hmm, i think im quite a normal raidleader.
I speak alot, consistent explain on VT what is happening around, call out who needs to move where. Who healers need to pay attention too in a few secounds...

I can give example of something that made my raid abit more focused, but also very fun indeed.

We are illidan farming guild(like most in here i guess) and nearly oneshot all bosses in the game, yet Supremus for some reason always takes 10-15 people with him down. Our meeles dieing before he reaches 70%. Healers dieing to vulcanous... Hell, one week we where 4 secounds from the enrage timer...lol! We had an awake hunter which did 17% of the total damage of that fight... So now the scenario is set. Easy boss = ALOT of slacking...

It had been annoying me for several weeks that our performance here was so low. So a few weeks ago i called out a meeting on VT right before pulling supremus.
Simply saying we will have a little game during Supremus fight. The ones dead at end off the fight would get normal dkp, survivors would get 25dkp bonus(same value as 1 illidan kill, so quite decent bonus to pick up... Anything would go. Soulstones, ankh, battle resses, FD... However, ofcause there had to be rules. People was not allowed to stand in a corner not helping, people was not allowed to on purpose try to kill anyone (MD at phase change, not heal the tanks)
Amazingly only one guy died during the whole fight, and he bargained with one of our druids offering 1 McDonalds meal the next day at School...
Our normal kill time of Supremus, 9 minutes. This time ~3 minutes, and only 1 death at around 20%...

People suddenly woke up, kept an eye out for others who might mess up and not get the reward, and who they could mock(friendly ofcause). And ofcause warlocks soulstones going for high price, and druids battleress was highly spoken about...

A fun game, made most people smile, killed the boss in 1/3 of the normal time + no down time after due ressing.

Coming from the perspective of a regular everyday raider, one of the things that kills me is half-hour long explainations of boss fights, even new bosses. It really doesn't help all that much. The raid leader tends to be throwing so much info out at once things get forgotten.

Obviously we're not a T6 guild (just really getting into T5) so maybe it's a little different than what people are talking about here. In my opinion, simply get tanking assignments out, healing assignments, dps order. Go over raid wiping abilities and how to counter them. Let the rest fall into place. You know the old saying "give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime." It works in raids too, I think. Don't force-feed raiders info. Let them figure it out on their own. Let them do research.

Calling stuff out in vent is extremely helpful once you're to the point where it'll just take a little more before the boss is dead. Best example of this was our first kill of Solarian. We were riding pretty high on killing Al'ar for the first time that week, 1 shotting VR and getting to move onto Sol. Problem was some people just couldn't get into their heads to move out of the group. So the raid leader started play-by-playing it. Basically holding everyones' hands. Sure enough next pull she was dead.

As somebody said above, it's all about leadership once you have a raid not filled with mouth-breathers.

I don't know why, but this made me laugh.

After a few wipes to silly mistakes, I stroly suggest taking a five minute break.

Tell people to get away from their computer for a few minutes, go get water, whatever, then come back.

Once they are back, *quickly* review the fight again, focusing on the hardest bits (don't take more than a minute) and then ask everyone to focus really hard for the next attempt.

If you don't see any progress, tell them that unless there is progress, you are going to call it for the night.

If there still are mistakes, call it, and use WWS, recount and your guild forums to discuss what happened and what went wrong.

We got our first Kael kill last night after having literally five people die to Thaladred in phase 1. We called a wipe, died quickly, played 'Low Rider' over Vent (I just turn this on instead of yelling, people have learned to take the hint), and went back in and got our kill.

I find that sometimes, the big, brutal mistakes serve as a great wake-up call. Obviously you can't plan on this, but little errors or omissions don't tend to elicit the same raid-wide "WTF?!?!?!" response. After a truly horrendous mistake, people seem to buckle down better (provided it only happens once!).

Congratulations, Vectivus. Good luck on attuning the rest of your raiders, and good luck in T6.

Tsarus: I think your having everyone read up on fights is a good move, one we encourage in our guild. I've yet to figure out how to definitively tell whether someone has prepped themselves, though; it's often circumstantial. Meanwhile, healing assignments tend to always need to be set up at the scene of the fight, depending on attendees; not much way around that.

For many raids, it's a case of 22-4 raiders having beaten it before, and 1-3 newbies. If they've read up, great. I don't RL except in rare cases, but if I do, I just give the new people a 1-2 sentence rundown of what they need to do, and what to watch out for, based on their role. Takes no more than 30 seconds ideally.

