So I've been trying to find a way to articulate the question that I want to start a discussion around. In essence I want to start a discussion that would look into how we raid in terms of a general frame work. What I've noticed is this. Every guild I've been a part of has followed a certain formula, for lack of a better term, when approaching raiding. The formula is repeated for each and every encounter in the game. It looks something like this: 1)develop a step by step strat for a boss->2)practice this strat until you live longer than the boss->3)move on to the next boss and repeat. The first part of this sequence tends to be the most varied among guilds. By the time some guilds get to content practical instruction manuals have been written where as others are pushing content when guilds are fairly hushed and hoping for server/US/world firsts. The rest of it is very consistent in my experience. The strategy is presented to the raid and then practiced step by step and eventually the boss lies dead and there are cheers in vent and capitalized profanities spammed in guild chat.

Recently I've begun to try and think if a common complaint I hear from raid leaders all the time is connected in some way. The complaint is always along the lines that many raiders need to be told not to stand in the fire. Now maybe this affliction is specific only to my server and my experiences but I have a hunch it's not. What they are complaining about, in essence, is that your "average raid member" lacks the ability to adapt and make decisions based on their current circumstances. It seems to me that a raiding formula like the one I've described above, rather than discourage this, actually cultivates raiders who are very good at following instructions but when it comes to adapting they are a deer in the headlights.

I've done a lot of thinking about this over the last month even written up an alternative way of approaching raids that I'm hoping to try. To you, the community, I bring this: Is this something people are interested in looking at or is it simply a personal curiosity I can continue to think on when I should be working on other more important projects? If it's something you'd like to get into; is this description I presented accurate? Have I made a logical and valid connection between it and a generally perceived problem?

I suppose when you've been raiding long enough to develop some.. shall we call it 'insight' for lack of a better word, you begin to see common patterns in the ways completely unrelated groups of people tackle the same situation. By the same situation, I do not mean individual raiding encounters, but, rather, raiding as a an activity spanning across a great deal of time. And usually, the simplest solution tends to become the most common. That would summarize the concept of raiding.

However, one other thing tends to happen when you raid long enough. You begin to analyze the whole raiding process, to run it through various filters, and generally, to try and optimize it. The cynic in me would say this happens when you raid too much, and that this is just a personal curiosity of yours. Period. However, I happen to share this curiosity, and I am greatly interested in some form of academic discussion on raiding as a whole, rather than maths or simple strategies. An alternate way of approaching raiding sounds almost like the 'build a better mouse trap' thing, but for the sake of discussion... why not? Even if this never leaves the realm of theoretical debate, it would still provide an interesting reading material, if nothing else. So, fire away, mate.

Quite simply, raiding is recruiting. If you have smart people who have the right schedule and can work with others, you win. So wow is top up, not bottom down, because by no means is it an overly complicated exercise. I would say experience is nice, but intelligence is all you really need.

There's more to it, but you're right, it does boil down to "intelligence is all you really need." I'd tack a few other requirements on to the list: diligence, maturity and understanding (not to be confused with intelligence).

That said, Raiding in WoW is very simple. Partially because WoW is a very transparent game, and partially because the current raid content (and I would say most of the previous raid content) isn't really very complicated. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor is it necessarily a good thing. It's just a thing that is.

However, it's surprisingly how many people do "stand in the fire" until told not to. As a friend of mine said: "How can anyone see a virulent green puddle of something-or-other and have any reaction other than "Holy shit I need to move?"" I think that about sums up the raiding requirements.

To the original post's three steps (1) Develop 2) Practice 3) Kill) I'd say that they're mostly correct. But that's because those are the basics of anything in life. The only thing that will ever vary is how definite all the factors are and to develop a strategy around. In a Raid environment there are a finite number of things going on, and they're quantifiable and observable. You can see how much damage the tank takes, you can see all the buffs and debuffs on the boss and the raid. You can see (hopefully) the puddles of slime and the fire raining from the sky. You can time how long until the drake lands. And then you have the framework of the fight -- the unchangeable elements that you then have to mitigate and deal with.

