This thread is inspired by several comments in both the Archimonde Thread and the Keeping your raid focused Thread.

What I'd like to discuss is the idea of personal accountability.

There are plenty of fights where your strongest players can carry your weaker ones, and it is possible to progress without exceptional play from all 25 members in any given raid. I'm sure most guilds have a few players who are generally expected to be the first people to die in any given fight. What I'd like to know is this: At what point is this detrimental to the overall success of the group, and how/when are people addressing poor performance?

For example - You have 3 rogues who all have virtually identical gear/stats, and one of them consistently performs 1-2% behind the other two. Is this worth addressing? If the weaker player understands combat cycles and knows how to gear/enchant appropriately, but just isn't able to quite keep up, how do you 'help' this person?

On the other hand - You have a group of healers, and the least geared of the group is totally dominating the others (30-40% more effective healing done) when they share the same healing roles/assignments. Clearly there is a discrepancy there in terms of play. Is it considered OK to allow the under-performers to continue along if it isn't holding the group back yet?

On non-meter related performance, how many times does somebody have to wipe the raid on Archimonde before they need to be replaced? (Obviously not just that fight in particular)

How are other people dealing with these sorts of things? Where do you draw the line on individual performance expectations?

There is no way you can pull someone up over a 1-2% difference in DPS. That's fully attributable to luck (i.e. did you have to bandage/use a health pot rather than a haste/destruction pot/etc).

As far as healing, meters are largely useless for comparing different people/jobs. They are good for fine tuning individual performance, though.

I see what you are saying, but if the healer's job gets done, then the healer has done their job, as circular as that sounds. If I'm healing, and someone else is capable of doing more than enough to cover the role, I'll let them so I can conserve mana. If my target dies, then sure, I've messed up, but if not, I'm going to be more effective at dealing with things going wrong.

The amount of slack a raid leader usually gives a slacker is (usually) directly proportional to how easily that slacker is replaced.

Generally, since people tend to dislike draconian policies, you're better off trying to teach and explain to get more improvement. If there isn't sufficient improvement, look to find/train a replacement for that slacker, until the slacker isn't as big a liability anymore (raid gets better geared overall). If the slacker just cannot learn, then you either disallow the slacker from the raids, or kick him/her.

There's a lot of intricacies involved, but that's pretty much how it goes. The details are typically the varying degrees to how tractable the slacker is.

This is a great point about healing. If people arnt dying, it can be better for a healer to conserve their mana to help pull the raid through in the case of a bad fuckup (or bad luck), then try to squeeze in some extra effective healing when things are going peachy.

I'd like to put a bit more in about healing.

In your example you have one person that is 30-40% ahead in the meters. But healing and indeed dps'ing is much more than that. For example on healing, some fights favour certain healing styles over others, for example raid wise splash damage will see circle of healing priests jump to the top of the meters. Fights with consistent tank damage will see paladins get good numbers.

The other thing to consider is that you can't "heal more" as opposed to "dps more." If one person is 30-40% ahead in the meters and nobody is dying, everybody "healing more" will just see overheal rather than effective heal.

Assuming this is based on a real life experience and not a hypothetical, somebody healing 30-40% more than other healers suggests that they are ignoring healing assignments. For example they are assigned to tank healing but are spamming heals on the raid as well. This will lead to: 1 Overheal by the designated raid healers; and 2. The tank healer going out of mana more quickly.

So in a real life situation I wouldnt' be talking to the people that are below in the healing meters but to the person thats in front. Do a WWS and look at who he/she is healing maybe.

In any case the best answer in my opinion is the one listed above, the amount of bad playing you put up with is inversely proportionate to the number of replacements you have. Having keen replacements removes the need for draconian policies as you just sit the person out (rather than yelling at them) once they have sat out for a little while they will ask why and you can tell them politely that they (have the wrong spec/don't listen/don't read up/don't bring flasks).

While my guild was still raiding, we had a mage who made herself infamous in officer discussions for consistantly underperforming despite having the best gear of all the mages. Unfortunately she was the only mage that showed up consistantly and was good friends with many valued players. That made it almost impossible for us to try to replace her because of the crap we would get from her and her buddies. Our very very skilled, but unfortunately 1-day-a-week-raiding mage tried to make her his project to help improve her performance, but he just ended up giving up after months of no progress. We never did figure out what she was doing wrong, but our GM assumed she must have been jotting down everytime she pressed the fireball button in her journal or stopping to knit or something.

So where was the line drawn? It wasn't. If we were to g-kick her, her friends would follow and we would lose valued members. If we were to try to not bring her to raids, the same thing would happen - she would raise hell for being the only mage to consistantly show up, and she's losing raid spots to people who come once a week. So we brought her every raid until the guild fell apart for unrelated reasons.

