#2 - Take your best 25 everytime. I have a "starting line-up" mapped out. Those people will get in the game first. If, for whatever reason, they are not around, then I go to my bench.
This is BAD. Any decent raider wants to go. If you continuously bench a good player they will leave. This really sucks when 3 of your 100% raiders quit within 2 weeks and you're left with a crappy bench. And if they don't mind sitting out, why do you think they'll suddenly jump in attendance?
A couple new things I've done in the last 6 weeks as we've made the move to a pure raiding guild (and seen 5 new kills in the process) is this:
#2 - Take your best 25 everytime. I have a "starting line-up" mapped out. Those people will get in the game first. If, for whatever reason, they are not around, then I go to my bench.
Are you for real? This way of raiding can't be fun and will most definitely not last long...
I can see taking your best 25 to progression nights, sure. Nobody wants to wipe on learning content because some window licker can't remember to breathe AND dps at the same time. However, on farmed content you should try to mix in as much of the bench as you can to get them experience so that if you DO need to bring along any of them on progression nights, it doesn't hurt as much.
There's a lot of ingredients that go into a raid, but they can basically be broken down into two general categories: quality of leadership and quality of players. Quality of leadership involves ability to motivate, ability to keep people focused, ability to strategize in a timely and efficient fashion, ability to identify problems and solutions, and things like that. Quality of players involves tenfold different qualities but the ones you're talking about mainly are ability to adapt and ability to learn and execute quickly. Your further progressed along enough that these are not basic L2P problems (I hope) such as bad dps, basic healing, basic situational awareness.
On the leadership end, there has been plenty of cases that we dragged our feet learning an encounter, along the way blaming various people in the raid (who may or may not have made legitimate mistakes) but in the end what it really came down to was not solid strategy. There are strategies that will work assuming everyone plays perfectly, and there are strategies with built in redundancies so people can make mistakes and you can still win. It's usually subtle differences between the two that will make or break you. The basic strategy for a fight is usually well documented, but adapting the small bits and pieces to your specific raid makeup and abilities is important on moderately challenging fights. Things like healer class makeup, what tanks you have available, how many AoE classes available, etc. all subtly or greatly influence your strategy.
On the player end, I hate to say it, but one of the conclusions I've come to is that usually people who are lacking the things you need will not usually improve. At the basic L2P level most people can be taught (more accurately TOLD) how to gear themselves, what buttons to press in what order to get the most DPS, basic things like that. But the big three people usually show very little improvement even over a long time: situational awareness, quick learning curve, and ability to improvise. Those three abilities are what separate ok raiders from great raiders. Whether these are talents people have from birth, or come from years of gaming experience, or something else, I don't know. But it's been clear to me that people either have them or they don't.
The conclusion I draw from that is that ultimately one of the primary things a guild can do to improve is to simply replace people who aren't up to par. I really just don't expect improvement from people and when it becomes clear that they can't keep up with a certain level of content they need to be replaced. The problem is that that's way easier said than done. As someone mentioned before, the people you want to replace often have friends in the guild, or are genuinely nice people, or have been in the guild forever and you in part owe them for getting to where you are. It's not an easy answer, but I can at least tell you how we did it.
The first step (which may or may not be done) is to identify the goals of your guild. Given your progression level you're probably closer to having done this compared to say a guild trying to kill Magtheridon. This is important because it helps define what ends you're willing to go to and to what goal those ends are for. We say "we are a raiding guild with the primary goal of defeating end-game content while having fun". The extension of that, and we make this clear to everyone joining the guild, is that we expect a certain level of performance from our members. A raid slot is a privilege, not a right. You earn and maintain that raid slot with reliability and skill. Because the situation is extremely clear, if we need to bench someone permanently then it is understood. We don't gkick people for poor performance in general because they usually become part of the family, but they do have their raider rank taken from them. The understanding, whether we actually say it out loud or not, is this "We like you, we wish you could come with us, but you're a liability to the raid that we just can't afford. We're sorry."
The next step once you establish a way to bench people who can't cut it is recruitment. Most comments I've read and things I've heard indicate to me that people really just don't know how to effectively recruit as a general rule. To me, the whole recruiting process is the most important component in whether a guild is successful or not. Your guild IS the people who are in it, and those people come from recruiting. Many people make the mistake of thinking of the "guild" as some entity that goes beyond the members that make it up, and as such should somehow have properties like "skill" that are different from the members in it. A guild IS the people in it! If those people suck then the guild sucks.
