Hadria

Its a rather simple question but I am posting it because I think its one of the main problems for me as raidleader atm.
To explain may "problem" I will just summ up our latest raidprogress:

We have reached Mother S. 3 weeks ago and from that day on we cleared to Illidan in 2 days in both of the next 2 weeks without any real problems. Now we spent 5 full raids (4 hours each) on Illidan and still we struggle to kill him. Not because we have problems with a speccific tactic or do something wrong but because we wipe due to small, stupid mistakes caused by a lack of focus all the time.

For example:

Shear gets through in phase 1/3 = wipe
People overaggro on the flames in phase 2 = raid toasted
People stand to close to the flames in phase 2 and get toasted = not a wipe but still makes it harder
People forget to stop dps between phases 3/4 and get aggro = more toast
Peaple "forget" to get away from Illidan when the demonheadthingys spawn = bad

After 3-4 of these wipes focus seem to completely fade from the raid and we struggle to get any decent tries untill we reach the end of raidtime and I call the last try (which is usually a rather good one).

So how do you make sure that ppl stay awake and focused over a long raid and do you have any suggestions, funny ideas how to avoid the needless wipes? I am really curious about this

 

DaveA50

Threaten to /gdisband if he's not dead next raid when you see the focus leave. That is how we got kael and archimonde downed the first times, as we did kill them the next attempts. If you don't wind up killing him with that threat, well, /gdisband.

 

clavarnway

That's a bit harsh! Threats are only effective if you follow through with them if you don't get what you want...I wouldn't have the testicular fortitude.

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/1424974uXyta.png

 

Amarysse

DKP penalties for slacking and no other bosses done or farmed until they are killed again.

Simple, effective and gets peoples attention. Not only that but the people who arent slacking will get on to the people who are cause they arent gaining anything.

 

◊ Klasto

DKP penalties and harsh criticism work best if your guild is in the position to do that.

 

aleyro

Ask yourself- are these "lack of focus" issues new to your guild? The players who are underperforming right now: how did they do with C'thun? 4HM? KZ? Vashj? Vael? Did you wipe those encounters for weeks as well?

If yes, then maybe there are some bigger-picture issues going on here.
If no, then maybe its just that.... people have a hard time staying focused during the holidays. There's a ton of stuff going on, peoples minds are (understandably...) elsewhere.

My guild took a break from raiding for the month of December. We focused on other things: alts, getting our bank in order, PVP/Arena, etc. Our raiding schedule starts up again later this week, and our players can't wait to get back in the mix- I expect a level of enthusiasm that we haven't seen in months.

 

Krazen

To be honest, I think butting your head against a single fight for 4 hours straight can lead to this. Unfortunately, flask durations don't allow for a more reasonable 2.5-3 hour progress night. I personally would rather raid ~3 hrs a night.

But do you get better performance in the first 2 hours than the second 2 hours?

 

Pamine

My guild has the same problems but we're no where that far. We're stuck on Kael right now, and our typical attempts go like this:

- p1, 2, 3.. several key people get killed by Thaladred.. reset
- p1, 2, 3, 4.. Kael tank gets exploded on the pyro cause we still have 2 advisors and a weapon up and people didn't pay attention to kael
- p1, 2, 3.. Sanguinar tank dies
- p1, 2, 3.. Sanguinar tank dies.. again
- p1.. warlock tanking capernian dies..
- p1, 2.. axe doesn't get MDed, blows up casters

Thing is this has been going on for days. At this stage in progression we don't exactly get tons of skilled recruits knocking on our door. It's very hard to find people of the right class to recruit. So this makes raiding somewhat frustrating.