I'm posting this just to illustrate one thing: it's always more complicated than you think. Unless you are a real hardcore guild, you will find it extremely difficult to weed out consistant under-performers without making a bigger mess than just keeping that person on. That's why it always gives me a chuckle when I see people post things like "well if they aren't performing as well as other mages, just gkick them!" If only it were that easy.

One way i would consider dealing with this is to get the guild 'on your side' including those who are friends with her. If you raise the issue, be honest about it and convince those close to her that her performance is a problem that needs working on and get them to be the ones that make the changes. One time i managed to convince my friend that he should teach his significant other to avoid keyboard turning and she listened to him - much more than she would have ever listened to me. Not only that she is happier now because playing the game is easier. It is especially important to get people who can contact the person in real life so they can go over and find out what is going wrong.

Of course, you have to act respectfully and avoid personal bouts otherwise it's all over, but if you can command the respect of the people around her by being upfront they will listen to you and try to come up with a solution for her. If there's still no improvement it's still a win to have her friends respect your decision when you dont invite her to a raid.

This sounds oddly familiar... Before BC, I was in a raid alliance with a Mage who did less damage than the tanks, went /afk in the suppression room, could not be relied on for CC or decursing, etc. But this Mage was an officer in the raid alliance and therefore had to be rostered week after week. It got old.


On topic more, I think even casual guilds should draw lines in extreme circumstances. I've been in several raids where 1-2 members were clearly not ready for the content. Whether they were doing very poor DPS, couldn't position properly, broke CC, or whatever. They were a burden on the raid.

I'm all for bringing friends to raids and trying to be more "casual," but there's a point where one player is making the rest of the raid work harder. If someone is doing that, I think they need to show rapid improvement or it becomes extremely frustrating to raid with them. If it's not dealt with, this can lead to stress, morale, and attendance issues for the entire raid. Often, this frustration comes out all at once when someone finally loses their temper with the underperformers, and it may not come out in the most constructive manner. I've done that myself from time to time.

Extremely poor performance can be due to ignorance. Most players don't theorycraft at all. They don't even read the official forums, much less obscure sites like this. So a bit of advice can go a long way. Extremely poor performance can also be due to players who don't care if they waste 24 other player's time. There's not much you can do about that, except stop inviting them.

I don't think it's worth the trouble to figure out small differences. A 2% difference in DPS, even if it's consistent between several players, is hard to diagnose and could be RNG gear choice, lag, slow reflexes, or other things that aren't entirely under the player's control. Even if you figure out the difference, there may not be an easy way to "fix" it.

Because small performance differences are such a subtle problem, you might try giving the underperformers personal goals. Make an informal contest between Super Rogue and Mediocre Rogue on the charts. Remind Mediocre Rogue periodically that his goal is to beat Super Rogue. Or ask underperformers to make a special effort on some encounters to try to get into the top 5.

It's not easy to come with a similar system for healing.

There is a fine line between being a douche bag and using constructive criticism to help a player improve their playing skills. If your just going to be that monkey throwing shit at people without any regard to bad luck or rough situations, or even player potential, your just shooting yourself in the foot. I honestly take pride in helping a player get their act together or helping a guild family and friend cross the line between casual noob to serious raider.

That is true, you do have to find the line between giving constructive criticism and just completely bitching someone out for doing poorly. But there is definitely a line between people who flat out suck ass and have little to no hope for improvement for whatever reason and people who are willing/able to learn and improve. I have absolutely 0 desire to even attempt to try to help the first kind but it isn't a black and white thing, I don't think. I love to help to improve people who are a notch below the top but I don't like wasting my time with people who are completely terrible, it's simply not worth the frustration.

This is really the time to make sure you inform them that you do look at meters. More often then not they feel that their personal effort isn't needed because others will carry the slack for them. WWS is a great tool especially for this purpose.

At this level of game play most players should understand their class mechanic if one person is consistently under performing vs the rest. Ask them if everything was ok did they need any help. There are many ways you can go at this without directly attacking their pride. More often then not it basically is just a lack of focus or making one or two mistakes in their cycles. Take a look first at their WWS try and pinpoint their problem, Ala are they not hitting their button fast enough not flasking etc. If you can figure out whats wrong bring it to their attention and 90% of the time it will be fixed. Also promote intra-class discussions more often then not everyone can learn something new.

The biggest problem is if players get complacent once sunwell is out they won't know how to rev it back up the thing with these encounters is it get boring fast. Try and make it a competition into getting better every week. If you consistently track WWS try and improve on kill time every week and see how you do. It gets people alot more interested and it also pushes the tanks to improve their TPS to allow the dps to do that. Especially if they see they are getting their asses rided on in terms of TPS.

On the topic of Archimonde. Basically it's 2 craters and your out. Dying to doomfire=bad as well. Standing in AE on council pulling aggro on illidan transitions all basically are on a short lease depending on how stupid it was.