Officer Stuffs: The Sub Solution

In my last post, I outlined the issues I've had to deal with regarding our brand-new, shiny Sub position.

1. Rotations are Out Of The Question.  Our raid team is used to having guaranteed raid spots after 3 years and people tend to get set in their ways.
2. Our guild leader point-blank refused to disallow people from pugging raids in case we needed them.
3. Our realm is epically dreadful and at the beginning of Cataclysm, 2/3 of the top guilds migrated offrealm, changing the recruitment pool from "Maybe we'll interest someone reasonably good who wants a lighter raiding schedule" to "Maybe we'll find someone who can log in all by himself on his first try if we're lucky.  Maybe.".

 With the combination of the first two points, there was only one real solution:  Another raid lockout every week to gear subs.  Now, in WotLK this would easily have been solved with one of our standard 25man pugs.  But, alas, with the changes to raiding lockouts in Cata, this was not an option.  Letting the subs pug by themselves was also not really an option - what if their group cleared a boss that we were working on in heroic that we suddenly needed them for?  And asking them to wait until Monday (we raid Wednesday and Sunday) to pug is just cruel - most Monday/Tuesday pugs end in a trash wipe and name-calling before you even see the first boss.  Eventually we decided on a third raid night on Mondays - optional for anyone who has raided on one of the Official days, to which those of us who were locked could bring raid-ready alts and at which socials were welcome.

We started off with a bang, netting 2 zomgawesome new apps and using the third night for progression.  Soon one of our main raiders had to resign from the raid team due to real life problems and we replaced him with a DK we'd been courting for a while (he'd been emergency-subbing for us for around 8 months, maybe 9).  Shortly after, we lost one of our zomgamazing new apps, who realised a 3days a week raid roster and a socially-minded guild was just not for him and went offrealm to a 5day a week progression guild.

We realised that rotations were going to be the only thing that would save us from losing our last, solitary sub and decided to do rotations on a voluntary basis, and night-by-night, rather than week-by-week.  This wound up being a solid solution that everyone was happy except for one or two teensy, tiny little details:  Our sub was a dps, and of the 5 people who volunteered to be rotated, only one was a dps.  The rest were the healers and a tank.  We arranged this such that one of our dps brought a tank alt when the tank was afk and one of our dps had to pick up a heal offspec.  It was a bit messy, but we handled it for a few weeks.  Then one of our raiders had a work-schedule change and could no longer make Wednesdays and took a drop to social and then we had a nice stable 10 again.

We decided to leave it there for a bit, kept the Monday as an option for progression and procrastinated a bit more on the alt runs.  Shortly after, we realised that we did, in fact, need subs, and started actively recruiting for the first time ever.  Shortly before we got in some new recruits, we started up the alt/sub run, albeit sans subs.

This turned out to be a great move for the guild.  We had to pug some people, which has netted us some new out-of-guild friends to replace the old ones who transfered offrealm, and even a promising new holy paladin recruit.  So far the alt/sub run has 5/6 BWD normal, 4/4 BoT normal and 1/5 BoT heroic.

I'm thinking of branching the alt/sub run out into 25s to make more contacts, but I must admit the very idea of pugging even one person on our realm positively terrifies me.  Any raid where we have spots that need to be pugged usually start with an argument about who is going to be the poor sod who has to hit up trade (I swear just by typing /join trade you can feel your IQ drop by 10 points before you even hit enter).