Havelcek

I think raiding pretty easily transitions from "fun" to "work", especially after you personally feel like you have mastered the content or gotten all the "loot" that you need. If you look at it from the 40,000 foot viewpoint it is really amazing how much time we spend running the same content over and over again. So just like at work, its natural to become frustrated or worse with colleagues who you perceive are performing below your level, but are rewarded the same. As raiding becomes more like work is it any surprise that folks tend to transpose the same behaviors from the workplace to the game? Or that they display the same personal ethics in the game that they might at work?

Fundamentally you need to apply the same types of management behaviors to the game that you might in the workplace as a manager. You need to have "team-building" activities. You need to mentor folks. You need to challenge people. You need to discipline people and eventually fire them. These are all critical to not only the development of individuals, but the maintenance of the morale of the team.

 

Machia

The sad thing is that pushing healers to heal more.. can lead to more wipes. This happens when healers start to cross raid heal while also trying to do their assignments. We had/have lingering problems with this because our healers are very competitive with one another. I still have trouble breaking them of the habit (mostly because I'm one of the healers and am also very competitive). For example when you have assigned healing and healers are just supposed to be bomb healing the MT (such as in Illidan) and they are cross healing parasite/flame target when there are already assigned healers to that role. It opens opportunity for healing gaps and we've occasionally had the MT go down because of it. Telling your healers that they just need to pump out more healing can lead to these issues. I wouldn't really talk to a healer unless they messed up on their assignment (I.E. their tank went down/they didn't heal or dispel, etc).

Likewise with DPS telling them they need to put out more damage can cause them to play more riskily. Lets say it's a rogue on Archimonde. Would you rather have them risk getting in there and getting flame damage to get that extra bit of dmg or would you rather have them stay out and bandage if need be? I basically come out and say on certain fights I don't care about the meters. When DPS are playing riskily like that they are 1) endangering themselves and possibly others and 2) they are most likely causing healers to have to heal more which takes focus off of their assignments. A classic example is when we did Kael with 5 healers the other day. A couple of our melee were in on P2 right off the bat. 2 of them pulled aggro and died. Being reckless to get that extra 2-3 hits in doesn't do a damn thing for your raid. Even praising those who did extraordinarily well on a fight but played riskily can be detrimental to your raid. Again I wouldn't talk to your DPS unless they are being vastly out done on multiple fights and/or dying even if they aren't performing well.

 

Kazanir

A useful contribution from IRC:

At the risk of being snarky, the man is right. If you don't have enough skilled raiders to not bring morons to the raid, then you are going to suffer. Is there really a lot more to be said about this issue?

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

Lansky

This is definitely a common issue. I've experienced this espeicially with some paladins. Once upon a time many of these players would top effective healing meters, but these days are largely gone in most fights... unless they decide to cross assignment heal. A month or two ago we had issues with our main tank dying despite being very overgeared for anything the game can currently throw at him. Couple times on Shahraz, handful on Council, and so on. Eventually, it couldn't just be chalked up to bad luck. Called the raid and went to look at the WWS. The MT healers were double dipping an alarming amount into the raid healing aspect to pad their numbers. In some of their cases less than 35% of their heals landed on their assigned target, the freaking main tank. Their effective healing was very high across the board, but all they were doing was sniping health before hots could tick or chainheals were cast while we got to watch the MT die. The common excuse was we had 4 healers assigned to him and he didn't take much damage. That is until he had a bad non avoidance streak while his healers attention went elsewhere.

Go look and/or get a WWS of a few raids and just look at who your healers are healing. Just because they are assigned similarly doesn't mean they are in fact following orders and it can come back to bite your raid in the butt. If they are all healing the appropriate targets take a look at the type of heals they are using and so on. There is a large degree of luck involved in healing as if your big heal lands .1s before the other guy then you just got 8k effective healing instead of 0. Have this happen a few times and suddenly you look amazing on that meter while the other guy must be slacking off.

