Ah the Group 2 problem. What a sad and illustrious history it has. It generally consisting of B-List raiders who do not appear to be as active or as skilled as Group 1 (yet). Back in the day (when Kara was THEE instance to run), Group 2 was like the middle sibling in the Guild. They would always be overshadowed by the elder group. Every week, Group 1 would continue to link their swag in Guild chat. Eventually, it comes to a point where Group 2 (or the reject group) feels demoralized without the desire to raid any more because they feel they aren’t “good enough”.
Would it be accurate to say that the above experience happens to all Guilds? No. But I suspect that it happens to most casual raiding Guilds (the hardcore raiding Guilds don’t have such a problem since they advance through Kara at roughly the same pace).
From what I’ve seen in the past, Group 1 consisted of the most keenest raiders who shot to 70 within a week or two, spent another week gearing up their characters, and then straight dove into Kara while the rest of the Guild lagged behind a littl bit because they were unable to keep up with that pace.
How do I deal with it?
As a Guild leader, you have several options. At this stage of a Guild, Karazhan is now on farm. But the problem with Group 2 needs to be isolated. It could range from insufficient gear, bad players, bad raid leader, etc. Personally, I think the main problem is that the Group sets their expectations way too high and consequently feels bad when they fail to meet them. You need to reassure them that your Group 1 did go through the same problems. They went through the very same frustrations as Group 2 has done.
Shuffle Players
Take a few core players from Group 1 and insert them and see if there is a marked improvement. Maybe the tank isn’t able to sustain that kind of damage. Maybe your healer isn’t capable of healing said damage. Maybe the DPS isn’t delivering. Ideally, instead of one overpowered group and one underpowered group, you’ll now have two equally powered groups with roughly the same skill and power set. Obviously, you can’t expect Prince or Nightbane shutouts immediately. It’ll still take some time. Lower Karazhan needs to be farmed sufficiently before Upper Karazhan be negotiated with (I consider lower Kara as every boss up to and including Chess except for Nightbane, Netherspite, and Illhoof).
Problem with that then is that the Group 1 players will feel a little pressure and frustration. All the hard bosses that they have farmed with ease now present a significant challenge. Zero-day Kara runs are no longer a possibility (Runs that are done in under a day I term as zero-day since it usually requires zero effort). It requires a lot of patience on the part of everyone. If all the players just grind through it and stick with it, then crosshair on Gruul will come next.
Large announcement coming later in the evening… stay tuned
Ahh yes, I was in group two on my mage and we went through the issues. But the main issue was lack of commitment from our guild. people from guild didn’t want to go with group two..till we started trying prince. But at that time group two consisted of half guildies and half nont-guildies. Well we chose not to dump those non guildies that had stuck with us through the good and bad and that upset the guild (the same guild who gave zero support in teh beginning). All of a sudden we were bringing down the guild. Group 1 was ready for Gruul and Mag and group 1 made sure to schedule Gruul and Mag on group twos days to go to Kara.
Needless to say, me and 4 other guild friends (group2) quit and rerolled on another server. (we were horde on a heavy alliace server so no other guilds fit.
We are about to become group 2 on the new server with a new guild. Lets hope this goes better but at least we have a bigger pop to choose guilds from this time around around if things dont go well.
Dude… quit spying on my guild. 🙂
I will say that I don’t think it was a lack of skill… just a lack of gear.
Theres always a variety of reasons for why Group 2 will fail. But regardless of the reason, it seems to happen. =(
The great thing is that Group 1 seems to always complain about is that they’re never able to do Gruul because half the raid doesn’t NEED kara anymore and the other half isn’t able to survive because of… like you said, lack of gear.
Group 2, the illfated group 2. With my old guild Group 2 started as the filler group and ended up being the progress group. But there are ongoing problems with that name “group 2”. With a new guild and a new outlook I find a few ways to fix things..FIRST don’t name them group 1 and group 2..let people decide what names they want their group to be…personally we use Team Panda and Team Charlie. People in both groups seem to be happy, and progressing at a good rate, with neither group being dominant at the moment. Its a nice change.
Make sure that you spread your most geared players out, it might slow their progression, but remind them that it gets them into the 25 mans faster and somehow they will find a way to get on.
Personally, I think Alpha Team and Bravo Team have a nice ring to it. But that’s too much Clancy for me speaking.
Your probably not going to have that problem so much anymore but if you are here’s my suggestions
Tanks
Prot warrior+Druid or prot pally is pretty sweet combo. Prot Warriors can single tank better then any class in the game IMO. Druids and Prot pally’s are awesome at multi mob tanking.
Healers
This is the big problem especially for Karazhan. So many guilds go into Kara undergeared and stack priests early on because they can shackle undead. What ends up happening is your second group is stuck without and shackles.
DPS
Bringing 4 Warlocks is not acceptable. I remember doing a Kara with my Alt Lock and they had brought 4 locks because there “THE BESTEST DPS” needless to say I left the group fast. All classes are valuble except Ret Pallies 😀
My first Kara experiance was with a group consisting of
Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
BM Hunter
MM Hunter
Enhancement Shammy
Frost Mage
Affliction Lock
Rogue
Holy Pally
Resto Shaman
Resto Shaman
It was a pug group and we were the first ones on the server to down Prince.
That group became a guild after because our respective guilds were to busy stacking groups
Yeah, we have been having troubles with our “group 2” for a while now.
Our problem is that in our guild, all the senior officers run in group 1 and are now overgeared for the place. But they wont split up and support 2 groups, so we end up with a group that barely scrapes together enough tanks and healers to make a go of it. Then the officers want to gear up thier alts, they do it coasting through on group 1 being carried through the instance rather tahn working for it again with group 2.
Finally, while group 2 has made 3 different attepts to get off the ground, we only ever get 1 attack at kara, because inevitably, one of the senior officers scuttles it by gkicking one of our essential tanks/healers, or tying them up in heroics when we scedule kara runs.
Then we have to listen to these same officers bitch and moan about how they only have 11 geared players that are ready to do 25man raids, and why are the rest of us so slow and lazy??
Time for a new guild I think… 🙁
(Not to sound like a /roll blame guy, but we have an officer to spy for us. we KNOW they are scuttling on purpose, mostly to be spiteful to one or two other players in group 2, and we cant get rid of those officers, so its a rock/hard place thing to stay, but all of our group 2 recruits are minimally kara geared, and we dont have a lot of options anymore, everyone wants better geared recruits than we can field 🙁 )
John: I would totally bug out of that guild.