here's the QQ part of the post:
First off, let me explain my own situation. I've been raiding with my guild since MC and the very firsts attemps on Lucifron as a mere member. Then, as we started naxxramas, we went through multiple crises, and i was asked whether i wanted to become an officer.given my state of mind at that time i naturally accepted.
Since then i've been leading raids, and lately we've been banging our heads against bosses which were supposed to be freekills ie: Void Reaver & Tidewalker, so i started wondering whether i was doing things right.

So here's my point: i've never "learnt" to lead raids or so, and it seems that most likely i'm doing it wrong

In raids i usually lead on vent, telling which mob we should be focusing, and recalling people of the boss mods alerts like "10 seconds to enrage" for instance.

Here are my questions

How do you manage your raid generally speaking ?

How are you dealing with people that just made the raid wipe ?

After a wipe, are you analysing the reasons that made you wipe on vent, or are you telling them what went wrong and what they should do next

What are you telling your raid on vent ? How do you make people focus ? Do you keep talking or do you talk sporadically ?

I must say that by posting this i'm not awaiting miraculous answers, but any kind of feedback is more than welcome

PS: yeah my english is quite bad and if you have trouble reading this, i will rephrase it

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.

During a boss fight, I tend to try and be a calming influence on my raid. People calm and relaxed play much better. Reminding people of phase changes a few seconds beforehand, incoming abilities, etc, all helps people stress less.

If we do wipe, then how we wiped dictates what happens next. When learning fights, as much as I try to keep an eye on what everyone is doing, I can't see everything. Sometimes I'll need to ask the raid what went wrong, and I generally have a few people who know what went wrong, and we can fix it.

If its a specific person that stuffed up, then I like to know why, but you have to be a bit careful when asking, to make sure it doesn't sound like an accusation. "What happened with the banish on that demon? Get resisted a couple times? Out of range?" works a lot better than "Idiot warlock, get the demon banished!". Sometimes the person just blantently messed up, but they will usually accept that, and being encouraging will mean they aren't as nervous next time around.

For trash, I don't usually provide much direction, I turn the raid over to the hunter who is pulling. I have a couple exceptional hunters that can move us through a trash clear pretty fast, but without overly rushing. Its also a pacing method for myself. Its hard to maintain focus throughout a three-four hour raid, and having someone else take us through trash allows me to slack off for a portion of it.

This also leads into focusing. My raiders know when I take over from the hunter that they need to settle down and focus on the upcoming fight, whether it be a tricky trash pull, or a boss fight.

This topic has cropped up before, and the general sentiment to handling stuffups is 'praise in public, criticise in private'.

For me when I'm leading a raid, I tend to go over the fight, then only call out dynamic stuff on vent (i.e. if a healer dies without a soulstone/brez, I'll rearrange healing then), but I trust people to be aware of timers/upcoming abilities.

Raid Leading Gems.

Also OzymandiusKJ has a thread where he's looking to salvage a guild, I think tips are in there too.

I did want to toss in that if you want to bona fide "learn" it, you should check up on management courses. Insert jokes about schmucky management, and cliche filed cash in book #1001, but there's good academic material out in the field too.

I'd throw in my beloved take a break every hour (give or take fifteen minutes) - not because you want to, but because study after study after study shows performance just plummets after that. 1 good hour 5 off minutes [repeat x guild raid hours] versus 1 good hour 1 ok hour 1 bad hour... until you basically hit floor, or second wind status? Easy choice.

Edit: I just wanted to extend this post with another point - not sure if it is in the other thread, but if you shoot the messenger ("Why'd we wipe?" "Well, I didn't figure out not standing in Obvious Zone Of Death was bad fast enough...") results in a messenger shortage.

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.

Figuring out why you wipe and making sure the raid understands is key. I find in our raids it usually takes 3-4 wipes before it actually sinks in and people start seriously reacting to things that caused us to wipe an hour ago. I'm sure we'd progress faster, but nobody knows how to stop people from being all zoned out after wiping a bunch with little progress.

This gets worse on any fight where it takes a significant amount of time to recover between wipes. Keeping everyone (relatively) focused and preventing people from standing around doing nothing too long is hugely important, especially during boring trash and wipes. If your raid is slow, pull faster.

To be perfectly honest, we just say "handle it" a lot. It's our best strat...no joke.

Don't put learning material (except perhaps a couple of trial attempts just to get feet wet) at the end of a long night if you can help it. Best to put that at the start after some warm up material, such as trash or a Horde raid arriving at the same time.

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.

A lot of leading a raid has to do with correcting the mistakes of others.

Something that I've found helps tremendously is to be very quick to admit to your own mistakes and explain them to the raid, e.g. "Okay, that was my fault. I was trying to be a badass and finish my heal before I dodged that orb." This shows people that you're not a prick who thinks you're better than everyone else, and it also establishes an atmosphere of "hey, relax, everyone screws up occasionally".

People will be tolerant of criticism if they believe you're fair about it. I've got a reputation as a bit of a hardass in our raids, but for the most part I can get away with it because people hear me swearing at myself on vent when I screw something up.

I've been a normal "grunt" in previous guild, a class leader, and now raid leader and nothing changes - there's always some people who "get it" and those who don't. And this basically means, they don't watch boss timers, they forget boss special abilities, they forget trash kill order, break CC and do all sort of random stuff that makes you wonder how did you ever finish Karazhan.

