Stop Doing Everything Yourself

In the summer of 2000 I worked at a youth camp. The director was a man in his late 40s who had lost part of his ring finger on his right hand and had relearned how to play the guitar with the "wrong" hand positions for chords. He'd been the director for several years, and one of the most distinct memories I have of him is the phrase "the strongest people know when to ask for help". I've always tried to remember this and not get myself in over my head when dealing with a potentially overwhelming project. As any guild leader or officer who’s done their job well will tell you, trying to lead raids is overwhelming. One of the things you can do to best retain your sanity and improve raiding efficiency is to delegate responsibility to people in your raid.

It is hard enough to tank well with no distractions. It would have been more or less impossible for me to explain the next boss fight or pull, assign targets, deal with healing assignments, mark mobs, juggle the raid composition and attendance, hand out consumables, figure out loot and still tank effectively. Trying to do this would have driven me up the wall, and as it was there were often situations where I was furiously typing trying to keep pace with the jobs I’d left for myself. I was fortunate enough to have people with which to share these tasks. Marking targets on the next pull was handed off to a warlock. Healing assignments were handled amongst the healers. One person would go over the upcoming boss or tricky pull on vent once the current pull was stabilized. Consumables were handled before the raid by a different person than the one who was handling the raid invites and group composition. This is a great way to get people involved without giving them so much that they feel used and abused. A good player who becomes bored quickly can be tasked with easy but attention-requiring additional duties to keep them involved and offset some load from the raid leader. You can assign a timid but natural leader small responsibilities to help develop their innate abilities that they may have never used. Many of the smaller tasks like marking targets or calling timers on voice chat don’t require any true form of status recognition within the guild, so people can help out without being dragged fully in to an officer-style position. Other more critical roles like loot assignment should be handled by reliable, upper echelon members of the guild who you trust. These sorts of assignments can also be used to test potential leaders by seeing what they do when given assist several raids in a row. It’s usually very easy to spot power-tripping players who overstep their bounds when given a small amount of room to work with or well-meaning members who lack sufficient leadership skills, and this gives you an opportunity to do it without jeopardizing an entire night of raid time by thrusting them directly in to a full-on leadership role.

While not always possible, try to bear in mind the player's class when you assign them a task. If they're the main tank, don't have them marking targets for the next pull. They will be busy tanking every single pull. A DPS class or an offtank healer is a good candidate for this job. Calling boss timers is a task usually best left to a ranged DPS class as they can typically ignore the status of the raid and any positioning requirements of the boss, reducing the points of their focus to themselves and upcoming timers. It's easy for tanks or healers to not see timers because their focus is on a raid grid or on mob positioning and threat. Your experiences with this will vary wildly depending on the personalities in your raid -- you may discover that your best timer caller is a paladin who heals the main tank, for example.

You should also try to mix and match who does what. If you've had the same person marking pulls for the last two months miss a raid, nobody else will likely know what's marked what except the individual people who handle each target. This can lead to a big slow-down and can be a major problem with permanent loss of an individual in an important role like healing assignments. Where possible, you should have multiple people who at least know the basics of each task that make a passable substitute. Waiting until the person you've come to depend on is gone means you've waited to long - have them in the raid for backup to the other person who is learning their job. You don’t need to trade off every week, but somebody else should be able to step in without much warning to handle one of the tasks you normally delegate.

It can be difficult for a person who prefers to micro-manage situations to give up some measure of control in raids, but the simple fact is the more you pay attention to the more things you have an opportunity to miss. A very experienced raid leader might be able to juggle multiple tasks like this at once, but taking on more than you can handle is a very common mistake and it burns people out quickly. If you can remove sufficient responsibility from yourself, you can evaluate on the fly raid performance and the quality of the job that people are doing with the tasks you’ve assigned them. Delegating as much as possible to other people spreads the work load evenly and lets you focus on playing well and doing the jobs you’ve reserved for yourself to the best of your ability, and if you ask that your raid plays well you must hold yourself to that same standard.