Forged Alliance

greetings! we've been contacted by a thunderlord guild by the name of the mediocre men to see if we can work out some sort of solution to our collective raiding issues. at the moment, they are the most progressed alliance guild on the combined servers, but they are also having issues fielding a consistent raid every week. their raid times are tuesday - thursday 7-11 server, which is actually a lot earlier than i thought due to the fact that time zones are confusing.

from what i gather, their primary needs are a tank and a healer, but potentially also dps. two suggestions that have been put forth is to run a joint 10 person raid with our combined 16-18 raiders and bench people, or try to get enough for 25, with the eventual goal of having a solid mythic group for wod. i said that we may have a couple people that can help out on wednesdays and would solicit feedback to see what everyone thinks about the idea in general, hence this post. i'm going to withhold my opinions on the topic for the moment to see what people think first, assuming anyone has an opinion one way or the other.

My personal opinions are:

Near Term: Currently, we just have Eric missing, Valdun missing, and Michelle in school. Otherwise, our own guild raiding roster would be sufficient and we would be benching 2-3 people per week just on our own. I'm not that concerned with a raid cancelled every once in a while when people are missing (e.g., Robert was out this week, but that's an irregular event).

Middle Term: When the pre-WoD patch hits and Siege of Orgrimmar goes mystic 20, we will be short. My opinion is that if we have already 14/14H cleared before mystic lands, then I don't care. If we have not already 14/14H cleared when mystic SoO lands, I'm pretty sure those guys will be 14/14H and they will have alts or other partially motivated people to backfill our own roster.

Long Term: I don't think we're going to clear heroic (the new normal) tier 17 Draenor raids super fast (we barely cleared tier 14 normal when it was current). I'm pretty sure various people will come back when WoD hits and with the new scaling raid sizes, we shouldn't have to bench people when we fire up tier 17, so people will be inclined to stick around. We can see if getting 20 people is going to be a problem (or if we'll be even remotely capable of raiding at mystic level).

Historically, we tried running joint raids in WotLK and those were not pleasant. Those guys are 11/14H and their expectations for super high performance raiding may not be in line with how we do things. I'm inclined to wait until we get feedback about their raiding environment from people that backfill into their raid.

-HP

I'd be willing to, "test the waters", as it were. Earlier raid time seems nice for me lately being that I'm up at the buttcrack of dawn M-F.

I am just a new guy, but here is what I have. Mediocre Men are from my server. I am familiar with them. They have always have had a solid progression team. As far as I know they are good players.

As far as the raid times....personally I decided to try to join this guild because of the later time. Later for me anyway. It fits with my work schedule.