And unfortunately, this means you basically have to repeat same obvious stuff hundred times, even on supposedly "farm status" encounters. You killed Magtheridon 10 times but forgot to tell people to stop dps at 32%? Blast nova + debris guaranteed. Didn't tell rogues to use wound/mind numbing - look at Blindeye heal himself until you yell at them. It's one of those things that makes RLing so annoying and yet necessary. Never assume everyone knows what they're supposed to do perfectly, better to spend that extra minute or two reminding people, what they are supposed to do, than 15 minutes wiping due to stupid mistake. Tell every important warning yourself, don't count on people using boss mods - it's quite easy to get too involved into combat to notice that Big Spell of Instant Death is ready in 5 seconds(one of reason I always assign myself "lighter" healing duties, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do anything)

Then again, we're somewhat casual, so maybe this isn't case for hardcores. But I imagine it's mostly the same.

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.

Maybe I'll answer this in more detail later, but you don't know your limits until you've done Gorefiend - get him to 3% on your 4th pull ever, then proceed to wipe for 4 hours due to a select few people.

Ability to control your anger is pretty critical I'd say.

Besides that - the best raid leaders are good at saying stupid shit 100 times even though everyone thinks its unnecessary, cause it isn't. Seriously...

The ability to do basic math probably helps too, and a large knowledge of the game's abilities and synergies.

You also really need to have a basic level of awareness. It is remarkable how tunnel visioned many players are - and if you can tell what is going on with everyone at once it really helps.

I find the ability to bite your tongue helps a lot and prozac...lots of prozac!

In general though, as someone already mentioned the "praise in public, berate in private" method works well though for silly mistakes sometimes doing it humerously in public works just as well. Dont make them feel totally stupid tho just make sure they see the funny side as well as the more serious side...obviously if they then repeat the same mistake then its time to get more serious.

Frankly though my guilds always been a bit of an odd mix, we've got some very hardcore players yet at the same time we've also got a lot of more casual players which can ofc cause problems with attendance which is the single biggest issue we have. When we raid we get encounters sussed fast and the bosses down in no time really, the problem is getting people on consistently to get going in the first place! It took us not even two full nites raiding to get Hydross down but that was over the course of 2 weeks, rest of the time we were stuck doing Kara, Gruul etc because of attendance issues meaning a poor group setup or indeed key players missing like some of the resistance geared OT's etc. Any tips on how to resolve this sorta issue would ofc be appreciated!

My main focus when leading a raid is to defeat downtime. Like I see it, downtime is the worst thing that can happend in a raid. It's important to be clear when there's breaks and when it's not. Scheduling 30 min breaks etc when trash respawns when learning encounters after flasking for 2 hours. Nothing is more demotivating and kills focus than having 10 min breaks here and there.

Defeating downtime as a raidleader is important as well. Have healing targets, strategy etc ready when you get to the boss.

- Controlling anger is a key point. If you can't maintain a calm emotional state, raid leading will not be enjoyable for you or anyone else.

- Being able to give clear, comprehensible instructions to 25+ people is vital. If you have experience as a tutor or teacher (and don't suck at it) you will do well.

- Knowing how the game works is obviously important because of the above. You should know game mechanics well enough to be able to immediately countermand idiotic things other people say. ("Oh we are pulling aggro on Void Reaver at 30%, DPS should slow down." "WRONG.")

- Be able to look around the raid and tell what is going on without losing your own focus and dying or screwing up your personal job.

- Know how to give on-the-fly direction and maintain order in what otherwise quickly becomes a chaotic situation.

- Know when to just remain silent and watch so that you can give better feedback post pull, rather than yelling at people screwing up during a wipe or a learning attempt.

Not sure I agree with that one malkuth - by being so positive you actually are just kowtowing to failure (man I know that comment isn't going to go down well).

But seriously:
"Ok we're still not getting blast nova interrupted, clickers.. any problems you are having or anything we can do to make your job easier?"

IMO, the correct comment is:
"Ok, who fucked up their job on clicking. OK, you're replaced."
Happy version:
"Some fine gent is less than ideal on their cube clicking. I'd suggest we replace them with the tin man from the Wizard of Oz" (wait somewhere I lost the happiness!!).
Seriously:
"We're going to change cube clicking up just a bit." Then just do it.

I mean, there are times to be nice and all, but not on cube clicking - asking people to ask questions is fine once strat time is done, but you shouldn't have to be that nice. Hopefully these people are here to get shit killed, not to hold hands and sing kumba-ya while tigole deathtouches mobs for them.

For the clicking we generally have a mini competition between the teams:
"hah we managed to interrupt it before the first wave hit, you guys didnt! you loose!" etc. Seems silly but it works and its always friendly banter between them never hostile. Encourages them to pay attention as to when to click and slaps them down if they mess up and its all self regulating without the need for us to step in and tell people off for the most part.

That said something like that is very rare ofc and its not something you can do for the majority of fights.

I was raidleader since MC, but had a little break through AQ40 and Naxxramas, where I joined another Raid. Now with BC I decided to lead raids again and we run quite successfull.

I usually do not lead a raid alone, but together with a second one (often my Brother), so that most of the time two leaders are present.
We use TS2 for conversations in raids and are spread to several channels to afford smalltalk. While doing trashmobs I usually say up to nothing, leaving the pull- and focusannouncement for our hunter(s) or mts.
At bosses I usually announce the bossmods (for instance "Wirlwind in 2 secs").

It's essential to involve as much people as possible while analysing your wipes, couse one or two ppl alone can't see everything that happened while doing the encounter.

PS: sry for my bad english

Leading a Raid - Tactics, Techniques, Procedures

The above is good reading, as are the below.

Thou shalt not - dealing out punishments in raids
Raid Leading Gems.
Best practices: Selecting officers/raid leaders/class leaders

5 minutes with the search function is great.