Having helped developed strats for my guild in EQ (during the Gates of Discord expansion) and having done so to a lesser extent in WoW (I don't play on the bleeding edge any more) I can say with a relative degree of certainty that this is the part of raiding that your average player can't handle, because the rest is practice. You need at least one person in (a bleeding edge) raid able to identify what's going on and keep track of things. The more the better, and if your entire raid is able to adjust their personal strats on the fly, you'll end up basically one shotting things with no definite plan or strategy. That would be a new paradigm of raiding: where an overall strat is irrelevant because everyone is able to figure out their own best course of action at any given time.

But that's also not really achievable or realistic. Or rather, that can only really happen on the very first kill of a particular boss or event, because from there on it's just refinement on whate everyone did last time. Unless the boss/even does something different each time, at which point it's a "new fight" until it starts to repeat itself, then it's pattern recognition and simple execution.

Or, in short: I don't believe any sort of 'new paradigm' of raiding is possible, in a game. Because the game is limited by the AI and the encounter design.

All things need a 3 step process, it's not just restricted to wow raiding. I believe South Park covered it best.



In WoW, it gets more convoluted just based off of what your standard raid make-up is. You repeat step 1 until step 2 allows you to reach step 3. It's never going to change, but how you do step 1 and 2 are.

While that's a pretty bold statement to say, it isn't possible to do in any sense, even if all the players in the raid were the best and smartest around. All that would need to be done is make an ability to needs to be countered before it goes off, because in no possible way would a raid manage to do those things on the fly. Well unless Blizzard makes all the mobs auto attack again.

I completely agree, actually. The entire reason I said it was because that's really the only possible state in raiding that's any different at all from our current state. It's the "other type of raiding," and it's -- as you correctly point out -- impossible.

Well for the sake of entertaining reading or at least interesting discussion, let me copy and paste into here something I was shooting around to some fellow players as a starting point. I apologize as some of it is slightly repetitive from my first post:

The current school of raiding, or at least that which I've participated in is what I would call Passive or Static Raiding. In passive raiding a boss strategy is presented and perhaps slightly adapted to your guild and then practiced until you've executed it successfully. This process is then repeated for the next boss and the next etc. This is a tried and true process, and it works. However, this tends to create passive raiders. These are raiders who can execute their job wonderfully but have trouble adjusting to changes on the fly or applying past knowledge to new boss fights. It also creates a raiding group that embodies these same stagnant characteristics. To counteract these tendencies I've come up with something I'm calling Active or Dynamic Raiding.

I'm sure this isn't a new idea and there are probably many guilds who operate this way but it certainly doesn't seem to be the norm. This approach to raiding is particularly effective if you wish to be a progression guild as there are rarely strategies written up when the first one to two hundred guilds are clearing content. Active Raiding certainly won't work for all guilds. If you have a plethora of people who consistently insist on “standing in the fire” type behavior they may not be able to adapt quickly or at all to this type of raiding.

All raid encounters have the same basic goal; kill the boss before the boss kills you. If you do this than you've beaten the encounter. All bosses or phases of bosses thus far have fallen into some basic categories. The categories themselves can be discussed later but the point is that each type of encounter has a type of approach that consistently works well. As opposed to developing a full fledged strategy to be followed step by step you simply identify the basic categories that each phase of the boss falls under and adopt that approach. For example: EvilBoss is the next new raid boss your guild faces. Phase one is a Tank and Spank with Adds. Phase 2 is a Spread-out Gimmick Phase. Phase 3 is a X% based Enrage. As soon as this is identified each raid role knows what they need to do in each phase. If I have a player who hasn't done the encounter I'll explain the fight in less than 30 seconds.



The reason I find this interesting is that the formula isn't any different but what you do, particularly in the practice phase is different. The benefit I see from an approach like this is that as opposed to practicing an narrower skill set specific to an encounter you are practicing a wider skill set and included in that is that apparent intelligence that Enova mentioned recruiting for. I guess my view is that the understanding Inoko added to the list is something that can be learned to a degree provided the potential is there and I think there are better ways to learn this than the current system.

