1) Have fun, WoW is still a game and played to have fun regardless of experience/talent.

The built in one automatically stalls on AFK players, disconnected players and sometimes we've had it flatout NOT show up on a raider's screen. Problems abound with that one. Whenever possible, esp. in a small raid like Kara, we do the "jump if you're ready" or "move to the square" method.

The best tips I can give are that you have to be firm, but gentle. Firm in that when you say "DPS the square first" people understand that this is the correct thing to do and that they will do it, but "gentle" in that when people screw up, you're not all over them and yelling at them to high hell. It needs to be a balance. People need to respect your authority as a leader, but you need to respect their individualities as people that are following you. Nobody wants to be mindless drone #9948, but you can't spend too much time on any one person either.

Keep it positive and keep it going. Raid morale absolutely dies when there are delays for no reason, or when the raid is generally going sour and people are getting grouchy. Be the first person to speak before an attempt and after a wipe to set the mood - if people pick up on a hint of hopelessness from you, it's going to spread through the raid. If you're yelling at people first thing after a wipe, then it's going to set the mood for any mistake.

Don't be afraid to call people out on mistakes and ask for an explanation, but be careful of putting people on the spot in front of their peers. If the mage for instance misses the spellsteal on Krosh, then ask him if he was lagging or if he just plain missed it. Don't put it in a negative context, but ask for reasonable explanation as to why he couldn't do what he needed to do for the encounter. Then - if you can - fix the problem.

On a wipe situation, the first thing I will do is ask for my tanks and my healers to give me their view of the fight. I want to know if it was just lag or if there was a slowdown in the topoff. If we're just running low on healing mana, then I'll ask the DPS if they were holding back or what they were doing. If it's a control problem, I'll ask the players involved with that. The key for improvement is quickly identifying the problem, and applying an effective and quick solution to it. I'll also ask for any suggestions people may have and it may be just my group, but in general I'll get little optimizations that I probably didn't see the first time around handed to me.

Be clear and calm to any troublemakers in your raid. Explain the situation to them clearly and present to them their options (i.e. smarten up, or be removed). In general, most people are willing to shape up, unless your recruitment doesn't filter those types out well.

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That's about all I have to add to this - but really it's about effective communication and attitude for a lot of it.

I agree with this most of all, although sometimes I get the impression we wipe because we simply are just plain terrible.
Knowing the exact aspects of what goes wrong is the quickest way to turn around an encounter, tweaking strategy one aspect/wipe at a time until you have a workable strategy.

I think a big part of raid leading is knowing when to be positive, and when to be (somewhat) negative.

Let's be honest, our raids aren't always going to be shining stars of excellence. If people are playing poorly on a night, it's typically benificial to everyone to be a bit firm and tell people they are doing a bad job. I'm not talking Sebudai reinforcement here (Sorry man! Although it's temping at times! ) but some honest, "Hey guys, this is not acceptable. We can do better. Here's what we're going to do next time..."

On the flip-side, it is really important to let people know they are doing a good job when they are trying hard, even if you don't get a kill. Nobody likes showing up to a raid, working their ass off, then getting the "cold shoulder" just because the boss didn't go down. Telling people, "Hey guys, those were some really nice attempts tonight. We are definitely going to get him next time after the progress we made tonight. Good raid and nice work," after a night of attempts can help more than you might expect.

I think balanced communication is key. A raid leader can't afford to be either too mean or too nice--because, really, people need both types of feedback at different times in the raid. Be understanding but do your best to keep your raid force motivated towards its goals. Many of the other typical problems of a raid will "magically" go away on their own if you have a highly motivated and focused group.

Don't be afraid to call a raid if it isn't going well. Sometimes it's better to say, "It's not happening tonight, good tries anyhow but we'll come back to this another night." Don't keep pushing if you are only making minimal progress. Just come back when people are fresh. Sometimes a raid force -wants- to keep pushing, because they feel like they are really, really close--feel free to take advantage of those types of situations--but try to avoid artificially pushing past resonable limits of time and repetition. Try to get a feel for when your raids "lose steam" and call it when that happens. If you're not making progress at 11pm, you're probably not going to be making progress at 2am either...so just don't go there.