 

Noxana

This is a thread and is a topic of discussion because many of us are not progression-only guilds where less than stellar performance is cause for dismissal - whether from the raid or the guild. For many, this is a recurring issue that entails delicate handling that many GMs and/or raid leaders are not used to. This thread can allow for constructive posts from those having dealt with these types of situations to enable another who is just now encountering the problem to deal with it appropriately. Obviously, this is a non-issue to many top end guilds, but it can be of great help to those of us who have social ties within a guild to those mediocre to average players who cannot be removed, whatever the reason.

 

Treesurgeon

This is an issue that has plagued every guild and raid I have been involved in while playing this game. I have served as a guild officer, raid leader, main tank and now main healer in several 'casual' raiding guilds and this topic is the bane of thoes type guild's existance.

Within those guilds you will have skilled, determined and prepared players who want to better themselves and play at a relatively high level. They end up here perusing the EJ forums same as hardcore raiders looking for an edge. However, in the more casual guilds, to a greater extent, you run into underperforming players. You have the same in hardcore guilds too, its just a matter of the level of tolerance.

As was mentioned above, some players bring added value to the raid through other avenues besides DPS/Healing, etc. This can only account for so much disparity between thier output and the desired level of performance and it varies between guild and other factors.

Where does your guild draw the line?

When I triple someone's raw healing with half the overheal over the entire raid, I get pretty riled up. In many of the guilds represented here, this person would be laughed out the door (Hell, *I* might be laughed out the door, big fish, little pond, etc) For us, we are looking at it and discussing it and it factors in when we go into a raid where we are working on new content and who we want to take. It might mean a player is no longer allowed to hold the requisite rank to have invite priority for raids.

Each time I have changed guilds, this factored into it. Every time I do so I threaten to "ride the tiger" and go hardcore. God knows I play enough hours per week to handle the hardcore schedule. One inhibiting factor is that I play with my wife. Fortunately, she has a keen grip on her ability as a player and doesn't currently raid. When she raided in the past, it took a tremendous amount of her time to stay up to date and locked in and she didn't want to do that anymore. I think that there is some insight into this issue.....most people don't get that, most people are unaware of how well they perform, even when the numbers are right there in black and white.

Players in wow in general are very poor at self evaluation. I expect this crowd is the exception, that's why you're here. When you point out to people problems based upon the numbers, they show that most people are adept at denial and the manufacture of excuses.

I guess my answer to "How do you make people accountable?" is that you don't. You find people who are and support that self improvement attitude. You can't make people give a crap anymore than you can get behind their keyboard and play thier toon. There are many things that can be fixed with encouragement and advice but at a certain point, you can't help someone who doesn't put forth the effort to do ti themselves. If you are a more casual guild, you have more room for slack. You play with 'nice' people with (not really) less pressure. Big fish, small pond.

 

◊ Nocturnus

Part of me (the part that's still trying to figure out how to make my raid kill Vashj) wants to agree with this, because I like to think that there are more guilds like mine than there are like the average guild we see here every day. I know we're behind the power curve compared to a lot of people here, but that's why I came; to learn from the people that have been there.

But the realist part of me? Yep, he agrees with Xi. While I don't advocate kicking them entirely, I know a lot of guilds have some sort of "social" or "probation" rank where they put people that aren't ready, and I like that idea. I've been making a pretty big push lately to start leaving behind DPS that are clearly not getting the big picture, we had a pretty big discussion/argument about it yesterday. I believe my exact words were "we're past the point where we need to be taking !@#$%^ home improvement projects".

It's unfortunate that there's such a harsh line separating 5/6, 3/4 from 6/6, 4/4... but that's the way the WoW cookie crumbles. Either you're content to beat your head on the endboss wall for eternity, or you go out and find the people that will smash through it.

 

Suian

As my guild is still rebuilding after various drama and /emoquits, we are only at vashj/kael.
Anyway, as a core raider of my guild I am often asked to help setup the raid and occasionally players.
We have had to resort to docking dkp for people screwing up on stupid thing, like spout and wrath of astromancer.