 

Machia

We don't offer DKP as we run a loot council so that isn't an option for us.. not sure about the OP but what I usually do is have a guild meeting every week. I'll outline what I expect to see out of my members, what areas I want to see improvement in and so on. Usually it comes down to a handful of members that just feel they can get through the content by doing the bare minimum now that the game is "won". I try to identify who those people may be and will talk to them privately. It's a disease that can easily spread throughout your guild however, and can soon cause even your more dedicated members to not want to login. One thing I am trying to relay to my members is that even though the game is "won" there are several areas for improvement.. try beating your DPS/Time records of previous kills each week. Try different matrices such as less healers and more dps. Try to keep things interesting and keep people involved. Whatever you do however you need to do it sooner rather than later as it can develop into a serious problem.

 

Pyros

Well there's a few ways when fighting a boss to keep people focused. First is quite annoying for the leader, but it's pretty much to call everything that's going on. It generates a lot of vent/TS spam, and doesn't leave room for other information you could miss, but if you start calling out names and specific stuff, people should wake up, somewhat.

2nd is the obvious carrot and stick system. Use the stick hard(remove dkp, forbid bidding for a week, pay repairs/farm consumables for the guild before he can raid again), and promise a big tasty carrot(huge dkp boost, free gold from guildbank, a thousand of virgins, whatever floats your boat).

If all else fails, you need to make example and simply kick the underperforming people. The problem comes with recruiting new people, you should start checking cross server applications, or maybe recruit 2casuals for 1kick, people who can only raid 2days a week. If you move up in content, you should be able to get new recruits(like if you down illidan, you'll probably get more crossserver applications, if you kill kael you can probably recruit more too) and replace the casuals.

The last way to keep focus is to reduce downtime to a minimum. Yell at people not running back fast enough or going afk before buffing and stuff. The faster you can get into another try, the less people will get distracted by what's on TV just before the pull. Same goes for trash back in the days, I would always force chain pulls so people wouldn't get the time to get "out" of the playing mood.

 

Malan

On the other it could be that you've been driving hard and people are having a lack of motivation throwing themselves at what the perceive to be a wall. If you didn't take the holiday time off from raiding you could consider taking a at least a few days down from either the entire raid cycle or at least from pushing at whatever is giving you trouble. Get people back into the groove of kicking ass on farm content and eventually they'll be eager to get back at the new boss with renewed energy.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Grubsnik

The basic premise is that people can't keep their focus for 4 hours straight. That is very understandable. Mistakes will happen, as people get used to other people fucking up, they zone out, just waiting for everyone else to learn from their mistakes, so you can proceed. While zoned out, they fuck up, adding to the list of people making mistakes, zoning out and so forth.

Basically the best way to solve this issue is call a break. Not a "finished for this evening" break, but a "everyone take 10 minutes of fresh air" break. This of course requires everyone to understand that they had bloody well better be back at their keyboards in 10 minutes time. The best way to avoid mistakes is just to say, take a break everyone be back and ready to pull at xx.xx server time. It's important to note that wipe recovery is not "break time" since people have to be in their seat getting back to the boss, buffing up and be ready for the next pull.

 

Amarysse

Well, generally speaking ill ask in vent if anyone has a problem and why they are doing stupid stuff. If they are tired and the general concensus is that we could do with a break then we will have on. If they persist ill have a go at them. May or may not work but the people in my guild know me very well and can tell in my choice of words and tone of voice that i wasnt happy, never had to raise my voice at all. They also know the raid leaders dont take any crap and will come down on people like a ton of bricks if people are out of line though at the same time its not often that it is needed.

If it still persists then we have a sit down and chat with the slackers and tell them if they dont get their fingers out we will be demoting them to backup raiders and letting someone more reliable take their place.

Again it all depends on the guild, got to try find a solution that works for the way you do your raids.

 

Buiden

1. Your main tank should not need his hand held at all, if he does consider finding somoene who is 100% self sufficient. So regarding shear well, yeah.

2. All the rest of these items are things that as the raid leader it is your RESPONSIBILITY to remind people of. People will fuck up if you do not constantly remind people of the same shit, over and over and over and over. If we went to kill Leotheras today, 8 months after we first killed him, I would still have to remind people to DPS off at the appropriate times or bad things would happen. It isn't because you're littered with bad players, it is that most players simply do not pay that much attention to the nitty gritty important details that make up all these fights, nor care to remember them.