But, the most important thing I'd mention (which was already touched on) is: you are the one who sets the tone for your raid. It's very important to display the attitude and behavior that you expect from everyone else in yourself, otherwise it will not happen. It is also important to not let yourself get into a slump or get too "down", even if things go poorly. If people see the raid leader is demotivated, they will follow very, very shortly. Always consider how what you say or do might impact the raid.

Being postitive and giving feed back is extremly important as a raid leader. There is nothing more annoying than raid leaders saying things like. "This sucks! Fix whatever you are doing wrong!". When something like this could have been said instead. "Can you tell me what went wrong?" I always try my best to tell people the truth about the state of a raid. If there is wipes due to general sloppyness I normally say so over ventrillo or in raid chat just to make people wake up a little. I also make sure to tell them that they did a good job on kills that are hard.

As a raid leader you can't know everything that is happening all the time so it's important to get feed back on what is acutally killing people. Many times it's the small adjustment that is needed to turn it from a wipe to a clean kill.

Back before BC Tenacitys raid leader structure was very good. (Changed a bit now due to the instances and such) We had a class leader for each class and their job was to analyse and instruct their class about any spesifics in a boss fight. To ease the communication the classes made their own channels, like the warlock channel, healer channel and tank channels. The information would be spread though those to avoid raid chat cluttering. We then had 1 raid leader where the general instructions would come from. We tried to keep it to one person giving instructions to avoid any confusion.

Make sure people know that you are the one leading the raid. It is very important during a raid that people do what they are told to do and not wander of and starting their own thing. There is nothing more dangerous in a raid than people doing something completly different from what they are supposed to do.

EDIT: Use SWstats or some other form of DamageMeters. Not to see who wins the meters, but so you can be able to identify obvious DPS\Healing problems in your raid. Like, Why isn't Priest A healing for 100k when priest B is healing for 300k?

In our raids i'm usually the very blunt ass in telling people where they need to shape up, but its expected of me now and usually flow very well with the GM when i tell people who messed up why and how to fix it, he will then follow in with the motivational talk maybe a jab at me to make people laugh and we get on with it and that mistake doesn't happen again,

Also on the flip side to the coin if I see someone performing very well (like a rogue who joined us last night from a guild that we're at magtheridon and he came 2nd on dmg on hydros and did really well at lurker unlike some old school members) then they will get commended usually in a pm but definately mentioned in officer chat aswell,

Raid leading becomes rough when the team morale takes a nose-dive. Digging the group out of that and having them keep going is the main real challenge I think. Everything else kind of flows and works. But emotions going way negative is the main challenge and the main disrupter of a raid.

I found that for the group I was with that trying to get people off the emotions and on the things that can be done to improve was really important here. I never used personal feedback, rather I tried to look at what was not working last time and look for improvements for that. I really wanted folks to think about what to improve (construtive) than being upset about what went wrong and who should get called out for that (kind of destructive).

But I can see that it depends on the culture and psychology of the group if a rougher approach is appropriate. In the group I was with I think a rougher going would have been bad news. People getting upset and losing focus certainly was the main staller for us overall, so the main job in a rough learning evening was to work upsets out of the system and keep the focus up, even if there isn't any visible improvement for some tries.

Next to being highly intelligent overall, and having a solid understanding of encounter and class mechanics, there is one more quality that every raid leader needs to have:

Make clear, strong decisions without coming across as stubborn

Too often I have witnessed people (not normally raid leading) taking too much time discussing things and doubting openly whether they are doing a good job. This is NOT what you should do when RLing: Rely on a few good people to give you advise, and tell others to 'hush' or shut up when they complain about a chosen strategy. It is of utmost importance that the raid has one clear raid leader to look up to and listen to: Coming across as doubting your own chosen strategy will make everyone feel uneasy.

The raid leader makes the decisions: Even when a decision turns out to be wrong, (s)he should be confident about making it and calling people to action.

