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Dos and don’ts of raid leading

I was having a conversation the other day with my girlfriend, and she mentioned that the raid group she had been running with recently had been having some issues with their raid leadership. This led to a discussion about what’s good and bad in a raid leader, and how to effectively raid lead and motivate people. Although I don’t raid much these days (as evidenced by the dead blog), I have done plenty of raid leading in my day and I think I have some information that’s worth sharing.

First, let’s talk about what not to do. I’ve seen raid leaders singling out individuals in Ventrilo when they screw up or when they die, but I think that this is a good way to demotivate people. If you do things like this, not only does it encourage other raiders to do the same (especially if you start focusing on one person) but it also leads the singled out individual to either feel angry and hard-done-by or even stop raiding. Not a good way to effectively motivate people.

I remember the last time I tried to lead a raid in this way. It led to one person that I was criticizing muting/ignoring me – which obviously leads to some problems with guiding that person through fights. Needless to say, I stopped doing that fairly quickly.

At the same time, I think there has to be some element of public criticism in raids. Typically, what I would do is make this criticism more general (if I noticed a raider consistently standing in defile on Lich King, I’d say things like “get out of defile” during the fight, sure, but after the fight or before our next attempt I’d bring it up as a general principle: “Hey guys, this attempt let’s really focus on making sure Defile doesn’t spread in phase 2 and 3″). Without doing this, your raiders may feel resentful or feel like they are carrying some of the less skilled players in your group – they need to see that you’re doing something to address the problem.

One thing that can help you as a raid leader is also bringing things up with raiders in whispers. If you think it’s a tactical issue that they may be able to fix between attempts, send them a whisper. Don’t be overly confrontational unless it’s the third or fourth time you’ve seen this, but for the first couple of times a simple “hey, I noticed you’ve been having issues with X boss mechanic, I’d really like you to focus on that for our next attempt and make sure you’re doing it right” should suffice.

If issues are chronic or speaking to them quickly as above isn’t fixing an issue, then I honestly think it’s your responsibility as a raid leader to talk with them about it after the raid. Pull them into another channel in Vent and talk with them about what you’re seeing. “Hey, I’ve noticed your DPS is consistently pretty low. I really need you to work on fixing this, because it’s seriously affecting our raid.” If necessary (for example, if you don’t necessarily know their class), put them in contact with a class leader or someone you know who can help them improve – don’t just say they need to get better and leave it at that.

I know I’ve spent a lot of time touching on how to effectively give criticism, but as a raid leader it’s also important to motivate through positivity. If you see someone really excelling, don’t hesitate to point it out. I’ve kind of gone back and forth about doing this through whispers or more publicly through Ventrilo, and at the end of my raid leading tenure I was doing it through whispers. The point is that it’s a great motivator as a raider to be told you did a good job. It shows that your leadership is taking an active interest in your performance.

The other part of this is that you should also be watching people who have been criticized on something recently and watch for improvement. If you do see improvement, you need to make sure you’re commenting on it! I remember one of my raiders during ICC had all sorts of trouble with Sindragosa’s frost bombs. I talked with her about it, and after a couple of attempts he started doing the fight absolutely perfectly. I then whispered him and let her know that I was really impressed with their improvement. I think he really took that to heart, because when we moved on to heroic modes he was letter-perfect on almost every single new mechanic we were learning as a group.

I hope the above ramblings can help you in your role as a raid leader. I think that the above principles have certainly served me well during my time leading. Best of luck moving forward in the tail end of 5.1, and happy raiding during the upcoming Hall of the Thunder King!

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Quitting

I go away for almost a year, and my next post is regarding STOPPING playing the game. Heh, go figure.

There’s too much sometimes. It’s not just the money thing, although that’s certainly part of it – there are so many jerks in randoms, so much frustration in the raids I lead, and I just got too fed up with it. It’s just time to be done.

I’m playing a lot more StarCraft II these days, though. I’m still only Silver League, but come September 27th I’ll have a lot more time on my hands to make a push up to Gold or higher. Should be fun.

So I guess the question is really how much did I accomplish in WoW? Looking back, I’ve finished most raid content every expansion since BC, helped out what seems like every NPC in the game, written a blog for a couple of years about the game, and earned a ridiculous amount of achievement points. For $15 a month, it wasn’t a bad deal – I guess eventually I could only take so much.

I might reopen this blog to talk about how I’m doing in StarCraft. We’ll see. Either way, it’s been a fun ride.

Decisions

I apologize for the extended silence from my corner of the Internet for the last little while. Long story short, I’m struggling with some issues right now, both in-game and IRL. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to end up doing in Cata, but I’ll figure that out later. For now, I’m still raiding actively with Cloudy Day on my paladin, where we continue to have some issues with bosses that we’ve downed before, especially heroic Frost Wing. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t take the person who’s obviously the best DPS in the guild and usually pulls around 30%+ of total damage. Meh.

Obviously, I disagree with some of the ways that raids are being run right now, and yes, I’m frustrated with some of the people in the guild still, but it’s not my job to make policy anymore, so there’s not much I can do about it. Maybe I made the wrong decision when I gave up the GM spot – but that’s neither here nor there. What’s done is done. Guess I didn’t realize just how big of a deal it was to me that I had an active voice in guild policy. I mean, I still do, to an extent – I was a pretty influential voice in determining the way that the guild would be raiding in Cataclysm – but I’m coming in from a much more outside perspective than I was before.