I'll let this resonate and rattle around a bit before I continue with walls of text. Thanks for entertaining my curiosity

I agree with this, and I like the "Businesses" analogy as I'd not made that particular connection to that style. I think the way I'm trying to describe might fall under something like "Sports Team." Where in the beginning there is a fairly steep learning curve and the raid leader is playing a fairly large roll, but as time progresses and the players(raiders) get used to working with each other things start to click and while still important the coaches role is much less overt.

There are a small number of fights in WoW that could be classified as "active," at least as a comparison to the rest of the content. In general, the arena-style encounters, starting with the T0.5 BRD arena event way back in vanilla, have been the most active and dynamic encounters. They're also the particular encounters where the plan "play well" is actually more effective than most detailed, minute strategies like having CC targets and focus-firing. In a similar vein, my favorite encounter to try out new recruits in vanilla WoW as always Sartura. In lieu of a strat discussion, we would direct people to sartura.ytmnd.com and see how long it took them to catch on. The Shade of Aran in Kara could arguably fall in this category, but the fact that you could get by with timer mods probably means it doesn't.

I think there could be a tendancy that following predetermined instructions generally breeds tunnel vision. It makes me wonder what people's motivation for raiding really is, though. Personally, I get the most fun out of figuring out how to beat the boss, not actually beating it or getting shiny loot (not that I don't enjoy those, but as a relative ranking). Following instructions doesn't sound entertaining, getting loot just to get more loot sounds pointless. But this does raise an interesting idea of how motivation correlates with type of raider. Someone like myself interested in puzzle-solving is going to be more interested in the design of the entire encounter, while someone more reward-driven will tend to be more likely to minimize effort required to achieve. Someone motivated by epeen is probably more likely than either of those two to work outside of raid-time for the raid (eg farm consumables and heroics), and so on. Have people noticed a correlation between motivation and type of raider, and are there any other psychological or personal attributes that correlate to either?

Optimising individual performance especially in the practise phase where it counts the most is something that interests me. I am often suprised at how some people need explicit instructions regarding their class abilities (use ability X to counter ability Y or during phase Z). I think this is indicative of players not really understanding game logic: even things like DPS order priority (or even maybe moving from fires) is just not instinctive to many people. Forcing people to figure out what their narrow skill set should be sounds ideal to me but I am wary that a lot of players simply don't see the fight as transparently as others - not bad players in the sense that they may have great reactions or be able to do perfect rotations, just bad strategists.

As a guild that basically follows published strategies, this can be a painful process because players are often not learning anything for themselves and any tweaking falls to the raid leader to figure out (often taken from EJ threads). Forcing people to figure out some more intricate fight mechanics on their own seems a recipe for wiping more unless you are lucky enough to have a guild full of people who are capable of doing that. In practical terms, it is hard to do anything about this (excluding radical options like just recruit new players). People need to think of a boss encounter as a personal exam with right and wrong answers as opposed to a level of some console game.

I'd find it a little bit difficult to agree with that. Two classifications is pretty narrow, and is trying to squish guilds into categories under which they may not fit.

Within a business structure, individuals are motivated by rewards (AKA loot), this type of guild usually falls apart pretty fast when progression slows/stalls and there is no influx of new loot.

Within the military structure, there is a high focus on punishment, and this type of guild has a very high attrition rate amongst casual or part-time raiders.

Our guild focuses more on collective desire for progression, but we don't use loot or punishment as a motivator for progression. So i'd say that we don't fit under either classification. Or in the very least hang somewhere in between.

Social structure alone isn't enough to run a raiding guild. You actually need stricter rules than a military/business guild, if you want things to move. An officer stripped off his emotions is also needed. As you're all friends, nobody takes responsibility on his own, you have to ask them. People do what you ask, when you ask, if you ask. The leader is responsible of pretty much everything in the raid; because "friends" don't act appropriately unless you strictly order them to, it eventually leads to another form of military. That's at least true for my guild.

