Now, this won't be an instructional guide . Just an observation on myself and others whilst raid leading.
I'd note at this point, proper endgame raid leading takes (imho) the patience of a saint to do on any sort of long term basis.
I'd also note, I lack said patience.
Don't get me wrong, my tolerance varies depending on the situation. If we're pushing new content, wipes are completely to be expected, my 'omfgwtfareyoudoing' nerve is notched down to a much more tolerant level.
On the other hand, wiping in farm content, having to reschedule it for another day, my tolerance drops to near zero. As a side note, i've done kara on 2 toons this week (one was a guild run) and finished neither. The problem with the guildrun, 2 healers, one of which was in horrible gear, trying to heal the whole thing without even an spreist as a mana battery.
We had a new tank as well, kara geared, and I suggested he maintank the whole attumen fight (always a good skill test I find). Not only did he not achieve this lofty goal, he didnt even vaguely bother to try to tank the second mob. After a few choice words from yours truly, he ragequit and joined another guild.
Then we had a solo tank for the next bits... And yes, this was painful. We stopped at Illhoof for the night. Next day, we hit Aran... After saying, on vent, 3 times not to move in flame wreath, the rogue moves. Twice. And ocne on the next attempt... His excuse? "oh ive never done this before its the furthest ive been in kara lol".
Meanwhile, he's wearing 4 pieces of tier 4 and lots more kara gear. I didnt bother to check further, but his excuse pinged my bull****ometer pretty hard. Regardless, if you're instructed, multiple times, DO NOT MOVE, who the **** naturally thinks 'oh, they mustn't mean me?'.
Again we had 2 healers and they werent coping. I left at this point, they grabbed another healer, and lo and behold started making progress (after 4 aran wipes).
In conclusion, I gather my temperament isn't cut out for raid leading in a BIG way. Give me a group of competent players, i'll shout out the necessary orders/reminders during fights to keep people on the ball, it goes well, etc. Everyone makes mistakes, but a couple here and there and few non critical ones, sweet. Every other pull turning into a disaster is just :facepalm: material.
Notedly the guild leader of my guild is all sweet "hay gize super nice effort keep it up hi5s" even after multiple wipes. I can't not tell people where when and how they failed in stiffer and stiffer terms. First time will be moderate, 2nd time will be wake up, more than that will be less than complimentary, generally speaking. Depending on the degree of fail and the difficulty of the job being done.
I just don't get some players though. If you're continually being chastised, told where you're stuffing up and need to improve, how can you keep ****ting up peoples raids in blissful ignorance of your own failings, ignorant that you're wasting 9/24 other peoples' time?
Maybe I should take up tetris instead, much less hassle :p.|||Hm.. the first thing that comes to mind is what the goals of the guilds are. If you're pushing hard to down new content and want to spend 5 nights a week doing so you can expect more of people and can allow yourself a fairly low tolerance on things like these.
Considering Kara is an entry level raidinstance and where most people get their first raid experience I wouldn't push this too far. Nevertheless, making it very clear to new people through your recruitment process (website, interview etc) what the guilds ambitions are and what you expect of them will make things easier for you when handling things like this. You have to make sure all the officers (I assume you are one of them) and the core of the guild has the same idea of what your goals are as well.
I understand how you feel, and I'd start out by talking with the others allready in the guild to sort this out. If you want to see as much as you can of raidcontent and do everything you can to improve and gear up outside raids and the rest of the guild along with officers are happy with the odd Kara run and bringing people like this along you might want to look for something else.|||Agreed on the goals of the guild, where the guild is in progression, and other things. If we had a hardnose raid leader, half the guild would /gquit the first night. There are other people that need the hardnose type of raidleader. Different methods work for different people.
Though yeah, I can understand the frustration. We gave up on Aran last week (and I can't even remember the last time we even wiped on Aran) just because we were getting frustrated. Too many undergeared people or people that had never seen the fight before, etc.|||I don't have the patience to do kara with terribles
hardly a raid though, more of a 10man heroic imo
GET RID OF PEOPLE IF THEY MOVE IN FLAME WREATH|||Only been back in the guild a couple of weeks, keep getting slotted with leading the smaller stuff (za, kara, etc). They're blocked on leo in SSC, and a bunch of people got emo about it and left, hence the gm going 'omg halp' so soon.
I just don't have the temperament, and i'd rather not see myself in an 'onyserious' ytmnd vid any time soon :p. I think a lot of guilds struggle for one reason, noone WANTS to be the hardass when it comes to handling slackers/people that arent up to speed. Because generally they're friends/not so bad people. Even the best raiders make mistakes, but some people are just **** magnets.
My guess is most guilds have the following:
5 Elite, good, react-to-any-situation-well players (these may or may not be the officers).
5-10 Solid raiders.
20-50 Loot whore hanger-onners.
I'd like to see a guild with just the first two some day. The last category show up to content once it's on farm, blame other people when they cause wipes, never rock up at the instance until they're summoned, and are always the ones not moving in/out/whatever when its vital since they're busy alt-tabbed browsing donkey pr0n or the latest mtv music video from dusty slapper and the crack addicts.|||you're forgetting the three people that think they're way more important than they really are and believe they deserve offspec loot on all of their four alts because their attendance is so good and the guild would crumble without them
gotta have those guys|||We usually don't play with terribles either. Every attempt on Aran we had that night ended with Aran below 5%. The first wipe would have been prevented if two of the new DPSers hadn't died on the first arcane explosion because rather than turn and run according to the instructions we gave them, they just pressed the down arrow to back away from Aran and didn't get away in time. Neither of them made that mistake again, though one of them died in the first arcane explosion in the second attempt because he didn't have the "oops, just got sucked into the middle of the room, run for the walls!" reflex trained in yet.
