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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Guild drama is a factor in every single guild, from casual leveling guilds to hardcore raiding guilds, you can’t absolutely escape the drama.  It is how a guild deals with drama that sets them apart from the thousands of other guilds out there, and how you can minimize the effect of drama on your guild members that keeps guilds together.

Introduction

We all have heard stories of guilds breaking up, and angry players taking out all their friends from a guild to join another.  Personally, when I left my old guild to form <iRaid>, I indirectly took almost 20 people (by indirectly I mean I only asked two people to come with me, the rest all whispered me when they saw I gquit).  To a raiding guild, even the loss of just a few core raiders can be a huge push back in progression raiding, unless the guild is prepared to deal with it and can recuperate in a timely fashion.

Last Night’s Guild Drama

My guild had a good bit of drama last night, probably more drama last night than the guild had in the entire 4 months we have been a guild.  Here’s what happened, feel free to skip to the next section if you don’t like personal updates:

I wasn’t the official GM of my guild until yesterday.  When I formed the guild, my coworker, aka Darkleaf, said he wanted to be a GM, and since he had been GM of previous guilds and is more mature than me, I readily agreed.  Last night, partially based on medical advice and high stress levels, he decided to quit the game (for the most part), and pass me GM.

Regardless, we ran into Ulduar25 last night full force, started 30 minutes early, and had almost 10 people on the bench waiting to get in.  We were blazing through, doing record times and 1 shotting most bosses (because I wanted to clear up to Yogg on our first raid night), but we eventually started losing steam.  After wiping on Thorim for 3 times, one of our officers, a beast resto druid healer, decided he was “going to PvP, tired of wiping”.  Knowing full-well he would gquit the guild if I demoted him to a regular raider (he has a large ego), I demoted said player and he instantly gquit, eventually taking with him most of his RL friends (none of whom which I actually cared about particularly).

Not only that, I had a holy pally recruit qq’ing all night about our BoE policy.  My guild takes all BoE drops (that aren’t BIS), and sells them to fund guild repairs.  We asked our starting raiders when we formed the guild if they preferred to have guild-funded repairs or access to BoEs, and the decision was unanimous.  Said pally would not quit qq’ing (he was even an app, completely ineligible for loot, and I still gave him 2 pieces of loot since he was the only holy pally), telling people to “farm your own gold for repairs”, and I had to eventually Gkick him.  That was the first person I had ever gkicked.

What Can You Learn About Guild Drama?

There are a few things you can learn from hearing about my guild drama, which hopefully will save your guild from collapsing when stuff like this happens.  My guild isn’t going anywhere, no one even said anything in guild chat when like 5 people gquit the guild.  Here are some key points:

• Know the type of players you want in your guild. With our new guild recruitment policies, we keep players for 1-2 weeks in a rank called “iApp”, where they are ineligible for loot or guild repairs.  It has taken a bit of trial-and-error to know by now what type of players we are looking to recruit.
• Attitude is half of the fight. There are players who think they are better than everyone in your guild, and you usually do not want these players.  They are usually the players that will show up on farm nights, avoid the progression nights, and ninja log when the wiping starts.  These players are counter-productive to any progression-based guild, and usually hurt the morale of the rest of the players.
• Choose your officers wisely. We made a mistake one time of making one of the most immature players I’ve ever met in my life (he server transferred months ago and still trolls our recruitment threads) an officer when we first started the guild.  Officers, Role Leaders, Class Leaders, etc, should all epitomize the type of players you are looking for in your guild.  For example, my officers are always usually present for all raids, and consistently out-performing the rest of the raid.
• Everyone is replaceable. When someone leaves your guild, don’t make the mistake of trying to get them back in.  Gquitting is usually permanent, and no matter how good a player was, you should always retain a sense of pride for you and your guild.  You can bet your pants that a player that is willing to leave the guild for petty drama would probably have left somewhere down the road anyways, so he is just saving you the time.
• Cut your losses. Removing players that you know for a fact are going to gquit somewhere down the road or aren’t a good fit for what you are striving for in your guild is a viable plan.  There is no reason to continue to bring a player you don’t like to your raids, and continue to give them loot.

