The Advantage of Knowledge

So I ran my usual Alt run today. Every Saturday (well...ok not every, but I swear I have been trying...), I run an alt run for our guild. There was a lot of talk that we needed a second raid group, as many of us have alts, and we have a lot of people that don't necessarily get into our progression runs, that if nothing else we need to keep warming our benches for when a regular doesn't show up (of course we also enjoy their company, but I'm being pragmatic here!), so Andvari (our main tank until he went skiing! shame on RL for getting in the way of raiding), asked me if I would be interested in putting one together with him. Well apparently it quickly turned into Mori's Alt run.
TL:DR, I ran my Alt run today.

I was quite happy with how it went. We powered through the first 10 bosses. We only really had any problems on...well...Blood Queen. We seemed to have a bit of trouble with people not spreading out on the air phases, something that in retrospect I see as a problem of just not being used to playing with each other (almost half were non jubilance, some of the Jubilance were fairly new to our guild, and many of us were playing rolls that aren't our usually, I for instance tank them usually.) Someone mentioned at the trash leading up to Valithria that it was interesting that a bunch of undergeared alts could go that far so smoothly, in around 3 hours. Mind you, we really aren't that undergeared, my tank for instance is 6k GS, higher than some of our newer raiders, but the point was valid, we had some people in there that had been 80 for less than a week, and some were under 5k GS. This brings me finally to the point of this post. Knowing a fight is far more important than being geared. I did a quick run down of the fights for people, just in case our strategies were different then the ones they are used to, and I know at least one of our Jubi's is back from a two(?) year break, so wasn't really familiar with it, but most people were quite proficient with what they were supposed to do.
While our healers were amazing and our DPS was through the roof, there are fights that if people didn't know them really well would have been insurmountable. For instance I was having a very hard time calling out the spores on Rotface (Festergut? I can never keep them straight), prior to them popping, but it seemed that as I was quickly yelling "Square range, Skull Melee, Ex Tanks" I would get halfway through and "o Good job guys, your way ahead of me". Its times like that that really shows you how knowledge is more important then gear. If I would have been a little late on calling those (which I was most of the time...) and people didn't know where they were going we would have had dps dying all over the place. That is a mechanic that gear really doesn't make up for. Another example is the Gas Cloud on Putricide (okay: orange slime, whatever you want to call it). If the people don't know where to run, it explodes on a person and does huge raid wide damage, that's puts the healers way behind.
I have decided that next week will probably be my last week running my alt run until probably at least January (once we actually have alts to raid on!). At this point it is getting hard to find the pugs to fill our spots, we were actually spamming trade chat for 10 minutes for our last dps. Granted I was being picky; I required people to "have mumble, until at least 5pm server time, whisper spec and furthest fight completed". I now realize that the instructions of whispering spec and furthest fight completed is difficult to follow, as most people consider "dps", "mdps", and "invite" to be the acceptable whispers to get invited. I think it would be more appropriate if I am going to be doing any raid leading in Cataclysm to start reading up on the instances and raid encounters currently up for testing in beta, so I am hoping to use some of that time for that purpose instead of leading successful, but difficult to put together, pugs.