Life on the Edge: Raiding, Playing and Leading
What is "skill" for a guild in raiding?
How does a raid as a whole demonstrate "skill" in raiding? Does anything go beyond the sum of the skill of individual members at playing their own class?
Abananax, for example, seems to push for a boss-DPS-based definition, as evidenced by their aggressive advertising for their guild as "highest DPS in WoW" and creating the http://wwsscoreboard.com/.
However, while pushing high dps is sometimes a judge of your cleverness on an encounter ("Hey guys, if we do enough DPS on Anetheron we can ignore the infernals completely and get the event over faster and therefore more safely"), it's often just a judge of how well your raidleader can raidstack, or how willing you are to engage in things that are arguably gimmicks (e.g. aggressive (ab?)use of mind-controlled necromancers in Mount Hyjal totally dominating the WWS charts and therefore wwsscoreboard.)
While yes, it's important that a raid leader understands group compositions and the strengths and weaknesses classes bring to an encounter, I'm not a fan of raid stacking for three reasons:
1) We're all in this together
Example: Fusion runs with two prot warriors. Despite this, we are frequently top-50 and have quite a few top-10 kills.
Would we do higher DPS if we sat out one of the prot warriors each time? Definitely. We'd also do more dps if we added more people to our roster, rather than leaning more heavily on respecs for those nights when we have a lot of healers or a lot of tanks and we prefer someone to respec and come in imperfect gear.
But we would also not be acting as a guild. I like that everyone is rewarded at the end of the trash clear with the boss, and that we don't sit people out just to push weekly DPS records.
(Note that on extremely hard content, swapping classes might be necessary to actually beat the content the first few times. This is not what I'm talking about.)
2) People matter more than DPS
I prefer bringing an imperfect raid composition (e.g. 3 mages, 2 locks) if the third lock was the one who wanted a night off and the third mage wanted to raid. Is the third curse technically "more useful"? Probably. But I value following preferences more than a specific DPS number.
If we have two rockstar elemental shaman, I'd rather bring them than say "sorry, we only have space for one, although we're going to go recruit a second enhancement shaman and raid with two of them, k?"
3) Raid/group composition isn't hard
Perhaps I read too much EJ and that's why I think this is easy, but I fail to be impressed by raidleaders who manage complex tasks like "feed all the bloodlusts to the melee group" or "have your warlocks cast CoR" or "put the rogues with an enhnacement shaman."
Someone could easily write down a guide that any guild could execute on for "how to raid stack for each TBC encounter". Such a guide would be even easier to follow than boss strategy guides, since the hardest thing is making sure your shaman can hit bloodlust when told to on vent.
So how does a guild as a whole demonstrate "skill" in raiding?
The most obvious candidate to me is the ability to move quickly through a raid zone as a guild: at the extreme end, this is raid zone speed clears.
Reliably clear non-trivial content quickly requires:
(It doesn't require clearing non-stop: in fact we frequently take scheduled 5-10 minute breaks throughout the night.)
Almost all of those tasks are raid-wide requirements: you can't just have a handful of strong leaders and good players who know how to read WoWwiki and execute on a fast clear.
The ability to reliably move quickly through a zone is a skill that transcends progression point: a guild that only raids two days a week is actually arguably more skilled as a guild than a guild that raids seven days a week but makes a bit more progress. While being at the top of the gear curve helps a raid recover from mistakes, it is not the biggest difference between your average clear time and the top 5% of times.
Obviously I'm biased: I chose to come to Fusion partly because I watched the 2-hour SSC clear video they made back in July of 2007, and this week we cleared all of Black Temple, from the first Najentus pull to "Illidan Stormrage dies" in 2 hours, 49 minutes.
I say this not to boast, but to give some scale for what I'm talking about when I say "fast clears" and "speed clears."
Also, a common comment I hear is that if you're clearing quickly you have no fun. I can only speak for my guild, but while 2 hour 49 minute BT raids are pretty quiet on vent, 3 hour 15 minute BT raids are very chatty and fun. Clearing content quickly does not exclude enjoyment and banter, and can actually make it more fun because you don't have silent resentment over "so-and-so forcing us to wait again."
I realize based on one of the EJ threads that not everyone enjoys moving quickly through the zone. I do, however; but for those who don't, I'm curious what they see as the guild-level "skill" involved in the act of raiding?
Abananax, for example, seems to push for a boss-DPS-based definition, as evidenced by their aggressive advertising for their guild as "highest DPS in WoW" and creating the http://wwsscoreboard.com/.
However, while pushing high dps is sometimes a judge of your cleverness on an encounter ("Hey guys, if we do enough DPS on Anetheron we can ignore the infernals completely and get the event over faster and therefore more safely"), it's often just a judge of how well your raidleader can raidstack, or how willing you are to engage in things that are arguably gimmicks (e.g. aggressive (ab?)use of mind-controlled necromancers in Mount Hyjal totally dominating the WWS charts and therefore wwsscoreboard.)
While yes, it's important that a raid leader understands group compositions and the strengths and weaknesses classes bring to an encounter, I'm not a fan of raid stacking for three reasons:
1) We're all in this together
Example: Fusion runs with two prot warriors. Despite this, we are frequently top-50 and have quite a few top-10 kills.