Conclusion

Drama happens to every guild out there, and it can (and will) slow your guilds progression if you let it hit you unprepared.  Even people you have geared to the teeth and been nice to can eventually turn on you and even bash the guild later on.  To minimize your guild’s drama, you should know how to effectively deal with it without seeming like an awful dictator, while at the same time maintaining the respect your position of authority merits.

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I thought I’d skip the introduction about myself and jump right into providing some (hopefully) useful content for the readers this site should have soon

This guide will be an attempt to help out new raid leaders get into their groove of leading 25 man raids (5/10 mans dont really count for much in my book), and will hopefully be kept updated with things I pick up over time.

If you care to know a little about me, I’ve been playing the game since the middle of BC, but it was only till March of 2009 where I decided it was time to become a guild and raid leader.  While I’ve only been leading raids for a little less than half a year, I hope I can help out

Background

Raid leading is not for everyone.  Controlling and monitoring the actions of 24 other players is not a simple task, and among other skills it requires, the major one is patience and assertiveness.  Some successful raid leaders are total dicks, others are so nice it makes people want to perform well, and others are complete nerds who will explain every detail of every fight (no offense if you are like that ).

What usually separates the good raid leaders from the poor ones is a simple knowledge of the game, or the raid leaders that are misinformed.  If you are trying to lead a raid, you had better know beforehand what you are leading.  Being misinformed on boss strategies or on class mechanics will detract from your authoritative position as a leader, and may cause problems for your raid or even further down the road.

Class Synergy

If there is anything that irks me the most about a given raid it is class synergy.  Raids with 10 DPS DKs, or 5 rogues, or 4 druid healers all annoy me.  While Blizzard has been seemingly trying to push their WTPNTC (Bring the Player, Not the Class) concept, there is still a line you cannot cross when building a raid, regardless of the circumstances.

If you are unsure what class/spec brings which buff, I strongly recommend using MMO-Champion’s RaidComp tool.  With it, you can see if your ideal raid comp is actually covering the myriad of buffs currently available in-game, or if you are lacking any buff that may noticeably increase the DPS of your raid.  For example, my raids are usually melee-heavy simply because we are still recruiting ranged DPS.  We noticed we were in dire need of a feral druid, so we went and picked some up, receiving a noticeable increase in the DPS of our melee DPS.  It’s as simple as that.

I won’t go into specifics as to how you should fill your raid or with what classes, but always keep in mind how classes work with each other.  If you have a caster-heavy raid group, you should probably have an elemental shaman and boomkin in your raid group for some really nice increased DPS.  This applies to tanks as well, as different classes of tanks are better for different situations and different boss mechanics.

Micromanagement

Unless you are running with an experienced group of raiders who have raided together, there is a certain level of micromanaging that a raid leader must do to avoid wipes.  Things like assigning what tank is tanking what target, what each healer should primarily be healing, and monitoring interrupts, kicks, disarming, etc, are among the list of things you should be prepared to manage.

Recount, or another DPS tracker, in addition to running WWS parsing for future analysis is absolutely required.  It let’s you analyze where your DPS is, who are your stronger and weaker players, and helps you if you need to split your DPS evenly for a boss fight.

You should be assertive if people are underperforming by either calling them out on Vent (yes, I do believe that a polite but firm “call out” of someone underperforming in a raid can help), removing them from the raid, or asking them to flask.  I can’t count how many times I’ve removed people from raids for simply having incredibly low DPS or dying consistently; there is no reason to be carrying people through raids.

Trash Marking & Crowd Control (CC)

I know.  I know.  With the joke that was Naxx, it seems that everyone forgot how to mark and cc mobs.  We were all seemingly used to simply “just AOE that group”, that the skills we learned in T5 and T6 content had to be relearned.

The only instance currently available that needs CC if your raid is even half-way decent is Ulduar.  Ulduar has certain pulls with 7+ trash mobs, which require a lot of your DPSers to keep things CC’ed.  You should always make use of the best type of CC you have, which included, but is not limited to:

• Warlocks – Enslave demons, Banish elementals/demons
• Druids – Hibernate dragonkin, Entangling Roots melee mobs
• Rogues – Sap humanoids
• Priests – Shackle undead
• Mages – Polymorph humanoids
• etc, etc, etc.