Nothing slows a raid down more than a RL in doubt.

The single biggest challenge as a raid leader is the balance between aggressive and encouraging, hardcore and soft. This is more complicated the more diverse your raid force is.

Some players (such as yours truly) perform better when given a hair drying beratement, Sebudai style. It makes them hellbent on not screwing up again, cause doing so would be a personal defeat, and their competetive nature doesn't want that.

On the flip side, other players react negatively to such treatment, become insecure, playing worse and losing morale.

Similarly, some players want to go in with high pot usage, and keep banging on an encounter until it goes down or they simply can't stay awake any longer.

On the flip side, others prefer to keep costs by low by limiting pots until you are very close to a kill, and suffer heavy drops in morale when you have been wiping for 3 hours.

Figuring out the correct balance to keep your raid force performing optimally as a collective is extremely hard, and what I felt I was the furthest from mastering as a raid leader.

I agree with Elerion, this balance is extremly important and it sometimes is quite hard to get the feeling for it.

I'm leading raids for almost 2 years now (doing most of the stuff alone - no class officers or something and I know i should delegate but... well, it works). The balancing between "hard" and "soft" should start with the raidpool. It wasn't fun for me to learn this.

Last year my guild had about the double size and when we finally killed Nef, the fact that we had way too different players showed up stronger every day. 50% of the group consisted of "hardcore" raiders spending most of the day with theorycraft and farming. They wanted to raid 5-6 hours without any breaks and needed (and wanted) the harsh commands and a quite offensive treatment.
The other 50% were "casuals" with kids running around in the background and something we once knew as a real life. They refused to see the use in farming 6 hours for 6 hours of raiding in a game. If I treated them like the hard raiders they were, of course, pissed and we had a lot of drama.
Reminds me of a Nef-try where only one healer was still alive (and he was OOM) so I called it a wipe on vent. "Healers are dead, wipe please."
It took me more than 10 days to calm down the surviving oom-healer as I officaly called him "not a healer". Well, call him a pussy... I guess your right.

End of the weird story: When we killed our first bosses in Naxx the raids got too hardcore for the casuals and as I had to treat them gently the raids also got too soft for the hardcore raiders.
We disbaned (with even more drama) and now I'm together with the hardcore raiding fraction.

You can be the best raidleader in the world, but you cant combine these completely different groups.

Yes and no. There will always be a spectra of players few in the top who does what you way/want few in the bottom who never/ with the least effort does what you say. And this you got in every guild. The best guilds have the smalest spectra, that is with people with the same minds.


Other than that, I think this thread is spot on. Never leave open answers and always ask for the short answer.


On top of this I want to add: When analysing peoples effort, don't ask who did anything wrong, but rather what can be done better.

Since there seems to be some non-belivers of -dkp I'll just add some thoughts:
awarding -dkp for misstakes have different purposes, one obvious and some less obvious, to my experience the obvious one is the weakest reason you want to use it.

the obvious one: as a whip, people will in theory try harder not to make misstakes.
some less obvious ones:
1. Reduce moaning and frustration of the ones NOT making misstakes, he made a bad misstake, he got some -dkp for it, ok something has been done maybe I should focus on my own play instead of making mocking remarks on vent and in raidchat.
2. Defining some actions/situations as player controled instead of random/someone else's fault will raise some peoples awareness of the fight, some people allways get which stuff they did good and bad but without this some types of players would keep doing the same misstake and think it was random/someone elses fault. good examples to this include: dying to iceblocks at saphiron, dying from tidal wave because you didn't bandage up after watery grave etc but there's a million of examples of this.

You need a competent raidleader that knows when to use it though and most of the time you want to be restrictive with it.

I didn't find this a problem. I was always happy to admit that no strategy is 100% before it actually has proven itself to work. As long as people respect your competency being honest about the situation never hurt, in fact I felt it helped because people felt that noone was trying to appear infallible.

