This deserves more discussion. One of the difficult balances a leader has to manage is the number of tanks required in a raid, or the guild, as a proportion of the total guild.

The problem is largely caused by the ratio required of tanks to others:

• In 5-mans, you need one tank  (1:4 ratio).
• In 10-mans you need two (1:4 ratio again).
• In 25-mans, you need three (1:7.3 ratio), but mostly you need two tanks (1:11.5 ratio).
• I wrote about this in my Ulduar guide, highlighting the tank requirements varying between 10 and 25-mans.

That’s half as many tanks for 25-man raiding as for 10-mans.

The problems this brings are manyfold:

• if you are changing from being a 10-man to 25-man guild you need to make sure your tanks are the most hardcore reliable players, so you can swap in/out everyone else
• or you can have more tanks than you need, to allow for casual playstyle, yet accepting the consequence that each tanks’ gear will be lesser and possibly some will be benched on a night
• growing a guild from a 10-man raid to 25-man raid guild distorts your recruitment needs to not more tanks, but more of everyone else. So during the growth period you might run 10-man raids but not have enough for a 2nd 10-man, and get disgrunted players. You can’t just instantly go from a roster for 10s into 20s, so this growth period can be awkward.
• running two 10-mans in one night requires more tanks than you’d usually have in a 25-man raid, so sometimes a 25-man guild can’t do two 10’s because of tank shortages. This limits your options when laying out a raiding calendar.

Also tanks need to be amongst the better players in your guild. They need more situational awareness, better reaction time, often more leadership personal characteristics. Luckily, you don’t need a lot of tanks, but good ones can be hard to find.

Tanks tend to stick with their guild, they’re not chopped and changed so freely as deeps, which in turn means a tank will guard his raid slot more. He’ll try to attend more nights and be more active.

No doubt, dual-spec helps us all with this problem, but doesn’t solve it. Tanks want to tank. Personally, I don’t enjoy dps. So this complicates the roster management for leadership, since you are juggling people’s personal desires too.

Point is: the divergence of ratios between tanks:rest whilst a guild is growing from 5, 10 to 25 man raiding is a pain in the ass for guild leadership.

Here’s the blue post that reminded me of this prevalent issue. » continue reading