A Raid-Helper alternative, built only for WoW Classic.
Raid-Helper schedules your raid and does it well. Hootus picks up the parts a scheduler was never built to cover: armory verification, signup validation, native soft reserves, loot fairness, and recruitment. All of it WoW-native, in Discord and on the web.
Raid-Helper is good at the job it was built for.
It has been the default raid scheduler on Discord since 2019, and for good reason. Post the weekly raid, collect class and spec signups, manage the waitlist, run recurring events. It nails that one job, it is trusted by hundreds of thousands of servers, and it works across any game. This is not a page about it being bad.
It is a page about a different job. Once a WoW Classic guild gets serious, the raid stops being the only moving part. Now there is a soft-reserve site in one tab, a loot addon in another, a recruitment queue somewhere, and attendance nobody actually tracks. That is the part a general scheduler was never trying to cover. That is the part Hootus is.
What a WoW-specific bot adds.
A general scheduler posts the event. Hootus knows your class, your roster, your loot, and your recruits.
- Collects the class and spec a member types in
- Reserves handled by linking out to a separate site
- Signup posts, waitlists, and recurring events
- Works for any game, on any server
- One job, posting the event, done well
- Confirms the character against the Blizzard armory
- Native soft reserves with Gargul, CSV, and JSON export
- Class- and spec-aware validation on every signup
- Roster pulled from Blizzard, synced every hour
- The whole guild: verification, loot, recruitment, lifecycle
Framed at the category level on purpose. The left column is what a general event scheduler does, not a list of things any one bot cannot do. The right column is verified against what Hootus actually ships.
The WoW-native parts are free.
Raid-Helper is free to start, with some of its extras kept behind a per-server premium. Fair enough, it is a big tool with real bills. Hootus takes a different line: the verification, soft reserves, recruitment, planner, and analytics, the parts a scheduler leaves to your other tabs, are free at the core and mean to stay that way. There is nothing to buy today, and the everyday raid-night basics never move behind a wall.
If a paid layer ever lands it will be for heavy extras, clearly drawn, never the basics. The honest version lives on the support page.
The parts a scheduler leaves to your other tabs.
Each one is a real feature, not a promise. This is where a WoW-only bot earns its keep.
It checks who they actually are
A scheduler asks what class you play. Hootus checks the joiner's character against the Blizzard armory and confirms it is really in your guild, with three strictness modes and a race-check step to catch impersonation. The roster behind it pulls from Blizzard every hour, alts and respecs included.
Signups that know a Druid from a Mage
Click tank as a Mage and Hootus turns you down. Every signup is validated against the character's class and spec, and the drag-and-drop planner blocks an invalid drop before it lands. The composition updates live as people sign in.
Soft reserves and loot where the raid lives
Native soft reserves on a public, rate-limited reserve page, exported straight to a Gargul addon string, CSV, or JSON. Loot logs import from Gargul, and the analytics compute a fairness Gini score, soft-res fulfillment, and an items-won leaderboard. No bouncing the guild to a side tab and back.
Recruitment that outlives the recruiter
A public apply form with a Blizzard character lookup, an officer review queue with approve, interview, and reject, and an approve-and-slot action that drops a new recruit straight into the next raid. The pipeline survives the officer who set it up leaving.
Bring your history with you
Drop in a Guild Roster Manager .lua export, pick which guild in the file maps to your server, and review a dry run before you commit. Alt links and join dates land on day one, so a guild coming from GRM keeps its history instead of starting from zero.
The whole member lifecycle
Onboarding with roles and nicknames, a rank ladder mapped to what each rank can do, careful leaver detection on the roster sync, inactive-raider demotion, and a web officer command center. A scheduler organizes events. Hootus runs the guild.
A scheduler collects who is coming.
Hootus confirms who they actually are.
Sometimes it is the better pick. Honestly.
Switching cost is real, and so is fit. Here is when a general scheduler is the right call.
- You run a community that plays more than WoW. Hootus is WoW Classic only, TBC and MoP, and a multi-game server is a poor fit.
- You want pure scheduling and nothing else. A guild that only needs "post the raid, click to sign up" has less to learn with a dedicated scheduler.
- You live in Google Calendar. Raid-Helper syncs to it. Hootus offers a read-only iCal feed instead, which is weaker if Google Calendar is your home base.
- You value a long track record. Raid-Helper has been the default since 2019 across hundreds of thousands of servers. That reach and reliability are real, and worth respecting.
And you do not have to choose. Keep Raid-Helper for posting the weekly raid if your guild loves it, and let Hootus handle verification, soft reserves, loot, and recruitment alongside it. Lower switching cost, same raid night.
Add the WoW-native half of your stack.
Verified rosters, signup validation, native soft reserves, loot fairness, and recruitment, in Discord and on the web. Add Hootus, walk the wizard, and let your scheduler keep doing what it does best.