"Leadership is defined by results, not attributes."

While the advice on the EJ forums is excellent from a technical standpoint, keeping the raid focused comes down to its leadership.

If you are asking, "how can I improve my raid, and it's focus", then what you should really be asking is, "how can I improve myself, and my focus?"

Everything rises and falls on leadership. No exceptions.

The advice in this thread is good, but keep in mind, it is you who must execute it, and who must keep focus before you can ask it of your raid. There are many ways to skin a cat, but if you're the raid leader, you are the one holding the knife. Improve yourself and your raid will improve.

Erm. Things that have worked for us and might or might not work for you...

- As noted, it will help to announce any tricky elements like upcoming abilities, timers running out or imminent threat wipes in good time and generally narrate the fight. Yes, ideally people would be Perfect Raiding Automatons and not need it. In harsh reality making sure that there's always vocal reminders and commentary helps everyone's overall awareness at little cost to you; there's no real reason not to do it.

- Don't be afraid to take short breaks for people to get some air and do some finger-stretching exercises. 5-10 minutes of rest is maybe a third to half of a wipe's worth of time and can be well worth it to give the officers time to analyze what's going wrong and the raid time to get their hunger back.

- There is no bad luck. All wipes are avoidable. Point out what went wrong. Point out what needs to be done to fix it. More to the point, make sure you know the fight and the game well enough to be able to tell why you're wiping. This means occasionally saying inane things like "Tanks, don't forget to Last Stand to survive if you need to. Healers, this boss hits significantly, make sure you always have a heal casting." You'll feel stupid but stating it doesn't hurt you, explains to the raid what went wrong and reminds the responsible parties not to mess up without being harsh.

I'm not fond of assigning penalties or even yelling at people for screwing up. I've gotten frustrated enough to raise my voice on TS every now and then and I've always regretted it later. People frustrated enough to make mistakes probably aren't going to make fewer mistakes because they just lost DKP and got an earful of abuse as well as killed the raid. Most importantly a likely effect is that raiders will become less likely to tell you what was happening when they died or just when the group wiped for fear that they'll take flak for it, which in turn makes your job of analyzing said wipes and fixing the problems that caused them that much more difficult.

Keeping a raid focused depends heavily on the tone and concentration of the raid leader. Being a constant presence in vent, and knowing when to ratchet up the voice or communication. DKP deductions or other meaningless threats do help to some degree - but the threat of a DKP deduction must be used sparingly or it won't work effectively, plus it can piss people off (although who cares).

Usually if people are falling asleep a comment about it helps somewhat, but it isn't until someone gets angry over warlocks not banishing and half the raid dying because of it (and its never their fault), that things start to get back on track. To that end, getting upset or sternly addressing an issue without losing your calm tends to work for me. My leading style often has me sarcastically mocking people. "Hey buddy, how much dps are you doing as a corpse?"

The raid leader can set the pace and the tone really. Also, earning the respect of your members is fairly key in this regard. Respect and comfort goes a long ways toward focus if your raid leader asks you to focus and pay attention, or is clearly upset by the performance of the members.

Also, I'm glad most of you avoid the politically correct knee-jerk R&D reaction often by those who have no clue and say that yelling doesn't work, when clearly it does. Now that doesn't mean Yell... but it doesn't mean people who do yell are automatically bad leaders, or doing something wrong.
Yelling is not my cup of tea, but getting frustrated sure is. Any raid leader who doesn't get frustrated is a bad one, not the other way around. Dealing with and balancing your emotions, other people's emotions, general psychology, and just basic instinct are critical to leadership.

Most wipes are avoidable, not all wipes. Sometimes you can literally wipe due to bad luck, or a string of calamities that are not worth addressing. 98-99% of the time it is due to execution, but I've learned that sometimes you can't automatically blame the raid outright - if anything it can be counter-productive.

This is just so incredibly true. At Kael you'd have to remind them of Thaladred, call out who Thaladred is targetting, etc etc. A lot of people, even good (not great) ones, will raid farm content very much on auto-pilot and miss a lot of that crap.

Myeh, true enough and hyperbole on my part. I've just suffered under a few raid leaders previously who would just state "oh, that was just bad luck" any time a tank died on the Twimps, never mind that an entire side's worth of healers just got themselves caught in a Blizzard (err, or was it RoF there? Doesn't matter much) from bad positioning and stopped healing. The main point is that when your raid wipes you need to take the time to figure out what can be done to keep it from happening, rather than immediately going for the blanket excuses of "bad luck" or "lack of focus" and washing your hands clean. Those excuses might very well be true, in part or in whole, but your job as leader is to do your utmost to make them as small an issue as you can.