In terms of improving we always had a drive to a lot of feedback. Not a 10 people talk at once but a sort of pipeline for feedback through class officers. That way if 10 people had something to say, that would happen in class channels and be relayed to the leader channel.

Often it was in fact hard to get the right piece of information out of people, stuff like is the healing balance right. Why exactly did X die and stuff like that. But maybe that was our crowd that wasn't overflowing with people who had to give their 2 cents on every aspect of the process.

Only occasionally we had someone who went into strong opinion mode and needed to bud heads, but that too is really just having the respect and the skill to bring things back to focus. Delegating helps here.

Part of the raid leading here is to keep the analysis focused and to the point. Sometimes folks want to adjust 10 things at a time, and putting the foot down and saying "Last try the tank died first, lets fix that only first" is good to keep the learning curve focused and make sure that the real problems are addressed and not something changed that may or may not help. Having a clear view what's broke and what needs fixing (and what is just apparently broken or possibly not relevant) is certainly a big part of doing this right.

We still have class leads in BC to some degree although the micro-managing that occurred in naxx definitely has gone away. Most of the class leads for us include recruitment, a go-to person to talk to in order to learn your classes responsibility on a fight, making sure everyone is prepared with full pots (wtb 2.1) and someone to make a decision when we need a spot in the raid (lol need a hunter spot). The broad fight overview is still defined by the raid leaders, but it keeps raid leaders from having to note every responsibility for every class.

We used to have class leaders as well. Recently we reduced the number of officers a lot by creating some kind of "role managers" - having someone to take care of the tanks, someone for the healers, etc. This also comes in handy since there are now more classes to tank and dps than before (non-healing specs have become more common).


To get on topic, if find that the subject has too much emphasis on not being too harsh, yet not too soft as well. As this is certainly an important skill that a raid leader should possess, it is merely a mean to a greater purpose: creating a good, positive atmosphere in the raid (and even in the guild). This is the most important thing there is in raids, and also what raids should be all about - having fun and exploring content with the people you like.

When people are feeling comfortable, they will perform a lot better than when they are bored or irritated. This leads me to one of the most crucial aspects of leading a raid, and this is reducing downtime. I think most people are not even aware of how much impact downtime has. I am in a raiding guild, where we switch raid leaders a lot, and every time I am not raid leader, I often get annoyed by how my fellow raid leaders can keep up so much downtime.
The problem with downtime is, is that people are waiting on something to happen. Be it the pull, be it someone who has been walking back from his corpse way too slow, whatever. Waiting gets people bored, and really brings the morale of the raid down fast. I myself try to reduce the downtime as much as possible by scheduling breaks. For instance, after downing Curator and before starting the trash to Shade of Aran, it is a good time to have a few minutes break. Don't make breaks too long, or the people that get back really fast will have to wait, which eventually will wear them down as well.

Another aspect with reducing downtime, is fast decision making. Often I see leaders having to choose between doing option A or option B (choosing betweens tactics, bosses, etc). They go through all the advantages and disadvantages between both options, which takes up a lot of time. If you are having doubts, then just simply don't. Just make a decision, it can't be all that bad if they both seem to be okay. Even if option A is slightly better than option B, it is still better to go option B immediately than going option A after 15 minutes of theorycrafting and discussing - do that out of the raid.

Some other issue with regard to raid leading, that has been mentioned before, but I want to elaborate on, are "know your raiders". Not only do you have to know them in order to communicate with them in an orderly fashion, but also for giving them the right task. Back in the 40-man raids, I was druid class leader and responsible for assigning healing tasks. I always put the bad gear/skilled/specced healers on the easy tasks and the good ones on the difficult ones. It wouldn't be wise to put a poorly geared feral druid on a bad geared tank who would require a lot of healing. This may sound like common sense, but again, I see people (at least in my guild) not being aware of this fact and putting really casual / unskilled people on important tasks (like for example pressing the cubes at Magtheridon's fight).

Playing music, especially "fun" music, on vent is a very good way to get yourself muted by me.

