attendance, in general

[Hitshade]

(something that has happened rather rarely since i joined 2 months ago, and probably happened rarely before that)

Negative.
It started to be a severe issue in ICC when wlph had to constantly recruit the remnants of broken guilds in order to replace the core raiders that began leaving. That is the nature of guilds, usually, so its not as if WLPH suffered something completely out of the ordinary. The rate at which high quality players began leaving was somewhat staggering... But no, the outrageous problems with attendance being seen now were never this great in the 2+ years Ive been here.

but we are taking new people to the fight. we have to because we lose old ones due to attrition. people don't completely forget the general mechanics, but they need to be reminded of specifics like stuns/cd/assignment/rotation/stay on the fucking valks/don't pull aggro we only have 1 rogue/blah blah and we lose more than a couple wipes getting it worked out. and that's time wasted not progressing. so maybe attendance is not the real true most severe problem, but it is something we can fix/bandaid, and anything that helps even a little helps. (john fucking madden here)

Are you really bringing in a new person every night? Beyond that, as you stated yourself these are issues that can (or should) be resolved within a couple of pulls. If you can go an entire night (or in this case weeks and months) having the same stupid little problems then its a skill issue or a potential leadership issue. Either people simply have no fucking clue what they are doing and are too terrible to figure it out and improve or the people that should be making assignments and solving these problems before they arise, aren't doing so.

Either that or there are a lot of people who simply dont want to give it 100% because they no longer care about the content. Im actually willing to bet its a combination of all three and I agree with Alyse that its not something that's going to resolve itself over night. I also agree its unlikely the issue will disappear any time prior to the release of Cataclysm.