Ch rots are mostly used velious to pop. They're of minor importance before and after. I don't care which expac you pick, its true regardless, a 5 cleric ch rot is 5 clerics only casting ch and maybe yaulps if luclin+ and slow enough. A 10 cleric rot is perfectly fine and normal because it lets you fuck around in between and now have zero clerics unable to group heal or whatever. It works great.
Your problem sounds to have been that clerics weren't even complete healing. You said everyone was ducking shit because everyone else was spamming to oom to parse up and then needing breaks. That's not a rot problem, that's a fucksticks wasting mana and not letting the rot do its job problem. It's fixed by not taking breaks and forcing everyone to fucking die once or twice until they learn to not shit their mana away. What exactly is the downside to every cleric in the rot? If its huge enough you can even squeeze epic clicks in between your turns. It literally frees every single cleric to do whatever between casts, rather than having 5 people useless except for ch so the others can fuck about more. Again, fine and normal.
CH rots can be used prior to velious and should be used to promote higher levels of efficiency and speed. For example Plane of Sky in Classic and Veeshans Peak in Kunark. If you were to race two raids of 72 doing a full clear in those zones, everything else being the same except one not using a CH rot, and one raid using a CH rot, the one not using it on bosses will lose that race 100 times out of 100 times. The entire purpose of a CH rot is that your raid never stops moving. It goes from one boss to the next without a break. The only time you would use a CH rot for a single boss with nothing to kill after, would be if the fight lasts so long that splashing would cause clerics to go OOM prior to the boss dieing, which I would agree doesn't happen much in classic and not at all in kunark.
Yes, I agree. What was going on wasn't 100% a problem caused by a 10 cleric rot, and could have been mostly fixed by not allowing med breaks and just overall having a better understanding of how to judge heal parses, but the 10 cleric rot still played a factor in what was going on.
The problem with a 10 cleric rot vs a 5 cleric rot with 5 splashers is that in a 10 cleric rot you are putting every cleric in a possible situation to expend more mana than they otherwise should. They are now thinking ok, if I'm not in a current cast of CH, I can throw in splashes. If you are to do a 5 cleric rot, those clerics will ALWAYS have enough mana. Doesn't matter if you are pulling in another boss as the current one is dieing, they will have the mana for it. It is a guarantee. It is a way of setting up the clerics to where you don't even need to do cleric mana checks or keep them on extended target to keep track of their mana. I guess a better way of putting it is a more efficient means of organization that takes away a lot of the ability for individual clerics to fuck up and slow down a raid by minimizing the amount of individual agency each cleric has.
There isn't any fight in classic-luclin that requires more than 5 clerics, not even AoW. Therefore, any cleric you have past that 5 is there as a bonus. It is irrelevant to the speed of your raid if the clerics outside the rot are oom or not. The job of the 5 CH clerics is to only CH on bosses, and during the trash clear to the next boss they are medding back to full if needed, and if full they can help heal during trash. Any cleric outside the rot does everything else. This is how you keep your raid non-stop moving. Could you do the same thing by putting all 10 clerics in the rot? Maybe in some instances, but not consistently. The individual agency allowed would ultimately cause a fuck up somewhere. Would a 10 cleric rot work if you were properly managing it? Sure, it would work. Would it be more efficient and faster than a raid doing it the other way? I don't think so, not consistently. Is managing your clerics to be the most efficient as possible the only thing you need to be doing? Of course not, there are a dozen other factors. Focusing on the rot topic is only marginal in terms of increasing efficiency and speed unless you are just completely fucking it up like in the example I gave of GIG. The CH rot issue was just one of many things that I saw that would have significantly increased their speed if fixed. Probably the biggest issue though, more than the CH rot, was the refusal to do things the fast way by saying "i don't trust our raid to do that." There were so many instances where other people brought up "why don't we do it this way or why don't we go this way instead?" but it was met with "this raid/guild is too retarded to pull that off" when it was all just stuff that is literally just the common way guilds do it these days, even casual guilds. They always seem to want to do everything the "phinny" way.
I don't want to keep bringing up issues with them as that was not even the purpose of the original point I brought up. I only brought up GIG as an example because that was the last time I experienced a place that had so many issues relevant to the context of the conversation. And like i said in my original post, I'm not shitting on their leadership, I know that they hadn't raided those era's in a very long time and had little experience when it came to early era's relative to the level of experience people are used to these days. I do think things could have improved a lot faster for them though if they would have dropped the attitude and ego when people would suggest things that were clearly far more correct than what they were doing.