When we do any fight no matter how many times we do it, I always remind people of what is coming so that they can be prepared for it. If you don't you're only shorthanding your raid. It only takes 1 person to forgot something they should be doing to ruin an attempt at a boss so even though 23 people might not need that reminder, it is well worth it if only 1 person did need it.

Also mentioned in other posts, keep progression nights short unless you are making meaningful progress. People need time to absorb strategies so trying to force a kill by staying 1-3 extra hours is not something I'd encourage. The exception is if you are completely confident he could be killed in that window.

 

Phantasie

Like many have already said......

Use voicecomm!!! Many of those can be fixed (or should be fixed) by simple reminders if they are indeed "forgetting". No matter how many times we kill illidan(or just about any boss), I still annouce all major phase changes and tidbits of important information like watch aggro, don't stand at X spot, move back, demon phase coming shortly, lazer on right/left side, etc etc. I do this so we won't wipe to simply forgetting, because I don't want to waste another 20 minutes. Sometimes I even forget to say something, but theres always someone on vent that notices noone has called 'stop dps for aggro' and they will say it themselves.

Yea I sort of get tired of saying it and im sure some of the raid members get tired of hearing me talk, but it beats the hell out of wasting an hour's time due to forgetful thinking - so I just talk, 1 or 2 shot him, and then we're on our merry way.

I'd say our quietest fight is Illidari Council, we only really say something when a mage needs to counterspell or the rogue gets bop'd after vanish. I think everyone just puts on some music and just gets in the groove.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....it&s4=&s5=&v=2

 

◊ pewsey

I can't stress this enough. This is something that I continually remind our officers and raid leaders of the importance. We had a lot of discussino in /o about "players shouldn't need hand holding, and they should know this".

My point was "it only takes 1 person to fuck it up, and that's 20-30 mins wasted, so let's just remind people".

I'm continually staggered at the number of people who just don't understand the particular mechanics of fights, and what abilities various bosses have. I don't think these are bad people, or necessarily bad players, just they aren't detail oriented enough to not need reminding.

We have an officer who we call "the voice of Crux" who has a really good speaking voice and he basically narrates the entire fight. It's just amazing to notice the difference between performance when he's narrating, or if he's not.

The other thing we don't do is call out players/berate players during a raid attempt. Sure, there's the occasional "who the fuck did that". I have been known to go beserk in /o when the RL or other officers have tried to focus on the negative too much. This creates a lot of additional pressure ("omg, I hope I don't get constructs because I'm gonna get yelled at") which some people just don't deal well with, and make _more_ mistakes.

We hold post-mortems in /o, as well as with the raid after significant efforts to highlight positives, instruct people as to what can be improved, and ask for any thoughts. We find that including people in these discussions also helps people focus as they feel part of the solution - not just pawns doing tasks told to by the officers.

So, backing up Buiden, for the sake of all things progression, just keep spirits up, narrate fights and you will find things go so much better.

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
Nemesis: "Pewsey is single-handedly turning around every guy in the BB that didn't want to have kids."
Viator: Because I had a baby so I'm better than non-breeders.

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

I definitely agree with the comments about breaks and announcements.

We've found that it's much more likely to help momentum than hurt it; any wipe, or partial wipe loses more time than a 5 minute break does. It's up to the leader / officers to read the raid correctly to work out when breaks should be; there's no One True Solution. For a more casual guild like us it also has the advantage of compressing /afk time into blocks, meaning the average /afk time per person may not change much, but it doesn't slow the raid as much.

As for announcements, I'd love if DBM or Bigwigs came out with a voice pack. A fair chunk of my job in raids is reminding people of the various timers and warnings. It's important to stress that some of these are reminders and not commands: just because I didn't say "3 seconds to Whirlwind" doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. I don't like doing it, but numerous people have independently told me it helps.

