Progress vs Rotation...

The big debate raging among the officers now is how to handle our roster of 25 raiders.


Our old system had a 'core' 20 raiders with 3 or 4 'support' raiders coming in to cover when someone had a night off... this fell down because our core were ultra-reliable and all turned up to every raid for weeks on end, meaning the support never actually got a chance to raid and eventually got bored and left.


When someone did finally need a night off, we were scrabbling around for someone to fill in and even pugging sometimes to avoid cancelling the raid... far from ideal for Mythic progress.


Our GM has recruited a few extra people now so we always have enough people but he hates benching anyone and we have to go through the rather torturous process of picking those benched people each time.


To make it 'fair', our GM decided we needed a rotation system to make sure the same people didn't keep getting benched over and over again.  That would be the same as our old core+support system, just without telling the support that that's what they were.


With this in mind, I figured we could have everyone open for rotation on our farm night then pick the best 20 available for whatever boss we were progressing on at the time for our progress night.


For example, we are currently progressing on Antoran High Command which is mostly an AoE-fest so...  I wanted to bench our lowest AoE dps - 2 BM hunters, 1 Rogue and 1 Frost Mage who are consistently lowest on our Heroic kills - They would get plenty of opportunities for the kill in future but it's a small attempt at min-maxing to get our first kill.


The first fly in the ointment was one of our BM hunters who is extremely resistant to being benched... one of the main reasons she applied to join our guild was our old core raider policy so I have some sympathy for her but ROTATION!
She went on holiday, taking full advantage of our expanded roster, before we implemented the rotation plan anyway but the GM is concerned she will leave.
It turns out she isn't the only fly and a few other people have now spoken up about their dislike for the bench.


One of our officers suggested just not rotating those people that are going to complain but I couldn't see that working particularly well for any length of time.
Another officer suggested complete rotation with making sure all roles are covered being our only consideration, the fairest of fair systems.


The GM was not happy with any of these suggestions... so I came up with a plan to cover ALL of them!
My plan was to have everyone rotate, has to be that way really, as a starting point.  But, beyond that, I set up a new 'core' of raiders that would only be benched on our farm nights with everyone else being benched on our progress nights.
Over a 5 raid period, all of our players would be benched once but we still had our top players available for progress every time.  I won't go into any more detail but it was a solid plan that covered all eventualities.


Submitted it to our GM, we went through some what-if scenarios, and he was happy!
We tentatively (and secretly) put it in place before our progress raid on Monday, benched some people, and went to raid.


Despite our best efforts (4 wipes at <5%), we failed to kill AHC and I should have predicted what happened next...
Wednesday farm night rolls around and our GM wants to push for the AHC kill so refuses to bench any of the new 'core' players.  This throws the whole rota into an absolute mess as we can't fit everyone in now and still keep the core for progress nights.


Personally, I don't really care what system we use but we probably should have a system of some kind in place if only so that people know where they stand... or, more importantly, I know what's going on if they ever ask me!


I thought my initial solution gave us the right balance of rotation and progression.


What do you think?
Any different or better ideas?