Finding Time to do Ulduar Hard Modes

As a GM, you are responsible for making decisions for the guild, especially in terms of how your raid week is broken up.  Pre-Ulduar, it was easy to break up the raid nights — my guild, <iRaid> usually raids 3 nights a week, so 1 night was usually Maly/Sarth, another night (or night and a half) was Naxx, and we usually had a spare night for 10 mans, VoA, or other things.  When Ulduar hit, we kept Naxx around as an OPTIONAL raid for a few weeks, then dropped it completely.

Up until recently, and before our Yogg kill, we used our full 12 hours of raiding (4 hours a night times 3 nights a week) on regular Ulduar.  Now that we can full clear the place with relative ease, and have begun heroic hard modes, breaking up the time has become increasingly difficult.  Here are some questions that I have:

• How many hours a week can we spend on hard modes and still manage to kill Yogg weekly?
• Does Yogg even need to be killed weekly, since hard mode loot is better than Yogg loot?
• As a progression-based guild, shouldn’t hard mode progression be considered more important that either farming hard modes that have already been downed or downing Yogg?
• With patch 3.2 nearing, should the focus be to simply get as many *new* hard modes down as possible?
• Is it necessary to farm hard modes that have already been completed if we can’t 1-shot them, or should we be more focused on killing new hard modes?

They are all tough questions, so maybe some unbiased opinions from other people could help enlighten me.  My mindset is more like — we are a progression-based guild.  Our focus should be killing new content (in this case, new hard modes).  Everything else, including getting people the gear they want, is secondary to our primary goal.

I understand that more gear will help us complete other hard modes, but its really a time crunch.  I consider 3 raid nights a week to be semi-casual raiding; and adding a consistent 4th raid night to our plate isn’t really an option at this time.  If re-doing Heroic: Heartbreaker is going to take us a few wipes to down it again, should we really waste the time for the one piece of i239 instead of using those 30 minutes on a hard mode we haven’t downed?

A *lot* of my raiders need Yogg loot.  Whether it be their T8 shoulders, or another piece, most people (myself included), want to kill him weekly.  However, we don’t 1-shot Yogg; we only recently downed him for the first time.  A Yogg re-kill could take nearly 1-2+ hours if we don’t have all of our main raiders on.  Is the time investment worth it?  Wouldn’t investing time on Iron Council hard mode be the wiser choice?

So — I guess my last question is — what do your guilds do?

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