Well, yes, I suppose it is circumstantial. It's impossible to prove a negative, as they say. Tidewalker is a good example of knowing people read the strat. Our first night on him our first attempt ended at a wipe at 80%. I mentioned to our raid leader for healers to keep MT healing to a mimimum, no raid healing and NO PoM or anything along those lines on the MT when the murlocks come out. (I had read something on the D&R forums, of all places. It's not 100% cesspool I guess.)

Next attempt was a flawless kill. To me that says prepared raiders. Interestingly enough, we 1 shotted Hydross that same night with about 75% of the raid having never pulled him before. Again that says prepared raiders.

My point, once again, is to let people learn what they're doing. Go in with a basic idea of the fight and it's strat then work the strat until you find something that clicks. But that requires a focused raid to make work, I suppose.

May I ask you a favour, it's an off-topic but I'd like thread in public discussion dedicated to art of chainpulling (so far I cannot create thread myself) and ways to get guild used to fast and possibly unstoppable (or minimal downtime) clearing of farm content.

Just pull really fast. Tell your healers to rotate drinks and call out rezzes and never stop pulling unless more then half your raid is dead. If you really needed a full raid to do trash mobs most guilds would never get anywhere. Anyone who complains is not likely going to be able to handle Hyjal trash.

Don't forget to use cooldowns like mana tide and bloodlust on trash either. Speeds up killing and recovery substantially and they're obviously going to be up again for a boss as long as you time it properly.

One thing that's important to point out is how one raid keeps focused is going to be totally different from how another raid works. We've all heard the soundboards of the crazy raid leader who yells. That works for some folks. I have a feeling if I did that on one of my guilds raids, probably half the guild would gquit and the other half would burst out laughing. While pretty obvious, I just felt it's important to point out what works for one group isn't nessecarly going to help another (and may actually hurt).

Penalties are another area that can be helpful or hurtful. I run a somewhat casual guild, and while I personally would love to dock someone points who can't control thier ghost or remove them from the raid, in the end I'd just end up with a lot of demoralized folk who'd carry that into the next raid.

Some general things I try to do to keep us focused and moving:

• Talk on ventrilo. If no one else is saying something, I try to fill the dead air. Even if I make a really horrible joke (which is pretty common) it's better then empty space. Folk seem to focus better on voices then on the game, so if by talking I can keep them interested I try to. During trash in places like Hyjal, at least on the easier waves, it's pretty common for a couple of our members to be cracking jokes or generally making fun of our resident joke targets. While not everyone might appriecate some of the humor, I do think it keeps things moving and fun. It's important to note that during say a boss or even some harder trash (Azgalor's 6th wave can diaf :p) I generally ask everyone to keep off vent and bark out instructions. Nothing tunes people out like having to fight to hear the important stuff over the humor. I guess that's all somewhat of a contradiction >>
  
  
• Wipe recovery. The faster the better. I'm sure we've all had a wipe where it took us like 10 minutes to recover from, and noticed that the raid just seems lethargic afterwards. i find Hyjal to be absolutely horrible in this regard. Notihng sucks like wiping due to one persons stupidity on say Kaz'rogal's last wave and having to wait for Thrall to repop. I try to have us all buffed and ready to go the instant he repops. Outside of Hyjal, it's all about just getting underway again. It's pretty common for me to pull while half the raid is unbuffed if I felt we've had enough time to recover. And by have enough time, I mean like everyone's been ressed for 20 seconds. Not only does this help cut down on the time wasted, but it also keeps people focused. Just ignore the folks complaining they don't have buffs and explain they'll get them in a second :P Obviously, don't do this on a boss. If you notice folks are being slow running back, just talk to them or say something over vent like, "Alright guys, lets go.. everyone else is here!". Silly as it sounds, I also find explaining that less time between attempts means more tries and hence more likely odds of killing a boss tends to speed a few people up.
  
  
• Do something strange. Like suddenly have your hunter MD a mob to your Boomkin and make her tank. Obviously, try not to make her tank something that'll kill her. A little quirk like this from time to time keeps everyone interested and excited. OMG WHATS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?!
  
  
• Tone of voice is very important. This could go with the whole point on ventrilo, but it think it's important enough to get it's own bullet. If whomever is leading sounds tired, uninterested, anoyed, whatever... it's going to hurt the raid. I try hard to keep my anoyance out of my voice. The raid feeds off the energy the RL puts out there. If you don't put out any, or put out negative energy... the raid is going to follow suit. Sometimes something will slip out, that's ok. Try to keep the net energy flow positive though. This can be very challenging for even a seasoned RL to pull off, but it's really one of the most important aspects of RLing nowdays.
  