I still have some issues in RL as well, a pretty tricky class coupled with a complicated prospective relationship means that I usually have a lot on my mind, and don’t really have time for blogging. To that end, I’ll be going on hiatus for a while from blogging, not sure when or if I’ll be returning. I can still be reached at velinath (at) cloudyday.net or via commenting on my blog.

Thanks, everyone. Whether I come back to blogging or not, it’s been a fun ride.

DRAKES

http://cloudyday.net/killshots/Drakes/

YES WE DID. Got our All You Can Eat on Thursday, which gave 4 separate people the meta. Fantastic stuff.

Fire magery in 4.0: my experiences to date

Well, I finally gave up the GM spot – about time I did, to be honest. It was getting way too stressful for me. Now that the most I’m doing is raid leading, it’s a lot easier on my stress level. I’m not necessarily agreeing with what the new leadership is doing, but it’s nice not to have to worry about the decision-making and just be a regular member again. If things go way past where I can really stay with the policies of CD, then that’s another story – but at the moment, things are fine.

Anyway, on to what this post’s actually about – playing a mage in 4.0. I’ve played around with a couple talent specs – both Fire and Arcane – and I’m pretty happy with the changes that were made. Feels like Mage Armor is the best thing for Arcane right now with the new mastery, which is pretty cool – each spec having its own armor that’s suited to the playstyle and so forth. Neat stuff. Onwards to Fire, though.

After speccing on Tuesday night, I spent some time benchmarking with the test dummies in Orgrimmar, just like everyone else. Pulled around 10k DPS without any uses of my Impact proc, so I was really looking at just a basic Patchwerk-style single target fight. All in all, I’m fairly impressed with the new tools they’ve given us, including the cool Hot Streak proc chance on non-criticals. That said, the coolest talent in Fire tree is probably Cauterize – I spent last night thinking about the bosses with “nuke” mechanics that we can ignore if we spec properly now. Festergut and Algalon, of course, are the first that I can think of. Definitely looking at offspeccing Fire as well as my main spec just so I can have the option to pick that talent up.

Rotation feels pretty much the same as it did in 4.0, with the welcome change that I don’t really need to worry about Scorching now – Pyroblast procs pretty much cover it for me. The only real difference is going to be watching for Impact and Fire Blasting that – whether that’ll come in handy on single target fights, I have yet to see. Combustion changes are interesting – I’m looking for an addon that tracks the strength of my Ignite DoT right now, as it should help a lot – any suggestions?

edit: found one! Check out CombustionHelper, it works great. (of course, this addon had the added side effect of making me worry about Frostfire Bolt. Since I’m pulling 14k DPS on some fights without it, I’m not too concerned.)

Mastery stacking is questionable right now from what I’ve seen. There’s a nice bonus straight from training; if anything, I’m dropping only haste and not crit to pick up a bit of mastery. We’ll see how it turns out. I think it won’t make too much difference until we hit Cata and there’s actually gear with mastery on it.

Pity fire mages are getting a slight nerf soon. Hopefully it doesn’t affect too much.

In other news, the tankadin changes are nice (after 12 seconds – once we get to start pressing our shield of the righteous button, you know, the one that can hit for 40,000) and the new druid tree form that got revealed is absolutely fantastic – although I may have to glyph the old one and switch it in/out depending. I really liked the old treant model too.

Fun times…not so much

Cloudy Day downed H Sindragosa this past Tuesday – after working on her for three weeks, it was nice to finally get the kill. People finally started actually coordinating and getting stuff done, which was great – on the kill, things went smoothly in P3, which in itself is a feat on Heroic. We followed this kill up with our guild-second H Putricide kill – which, again, was one of those things where we spent a night wiping in stupid ways, and then things just came together on the last attempt. I was so happy to finally see him go down again – it got a lot of guildies the H Plagueworks achievement.

This is really just a roundabout way of getting to the actual point of this blog post, though. I’ve been GM of Cloudy Day for, oh, about three months now – started leading before that, but officially got the GM spot around July 9th or so. I’m pretty burnt out on it, though; having to deal with some people being bad as well as the regular day-to-day drama is not something I’m really cut out for.

Essentially, I took the position out of necessity; our GM at the time had been AFK for the last 4-5 months, and someone needed to step in. As our other officers had either left or had RL stuff come up, I was basically the only person that was already in a leadership position and also had the time required to be a GM – so I took the job rather than letting the guild die. Three months in, though, it’s getting pretty tough for me to keep going.

At the same time, it’s hard for me to give it up – I feel like so far, I’ve been fairly unsuccessful as a GM, and I don’t want to leave without having the opportunity to give something to the guild. I decided the best option would be frost drakes, and those have been going well. If things keep up, we should be getting our first sets of drakes in the next week or so, and should be able to finish off the achievement for most of our top raiders before Cataclysm hits.

After that, though, I really can’t justify being GM any longer. It’s become more of a job than anything else, and that’s tough for me. Maybe it’s because at the moment I’m both GMing and raid leading, and that’s putting quite a stress on me – I don’t know. Either way, though, it’s not too fun anymore.

I figure the best thing to do is finish leading during WotLK, and then transition leadership as the guild heads into Cataclysm and level 85. That way I don’t try and switch leadership while we’re still actively raiding, and also allow the new GM to start taking charge and getting things ready to go before we start raiding again.

This was supposed to be my blog post for recently. Unfortunately, I had a pretty terrible night tonight. Two of my guildies got into a pretty big fight, and I didn’t step in or try and break it up at all. It kind of woke me up to how much of not a GM I really am. I ended up essentially resigning as of tonight, and whoever wants the GM can take it.