Once you grasp how important the quality of people in your guild is, the followup logically is that recruiting should be very important to you because it is the lifeblood of your guild. Why not spend a decent amount of time trying to do it right? There's a lot of little details that you can discover on your own through reading some other threads on here or maybe elsewhere, but there's a few big lessons that many people miss:
1.) Your own server is not your only recruiting pool. I hear this all the time from recruits joining my own guild: "Our guild died because our server died, there was just no one to recruit!". Going back since the day server transfers opened, 95% of our recruits have been from other servers. Why would you restrict yourself to your own server when there is this giant pool of apps from 250 servers? Put your ads out there on as many places you can. WoW Recruiting Forum, Bosskillers, worldofraids, wherever the hell else has listings (80% of our recruits find us on the WoW recruiting forums).
2.) Write long recruiting posts that describe in detail who you are, what you expect, and what you're looking for. You're looking for a MATCH, not just a random schmo. The more detailed you are, the more you look like you know what the hell you're doing, the more the good apps are interested in you. They're looking for a good guild too remember, and you need to do your best to prove that you are with your first impression. You do this by showing you know what qualities an ideal app should have.
3.) Get to know people before you recruit them. On your application, you don't just need the mechanical things like gear and raid experience. Find out their age, where they're from, ask a few somewhat open ended questions to see if they'll open up a write some interesting info. Things like that. You're not just recruiting a raid bot to execute commands for phat loots, you're looking for someone who will fit into your guild personality and become part of the team. If you get an app that you like and seriously consider for the spot, voice chat interviews are a MUST. When we started doing these we seriously upped our success rate with applicants. Have a list of general questions to touch on, maybe some side notes or things to induce conversation, try to get them to open up a little so you can get a feel for their personality. If you don't feel like you could run a smooth voice interview then find someone in the guild who can conduct it and listen in. It's important that you hear your potential recruit talking and answering questions before you let them into your guild.
I know this wall of text may seem like I'm overdoing it, but I need to reiterate that recruiting is the lifeblood of your guild. Your guild is its members and if you want your guild to improve then you need to improve the quality of the members. Some people end up screwed, benched due to lack of skill. But if your guild's stated goal is success at raiding and there are members that bring you failure, if you don't replace them then all you bring about is the doom of the guild.
I can see taking your best 25 to progression nights, sure. Nobody wants to wipe on learning content because some window licker can't remember to breathe AND dps at the same time.
If you have this much contempt for your raiders, they will leave - and rightly so.
Seems like there's a lot of good advice in this thread so far. I've only spent a short time actually leading raids but a lot of time as an officer in past guilds with situations close to the OP's. Smaller guilds where kicking people out or telling them they will have to sit out isn't an option because you'd be raiding with 24 people instead of 25 and you don't have a large pool to recruit from. That being said, I always felt having people coach the specific players you feel are under-performing helps quite a bit. Obviously it's less of a blow to the ego if you have say, a warlock who knows what they're doing ask under-performing warlock how they typically dps a boss fight, where they stand, how they move and whatnot because it comes off as more a social conversation than anything.
There are a lot of players who are too set in their ways because they refuse to take criticism from anyone, but your application process should probably make it clear that people need to leave their egos at the door and accept a few suggestions and whatnot. If they fail at some sort of movement based fight let them know exactly what to do on a personal level to insure that person never does it again. At that point it's just thinning out the herd of people who don't "get" the fight on an individual basis. There's a pretty good chance that raider type 2 will never quite stack up to raider type 1, but the improvement can be pretty substantial and given the limited options it always seemed like the right way to go.
#2 - Take your best 25 everytime. I have a "starting line-up" mapped out. Those people will get in the game first. If, for whatever reason, they are not around, then I go to my bench.
#3 - Always be looking to upgrade your team and don't be afraid to sit people who've been members since day one, especially if they don't have the raid% to back it up.
#4 - PLOW through content you know how to do with your best every time. This is an approach I changed last week and wow what a difference. Before I would swap so-and-so in because they needed this, that or the other. Now I take my best 25 and if it rots then oh well, so sad, too bad, make the starting line-up and loot won't be an issue. Be in the progression business, not the gear farming business.