  
• Give your raid goals. Meetable goals. For example, yesterday we had a bit of a rough time on Kaz's trash for whatever reason and it was getting late. We had about an hour left, so I said, "Hey guys, lets focus and get this done. Lets not screw up this time and kill Kaz, and then Az. I don't know about you, but I really would like to not have to come back here the rest of the week unless it's for Archimonde". While somewhat lame, it worked. We picked it up and got through the trash and now I don't have to go back to Hyjal >> Other examples are I might say, "Lets kill VR in under 5 minutes", or "Lets kill supremus without wiping once!". How we wipe to supremus EVERY WEEK AT LEAST ONCE is beyond me... but that's another topic. The important thing about your goals is to make sure they are meetable. If I logged on and was like, "Ok guys, lets one shot everything today, including Gurtogg!" (we haven't killed him yet) and was serious about it, it'd most likely end up hurting morale. When we wipe to the first two auquos spawn things.

Anyways, I probably can come up with some more things but class is about to start >> I hope this is helpful to at least one person (as long as it's not Kewangeder).

I'm not sure if this technically falls under the "keeping the raid focused" umbrella, but it's related to a certain degree.

I belong to a casual guild (I can hear the moaning already ;-) that's casual in that we don't use DKP, we don't force attendance (although it's amazing how many people want to go to ZA once we downed the first few bosses) and we don't force specs. It's kind of a "play what you want" philosophy, and it seems to divide people into two groups:

The first are the ones that research specs, and gear, and will do things that will help the guild progress. For example, we were short on healers, and I had a Shadow Priest on another server gathering dust. I moved her over, spec'd Holy and invested in the Primal Moonfire/Whitemend set. Bingo, we have one more healer, and we can get more people geared up through Kara. I liked Shadow, but this is what the guild needed at the time, so I was happy to do it. These are the guys that see what other people are doing well, and try to do it to the best of their ability.

Of course, there is the other group. That spec how they want, when they want. That raid in PvP gear socketed for +Spell Crit and invariably hover near the bottom of WoW Web Stats. The guys that can't take criticism, that know everything about every class... and if you question how they allocate their talent points, they throw some Alakazham web page from 2006 in your face about how every Mage puts two point in Magic Attunement.

My question is, how do you reach those people?

This site, and the people who post on it, is THE best source of WoW-related information in existence. But you can't make the horse drink... This community is built by people who want to learn and share their knowledge with others, yet if people don't want to seek it out, or put these lessons into practice, what can you do?

I'd like to know if you've had fellow guild members who were hell-bent on doing things their own way, in the face of convention (or even common sense) and how do you deal with it? /gkick'ing isn't really a viable option, or maybe a last resort. How does one approach the BM Hunter who thinks 2/2 Pathfinding is a good idea? ;-)

And more importantly, how do you do it without sounding like an "elitist jerk"?

Start using a tool like WWS and prove them wrong with hard facts and evidence.

Kind of hard for the rogue who specs shadowstep to legitimize his build and dps when you are proving to him that it's pitiful.

If you already do and people are seriously that hardheaded then consider finding replacements for them. Don't kick them out of the guild but do go about finding someone else who will put in a decent amount of effort, at least equal to the amount your guys already put in. If they see that suddenly its not ok for a rogue to be 7th on the dmg meter in a 10 man raid and there is competition maybe it will push them to change for the better.

Personally I find it quite distracting when people talk on Vent about things unrelated to the raid for any period of time. A dig here and there is ok, but quite often 4 or 5 people will get into a complete tangent of a conversation, delaying pulls and making for lackluster performance. I guess it's a case of what works best for your team, but I think it is definitely possible to be TOO relaxed :P

Some people like 100% focus on raid issues even when everyone's sitting around waiting for Thrall to respawn. Others do better when talking about their kids while passing up the 3rd Vashj orb. Most raids contain a mix of these two, and it helps if the RL sets a reasonable compromise. My preference is to identify the trouble points, where we have the highest wipe %, and "focus the focus" on the raid there, and let things relax at other times. I also don't mind talking on Vent mostly. Even during boss fights, though in that case, if I were RLing, I'd take a page from another RL here and say talking's allowed, but only 3 seconds or less at a time ("skellie on me", as opposed to "could someone get this skeleton mage off of me please - nevermind, I'm dead").