Marking is important because it helps get stuff killed, and it is way more efficient (and less confusing) to say, “Kill Skull”, rather than say “Kill the Faceless Horror”.  Remember, many of the people in your raid group may not take the raid as seriously as you, and may be listening to music while raiding, not listening in vent, tabbed out during explanations, and things of that nature, so marking targets for CC and specifying a kill order can help out significantly.

Ventrilo

One key thing every raid needs is Ventrilo.  If a PUG raid I join isn’t using Ventrilo, I usually immediately leave unless I know the people in the group.  Regardless of how competent people may be, Ventrilo can often be the discerning difference between a fail and wiping raid group versus a successful group.  Ventrilo is used to communicate important information, who is doing what, and how the fight is going to work out.  It can be used to let healers know who is tanking, who has x debuff and needs extra heals (or that people should move away from that person), and can even save a wipe after the MT dies.

You need to make sure your raiders use Vent seriously during raid times, and keep it clear of useless chatter (off-topic conversions, asking for buffs, etc), so that it can be used to successfully down bosses.

Leading Pick-Up Groups (PUGs)

This is pretty much an entirely different topic altogether, I won’t even get into this on this post.

Boss Fight Explanations

I personally believe that a lot of raid leaders over-explain boss fights.  You, as a raid leader or guild leader, probably know your players and their average age, but, for the most part, WoW players are probably somewhere between the ages of 16-24 (completely made up stat, but that’s my guess).  At any rate, the average attention span for WoW general demographic isn’t that large.

If you are leading your raid through a fight most of your raiders have never experienced, the best thing to do is explain quickly and put in some reps on the boss.  If you do feel inclined to explain every single aspect of the fight to your raid, then at best, you should definitely summarize the fight mechanics, and piece together everything you said.  To think that 24 people will sit through a 10 minute explanation is completely naive, between checking your buffs, chatting in /1 or in guild chat or in whispers, and other things in game, people are generally very distracted.

I’ve often found it helpful to simply explain the first phase of a new fight, and only worry about the next phases till we have the first phase done perfectly.  That way, you are not bogging people’s minds down with information about 2 phases they won’t see for another hour, and most of the people will have forgotten what’s going on during those phases anyways.

Remember - there is nothing more important than you knowing the boss strategy 100% beforehand.  I cannot stress enough how awful it makes the raid leader know if you don’t know a fight, and will ultimately be what wipes are attributed to, even if its not the case.

Evaluating Boss Encounters

Another thing I don’t see enough raid leaders do after a wipe is analyze what went wrong.  Too many leaders just want to get back into the encounter, without even seeing if something in the strategy or raid is flawed, if someone STILL doesn’t understand the encounter, or if someone simply isn’t pulling their weight.

After any wipe, you should always ask yourself what the problem was.  What went wrong, who didn’t do what, and how it could have been avoided.  Fixing the problems in a previous wipe and learning more about the boss fight is what I usually refer to as progression.

Recommended Addons

• Recount, or other damage meter, primarily to monitor DPS and damage taken.
• Omen – shows threat for all players on your target, which is helpful if some of your DPSers don’t already have this addon.
• X-Perl, or other UnitFrames, can be very helpful in seeing how raid healing is doing, who is taking damage, or easily see who is dying when they shouldn’t be.
• Failbot, let’s you know who is consistently failing to things easily avoidable and even calls them out in raid for you.
• Raid Assistant Assistant – I like RAA simply because it automatically promotes people to Assistant that I tell it to.
• Big Brother – shows you everyone’s buffs, flasks, food buff, pally buffs, etc, so you can easily address who needs what.
• Deadly Boss Mods – Your raiders should have this too, but as a RL, I strongly advise you call out those particularly important boss timers or shift-click them into raid chat.

Conclusion

Raid leading is not easy.  There are a lot of moving parts, but in the end, it can be a very rewarding experience.  Always remember the ultimate reason why you are raiding – whether it be for casual fun, hardcore progression, or somewhere in between, you are there to down bosses, and get loot.  It is your responsiblity as a raid leader to do everything in your power to make sure this happens, and in a timely fashion.

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