep talk about the benefits of enchants and other such gear enhancements.


So now I wonder how to deal with this going forward.

Do I inspect unknown/new-ish folks prior to the raid? Before invites?

If I make a stink and assert that a person is clearly unprepared, we would have been faced with calling the raid.

Would it have been better to not raid at all that night, than to struggle on Nalorakk but kill him eventually, and then struggle through the gauntlet but make it to the boss, and then wipe on Akil'zon until the scheduled end of the raid time?

Do I make the reason for not including a person in a raid public? To do so would reinforce to the other raiders how important ship shape gear is, but it also might publicly humiliate the person being singled out.

In the end, I wasn't sure if I was just in a generally cranky mood yesterday or if my anger was appropriate. Although I did share my thoughts on enchants with the team, I only shared my level of upset with the GM/RL, and he agrees we need to prevent this from occurring.

I've never minded wiping before, but knowing we were wiping while people were clearly leaving massive amounts of capability right there for the taking, probably my most frustrating raid to date. The guild needs to put steps in place to ensure that our wipes are because we're doing challenging content with well prepared people, not because we're doing things well within our grasp but we're just not doing the basics to achieve that.

The question is how do we make that happen?