Your guild sounds more like a machine factory than a group of people with a common goals. Taking your best people every time, even on farm instances, means that your bench never gets experience with the zone, never receives upgrades, and holds back your raid a great deal more if they ever get called upon from that lack of gearing. Additionally, relying on 25 people to attend 100% is begging for trouble. You need some slack in your roster to prevent Murphy's Law from gutting your progress. Lose a couple key people, and all of the sudden you've gone from killing Vashj to failing Gruul. Any smart raid leader builds redundancy into their roster planning.
As for your bench, I doubt any one of them likes sitting all the time. I've been on that end of the spectrum, and let me tell you, being sat all the time is not fun, especially when I would like to raid. At some point your bench will reach breaking point, decide they never will see the bosses anyway so there's no reason to stay hoping for crumbs, and leave for another guild that allows them to actually come to raids.
I partially agree with your third point, but with a caveats. One, always try to see if you can help the lackluster raid member improve. Pinpoint the problem: are they dying because they've never seen spout before, or from not paying attention to warnings? Is their DPS bad because they lack the gear or they're using bad spell cycles? Outright replacing them because they don't pass some arbitrary standard and were never given help means you likely removed a good player who had potential to be great. As the proverb goes, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."
Second, state your standards somewhere. Post them on the guild website or forums. You need transparency, otherwise holding people to some subjective benchmark makes them feel like puppets.
If you have this much contempt for your raiders, they will leave - and rightly so.
My point wasn't that your (or my) raiders are necessarily dumb, but out of any class, you can generally always pick the people who are just a bit better than the others. That or you might have people who are just friends of guildmates who tag along to farmed content for fun.
You generally want to field the strongest raid team you can when you're up against a brand new boss, especially one where execution and dps are critical. Once you get the hang of it, then you can scale back a little and screw with the class balance and DPS requirements.
speaking of benches - how big of a bench do you keep?
In our guild, we've traditionally tried to have 50 active raiders. We rarely hit a full 50, since we can generally field a raid of 25 consistently with 35-40 members, but the idea is to make sure that you have (as noted above) effective redundancy.
I look at it as a sort-of understudy program - for every core raider who knows their role, and brings their A-game to every raid, I have a replacement that can fill the gap (warm body-wise, if nothing else). We like to have the option to rotate classes as we move between encounters - extra tanks and Warlocks for Magtheridon, extra Hunters for Void Reaver, etc. Flexibility is paramount to raid roster planning.
50 active raiders for 25 slots is way too many. That means that theoretically you could have 25 people sitting outside an instance on any given night. 25 people!
IMO, the perfect number is 33. 25 people, with one spare person per class. That gives flexibility for missing raid nights, but emphasizes performance and attendance. You want people to be there, and to want to be there. If you run a much more casual guild, with ~ 50% attendance, maybe you should aim for 45-50 people ... but if you have that low a % of attendance, you're going to progress on glacial speeds. Too much of TBC requires first-hand knowledge of the fight mechanics -- things you can't entirely learn from videos and strats.
IMO, the perfect number is 33. 25 people, with one spare person per class.
Pedantry: you meant to say 34.
And as for extra people per class - what about hybrids? You could conceivably need 3 backups for shamans, 2 for priests, 2-3 for druids, and 2-3 for paladins. Sure, your hybrids could collect gear for other specs/roles just in case, but that takes time. And maybe some of you do just that. (Actually, I wonder how many people do this, and to what extent. Especially with the MTs...)
In regards to the original idea of this thread, i've been looking at ways to improve our raids.
We're currently on lurker/void reaver transitioning them to farm soon hopefully.
I recently added some mods that should help (Recount/Expiration, etc) me identify weak spots in the raid.
What i'm currently trying to do is find a definite, exact, guide on how to be the best X class. Spec/stat gearing/ etc etc. I'm a big fan of theorycrafting and getting the absolute most out of what you have available to you.
That being said i play a paladin, and dont know a whole lot about some classes.
I've been searching through these forums for a couple days learning a lot, but i dont see a lot of real guides that hit all points of being the best that you can be.
Would you guys have any advice for me on where to find this kind of information easily?
Hmm...I always wanted to make a thread like that. Problem is I can't actually fill it out for some classes. Do you think people would help out if I tried? DPS 101, basically. A simple strat, spec, and gear, and what to look for in a WWS report.
Pre-TBC it would of been fairly easy to point out the optimal for each class, however now there is so many variables that you cant really pinpoint things down, a judgement case on each situation tends to be needed.
The first thing I would do for your healers atleast is work out who you want doing what (can check WWS reports to see what others do), and get them into that role and find out the optimal spec/stat distrubution should be.