Now to the real question, why had noone modified DBM/BW to "extreme" mode with bigger, flashy and configureable warnings that you could set for every boss and every timer in a way that you would never ever miss? While I'm often calling out when timers are about to run out, just like other people miss them I miss them too from time to time, and it helps a lot when someone else calls it. Why on earth would the addon would not call those things out by itself? If I had the time and the programming background I would do it myself, but imo that's something that needs to be done, since a lot here mention "call out timers on vent", and my experience agrees that it helps a lot. I just with you didn't have to assign 2-3 people to call out timers in order for the raid to stay on top of reacting to those timers properly.
Would also be awesome if certain combatlog events would be configureable to have notices that are un-missable, such as "you're in a void zone" or other events of that sort.

Encorporating combatlog events to your raidframes of choice would be even more awesome (example (and I'm sure there would be many more): have the frame of a person that gets hit by the spear of the last ZA boss in phase 1 light up. Having sRaidframes show the debuff work but the actual spear throw happens way earlier than that. Having a boss target of target can help but is not a solution as the boss only targets that person for a split second and it's very hard to actually target him from there or even see his name).

Maybe this belongs more into the addon forums, but it feels like something of this sort would help a lot in terms of how much "focus" is actually required of your raid, as we all know that the more things you have to pay attention to the more likely you are to occasionally miss one of them.

Recount seems to help a lot with "how the hell did player X die?" however it doesn't always show the whole picture and I wish there was something better out there. Very useful though to see the tank died because he took a hit overpower hit parry crush or something on zul'jin phase 2 - while healable it's extremely harsh to expect your healers to be able to heal through something like that every time when the priest is mass dispelling.

True enough. A death on council because you get a "deadly-poison-flamestrike and jump out of the flamestrike immediately as blizzard gets cast on you and envenom goes off", there's not much to do about that. Even stick a divine wrath on for good measure.

What frustrates me is the "feared into a doomfire with trinket down" or "got air bursted away from the decurser and died to grip" sort of "bad luck". Yes, maybe it was unavoidable that you died after the fear or the air burst, and yeah, maybe it even took a few seconds for you to actually die. But why, oh why, were you standing near enough the doomfire that you could run into in a fear duration when you knew your trinket was down? Why didn't you stand closer to your decurser so that you got air bursted together? Heck, why didn't you eat a healthstone and drink a potion when you came out of the fear and realized you had only seconds to live?

Those are the sort of "bad luck" situations that I can't deal with. As you say 98-99% of the time it's poor foresight not bad luck.

Illdari council is on the edge of being a Shahraz like overtuned shitfest of an encounter. Instead it is terribly easy because it errs on the side of the player. Just tweak the AE's slightly and you're in RNG city.
As it is, unavoidable deaths are possible, but rare - those deaths are mostly avoidable if you're at about 9.5kish HP.

That being said, I still mock people for unavoidable Illdari council wipes - just cause I think its funny. Even when they get killed by the bug - the one where you get hit for 18k from the invisible rogue well before he ever destealths. That shit is quality, and proof that Quixotic is bad at WoW.

Almost as much fun as congratulating people for surviving single ports on Shahraz.

I get regularly gibbed on that fight. I've starting to go into that fight at over 12.5k buffed to mimize it. But when you get hit by a dp, and you're like okay and then a FS hits you and your healthstone isn't enough to save you from the coming envenom plus fs tick, it's pretty damn annoying. All having 9.5k health does is prevent you from dying to dp/envenom alone. But you get a double or triple combo there is almost nothing you can do other than hope your hs/pot (provided you have a pot available due to mana issues) can save you along with quick shields.

I think you just weren't focused Kasi, and should probably lose DKP for your ignorance.

Our dp healers got that fight down. They'll see DP on the raidframes and are able to time the envemon and heal to hit right at the perfect time that you don't even see your health move, well most of the time

Sort of.

First off, if a single Divine Wrath gets cast for the entire fight, someone screwed up. We see maybe one or so per fight, where BoP went up midcast right as it got shield bashed or something.