 

bv728

Yeah; as raid leader, I find that announcing everything that's supposed to be happening helps a lot, not only because it lets people know what to do, but because it means that people who aren't listening get yelled at by the rest of the raid. Certainly, mistakes do happen, but a running announcment of what's going on and people are supposed to be doing really reduces the number of zone out mistakes.

 

UnholY_Prince

I'm not a fan of punishment or threats, from my research in Psychology they're less effective more often, and they create a n environment unfit and unproductive for enjoying a game and playing to your max. Threatening to Gdisband and DKP penalties create players who are only go so far to avoid punishment, instead of pushing themselves for their own or guildies' purposes. As someone also mentioned, threats are also only useful when they're followed through with, one or two threats without follow through can lead to a loss in faith in the Officers' validity.

Personally, I use motivational tactics to keep people focused. One trick is to remind people of what a good performance here means. "We kill this guy and we can go to BT and farm a few bosses till the end of the night, and have an extra few hours to work on Progression this week." Also along a similar note is reminding people of the rewards they'll get for fine performance; "Come on guys, this is T6 Helms AND 10 DKP right here, get out of those Doomfires and focus."

If time's running short there's a variety of options to squeeze that kill. Reminding people of the short time; "We can't go late tonight guys, we only have 30 min for Trash + Boss, or we have to come back tomorrow and reclear. Let's focus and one shot him." If you're on progression, the "last attempt" has worked wonders for us, people seem to focus up and try hard to make that last attempt the kill. I've found that if things are going sour, mention the last attempt even if you're willing to do 2-3 more. Make people think if they fail that the raid is ending, and often times they'll pick themselves up.

It's also very important to include your Officers and RL's in the criticisms. When I know I messed up, I'll make a blanket statement and include myself. "Lets be more mindful of staying together for the Air Bursts, I've seen a lot of us spread too much out, including myself that time."

The most important thing I believe though is keeping a positive outlook and atmosphere, as well as your RL being respected and liked. That's another reason I'm against negative punishment tactics, often times they make your Raiders resent your RLs, and then they don't care about expectations of performance, they only perform well to avoid being yelled at. If your RL's are respected and liked, you'll find your Raiders want to strive to impress and please you as opposed to avoiding punishment. If things are going sour, you'd be amazed at how effective saying something like, "That was really bad guys, I know we can do better than that, please pick it up" can be. If your raiders respect and want to please you, often times expressing disappointment is 10x more effective than yelling and bitching.

 

Frogmite

I'd definately have to agree than punishments should be avoided. Certainly the thing that normally works for us is simply an appeal to the masses; honest recognition that certain, never specific, members are letting the raid down; their friends. Appealing to people not to do better simply due to me complaining but due to wanting to defeat the boss and help their fellow raiders. While punishment and embarassment can cause people to perform better it by no means makes a positive atmosphere. If someone messes up they most probably know they have! Remember you're raiders arn't stupid, if they mucked up ghosts at Teron/cores at Lady Vashj/Blew up the raid on Solarian they by no means need berating from anyone but themselves. When dealing with motivation you need to hold your judgements in context;

You think someones mucking around not really caring? Boot him, even if he's otherwise doing well.

You think someones trying his hardest but still not understanding a fight mechanic even after questioning specific parts and doing prior research? Talk to him.

Help he who wants to be helped. Thats probably the thing that I believe in most; helping people to achieve what they want to achieve. I'm not raiding to lead school-kids here simply because they have to be, I'm here to lead people with similar interests to my own to be damn good at what we do and as such the general appeal is probably my used motivator. It doesn't however always work, for whatever reason sometimes it happens and its then and only then that you even consider any kind of drastic action and by this I mean ending the raid early, one of the best tools a Raid Leader can have. I still remember the first time I did it, after coming up through the ranks with the release of TBC for a long time guild of my Server I was a relatively new but well liked Raid Leader for the guild and had all the officers cry out in dismay when I said that we were about to stop 2 and a half hours before our normal raid ending time. But they trusted me, and it worked and does work, its certainly not something to be used often, I've said it twice in the last 11 months but it is something is effective none the less.