We we set roles on the raid, we don't expect healers, dps, tank or CC to anything except there assigned role, if something goes wrong, then I always find ordinary raiders do something extraordinary to avoid that wipe and to keep the fight going.

Under performing people are met with som councilling from officers, normally advice on a spec or giving them the link to this website will warrant some improvement. If people onsistently underperform, they just don't get a raid invite.

 

Aural

In my guild, people dying to spout/blowing up the group/cratering on Archi/anything else silly and obvious get a dkp penalty and some ribbing by their fellows. It's worked out pretty well, people generally only make a mistake like that once.

 

Sepulture

The keys to accountability are:

1) Don't accept excuses for mistakes. If someone starts making an excuse, cut them off mid sentence and nicely remind them that a death with an excuse is still a death.
2) Be systematic and consistent in your approach to dealing with mistakes. DKP penalties and yelling don't usually get results. The most effective solution is to bring someone else into the raid if they make X major errors in a raid.
3) Personal accountability can only work if raid spots are not guaranteed. The key to successful raiding is to over recruit a nice buffer and make it common knowledge that those that fail to perform don't raid.

We have always had our best progression streaks when we had extra raiders in every class. People have a way of managing themselves when they know that they have to earn their spot and there are immediate consequences for slacking off.

 

◊ Noressa

We tend to not meter the raids. People run their own DPS meters, however they aren't spammed. WWS is reviewed at the end and we can look at specifics there. We usually have a high discrepancy in healing, but most of that can be categorized into lifebloom, chain heal and circle of healing friendly fights. There are just times when the other specs can't compete well at all. Trash is rarely looked at mostly because it's just an effected "who is afk" guide, vs who heals.

As for the personal accountability portion, that largely depends on the player. If we have someone who has failed repeatedly, we bring them to the fight again and they fail again, usually we'll kick them out of the raid and replace them with someone who can do it. It sounds harsh, but the goal is to complete it quickly, not wipe hoping someone doesn't mess up. I know that we are slow to remove people from our guild and we tend to give people chances for redemption, but all that aside, the biggest goal is low wipes, fast clears and clean runs. If it starts effecting your raids morale, then take action.

Original Post by Boogsy: Now by benefactor, I am guessing that I am in fact, benefiting from the wealth of knowledge here. Or perhaps it is just benefiting from the Benefactor's Bar....a wonderful place for which I am just exploring.....and preparing to be attacked perhaps a few times
RIP Boogsy

 

◊ zeidrich

On the tangent of healing:

Don't use meters for gauging healing effectiveness.

Thanks. Seriously, when you start gauging a healer's effectiveness off a meter they start doing really stupid shit, like, as an above poster mentioned, crosshealing when they should be healing their assignment.

You have to look much closer to tell if a healer is underperforming. If one person is assigned to tank healing and another is assigned to crosshealing, and the crosshealer is outhealing the tank healer, then there is just more crosshealing that needs to be done. You don't want to pull your tank healer and tell him to start helping to crossheal if the boss has any sort of burst potential. Are you comparing HoT classes with Direct Heal classes? Are you comparing multi target healers to single target healers?

If a healer's assignment doesn't die, and you're not taxing the other healers on the assignment unduly, IE: One of 3 tank healers is doing half of the healing compared to the others, but the others are running completely OOM while the first is sitting pretty at 75%, then you can not start bitching about healing efficiency, overhealing, quantity of heals etc.

If healers are able to maintain their assignments and a healer is underperforming, but doing the job that he was told to do, then it is the Raid Leader's fault. The assignment was wrong, or it was intentionally lighter. If the healer is not able to maintain their assignment but is competitive on healing done, then their assignment is too much. If the healer is not able to maintain their assignment, and is lower on healing, then you might have have an issue with the healer.