Second, I've honestly never seen a death on Council that I felt wasn't preventable, not counting spellsteal resist on the pull or something along those lines. Some of that is the fault of the guy who died. If someone stays in a flamestrike to finish their cast, that's their problem. If someone doesn't use a healthstone when they dip very low, that is too. But mostly it's a healing issue. Anyone should be able to survive flamestrike application + a tick of Blizzard unless they have an unacceptably low HP pool. If you add multiple ticks in, then they by definition had time to do something about that, and/or to receive more healing. For Deadly Poison, good healing can make it so that the target's HP barely budges visually. I raid heal on Council, and if anyone is in my range and gets poison, I try to LHW, pause a moment, then HW such that the HW lands ~0.5sec after the Envenom. I save NS for situations where DP is combined with one of the AoEs, so that I can HW-->NS/HW back to back if someone needs it. Every time someone has died that was within my range, it was my fault. I was distracted, or mistimed something, or else they could've been saved. If they weren't in my range, then it was probably the fault of one of the healers who could heal them.

Not saying a true unavoidable RNG death is impossible. But I personally have never seen one I felt that someone couldn't have prevented.

Regarding the OP, I guess I do a mix of a lot of what's already been said. I talk a lot on Vent, I call out all important aspects of a fight (our RoS fuckery decreased 99% once I started calling out when the next cast was going to be a Deaden, and not to kick the damn thing, for example), etc. Honestly though I'm fortunate enough to have a very skilled group to play with, overall. That makes my job easy in the sense that we all know that we're capable of being flawless, and when we aren't, it's because people are being sloppy or are distracted, and not because they're actually retards. I have high expectations, but those expectations are reasonable based on our history and I let people know (harshly at times, I'll admit) when they're underperforming. But the key point in there is: "I know you can do better than that," not "you suck." In terms of keeping people focused in the long-term on farm content, I constantly try to push our pace on clears. As far as I'm concerned, we can always improve on the last week's clear, whether it's a new DPS mark on WWS or shaving a couple more minutes off our clear time. A few months ago just doing the t6 content in two days was a source of pride. At this point if a full BT clear takes more than 4 hours, I'm not particularly pleased. Of course, really, my guildmates are probably the ones to ask, since maybe all the things that I think are effective are just annoying. :P

Yeah at 9.5k or whatever it is you're going to avoid almost all of those deaths, but it is still possible to have a triple envenom, blizzard, flamestrike. It is rare, but possible.
The one that wipes us most often are various issues on the pull. Dispel failures, resists, unavoidable aggro shifts or lagged misdirections. Usually resists.

A few other points on Praetorians post:

-Repeating the tedious and almost obvious comments is very important, as reiterated by Buiden et al above.

-Calling things out, or as I do it: designating someone to call things out for you... is hugely valuable. I have someone call out "deaden's in 7 seconds" for me even though I have a bar and a timer... it STILL helps me a lot. Zilch even added a gong noise to the sheer cast time (its so easy to lose focus, especially when things are not going perfectly, and you are adjusting).

-There is also nothing wrong with "harshly" letting people know they're under-performing in a guild at your level Praetorian. In fact, I would guess that most guild members (besides the one being chewed out) would prefer that level of precision and adjustment.

-Having a goal to improve each element constantly is huge. We used to talk about Naxx fights for MONTHS after they were defeated on this forum, simply to improve on it. Improvement on Hydross strats? 4H strats? Faerlina, Leotheras... theres lots of room for strategy tweaking and improvement.
Further, in farm mode, getting faster is the big way to improve.

Where does getting faster stem from? Mostly: Trash. Trash trash trash. Speed on trash is really about focus, and having people realize that their DPS meters on Teron don't even compare to their DPS meters on the 4 pulls before him which take nearly as long to kill. Careless deaths going for 100 more DPS cost you more time in rezzing and effectively reduce the raid DPS.
Working as a team, and keeping focused are huge for maintaining speed. The raid leader has to keep things moving, and the atmosphere of a 6-7 hour bt/hyjal clear has to be anxious almost - faster, focused. Not letting loot bog you down - having little downtime on player swaps and strategy time. Honestly it is more fun that way.

All that being said, when everyone knows what to do, sometimes the best way to focus is to simply be completely quiet. Our vent is rarely quiet, and it is almost unnerving when it is. I recall being extremely focused and extremely quiet on our first Patchwerk kill and the release of excitement by everyone when he went down was incredible. You can actually distract the raid by bringing up pointless information, especially if it is done excitably. We have actually wiped on reliquary due to rogues shouting about missed kicks when it wasn't an issue due to backup. Most wipes by guilds learning Illidan in phase 3 and phase 4 probably fall into the confusion and lack of tunnel vision or relaxed-vision that you'd have from farming. Its like killing someone, it gets easier the 2nd time.