The true irony here is you'd likely be one to say the latter :p

Anyhoo, personally I'd prefer people just stayed off Vent and I only had to talk when important stuff needed to be said. That said, I'd also probably prefer raid leading via typing and just listening to music. One important point I think I probably missed is that it's important to do what works for the majority of your guild, not nessecarly what works for you. I think one of the halmarks of a good raid leader is someone who knows how to play to his groups strengths, even if it's not nessecarly how said raid leader would prefer to do things. If that makes sense >>

One more point to add to my list, is I think it's important to not overload people with information. Kew can probably atest I argue about this all the time with him, often telling him something like, "they don't need to know that". While some people like to know who the entire fight works, and thrive on that information, it's my personal belief that the vast majority of people (especially in WoW) work better in as small worlds as possible. While not the best example, you might tell your melee to just ignore striders on vashj for example. A rogue doesn't really need to know that it's being kited around by a shadow priest or whatever. I'm sure if I wasn't so tired as to be functionally retarded today, I could come up with an actual worthwhile example >>

The final point I've got to add at the moment has little to do with raiding, but is still an important factor. I think that the more a raid leader is around and interacts with his (or her.. yeah ok right) guild outside of raid time, the more comfortable raiders will be in general on raids. I like to think that most of my guild considers me a friend, and if not at least sort of likes me (most of time >>). If I mention a screw up to someone, I think they're more likely to listen and understand I'm not trying to be an asshole, if I'm someone they're comfortable with. Maybe this is a bad point since I'd wager most raid leaders have no lives and are on all the time anyways (guilty as charged), but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Oh, and one more quickie: If you feel your leading is being detrimental to the raid, have someone else take over for a bit. For example, the other night (that I'm trying really hard to forget) we wiped like 4 times to Supremus. AWESOME, HUH. I wanted to kill someone, and I knew my voice was showing my digust. I could of pressed on, but instead I tossed off the speaking roll to another officer. While it took us a few too many more tries to kill Supremus (avoiding doomfire is HARD), I think the change in leadership helped to keep a bad situation from becomming a really bad situation. Again, I guess this is kind of an obvious point probably, but I know sometimes I probably "press on" as fearless leader when I should toss the raid off to someone else and take five myself.

Just to add to the Gilneas postings....

I have to say I pretty much disagree with this point. I've felt that with TBC, and the increased complexity of the fights, that people need to have a better understanding of the entire fight. It's true on some fights that's really not necessary( a holy pally friend of mine did Lurker on his mage for the first time the other night - we're a BT/Hyj guild now - and basically had no idea what was going on. He'd only ever been submerged underwater healing the MT for the entire fight, and really didn't need to know anything else). But I'd argue that this is the exception, not the rule. Take a fight like KT, one of the more complex fights in the game( I've seen 4/5 Hyj and 5/9 BT[only killed 4/9 though]). I'd argue that every single raid member needs to know every single aspect of the fight, or they have high odds of dying. If you don't know that the axe whirlwinds as a mage, and you go run in to grab your staff, or close-target AoE, you're going to die. If you don't know the phoenixes have an AoE fire effect that really hurts, you might not react in time.

I will say that explaining a boss fight for the 10th time to the 2 new people in the raid is the easiest way to check me out of raiding( well that and Kael trash....hooray in-game Asteroids mod). People should read up ahead of time, have their class leader explain ahead of time, etc. Especially at our level (which is where I'd assume focus would be an issue) where there's so much info up about the bosses.

First, our Raid Leader is actually a female. Shocker I know, but she's great. Secondly, I think more important that being a friend is being fair. If you screw up, Enig (or RL), is going to yell at you. It doesn't matter if you're an officer, or a new recruit, you're gonna get yelled at( Don't get me wrong, Enig's awesome outside of raiding as well, but I think being fair is more important). If you play favorites, or are inconsistent, people will get disgruntled and pissed off. One of my warlock friends is apping to a new guild because her old CL was a dick to her - making her spec rigidly while he specced how he wanted, demoting her to casual after two weeks of low attendance due to an out-of-town funeral and work issues while not showing up on non-interesting nights/showing up late enough to always be on the WL. Basically if you're consistent and fair, you're going to be far more successful as a leader, and your guild will be far more likely to follow your lead.

Actually, the person I make RL most often besides myself is female. Anonymous has a very high percentage of raiding females (10 out of 38 total raiders). We joke a lot that there's no women on the internet.

Anyways, I completely agree about being fair. Being fair is definatly way more important then being buddies. I'm just trying to say I think that you can be both, and it helps to have the friend ascept in there as well.

Is this a joke? Or are you really that big of an asshole? I've had guild leaders like this, and I left - not because I'm a bad player, but because I don't want to come home after a long day of work and be subjected to that kind of bullshit in my free time. The sad thing is, you could probably have a guild that does decently well progression-wise using the methods you've outlined above. By the way, if you actually do the things listed in your post, you're not a leader, you're a bully.