In terms of breaks for focus, getting a drink ect.. I think these almost go without saying, every guild that raids for more than 3 hours at a time ie: most guilds, should have a break of some kind. I routinely tell my raiders to get out of their seats and walk around their room or to at least move about somewhat at a convinient time especially on a progression run. People need to move, to fidget and small breaks are wonderful for allowing that.

The only punishment I would condone, and this is going slightly OT but I believe holds relevance is for both going AFK and laziness and I now and again have given out harsh penalties to people who're lazy albeit always with prior warning. Probably the best example is Hydross, as when we were first learning him we'd repeatedly wipe to an over-zealous mage or resto druid pulling aggro even after asking people to switch sides to compensate for the fact that even if they aggroed and died they would never bring Hydross back across the line and spawn multiple adds. So we said ok; you can be lazy and not move, but wipe us due to that and you lose DKP, if you get aggro and die and are on the right side then you don't.
This coupled with some use on Solarian/Thaladred kiting/jumping around on trash has seen quite a bit of use. But is something that I think is more than valid as do all of my raiders. I don't mind people wasting their own time, but wasting other peoples is not on.

 

sovelis41

Kael is probably the first fight in TBC that required me to really manage the focus of our raid group. The length of the fight and the small but tangible bits of progress can lead to focus wavering a bit over the course of the night. Just dumb things like someone zoning out and getting conflagged in p1. I made it very clear early on that if ANYONE died to Thaladred or Capernian in p1 we would reset the fight, no battle rezzes, no ankhs, no SSs. When we were making the p3->p4 progression turn, and the fight was very much in hand I changed the GMOTD to read: "Thaladred's Victims:" and put anyone that died to Thaladred in the motd. No one got on the list, and Kael died soon after. I have since done that for every Kael kill.

Kael and flasking give you very defined 2 hour windows on progress nights. We would clear the trash constantly getting on people to rez drink and prep for the next pull, constant vocal presence on vent. This ending up paying off in spades in Hyjal since people were already used to the fast pace. Then after 2 solid hours of attempts we would break, reflask, reclear, and work on the boss until trash respawned again. We've always done a break during raids just to help people step away from the monitor glow, and "charge their lasers" as we call it. Nowadays the break is 7.5 mins because people tend to slack on getting back after 10.

I think the best thing, overall, for any raid leader to do (from kara to BT) is to make people very aware of that raid's goal. Say what bosses you want down and why. Outline your plans and look to improve every time you pull a boss. Killed in 7 minutes last week? Try for 6 this time. Arm yourself with performance analysis tools like WWS and recount. Get raid monitoring mods like XRS and Demon. Pinpoint exactly where your problems are, and fix them. Most of the time people will say "man these people all died from <random ability X>. the RNG HATES US!!!" but most of the time it isn't random, and the event that triggered the cascade of deaths was likely a minor mistake on someones part.

It doesn't really do much good to single out people publicly. Offer them a chance to own up to their mistake on their own and ask the raid for help (a la Teron). If someone does an encounters "personal task" (core throwing, ghost handling, etc) particularly well, have them share with the raid exactly what they did. Someone that has been screwing up might just be missing something painfully obvious to someone else. If that person is habitually screwing up on the same fight week to week, don't invite them to the next raid you are doing on that boss and tell them why. Helped us fix a lot of Leotheras problems way back when.

Quick Version: Keep a constant voice presence, whether it's a single person, or multiple officers keeping up on it. Keep the ready checks coming, keep announcing how many mobs are left in a pull, and to be ready for the next one, announce menial boss abilities over vent EVERY TIME. "Kite phase in 10 melee out" "Bubble soon, get your health topped up" "Demon in 5, no DPS" "Silence soon, refresh your hots, get that tank topped off."

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Shandara

From my personal experience (having been in a few 'end-game' guilds on our server), it's always a minority population in the raid who tends to have lower focus than the rest. 4 hours is a long time, but by no means impossible to keep the focus, really.