Deaths: Deaths are almost entirely the dead players fault unless you are the MT. There are exceptions. Taking a flame strike after not being healed up from deadly poison on council is your crosshealer's fault. Dying to bloodboil or to your Shade on Leotheras is a healer's fault. Dying to random AoEs, or because of pulling aggro, or any other crap like that is your fault. Not using a healthstone and a potion before dying makes it your fault even if otherwise you might be able to blame the healer.

On DPS: I don't think it is a big issue, unless you have real DPS issues. 1-2% is easily accounted for by lag. If someone is consistently like 30% lower than other identically geared players in their class, they should be figuring out what they're doing wrong from the leaders, or from a resource like this. If they don't, then urge them to. If they still don't, start bringing people who know how to hit the right buttons in the right order.

On Archimonde: It's variable of course, know your raid. If someone craters every time they get air bursted though, of course replace them. If a healer is being too bold towards doomfires and getting hit by them more frequently because other healers are being too timid and the tank is getting dangerously low, you should be able to recognize that, and instruct the healers to correct the problem. On the other hand if a rogue is running through DF in order to get back to DPS asap, then you have some real retardation on your hands.

Conclusion:
Before you start calling people out, ask: Is this person doing everything they can to do their job?

A healer underperforming? Are you sure he hasn't just healed all of his assignments up? If there's only X amount of healing to be done, you can't expect more than that. Starting to crossheal unless he is told to means he is unable to instantly react to his assignment.

People dying? Is it in their power to stay alive? Sometimes it is not, and they rely on a healer to keep them up. As long as they do as much as they can to recover and avoid damage that's all you can ask for.

DPS low? Are they too cautious? Are the other higher DPS pulling aggro frequently? (Is this a tank problem?) Are the other, higher, DPS dying more frequently? Or does the DPS just not know how to push the right buttons in the right order?

 

Ared

One aspect of managing personal accountability in raiding which has always perplexed me is how you, as a Raid Leader, deal with those under-performing members who have by some means or another attained something akin to 'Untouchable' status without severely rupturing the social fabric of the group.

Pre-TBC I raided with an alliance which was one of the oldest raid groups on the server. Until around March 2006 or so we were somewhere around second or third in terms of progression with a server #3 on Ragnaros and a #2 on Nefarian and looked well placed to maintain that position in AQ40. I joined the group rather late but quickly found myself in a leadership role after the Huhuran cockblock exposed the inadequacy of some of our 'core' members and triggered a spate of departures, reconstruction efforts and a general whirlwind of drama which took until TBC to play out in full. At the point I became a leader we were faced with the dilemma of having two main groups in the alliance - those who had been there since very early on and had farmed BWL and early AQ40 to death but were too loyal/lazy/stupid to leave for the groups which had since overtaken us and newcomers who required gear from the farmed instances if we hoped to make any kind of a determined push on AQ and Naxx. For the most part our new recruits more than made up for their lack of gear and experience with enthusiasm and many of them got to grips with the encounters extremely quickly and became very valuable members of the group. Even still our progress was slow and it quickly became apparent that some of our 'legacy' raiders were holding us back. Despite the fact that they had been with the alliance since the beginning and gearwise had the best the content we'd done so far had to offer, some of them simply lacked the L2P to cope with late AQ and Naxx bosses. One particular priest stands out as being exemplary of all that was wrong with these people. We had noticed in the past that he seemed to burn through his mana extremely quickly and needed constant innervating to be any use but couldn't work out why - he usually sat fairly close to the top of the healing meters and while his overheal % wasn't ideal it was far from horrendous. We began to pay more attention to what he was actually casting and discovered that for 90% of the healing he did, regardless of what he was actually healing, he used max rank Flash Heal. Other problems began to emerge once we (finally) downed Huhuran. On the Twin Emperors he had extreme difficulty getting out of the blizzards and frequently got himself killed. Even with Vent reminders he still failed hard. On Razuvious he once again proved that he couldn't move to save his life (quite literally) and on C'thun was simply a liability of the worst kind. There were others too of course - a warrior, paladin and warlock spring immediately to mind - but said priest was definitely the worst offender.