Would we do higher DPS if we sat out one of the prot warriors each time? Definitely. We'd also do more dps if we added more people to our roster, rather than leaning more heavily on respecs for those nights when we have a lot of healers or a lot of tanks and we prefer someone to respec and come in imperfect gear.
But we would also not be acting as a guild. I like that everyone is rewarded at the end of the trash clear with the boss, and that we don't sit people out just to push weekly DPS records.
(Note that on extremely hard content, swapping classes might be necessary to actually beat the content the first few times. This is not what I'm talking about.)
2) People matter more than DPS
I prefer bringing an imperfect raid composition (e.g. 3 mages, 2 locks) if the third lock was the one who wanted a night off and the third mage wanted to raid. Is the third curse technically "more useful"? Probably. But I value following preferences more than a specific DPS number.
If we have two rockstar elemental shaman, I'd rather bring them than say "sorry, we only have space for one, although we're going to go recruit a second enhancement shaman and raid with two of them, k?"
3) Raid/group composition isn't hard
Perhaps I read too much EJ and that's why I think this is easy, but I fail to be impressed by raidleaders who manage complex tasks like "feed all the bloodlusts to the melee group" or "have your warlocks cast CoR" or "put the rogues with an enhnacement shaman."
Someone could easily write down a guide that any guild could execute on for "how to raid stack for each TBC encounter". Such a guide would be even easier to follow than boss strategy guides, since the hardest thing is making sure your shaman can hit bloodlust when told to on vent.
So how does a guild as a whole demonstrate "skill" in raiding?
The most obvious candidate to me is the ability to move quickly through a raid zone as a guild: at the extreme end, this is raid zone speed clears.
Reliably clear non-trivial content quickly requires:
- Raidleaders that are time-conscious and good at leading/motivation
- Raid-wide discipline to follow move/stay directions religiously
- Attention and "oh-shit" skills strong enough to handle unexpected pulls, adds, and deaths
- Fast wipe recovery without extended bitching/blamefests
- A strong raid crew that does not need detailed boss information each time but merely a handful of reminders
- Raid leadership that gets tasks assigned *before* standing in front of the boss so you can engage quickly
- Fast loot assignment (more of an officer thing than a guild thing, but including it for completeness)
(It doesn't require clearing non-stop: in fact we frequently take scheduled 5-10 minute breaks throughout the night.)
Almost all of those tasks are raid-wide requirements: you can't just have a handful of strong leaders and good players who know how to read WoWwiki and execute on a fast clear.
The ability to reliably move quickly through a zone is a skill that transcends progression point: a guild that only raids two days a week is actually arguably more skilled as a guild than a guild that raids seven days a week but makes a bit more progress. While being at the top of the gear curve helps a raid recover from mistakes, it is not the biggest difference between your average clear time and the top 5% of times.
Obviously I'm biased: I chose to come to Fusion partly because I watched the 2-hour SSC clear video they made back in July of 2007, and this week we cleared all of Black Temple, from the first Najentus pull to "Illidan Stormrage dies" in 2 hours, 49 minutes.
I say this not to boast, but to give some scale for what I'm talking about when I say "fast clears" and "speed clears."
Also, a common comment I hear is that if you're clearing quickly you have no fun. I can only speak for my guild, but while 2 hour 49 minute BT raids are pretty quiet on vent, 3 hour 15 minute BT raids are very chatty and fun. Clearing content quickly does not exclude enjoyment and banter, and can actually make it more fun because you don't have silent resentment over "so-and-so forcing us to wait again."
I realize based on one of the EJ threads that not everyone enjoys moving quickly through the zone. I do, however; but for those who don't, I'm curious what they see as the guild-level "skill" involved in the act of raiding?
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The skill involved in raiding is at least 80% logistics and leadership. It's the biggest differentiation between guilds at this point, especially now. All progressing SW guilds are going to have roughly the same amount of "skill" in their players, at least in terms of their ability to maximize their character by following spreadsheets or forums or whatever.
The only other major difference then is awareness, which is definitely important (and SW pushes this envelope farther than any other instance), but still rare that every single person has to be really "aware." Even M'uru, probably the hardest fight in the game (maybe KJ?), doesn't require that much awareness from large portions of the raid. Stand in a spot, press one or two buttons over and over, etc. Individual tasks in a raid are still rarely hard, or at least rarely hard for more than a few people at a time, and maybe a half dozen in total. |
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1. Ability to push your buttons and pull your levers = Skill. Doing it to the best of your ability, doing your homework and knowing what buttons, and levers to use at the right time is the skill factor.
2.Stamina, Being able to last in this game is the next facet of this, if your some guild or guild member who made a super amazing first, like the first C'thun or Illidan or whatnot but then the guild died shortly after you are worth less then a guild still raiding content beyond what you attained. Not being able to last the long haul is an element of skill. 3.Adaptability, Many warriors were good Pre-BC and post BC they turned to crap. Why? They couldnt adapt to multi-target tanking. They became not good. The role of a warlock changed, the role of mages changed. The role of most every class changed. Many couldnt adapt and like the dinasaurs died out. Those are the prime three elements of skill I kinda keep as my criteria of how I value people. |
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Recent Blog Entries by Kyth
- Who Are You, as a Guild? (03/16/08)
- What is "skill" for a guild in raiding? (03/15/08)
- Introduction (03/14/08)