The frustration starts for the other people in the raid when we have noone to replace those unfocused people with during a raid. Everyone can have a bad night and be unable to focus, but when we're forced to _still_ take them it usually ends in an evening of reverse progress.

While I agree that calling out a boss' abilities on vent/TS helps enormously, I always am amazed that people fail to notice the big timer bars on their screen, or the automatic announcements in raid-chat. An 'I can do it, why can't they' mentality obviously tries to impose itself on me, but I know it's not 'natural' for everyone.

What can we do to make people actually use the tools we make them install? DBM + BigWigs, Omen/KTM, raid-frames, etc.. Nearly all guilds make these mandatory, but it really seems as if some people don't actually pay attention to the information these add-ons are giving.

 

Calencia

If you have otherwise good morale in the group, and have a sense of humor or the bizarre, past guilds of mine have tried various methods.

One was at VR. People, for whatever reason, could not figure out how to dodge orbs. Wiped and wiped and wiped, until one pull the RL told everyone to take all their gear off except the four tanks just to practice dodging orbs and to see how long people could stay alive. Up to that point we'd never been up longer than 4 minutes--but naked, we went almost 8. He died for the first time for us on the very next pull--with gear on.

Another method I've seen used to some success is the opposite of what's being suggested here with narration: Turn off Vent and turn off sound completely for one pull. It forces your raid to really pay attention, and to have to know exactly what they have to do, without waiting for someone to tell them. This was used in a past guild on the HKM pulls, and it was shockingly effective.

It's odd... if you set up a pull with "we know we're going to wipe, we know we're not going to kill this boss right now, but let's see how long it takes us to die" as the goal, people can actually relax and learn things better. I don't know why this is.

 

srljstr

How you get people to focus and keep them focused is to simplify the fight as much as possible. You give a complete overview of the fight once or twice, go into very specific detail covering every tiny little facet and from that point on you just want to highlight the important parts of each phase and part of an encounter. People will overload their brains if you feed them too much, establish a list of priorities for each phase and turn it into a mantra.

You're really trying to indoctrinate people into the mentality of a specific fight, your goal as a Raid Leader is to get people to visualize what they are going to be doing from 100-0 as well as what the rest of the raid is doing, and how that will affect their decisions. Your raid will lose focus if they try to think about the entire 10-20 minutes of the fight as one whole, you really should try to isolate their attention into the very here and now of the particular phase and use vent to communicate upcoming changes to prepare everyone for the next part of the fight.

You absolutely have to have someone calling everything out in vent, it calls attention to important things and lets people adapt better than they would without it. You don't have to say much but you do have to say something.

On punishments, I don't like them but I will use them. I think they are best reserved as blanket gestures towards a particular "do not do this ever" situation. We currently have a one Cauldron tax on anyone who craters on Archimonde, regardless of if they clicked their Tears and got owned by lag or they just failed to time it correctly. It is the easiest and most avoidable death on the entire fight and I push the unacceptable nature of dying that way. The guild I raided AQ/Naxx with was fond of punishing stupid no brain moments with hefty amounts of Stonescale Eels or Chimaerok Chops and it was effective to a point until it happened so often that it became a caricature and was joked about more than feared.

Punish in moderation, and punish fairly with no exceptions if you're going to punish at all.

"A man is the less likely to become great the more he is dominated by reason. Few can achieve greatness-and none in art-unless they are dominated by illusion."

-Mr. Doctor

 

Soladoras

As fun and appealing as it may sound to play the hard ass RL, I've found it rarely works. While your personality might respond positively to negative reinforcement, a good portion of your raid won't react the same way. Even the raiders in the top guilds log into WoW for fun and as an escape from real life, and your thin-skinned raiders just aren't going to respond the way you would when faced with similar yelling/threats/castigation.

I would recommend ending your raids early on a positive note a few times, regardless of flask time, simply so that the next night when you log in, your raiders have been thinking about how close you are to success for the last 24 hours. It's almost always better to end early than late, for pretty much any reason.