What some people (not directed at you, just a general observation) fail to realise is that some people will NOT think their "fun" and witty comments on vent are funny, or their silly /yell macros. We just want to raid and not listen to idiots. Everyone should be there to raid (if not then you have a bigger problem), so let us raid and remove as much of the clutter as possible. If they want to joke around there are other ways and times than delaying or disturbing the rest.

If things aren't going too well blame that always-afk guy or maybe even a hunter

Well we have a laugh but the main ethos from the leader is "dont suck".

We also tend to not talk constantly on ventrillo during proper bosses, something I noticed during a recent routing problem with my ISP - ventrillo can be a huge distraction especially the molten core moment where someone yells "heal meeee" on trash and the tanks HP starts to fall rapidly

Greatest bit of adivce on pulling/assigning targets I ever got: Kill the funny looking one first.

Course lately the 2 Greater Boggstrok single Boggstrok pull in Heroic Slave Pens vexes me.

Great way to identify a raid leader who will invariably fail somehow is to get this in a pm:
I was correcting things in his posts of strats taken from Bosskillers and trying to help him out on his spec. Stuff like: "Umm, hey dude, its the chargers the charge, not the stallions."

Make sure your guild has a defined set of common goals and expected commitments. There is no amount of raidleading 'skill' that can make up for completely different goals, commitments and expectations. 24/7 min-maxing theorycrafters and friendly casuals get along fine as long as there's decent progress and new content, but when you start wiping and learning encounters it'll create alot of unwanted stress. (This learned the hard way with a casual guild going from MC->BWL->Emps down. Still casual raiding 3 days a weeks with Kara clear and Gruul down, but very much more selective with new members).

Lead by example. Don't let officers/classleaders get away with what you don't expect members to do. ie Don't have cl/officers hog all firstloots, raidspots, ninja afk etc.

Don't get personal, help promote group bonding. No matter how the meters say priest_a, rogue_2 or shaman_c sucked, it's a problem within their group, for them to solve. Not for you to call out on vent. Works for both criticism and praise.
Have the members of a class move to a different vent room for instructing new people or during cruicial tasks for some encounters.

Listen to feedback. 'How did the healing work out this time?', 'Tanks were never to low?' Make changes accordingly.

Keep everyone focused. Mark targets, announce kill order and target changes, remind of specific things to look out for(cleave on attumen, wreath on aran, cleave on specific mobs, non taunable mobs etc). Small details most should know anyway, but it helps to keep everyone focused on where the raid should be headed. Take 5 min breaks every now and then or people will have a hard time staying 100% focused for 4+ hours.

I think you're taking yourself a little seriously here. Obviously there's a time and place for shenanigans, and progress runs aren't one of them, but the 700th time you're clearing ZG definitely is.

I'm not disagreeing with this - just mentioning couple of issues with this in past, so it's something to consider. In some guilds it can be a problem, even though RL is quite good in what he does. Myself, I don't mind people correcting me if I make mistakes or suggest better solutions, as long as it doesn't turn out into people trying to act smart and pointing insignificant details - then it's time to say "shut up" and ask people for some actual meaningful input, provided it's still needed.
I guess it helps that nowadays, you pretty much need 2+ raid leaders to handle multiple Karazhan groups, so that's always someone to rely on if you need help - in fact, during raids I have one channel set for that - so lots of stuff stays there and average raider never sees all annoying details that have to be dealt with to properly kill boss. Kinda like officer chat really, except it's clear of all drama. (though it helps that I played with those people for 2 years and pre-wow, otherwise, communication issues might arise)

"Hi, if you've never done this before, if you move at any point while flame wreath could possibly having been being castederes, you WILL KILL US, and then I WILL HATE YOU. Other then that, lots of random damage. Enjoy!"

And I'm pretty sure it was stolen from here, but, recognize when another wipe tonight is just another wipe tonight, magical things don't happen just because you went for the 100th time instead of just 99.

Vent music has always been incredibly obnoxious - headphones vs. speakers, metal versus classical, eccet. I do enjoy randomly misquoting the meme of the week, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4

"That kind of sloppy thinking will never get you a tenure track."