Well firstly, there is no such thing as "free kill" encounters in the game, except maybe chess event. SSC/TK bosses will ALWAYS have a learning curve,whether it being brief or long depends on your guild's experience, gear, make-up etc.

Every guild is different, some guilds raid with complete seriousness and a no-messng-around attitude, some raid with a casual, easy going attitude.

Our guild is more on the light-hearted side, and we mess around on vent and have a few laughs, however if we start wiping stupidly on easy bosses, the nature turns serious and our GM gets frustrated.

If someone is constantly causing your raid to either wipe, or slacking in their duties, I think it is important to tell them to shape up. However if its just a one-off accident (which happens to the best of us), then I think it would be a bad idea to attack them on vent or in chat. Its always good to have an understanding raid leader rather than a ball breaking raid leader who rages over vent when things arn't going as planned.

And remember, this is a game of patience, don't burn yourself or your guildies out.

One thing I've learned from both raid leading and being a grunt pew-pewing in the back, is that when you wipe, find out exactly why. If the tank died: was it a spike? How much was the spike? Add out of place hitting him? Healers CC'd by something ecnounter specific (i.e. tombs, graves)?. If people are dieing or something isn't happening the way it's supposed to, ask why, and figure out a way to rectify it. Wiping for several hours (or days!) simply because the healing camp for tank A needed a little more help or a slight position change can be frustrating.

After progression nights if we haven't down a new boss we discuss it on our forums. People post vids, offer suggestions, say what went wrong with their part of the fight etc. and it's helped us refine our strats and learn encounters better.

As a raid leader, I've found that repeating stuff works wonders. Noone ever told me how to lead raids either, and I haven't actually led raids since TBC, but that was how I did it before TBC.

Keep talking, repeating, motivating. Things differ from 'loot the dog' to 'keep everyone up now' - etcetera. Usually people say it has to be 100% quiet on Ventrilo/Teamspeak, but I find it better if one person keeps talking and telling people what to do on the fly.

Take for instance Twin Emperors - When I was raid leading there, I was constantly telling people on the second when to attack, when there was a bug, when there was going to be a teleport, when someone had to move for a Blizzard, etcetera. Obviously people could've figured this out themselves, but a raid leader speaking constantly kept them on their toes.

Usually when people wiped the raid, they were pretty upset themselves. A quick 'please don't let it happen again' would sort that. Obviously saying what went wrong so everyone understands that.

Now I've always thought that having to repeat each and every damn instructions was a weakness ... if people need somebody to tell them what they're supposed to know, how are we progressing?

But experience led me to think that yes, indeed, having somebody to double-check things and making sure everything was ok is necessary. People will be more relaxed and like a previous poster said, relaxed people play better.

But back to wipe and the reasons for it: if you do not know why you wiped, you just wasted time. You should always ask for what happened. We had to force some tanks to use eavesdrop and other similar addons as they were not able to tell us what happened. I fraps most encounters we do not fully master yet. We have combatlogs available.

Sometimes I'm wrong in some immediate analysis. I think that healers slacked while in fact, it was some other factor somewhere (bad positioning, unexpected crushing blow, etc). When it's obvious, like a MT death on Gruul's seventh growth, I try to point out how the healing *team* kinda sucked. When tanks aren't able to get back to good threat level on VR, I tell them that, as a team, the tanks were bad. As the team feeling is quite strong in our guild, people will tend to help and coach each other. And there it's much easier to delegate a lot of the RL's tasks.

I guess the only reason for when a name is actually called on TS is for stupid deaths when there is no reason for it. When people die on the first shatter, I call their names. Not in an insulting way, but just to tell them that it was wrong and that they should be more careful. Same for people insisting on DPSing an uncontrolled mob when the tank is struggling to get back in line.