The Class Mechanics forum here should be able to provided you with solid theorycraft to each class/sub-spec however you will most likely spend a lifetime if you intend to do it yourself as they tend to be pretty huge, and messy threads :|
But keep WWS reports (and the handy armory link) in mind, they are full of information if you can manage to sort through it correctly.
I would advise recount as a useful tool for finding out why people died, quite often now I tend to ask the cause of 'strange' deaths from people from it, and if needed adjust raid roles to adapt for it.
The only real way to understand a class correctly is to play it, else you will need to rely on someone else to. Generally there tends to be atleast one person of each class who theorycrafts alot and knows their stuff, just get them to write up some basics and simple math and you compile it.
Well i do have 1 last question, and i cant seem to find the definite answer.
Will +hit rating/spell hit rating always give you the highest dps boost per point until you hit the cap? i can start having some of my guys redo gems if i can find that info out.
Keep in mind the warlock affliction hit talent does not work for shadowbolt, which remains a large part of their DPS, so they will need more hit than 16%-talent points%.
For DW'ers you should aim for atleast 20% before you consider straying, more is good but your typically out of the danger zone.
Hunters... 2H players somewhere in the range of 8-9% is needed, and easily attainable (and as a result they should never not be capped).
When you schedule a raid - what do you start out with? The farm boss or the new one?
Some say start easy and work up, but I'm concerned that people aren't as fresh for the new content.
On the other hand, it could be warmup and a confidence boost?
Like when doing TK. Skip Alar, go hit VR, then come back for Alar or Solarian?
Alar we downed once and wipe to a lot since. Solarian is brand new. VR is a consistent kill when people pay attention.
Work on farm content until you reach the holy grail of each instance. Then push for several nights in a row on JUST that one single boss until it's dead. So, for example if you haven't downed Leo, I would say it's totally fine to kill everything else you have on farm but him. Then take some shots. But if it's Vashj or Kael'thas, give your raid some quick attempts to get a feel for the encounter and come back on full days for attempts.
As I see it, there are 6 important roles in the raid:
1) Raid Leader: Keeps things moving smoothly, keeps morale up, and explains boss fights
2) Target Assignment: Assigns CC & tanks. Must do so quickly and have next pack marked before current is dead.
3) In-Combat Targeting (Main Assist): Calls out order of kills. (Rogue is best)
4) Healing Assignments: Pretty obvious here. Consistency is key.
5) Master Looter: ML or FFA, doesn't matter. Must be dealt with quickly. (Ranged DPS Class is best)
6) Puller: Watches raid mana and pulls when appropriate. (Hunter is ideal)
I often find myself doing all 6 in our raids, and it really slows us down. I believe delegation is key here. Find people you can trust that attend every raid and have them do it. Personally, I can't find people that take these responsibilities seriously, but that's mainly because everyone in my guild is lazy. =\
It's slightly offtopic, but add me to "raid leaders that tried to do everything" retirement club, back pre-tbc on my hunter. Just like a guild leader usually assigns other people to take care of the dkp/webpage/recruitment, a raid leader should have trusted deputies. That will allow you to concentrate on leading and motivating (or any other job you think you do best).
I'd make some alterations to your list. These are, in my opinion, functions you can fill in a raid, usually you will have 2-4 people combining a few of them:
1) Raid Leader: Keeps things moving smoothly, keeps morale up, assigns people to other tasks, makes major decisions (when to flask, use bloodlust, etc.), pays attention to how the fight is going.
2) Target Assignment: Assigns CC & tanks. Must do so quickly and have next pack marked before current is dead.
3) Healing Assignments: Pretty obvious.
4) Master Looter: ML or FFA, doesn't matter. Must be dealt with quickly. Takes care of dkp.
5) Puller: Watches raid mana and pulls when appropriate.
6) The Watcher: Someone who can make good use of recount or anything that can help you analyze the previous fight on the spot. Will know why Mage #4 died and what were his healers doing.
7) Human Resources: Takes care of group composition, handles replacing people in the raid.
Unless you can simultaneously observe what 24 other people and a few mobs are doing, you'll also need a few people that are aware about what is happening to people around them. Example: It will take some time to gleam from WWS that Lord Robin Daris killed A_Druid because of a frostbite proc from A_Mage, so if someone noticed it you've saved time. Ideally everyone in your raid could do this, but some jobs are more absorbing and some people are more easily absorbed.