I was joking. Lay off the steroids and protein powder, tough guy.

I am serious about not coddling people who don't try or aren't any good though. While you might not like being "subjected to that kind of bullshit in (your) free time.", I might not like be being subjected to waiting for the lowest common denominator to stop drooling on their shirt and learn a fight I picked up within 15 minutes.

Often times cutting out your worst players can really motivate the others to perform. No one likes being held down by mediocrity.

Indeed. Items 2-4 sound like someone wants to celebrate Festivus every evening. Item 1, I can actually sympathize with - barely. (If it's in good fun, it could work... maybe.)

This "pack of wolves" approach to raiding can result in progress, if you can find 24-40 other people who feel the same way. That's true of nearly any approach - unless that attitude also selects against actually playing the game well. Vicious warlocks aren't going to carry your raid to victory; they're either going to pull aggro early and die, or slap every debuff they can on a mob, fighting push-off wars with other classes, and have little effect while thinking they're doing great. The PvE game rewards thought and teamwork more than aggression and individual bravado.

This doesn't mean you must feel locked in to bad players just because they are friends, though the improvement process may take longer. It requires a different approach. You might be fabulous company in guild chat, but drag raids down with wipes or poor performance, and others won't want to raid with you. If I'm raid leading a "kinder, gentler" raiding guild, that begs patience I'm happy to exhibit - but I also have to think of 23 other people who've chosen to spend their evening hours here. A raider who shows they're getting used to an encounter while still having trouble, gets support; a raider who shows not even motivation to improve gets The Look. Then, The Talk. After that, yes, sadly, The Portal. On the upside, if they're true raiding friends, it never gets that far.

How does this tie into focus? For me, it's a participation thing. If someone messes up in a raid in BC, it's a lot easier for everyone to know than it was in MC days. May as well be honest about it, and call on that raider to provide feedback. If it wasn't under their control, best to respect that, too. If your recruitment did its job right, then everyone can and should feel sure that everyone else is smart and knows what they're doing, and the raid team can work from that assumption toward a solution of the problem without having to put one raider in stocks. In other words, involve raiders in solving the problems they have, and you demonstrate you're there to fix the problem, not to lynch someone. (At worst, it turns out to be an inattentive or distracted or even just plain bad raider, but then it's backed up by evidence, and better, it's acknowledged.)

If we're really doing poorly, me and the MT start yelling at each other over vent for like 5 minutes.

95% of the time the next attempt is a kill.

With TBC's typical level of encounter complexity, raiders that do their homework on a new encounter before going into it should be the norm, not the exception. Granted, there are many concepts you'll either forget or won't understand until you've actually seen the fight in action. That's why people can still spend days or weeks learning an encounter like Kael'thas even though every person in the raid has spent hours farming consumables, watching videos, reading strategies.

The fact is, though, there's only so much you're going to absorb from a half-hour lecture over vent, or a barrage of text in your chat window when it's your first introduction to an encounter. You're probably going to zone out, you're probably going to forget things. Plenty of raid leaders will require you to do your homework, and will STILL do that 20-30 minute explanation, just to reinforce, just to get people on the same page, but if you've already read about it, you're a lot more likely to think about what's being said, and contribute to a meaningful discussion instead of listening to a droning lecture everybody hates as much as their high school English class. Helps keep you focused! And there's a little piece leading back to the thread topic.

I think it's best to cover all aspects of a fight, unless it's a complex multiphase one in which case it's usually more effective to split it up in chunks based on how hard each phase is. However, each aspect should be simplified. Shortly touch on everything a boss does, but mention each thing in a short and effective way that states what something does and what the result should be.

Don't say "He does burninate, which is a fire based breath that ticks three times for 6000 damage a pop over its duration of 10 seconds. its range is about 20 yards and the cone is about 60 degrees wide. Oh and it happens every 20 seconds." Just say "He regularly does a breath attack, so that will add some burst damage to the tank." This should give your healers enough informatie to deal with it.

Most of the time instructions on raids will be reminders anyway, since people are supposed to have prepared themselves, so if people wanted the details, they will have read them already. A side effect of keeping it simple is that it keeps people's chat windows less spammed and will allow them to easily scroll back to read something again if they missed it or need to read it again to be sure.

Obviously this will be kind of diffirent for bleeding edge guilds or those that stll enforce a strict non-spoiler policy, but I don't think that really makes up the majority on here.