Every now and then a boss fight comes along that is known as "the guild breaker." 25-man Heroic Ragnaros justifiably earned this title. The last time this moniker was used as extensively was in Sunwell for M'uru. Sure there were tough fights in Wrath, but nothing like Sunwell, and certainly nothing like Heroic Ragnaros.

The difficult issue many guilds faced, and the very one that we did, was a choice between returning the commitment of dedication versus the very real prospect of stagnation. For us, it came down to clearly defining a starting roster, one which left many raiders on the sideline feeling marginalized by the guild.

Why should this be a problem for a progression guild? Big Crits has always been able to strike a balance between progression and fun. We raid on a very limited schedule, we keep a healthy roster that allows for depth without too much bench time, and it used to be that we did our best to rotate people around to maximize the fun for everyone.

Every raiding roster has top players and bottom players. Some guilds look to replace these bottom players immediately, while others will keep them around because they are good, reliable people who will be present 100% of the time, even if they underperform. This was the balance I sought to strike in Big Crits: to keep around good, reliable people, even if they underperform, and rotate them in when I could. This was an unwritten, but well-understood guild philosophy here as well.

And then came Ragnaros

Heroic Ragnaros changed this. Or rather, we knew we had to change in order to defeat this boss. After a few weeks of pulling the boss and seeing just how tightly tuned the fight was, we started keeping track of unnecessary deaths. It became immediately apparent who were our most raid-aware players, and who was lacking. By combining the deaths with the DPS output (I'll address tanks and healers below) the officers were able to create a priority list for raid spots.

Any hardcore progression guild does this, even a progression-minded guild such as Big Crits does this to an extent, and in other tiers it wasn't a problem to balance play time for everyone. For example, in ICC, a full clear took a good chunk of time, because you had 11 bosses to go through before getting to the Lich King. Tier 11 was similar, with three instances and 13 hard-mode bosses, so we could rotate people around, spread out the play time, and then pull a select group of raiders for the progression boss du jour.

Not so in Firelands. With a 6/7 HM clear taking three--maybe four--hours pre-nerf, and then taking less than two hours post-nerf, if a raider was on the bottom of the priority list for Heroic Ragnaros, their time in the raid became extremely limited. Thus, the opportunity to reward a raider's dedication by getting them in was limited to one of two scenarios: in for one boss where they needed loot, or in for heroic Rags only if we had no other replacements. In other words, it became crystal clear that they were backup players.

Raiders want to raid. You wouldn't be on a progression team if you didn't want to fight for your spot on every single pull. I respect this. In fact, I demand it to some extent from our raiders. Any raider worth their salt, who is sitting on the sidelines for the majority of raid time, will quickly become frustrated.

We chose to kill heroic Ragnaros and by doing so we chose to sideline people that we like--people that I care about—and as a direct result of these choices those people were left feeling marginalized.

Specifically

We started the tier with four tanks, and after many weeks of observation, discussions, and analysis, three of those tanks took a back seat and we moved a healer into a main tank role. Only two tanks are required for heroic Rags, and ideally you want them to be the same tanks for the sake of consistency. Our two new main tanks had the best combination of consistency, attendance, awareness, leadership initiative, and synergy. That was awesome for the guild as a whole to have these two at the front, but what about the others? Three people marginalized for the sake of progression.

These are three people who I like. Two of whom I partied with at Blizzcon (we had 29 Big Critters at the 'con), and all of whom have shown their dedication to the guild, in fact one of them was one in the very first round of invites that went out to start Big Crits in March 2010; a founding member marginalized for the sake of progress.

Healers were another unique situation. We went into the tier with eight healers. Post-nerf we were running four healers except for Beth'tilac and Baleroc. The majority of our 289 heroic Ragnaros pulls were with only four healers, though we eventually killed it with just three. The three healer comp required a very specific setup, which meant that our Resto Shaman was sat for a majority of the time, as were a few others. In fact, the only way we got our Resto Shaman the Firelord title was by bringing him in as Elemental. Again, more raiders marginalized for the sake of progression.

As for DPS, we refined the fight so well that for the last few weeks, only two things mattered for DPS: survivability, and your output in Phase 3. If you couldn't avoid unnecessary deaths or if you couldn't pump out at least 29k (the bar was variable, based on class) for the first 100 seconds of phase three, then we didn't want you in the raid. (The 100 seconds was the amount of time you had to push phase four before a second meteor came down.) We took our analysis of DPS even deeper, looking at cooldown usage and DoT uptime in order to find out who merely knew their class, and who was really truly maximizing at an intensely hardcore progression level.

This process left a few dedicated raiders in a lurch. They became backups, and being of the right progression mindset, didn't like being a backup. Again, more people who I like as people, and who are dedicated to the guild to the utmost, got pushed aside.

Philosophical change

It's not like I haven't faced difficult conversations with underperforming players before. In fact, Big Crits has grown from being a brand new guild that took a month to get a normal-mode Lich King kill, to a US top 100 guild. Along the way, I've pulled dozens and dozens of people aside to discuss their underperformance, and replaced just as many people as we sought to continually better ourselves.

What made it difficult this time was because it was so many people, all at once. All of this came down to one, big philosophical change for Big Crits: from a raider-rotation to a strict starter-and-backup designation.

We set a goal, and in order to accomplish that goal we had to change as a guild. The result of this change left some people behind. For many guilds, and many GM's, this wouldn't even require a second thought. But for me, and for my officers, we struggled with this choice. We all look at Big Crits as an extended family. We have a huge guild filled with truly awesome people who respect one another, have fun together, and play hard. It's a guild to be proud of as a leader or a member.

To take that atmosphere and also accomplish something as awesome as a US #97 kill of Heroic Ragnaros is great. It's great, until you look at the cost: to deliberately leave multiple behind for the sake of your collective goal.

I imagine this is a growing pain that any organization goes through. At a certain point you stop being a family-run business and you start being a business. Someone you like, who's been with you, and to whom you promised to match their dedication with your own, suddenly finds themselves shut out because the organization out grew them.

This is no one's fault, and don't take this as a "blame the game designers" post. The fight was incredible and highly tuned and we loved it. It required Big Crits, as a guild, to adjust, just as every tier requires some adjustments. The decision to bench some players and cut some others was our choice as leaders, and ultimately, as the GM, the responsibility of these decisions lies with me.

I had a choice between my commitment to lead the guild to achieve a goal, and my commitment to half a dozen individual players. I chose the guild and the goal. I don't regret the decision because achieving a goal is such an absolutely fantastic thing. It would have been sweeter if we were able to do it with everyone, but between achieving it with some versus not achieving it at all: we made the right choice.

May all your hits be crits!