While it seemed obvious that these people desperately needed kicking and replacing we, the leadership, found two rather large obstacles in our way. First of all, we were struggling to fill raids as it was and there were no suitable replacements available. Though nobody ever vocalised it, I'm fairly sure most of the other officers shared my view that a raid spent wiping because of our 'special' people was preferable to no raid at all. At least there was some small chance of getting lucky and killing something new. Secondly, some of these dysfunctional players had been in the group for so long that they had become all but 'untouchable', as I referred to at the beginning of my post. Through a mixture of popularity and simple longevity they had become virtually immune to any form of direct criticism and any attempt to correct their behaviour would result in getting the decent old-timers' backs up even though they too must have been aware how painfully dreadful some of their peers were. It was almost as if any sort of criticism of legacy members was interpreted as a direct attack on the history of the alliance and of the people who had been a part of it.

Truth be told, we never really did find a way to resolve this issue. When TBC hit the width of the gulf between our skilled and unskilled players became even more apparent with the early runs on Karazhan. We ran two groups most weeks and ended having to seriously gimp one just so the other wouldn't be composed mostly of players who were a major liability. This held us back and when it became apparent that the current leadership had no real hope of finding a permanent solution we left en masse and most people drifted towards guilds more suited to their skill and ambition. Even now I still don't see what we could have done without alienating the skilled older players and causing the breakup of the alliance although sometimes I wonder if that would have been the kindest thing to do.

 

Karede

This is an important thing about healing, most notably what I've added emphasis to. My guild is just starting T5 content, with Lurker and VR and an attempt on Leo. So I don't have the experience that a lot of others do here. But while we were first starting to move into 25-man content I was looking at our WWS and meters for everything from the DPS to the healers to see what was going on and where we could improve. In our case, there was one healer that was always consistently at the bottom. And it wasn't by a small portion. I tended to be on top with my chain heals with a resto druid close behind. This was a CoH priest that was actually our best geared priest at that time, just over 1750 bonus healing. With 7 healers in Gruul's, I was coming in around 30% of total effective healing while this priest was at 6-8%. I couldn't understand what was going on. I mean, at the end of the day, we were still getting the job done, so I thought that I could probably just look past it. Ultimately I wasn't looking to compare him to me directly, but to the other CoH priest we had in the raid. He was at around 10-12%, so roughly twice this guy.

In order to get a better grip on what was going on, I thought I'd take him on a Kara badge run to see if I could figure out the problem. What I came to believe was that it was just laziness. We ran two healers with one real tank and one MS with a shield. Our MT was a feral druid. I rarely used ES all night and at the end of the night, the druid had beat him in effective healing. THE TANK. There is no way that a tank should EVER be able to beat a healer in effective healing. I had to bust my ass all night long to basically heal everything. I had just over 80% of the effective healing for the raid.

Moral of the story: While you do have to be careful in using meters to gauge healing, they can provide some benefit. Most will say that it's not a big deal if everyone stays alive, but you shouldn't keep someone on the roster who is essentially so lazy that they ultimately require others to go above and beyond the call in order to get the job done at the end of the day. As many have said, this is a very delicate subject, but one that each guild has to address from time to time.

 

◊ Bekah

Healing meters drive me nuts. I spent so long being one of the best priests in my old guild (low over heal, high numbers- consistently picking up the slack in the raid. I thrive on difficult assignments), and 4 months later I'm consistently near the bottom. I spent three days tearing apart WWS and trying to figure out where the hell my consistently good returns had gone wrong. My targets weren't dying, I could see a few places to improve regen, but I wasn't having trouble with my mana pool. Then it dawned on me that, sitting in a primarily healer/caster group as the imp spirit priest- I had no way to keep up with chain heal and CoH- and my hots couldn't touch the effectiveness of life bloom. Paladins were being consistently put on the heavy duty tank assignments... so I was basically twiddling my thumbs trying to snipe heals faster than the people with targetable AoE heals and superior hots.