The one person that moved during flamewreath was just a case of someone fatfingering a spell cast. The person had never moved during a flamewreath in dozens of previous Aran kills. It was just a night of wipes for unexpected reasons like that.
Usually, if we don't get a boss down, we look at why, and fix it. We could have swapped out the newbies on Aran and got him down at any time, except that we honestly expected to get him down on the next attempt every time, so we wanted the chance for the undergeared to get better gear rather than bring in someone that doesn't need anything from Kara. We only gave up when we had respawns that we'd have to clear, and at that point, morale broke.
We've got a solid core of raiders that can clear Kara in 3-4 hours even with one or two of our less solid people, but almost every one of those people have been running Kara long enough that the only reason they go to Kara is for badges, if that. I can honestly say that my priest only goes when there's a shortage of healers. She's already got her important badge items, the rest are small upgrades at best, and the only drop she'd use in Kara is the prince healing mace.
Getting back to the subject, I'm the kind of guild leader that doesn't say harsh things, doesn't like to hurt people's feelings, etc. That's why I'm not one of the raid leaders. Sure, I know the fights, but I'm no good at managing people. Though I will say that if someone ends their "apology" for wiping a raid with lol, I might just go off, especially if they're claiming ignorance to something they really should have known.
We don't get down on individuals during a raid. We'll remind people what they need to do/need not to do, etc. If the problem doesn't go away, we bench people, though the reason given is the generic "the current roster isn't working well for this fight." We have told one or two people that thought that they were being benched too often to look at who we're keeping, and figure out what the difference is. If, for example, we're benching a bunch of melee toons on Curator and bringing in ranged DPSers, it's probably something about the fight, but if we keep benching rogue X but keep rogue Y, it's probably something about one of the two rogues where we believe there's a reason to have X over Y in the group.
And yes, we've had people that weren't bad players otherwise, but caused loot drama. Yes, we know your alt wants a drop from this boss, but if we need to change the roster or noone is getting loot from the boss. Or the rogue that threw a hissy fit because we asked him to pass on something he wanted because a hunter really needed it. Never mind the fact it was a huge upgrade for the hunter, and would have actually reduced the rogue's DPS, he wanted his three STA upgrade.|||Aye Beruen thats definitely the better way to go about things, it's disruptive to the rest of the raid to go nuts at someone. And sometimes, I do manage to control my temper. ****ty day at work + ****ty raid = angry traka though, generally.
Loot is the source of all other drama though, i'll grant you. On my druid, the feral staff is the only possible ug I could want, and even that is pretty *shrug*. I've wanted heal gear to offset with, but you cant roll over mainspecs, so a painful run in there just to maybe have a shot at something you don't get preference on, ends up pretty pointless. I mostly don't bother tanking the instance now. I ran my tanks gear through that rating website and it's up to doing bt/mh apparently. Funnily, none of it's from 25 mans at all.
Admittedly i've done very little 25 mans to date. Pre BC I was a 5 day a week raider, MC, BWL, AQ20/40, and some NAXX as well. Burned out pretty hard, gave up WoW for a few months, and havent really gotten back into hardcore raiding. By the time I got close most things were old hat.
Tbh, i'm considering going hard out raiding in WotLK. But the only motivation towards this would be nailing world firsts. I'm tired of being in guilds that feel 'leet' because they all read clichewiki from the guys who actually beat the encounter with their brains, instead of just being the guys who managed to get 24 people to listen for 10 minutes. I've always felt the achievement in these encounters was to be the ones doing the figuring out.|||Quote:
We don't get down on individuals during a raid. We'll remind people what they need to do/need not to do, etc. If the problem doesn't go away, we bench people, though the reason given is the generic "the current roster isn't working well for this fight." We have told one or two people that thought that they were being benched too often to look at who we're keeping, and figure out what the difference is. If, for example, we're benching a bunch of melee toons on Curator and bringing in ranged DPSers, it's probably something about the fight, but if we keep benching rogue X but keep rogue Y, it's probably something about one of the two rogues where we believe there's a reason to have X over Y in the group.
i dont like this. if someone makes mistakes, you have to tell him. you dont need to "get down" on him, but you have to say him what he did wrong and if he keeps doing it you have to tell him that it is the reason you dont want him in the raid till he learns to do what he is asked to do.
noone can improve if you just kick him on the bench and tell him something vague like "player X does it better, watch and learn". you have to be spot on on the mistakes someone made and be honest about it. Sugarcoating and evading confrontations will hurt the player, the raid and the guild in the long term.|||Quote:
i dont like this. if someone makes mistakes, you have to tell him. you dont need to "get down" on him, but you have to say him what he did wrong and if he keeps doing it you have to tell him that it is the reason you dont want him in the raid till he learns to do what he is asked to do..........
Indeed on my second kara run the rl whispered me "would be good if you could pickup your dps"..... I'm not expecting him to watch my cast sequence or anything but how helpful was that to me really?
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