Everyone brings pugs: what 26,727 raids say about the roster boss

In brief. If you brought four pugs on Tuesday and took it as a warning sign, relax — three is the median. Across 26,727 logged raids, about 12% of a 25-man is somebody from outside the guild, 68% of kills happen at exactly 25 players, and the class you are desperate for is precisely the one you will never manage to borrow.

Every raid leader I know has done the same maths at 19:40 on a Tuesday. Twenty-two online. Three names in the officer channel. Somebody types "I can ask in trade" and everyone pretends that was the plan all along.

What nobody has, in that moment, is any sense of whether this is normal. So I went and counted.

How many pugs does a normal raid bring?

About three. Roughly 12% of a median 25-man raid is somebody who is not in the guild, which works out at three seats a week.

Across one realm's 25-man raids over two months — 2,808 raids and 16,354 distinct characters — the split comes out like this:

• Around 88% are the guild's own people, turning up across that guild's raids week after week.
• About 12% have no guild the logs can place them in. These are your pugs.
• 0.3% belong to a different raiding guild. Three in a thousand.

That last number surprised me most. Cross-guild raiding — borrowing a healer from the guild that raids Wednesdays — is essentially a myth. It happens about as often as a Hand of A'dal drops out of a lockbox. Almost every pug you take is genuinely unguilded or in a social guild that does not raid.

Is bringing pugs unusual?

Not remotely — it is what the middle of the distribution looks like. Pugging is close to universal: the overwhelming majority of guilds bring at least one outsider in a given week, and three is the median.

That is worth sitting with if you have been treating your pug count as a private embarrassment. The guild three realms over with the clean logs and the tidy recruitment post also brought three strangers last night. It did not put that in the post.

Pugging is the normal operating state of a 25-man guild. Whether an unusually high pug rate says something about a guild is a different question, and a harder one — I have not answered it here.

Does anyone actually raid short-handed?

Almost nobody, ever. Of every boss kill logged in the last 45 days, 68% were with exactly 25 players, and only 5% were run with 18 to 23.

Which tells you something specific about how the roster boss actually kills guilds. It is not that you raid with twenty-two and lose to the enrage. It is that you do not raid at all. A guild that is three short either finds three or cancels. There is no middle setting where you go in with twenty-two and shrug.

Why doesn't the shortfall show up in the log at all?

Because the log records the raid that happened, not the twenty minutes of panic that made it happen.

Every log is, by definition, a raid that went ahead. The nights you spent spamming trade for a healer and gave up at 20:15 leave no trace anywhere. Neither does the hour your officers spent whispering people, or the tank you talked out of going to bed.

So the visible record of a guild in trouble looks exactly like the record of a guild that is fine. Both of them show twenty-five people killing Hydross. One of them took four minutes to fill; the other took ninety and a favour that will need repaying.

This is worth knowing when you are sizing up another guild's logs before you apply. You can see what they killed and when they raid. You cannot see what it cost them to get there.

What are guilds actually short of?

Shamans, overwhelmingly. Of the guilds currently listed as recruiting, the most-wanted specs are not close:

All three shaman specs, ahead of everything else, by a distance. That is Bloodlust and totems doing what the class design always said they would do — every 25-man wants three or four shamans spread across the groups, and on Horde side there is exactly one race that can be one.

If you have been thinking about levelling something and you want to be able to pick your guild rather than apply to one: it is a shaman. It has been a shaman for eighteen years — and the guilds asking for a Restoration Shaman will still be asking by the time you get there.

Why can't you just pug the class you need?

Because you can only pug what is abundant, and by definition you are short of what is scarce. These are opposite sets, and it is the cruellest structural joke in raid organisation.

Work it through. Sixty-one guilds on one directory want a Restoration Shaman. Now imagine you are one of them, it is Tuesday, you are one resto shaman down, and you start spamming "LF1M resto sham SSC" from the Shattrath bank steps.

Nobody answers. They are all raiding, in the sixty other guilds that also wanted one.

So you do what everyone does: you bring a second Mage and cover the healing with an extra Paladin, and the raid goes ahead at twenty-five. The hole in your roster gets papered over rather than filled, and the paper is whatever the server has spare.

Which means the composition of a guild's pugs tells you what is plentiful on the realm, not what that guild needs. A guild that has been advertising for a resto shaman for six weeks will show six weeks of pugged mages. The thing they actually want never appears, because they could never get it.

The gap is invisible precisely because it could not be filled. If you want to know what a guild is short of, the only reliable method is the oldest one: read what they wrote and ask them.

Why do some guilds field seventy-five characters?

Splits. A handful of the most organised guilds on each realm run two or three separate 25-mans in a night, each on a different set of alts.

You can spot them instantly in a log list: TK Split 1, SSC Split 2, TK Split 3, all on the same evening. One Nightslayer guild fields around forty players across roughly seventy-five characters this way. The names give it away if you look — Zerpyoo and Zerpyxp, Donnarsham and Donnartie. Same person, different Tuesday.

The point of it is attunements and loot funnelling: more characters through the door means more people cleared for the next tier, and gear can be steered toward whoever is being pushed. It is a lot of organisational overhead for a guild that has spare bodies.

It is also worth knowing as a raider, because "we run splits" in a recruitment post means something quite specific about what your week will look like. You are not being asked to raid Tuesday and Thursday. You are being asked to raid Tuesday and Thursday on two characters.

So what actually tells you a guild is in trouble?

Attendance percentage and roster size — neither of which is visible from outside. Certainly not an ordinary pug count, which almost everyone has.

The things that genuinely predict whether a guild is about to hit the wall are all internal:

• Roster against the 30-to-32 floor. Fielding 25 reliably needs about 30 people on the books, because attendance is a percentage rather than a headcount.
• How many people you benched last month. Benched raiders leave, and over-recruiting to fix a shortage causes the next shortage.
• Whether raids get cancelled, which shows up nowhere at all — a cancelled raid produces no log.

I went through all of that maths in the roster boss post, which is the practical companion to this one. The short version is that if you are worried, count your roster and your attendance rate, and ignore how many pugs you brought.

The short version

• Everyone pugs. Around 12% of the median 25-man, or three seats a week.
• Only 0.3% of raiders come from another raiding guild. Borrowing across guilds is a rounding error.
• Nobody raids short. 68% of kills happen at exactly 25 players and only 5% at 18 to 23. Short-handed guilds cancel instead of going in light.
• Shamans are what the game is short of, by a wide margin, and all three specs top the list.
• You pug what is abundant, not what you need, so the spot a guild is desperate for is the one that never appears in its logs.
• An ordinary pug count is not a diagnosis. Three a week is the middle of the pack. Your roster size and attendance rate are what actually tell you where you stand.