The whole picture is very important in healing. My assignments are fine, but no longer tailored towards my spec/strengths (my old guild had very rigid assignments and was constantly running one healer shy, new guild has much more fluid assignments and generally has enough or more than enough healing at any give time)... which leads to a weaker showing in general. I've been trying to talk myself into speccing CoH because I know it'll improve my healing performance- but it'd leave the raid shy on Imp DS occasionally.

The whole picture- encounter/class/spec/assignment all matter.... Which is not an excuse to suck at healing.

 

pinchet

Bekah, you're living my life.

Until this past summer I had been the only raiding healing priest in our raids and I always placed decent (anywhere from 1-3) on the healing meters. We picked up a 2nd priest and he specced CoH, since I had always been Imp. Spirit and he absolutely destroys me on healing meters on every fight. (except Bloodboil or RoS because we're both spamming group heals there anyways)

I can't wrap my mind around some of his parses and seeing upwards of 75% of his healing done with CoH. I never expected it to look like that.

 

Mezoth

The hardest part about being the healing lead in a progression oriented (casual or not) guild is telling those recruits that suck to leave. They can argue every way from sunday why they do not, even when presented with overwhelming evidence otherwise. Thankfully, I only had to do this twice before the guild went kerplewie, but both cases the people argued with me about it even in the face of detailed evidence that they sucked.

The best factor I used on telling an individual healer they sucked was typically: you got hit by "x/y/x" boss ability that should be dodged. Be it the bomb on Solarian, flamestrike on Kael, Spout, or even a cleave from a boss, those types of deaths were pretty well documentable that healer X was in the wrong place.

Kicking a healer because they sucked at healing requires that you know their class almost as good or better then they do, and then have the evidence that they suck. Examples of druid's using regrowth for 60% of their effective healing, or Shaman with less then 10% healing done from Chainheal (for an entire Hyjal raid) come to light. Never expect the DS priest to keep up with the other healers on the meters, but give them good single target (or healing their own whole group) assignments and you will see them come close. Sadly, paladin healing is about the hardest to gauge from types of spells cast, and the easiest to gauge from meters - 2 paladin tank healers on the same tank, one doing 50% more effective healing then the other consistently over the course of a night indicates a problem.

tl,dr version? Meters help in the context of the greater bits of information, but you have to take the characters class/spec/assignment into account. Also, people that suck generally suck at positioning/movement too, giving you ample excuses to give them the boot.

 

Hegen

In addition to showing good character this also sets an example for the others. If players see that admitting fuckups is done by others and accepted by the raid (if happening rarely), at least some of them will do so themselves. This in turn will improve trust and overall morale.

 

◊ gwystyl

I didn't see a response to Qan's question to the OP about the dps difference between the 2 hypothetical rogues. I might have missed it, though, since I didn't read the thread in one sitting.

If that 1-2% difference is overall raid damage done, there's a very big problem there that needs to be addressed. If the 1-2% difference is simply one rogue doing 2k dps and the other doing 1960 then one got luckier with dodges, crits, etc.

My guild is kind of unconventional. We're not hardcore in that we don't require 100% attendance, but we raid 5 nights a week (when there's stuff to do, but we're now part of the under-3-night-t6-clear club). We carry 42 raiders on our roster, and it has worked out pretty well thus far. We run a fun, friendly raid group and people aren't called out in vent, which has its plusses and minuses.

That said, there's no reason not to play as well as you can when you're in the raid group. I've actually been pushing my guild to really ramp up raid dps now that I've been eyeing the top ranked WWS out there. It's been an exercise that was taken up with enthusiasm and all kinds of theorycrafting is taking place. It has inspired people to go spy the combat logs of top performing class/spec peers and see what they can do to mimic this. I didn't approach it in a "hey, we suck. Look at those guys!" manner. Rather, I simply started talking about a top guild's parse during a bio break, and people started getting interested. I admired the speed in which they downed the boss, and then people would check out the link and say things like, "How are their mages doing 400 more dps than me? Hmm..."

