Satisfying newbie raid

This past weekend I kicked of my "training" raid for WoW. It was a commitment I made to our guild leadership, that I would continue to help develop and train any member that is new to raiding or want to learn how to improve their characters as well as skill to join our progression raiding teams.

We started off with a easy raid: Naxxramus. We had 3-4 people that never raided before and that were interested to learn. The remaining 7 raiders were old hands - either on their main characters to help, or on alts they wanted to gear up.

First off, thank you to the new people - without you, this would have been boring :D. Ed/Black, Kristie/Garsindrea, Chance/Meetloaf and Lex/Iceelatte - thank you for allowing us to teach you. Black was tanking, the rest were doing melee or ranged DPS.

Friday night we started in the spider wing and after a rough start on the first boss (2 wipes before we took him down), we 1 shotted the next 2 in the Spider wing. In Plague wing, Noth was a pushover but Heigan's dance caused 3 wipes. Rather than beat our heads against him, I opted to switch to Construct wing, and we took down  Patchwork and the next boss pretty quickly. We called it a night - and I was well pleased how the new people learned.

Thanks to the experienced people that was willing to swap their characters, talent specs and assignments in the raid around as needed to be successful.

On Sunday night we continued. Icelatte did not join us, but Adam/Gracefulfury joined us on his rogue. The experienced people once again had to swap some characters and talent specs around, but we started off with a wipe on Gluth, then downed him next attempt. Thaddius was 1shotted with only 1 raider being killed.

On to the DK wing. The instructor caused a wipe due to our new tank not clearly understanding the use of the bone shield from the trainee, but next time we got him down very smoothly. The trash to the next boss continues to be a problem, but we 1shot the next boss even with us losing the healer on the Dead side. The 4 Horseman suffered a similar fate, although we lost 3 people (including myself - watch your stacks! :D ).

At this time, rather than go back and finish plague wing, we headed to Sapphiron. We had a very good 1 st attempt, that failed due to our Druid healer DCing twice during the fight. But on the next attempt the big undead wyrm bit the dust.

I unfortunately could not stay longer, but the raid planned to proceed to KT without me.

All in all, a very successful first training raid. We had 5 new raiders came and learn. I hope to speak to them individually through the week, to discuss their performance, lessons learned and plans for the next raid.

But why spend this effort if very little of the gear is off use to the characters? 1) Due to most raiders having much better gear than what the encounters were designed for - they are much more forgiving, and allows for a "safe" training environment for new raiders. Almost like Karazhan was towards the end of the Burning Crusade.
Secondly, it introduces basic raiding concepts to new raiders. The value of raid buffs and consumables, tactics and strategies, as well as the need for voice communications.
And lastly, it allows the experienced raiders to share their knowledge, wisdom and experience playing with the new people to make them better gamers, and future participants in our progression raids.
It allows creates a larger pool of skilled, experienced players to fill holes in the progression raid roster, if a raider is absent on a given night.