Giving up some functions doesn't prevent you from doing things yourself when you feel the need, on bosses for example, but delegating is convenient for you even if you sometimes have to correct your deputy.
I'm sure people here are used to much more efficient communication than I had in my guild alliance, where I basically had to talk with a few people via whispers before each boss - but I wish I had someone to help me back then, would make things much quicker.
Originally Posted by kaib
The only other solution, if recruiting really does not work, is to apply to a far further progressed guild. But that will most likely split you guys up. Group deals work only very rarely in my experience.
The OP and some of the posters should really consider this. There's nothing bad with seeking to play with people at your level of play and commitment.
If, for good reasons, you decide to stick with your roster - just take care not to alienate people you're trying to teach. You just can't force them to be as good as you wish they were. If you feel someone is hindering you, and you have a replacement - send them to the bench, but don't push your raiders too much or you'll get adverse effects. I'm sure nobody likes feeling like he needs to constantly "catch up" to other people.
Make sure the people who need it are getting adequate training time. There's a lot of guilds that have a group of raiders with high attendance and the remaining spot are filled from a pool of remaining members. Obviously, someone who comes to boss attempts two times a week will have more time to learn than someone who comes just once.
The post about having fun learning also tipped me off to an idea. I'm not sure if it's worth anything, but if your people are dying to "awareness checks", maybe if they didn't have to divide their attention, it would help learning? If you told them to skip dpsing/healing/tanking and just try not to die, would it help their learning curve? Obviously, in case of healers you'd need someone to replace them, tanks could be either replaced or told to generate minimal aggro (that would mean no dps on their target). Also, in most cases it would mean automatically giving up on the try, something the better raiders might not be keen on.
Those two issues remind me of my guilds last encounter with Big Bad Wolf. Our healers on that run didn't have very good reactions, and it became a massacre of little red female gnomes. We've got some people who run awfully (me included), but not only you can go through the fight without being chosen as the hood, but you can win it with a few people dying. This contributes to people getting very little training time being the hood, and I'm sure some of them just wish they aren't chosen and are stressed if they are. We eventually killed him, but what if we just asked the people that can't run + a tank/healer to stay, and did some practice runs? No dps, little healing for hoods, just a lot of running.
Well i do have 1 last question, and i cant seem to find the definite answer.
Will +hit rating/spell hit rating always give you the highest dps boost per point until you hit the cap? i can start having some of my guys redo gems if i can find that info out.
Keep in mind this special case for casters:
Veiled Noble Topazes (+5 dmg, +4 spell hit) give just slightly better bang for the buck than the Great Dawnstone (+8 spell hit), at least if your Fireballs are about a 2k average.
With 2 sockets available - gemming 2 Veileds gives +10 dmg, +8 spell hit, whereas gemming 1 Great and 1 Runed gives +9 dmg, +8 spell hit.
Moreover, in raw damage / DPS terms, with an average Fireball of 2k, the best gem for overall damage is the Veiled Noble Topaz (12.75 dmg from an average Fireball as opposed to 12.70 dmg per average Fireball with a Great Dawnstone).
Once you are at the hit cap, Runed Living Rubies are the standout gem, unless you can match a socket bonus giving spell damage with a Potent Noble Topaz. Note: Yellow slot only.
Thanks for the topic, I can definitely feel some resonance with many of the views I've read in the thread, especially the "How can you die from spout again??" comment. My guild leadership had a sort of collective epiphany back when we were working on Void Reaver wondering how people had so much trouble avoiding the orbs.
What came clear was that not all raiders have the the same physical view of the game that the hardcores have. After some questioning and discussion, it came clear that many of the raiders could quite simply not see anything beyond their raid interface. This is especially true for healers who tend to get tunnel-vision on dropping health icons instead of the impending source of death slowly lumbering toward them.
We started a thread in our guild forums where many of the active raiders posted their UIs and work-shopped with some of the less mod-savvy raiders to help clean up their interface. Some raiders were simply not aware of the options available in the UI... when I showed one person the "Scale UI" option she was almost brought to tears: "Oh my god, I can actually see the game now! Thank you!"
It is easy to brush aside performance problems by concluding that these people suck or don't have some innate aptitude for the game that others do, but do not write off the simple possibility that these people are playing with default UI and keybindings that are inefficient, uncomfortable, that may be quite literally blinding them to the game environment.
Encourage discussion among your raiders about the mods and interface decisions they make.
09/28/07, 1:36 PM
Similar Threads