I know this doesn't address raid awareness / mortality, but at least in this respect you can lead them to the target and see if they motivate themselves.

 

Treesurgeon

I would not go so far as to say meters are entirely useless when it comes to healing but basing performance judgements on them alone is indeed a big mistake. Whatever you see there is a possible syptom and the most obvious indicator. If you walk into an emergency room puking your guts out, it could be about anything but there is obviously something wrong.

Different encounters require healers to fill different roles. However, when you take Morogrim for example and have 4-5 healers spam healing and compare two of the same class and spec side by side and its not even close, you've looked at the meter and seen a problem but it doesn't tell you too much about what it is. There will be situations where a Jesus beaming shammy will heal circles around everyone. There will be times when a druid can cross heal multiple tanks and wheel 2-3 LB stacks that are always ticking for effective heal and crush the meter.

Its a small part of the over all performance evaluation process, but it is not, IMO, completely useless.

 

Jehane

I agree that there is a very fine line to be walked here. For me and my guild, it indeed does boil down to personal accountability: What's the attitude in your guild to subpar playing or mistakes, and how do your players handle it when they suddenly realize "Hey, I'm THAT player"?

This has been very difficult to effectively manage for guilds like ours which historically did not have any participation requirements for raiding.. and it's impossible to manage when you have not estabilished a sense of trust amongst your raiders.

It takes a special kind of courage to say: "Guys, this encounter's really throwing me.. I'm just holding the rest of you back. Sub me out and I'll watch some more movies while you learn it" or "I don't have the time to both do research on my character and play, so I'm out for this week of raids while I try to fix this threat generation problem." or even "I know what your raiders need to do to keep up with the pack, and I just can't handle that level of time investment right now; I can't do it that easily." You don't see statements like that unless you've managed to foster an environment which allows for both focused criticism and player support.

Down here at the bottom end of the curve, we work with limited resources. We don't have as much time to invest, and we have little attraction for progression-minded recruits who haven't burned bridges elsewhere. This means that we spend a great deal more time on 'raider repair' and accept that there will be several encounters for which we need to build in workarounds.

 

Distomos

This is a tricky, tedious subject that each guild has faced at some point in time. For example, in my last guild, we had a Rogue who often under-performed compared to the two other Rogues present -- a situation that you mention by name. In this particular case, the said Rogue was never approached. If, as you say, this behavior is "consistent," I believe it's an issue that can be properly (in kind fashion) addressed. Because, if we look at this from the larger picture, that particular individual could be holding the collective raid's DPS back, albeit in "smaller" terms.

In terms of healing, I've come across many situations where I ask myself, "What was that person possibly doing?" However, this concept is also what I truly love about being a healer. A healer's gear can be less significant than another player's, but they can still "outheal" (What is that term, anyway? Is this effective heal? Overheal?) another person. It's all a matter of whether or not they're handling the situation properly, though. If someone is just spamming Flash Heal on a target when it's not necessary, that is also something that should be addressed. Such a "lower" person (in terms of gear) could be spamming their buttons in an effort to impressive but, in reality, do not know how to be effective at their class role.

While meters are difficult to really judge these days, because they don't really tell us how effective a person is, I think that they can be an indicator of a person's performance on an individual level if taken in collective form. Meters give us a way of determining a player's abilities, but not necessarily their strengths. For example, the previous Rogue that I mentioned was quite fabulous at his situational awareness, and would attempt to take control of a situation if, for example, a particular target was untanked and beating on a healer. However, at the same time, this "functional" role could be countered with the question, "Well, why wasn't it tanked?" It's a win-lose situation but, as you said, consistent evidence of "being behind" should certainly be approached. When it's not, people ponder why it's not recognized.