I'll have to second the shorter explanations. When I lead one of the smaller runs, I ask who isn't sure what to do first and then explain in just a few words (where possible) and only what applies to him. Going over the fight in full detail when many have done the fight causes AFKs and delays as well as lack of focus. Also generally clearing, speaking and overall doing everything fast seems to increase overall focus level on the raid, as one would simply not be able to keep up with fast pace if he's not focused he just has to up his focus. And when that one guy is lagging behind he's definitely getting a "everyone's waiting for you" comment, and if possible, keep pulling without him which sooner or later teaches him he needs to be on top of his game or he's not being very useful.

Overall yeah, speed and saving time lead to more focus and vice versa if you ask me.

This is very true. The difference between a boss with the timer up in Zul'aman and one without the timer up is literally an extra half hour on the trash clear + boss for my guild.

I think raid focus is something that you can prepare for. In no particular order, I noticed some of our more successful progression nights happened when a few checks went into play:

* Verifying that all members are normal for that day (internet ok, tv is off, they ate dinner already, etc)
* Adequate backup (you have 1-2 of each core role available on standby)
* Whispering or pulling particular raid members into a private channel pre-raid to remind or reassure them of their role
* Being absolutely sure about timers and abilities so you can debunk the bosskillers or wowwiki misunderstandings

As for the 7-8 attempts a night type thing, you'll need to set a baseline threshold (like dying to Thaldred in Phase 1) which is inexcusable.

We're going a bit far afield but ... I considered making one of these for BW when I realised I was saying the same things over and over. Two reasons it wont work much.

1: When timers end at the same time, their associated voice messages will trigger at the same time, and you'll hear neither.
2: Relatedly, if you actually need to say something over Vent/TS and a voice triggers you'll have the exact same problem in that neither you nor the addon will be heard.

You could presumably limit things to only certain non-overlapping timers or some such, but it will probably always be too prone to interrupt raid communication to work well.

We have a mod that uses imported wav files, and we used it judiciously in Naxxramas. It told you when to move out on 4H, whether to go left/right on Thaddius. It even had Shatner yelling Khan, and Darth Vader yelling Nooo!
We use some automated chicks voice to give us instructions - its useful when its applicable.

Its been rather useless in TBC since most fights are "poke boss with stick."

I think being able to set for each fights which timers will and which won't give you a voice warning would be nice, as well as having the option to choose between an actual voice announcement to just some kind of a "beep" sound, and would you choose voice, being able to choose how fast it's called out can also be helpful. I think just configureable "beeps" would be nice, right now the sound effects for incoming stuff are all pretty much the same regardless of how important the event is, and not configureable - neither can you disable them for certain timer nor can you make them call it out or "beep" 10 seconds before.

I mean it's really anoying to pretty much have to have someone watch the timer just so he can tell the raid that it's incoming. It's such a mindless action there's no reason an addon wouldn't be capable of doing it - and an addon won't miss 1%/5%/whatever% of the events becuase he was focused on healing/dps/threat/not dying.

Announcing things makes the fight less boring for one of the DPS; Prince as the Infernal Caller is vastly more entertaining than Prince as Random DPS #3. That fight is a good one to highlight the limitations of an automated voice pack; a lot of information isn't directly tied to timers / combatlog messages. Still something I'd like to see. Something like the bomb on Solarian would be a great use for it.

As for yelling, I do get exasperated, but I leave the longer rants to some Bad Cops in the raid. They do a better job than I could.

As someone said above, even skilled players with good reactions and good spatial awareness will sometimes die on a spout if they aren't called out, and this can't in the long run be perfectly avoided. We simply do not have wide enough attention spans to cover for absolutely everything that goes on in a raid. Nice thing is that when you have 25 people, you can distribute this attention, perfectly illustrated by one person being responsible for calling out a certain timer, or deciding a certain movement vector (like on prince), etc. For me, knowing that a timer will be called on TS/Vent means that I don't have to keep that timer in visual focus, meaning that I can spare that focus for my healing instead. I still have to have it somewhere, but knowing that someone else is responsible for focusing on that means that I can perform better.

Think I would go spasmic if DBM where to flash my screen everytime a timer ended, it would steal my attention from keeping a maintank up or whatever I was doing at the moment. An audial reminder serves a lot better, and I'd rather have a real person call it out than having a computer generated voice or a sound reminding me, if nothing else the human player will be more flexible.

Sometimes raids have a bad try or two and it is best to paper over the fact, maybe talk to people not paying attention privately and write off the tries publicly as "bad luck." Bad luck can be one of those useful white lies you can tell the raid as a raid leader to hlep people move past the wipes and focus on winning. It is a way of saying "we are not going to spend 15 minutes calling people out individually on vent (which is never a good idea) we are just going to try again."