It's always been my firm belief that someone should be given a second chance at an encounter. Naturally, our expectations proceed ourselves insofar that we do expect adequate, skilled players to be able to accomplish something at the drop of a hat. But, let's take Archimonde for example. A Priest in my former guild took upon himself to try and use Circle of Healing during this encounter, which resulted in him often getting too close to the melee and blasted by fire. Despite repeatedly being questioned as to why he was taking such an extreme amount of damage, he continued to do this. Behavior such as that should be addressed by the raid leader. If it's not corrected, they should be replaced. However, one would think that a competent guild would be filled with players who know to take the raid leader's advice above their own ambitions but, unfortunately, it is not always that way.

 

sickening

The line between who is a good raider and who is a good guildy is often way too thin. I currently have a rogue in the guild who is a great person and awesome friend to everyone in the guild, but can't dps to save her life! Her roles in raiding is usually to loot trash mobs (i am sure you have one too) and basically sort the guild bank.

I have tried and tried to turn her into something to not get angry at. She just doesn't have the will to change anything. Only after getting towards the end of SSC has she finally discovered slice and dice. She has stayed with the same "ss till 5 and evis" since she leveled her rogue.

1. Her reflexes are slow.
2. She is either not in ts or doesn't have her headphones on. Fights where moving counts are usually rough on her.
3. She will have the best rogue gear the guild has available, but will only be middle of the pack in dps at best.
4. She is always that person you are waiting on to not be afk while waiting for a boss pull.
5. She has been in the guild since the beginning and has dkp from molten core to now still unspent. 5x to 1

The headaches really start after the thrill of downing a new boss is over and then knowing she is going to get the new loot first. All i can do is silently sigh though, she is too good of a person and a friend to complain too much in the open.

 

Sepulture

Sickening, you've let yourself become to subjective. To be an effective raid/guild leader, you need to keep a certain level of professionalism and separate business from ass-grabbery and merrymaking.

Here is all you have to do:

1. Start a new forum on your guild website called "raid metrics"
2. Post a WWS link there for every raid you attend.
3. After every raid, write a few sentences on each class.
4. Highlight the best and worst performer.
5. Even if you know the reasons why, ask open ended questions to get people talking about how to improve their performance.

Things will either sort themselves out, or it will be far easier to deal with that underperforming person when you tell them that you can't afford to have them on your Vashj/Kael'thas attempts.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant/hang a lantern on your problems/some other cliche. You get the idea.

 

• Vema

Depending on your guild culture there is a few solutions to the "good guildly, bad player" issue. Not all can or will work.

1) Recruit more rogues. Let all of the current ones know that who gets raid invites is directly related to performance. She will face a situation where she will either improve or benchwarm on progression content.

2) Create/enforce rules that directly deal the issues of AFK, and lack of voice chat. You need to emphasize to the guild that Vent or TS is a tool the raid leaders use to direct critical information to the raid in a quick manner. People who are not at least online and listening should not be given raid invites. Ninja or excessive/long AFK can be handled in many ways, ranging from dkp loss to replacement to no loot for the night with just about everything inbetween. While not every person can be at there keyboard for every second of the entire raid, make clear rules that state if you need to take a 10+ min afk that you have to inform the officers and be willing to sit out. Shorter afks can be handled by the /afk flag. Ninja afking, particularly when the raid has to wait, should be reasonably explained, and if constantly repeated is easy justification for full-time benching.

3) Use a non-insane loot system. Point stratification is a problem with all DKP setups, but take some reasonable steps to reduce it, such as a hard cap or per-tier DKP. There is no reasonable justification for a specific person in a guild to always get every first drop. At very least you should throw out pre-TBC points, raiding was a totally different game then.

4) Deal with the "good guildy" portion. Does she handle the administration, looting, raid setup or other responsibilities? Reassign these roles to other people to make the issue less of "but who will do X without her" to "why are we bringing bad dps". If she is the social center of the guild you may have little or nothing you can actually do, as you may loose far more then a single poor rogue if you come down too harshly on her.