I don't believe a military type is needed to achieve fast raiding progression. In a military system, soldiers are trained to not think unless asked. That's not good for gameplay. Although this term might be about the leadership only here; what it does in action is the same: It controls raiders via fear. Fear keeps the whole structure together, even among a group of friends. In a business centric guild it's revenue, as expected. In a social guild you may run the guild without fear or profit, but the raids should incorporate more incentive than "hey, let's do something!".

An alternative we tried was to focus on collective goals; but hell, you need a very educated group for that to work; and with such a group I guess you don't need any system with many rules. Focusing on individual goals works better, if you can keep them mostly notional and if you can get people to talk about their interests.

I'm seeing some pretty wonky theories on motivation, leadership and their applicability to raiding. Let me start by putting this fallacy up for examination: raiding is not a personal exam.

Let's take a simple example: the Illidari Council in Black Temple. By your logic, its clear that any rogue, warrior or mage who doesn't interrupt the priest's spellcast has failed his personal exam. Great. So first time Malande casts it she gets 7 different interrupts. Next time she casts it all the interrupts are on cooldown and the raid goes downhill from there. Whoops, we need a cycle. Forget about leadership, you are expecting these 7 players set up their own cycle in a little group huddle? Well, now, hold on a second, why are we including the mage in the interrupt cycle? Its more important to use his abilities over here to spellsteal the mage's damage buff. Of course the rogue doesn't know that and his preference is to be dps'ing the boss. Hell, maybe we shouldn't even bother interrupting, we have good healers who can heal through it. Who makes these decisions? Who trades off the strengths of the different players, the raid makeup, and all of the demands of the group against the strategy? Good luck doing that with 25 smart, quick-fingered but completely independent players running all over the place doing their thing.

In short, you need leadership. You need a small number of people who's opinions are respected to consolidate all of this input and make decisions on which track to follow. Having leadership isn't a bad thing. As a raider, being told what your role is, what the expectations of you on a certain encounter is not a personal failing. Sure, some of it should be obvious (get out of the fire dumbass) but if raiding were as simple as 25 people passing their personal exam it would be a lot less interesting than it is now.

I think this thread does have some validity because if you accept that you need leadership your are led to the second point the OP has made: being told what to do tends to train people not to think for themselves. Now, you can do what a lot of raiders do (sit back and whine about the fact that people don't think enough for themselves) or you can recognize the reality that the way you run your raid is contributing to this problem. In other words, you can try to see if you can do something about it that is more constructive than just being a victim.

This isn't new stuff; businesses run into this problem all of the time. People are influenced by their environment and if they work in a tight command-and-control-do-as-I-say structure where they are rewarded for doing exactly what they are told then over time they will do exactly that. Ask Jack Walsh or Larry Ellison or Richard Branson what their big issues are and I'm sure one of them will be all about motivating people to take the incentive to think on their own while still being aligned with the overall corporate strategy. Because that's the same problem you are trying to crack here: how do I get all of my players to adjust their play according to situational events but still stick to the strat we've decided to use. Once you get there its all "3. Profit".

I would have to agree with the, raiding is not a personal exam point. Its far closer to those "group bonding" activities I remember from summer camps or what have you where you were given like 3 pieces of card board and were told that you had to get your whole group of ten people across this 20ft gap and you have always be stepping on the cardboard. In this activity 9/10 times the group will use a ferry strategy where two people go over using the cardboard as stepping stones and one person comes back and brings another person across. This is a very valid strategy and if you have multiple groups doing this in the same field this will be what everyone does (Assuming it's what the first group decides to do and no one else has done this before) The other method to solve this challenge is that the pieces of cardboard are large enough that you can rip it into two pieces for every member of your group and have them all just walk across making sure they keep the pieces under their feet(usually by tying their shoe laces or something under their feet.)

I know that got a little tangential but the point I think I was trying to make is that if you had given everyone a step by step instruction on how to ferry across the gap, or even had 2 of the people leading the exercise do a demonstration first where they used the cardboard in that manner, you'd find that that is how everyone did it. This isn't really an issue since it works just fine but what happens if you then give them only 2 pieces of cardboard. The ferry strategy is no longer valid assuming the pieces are not large enough for two people to stand on simultaneously. I would wager that groups that had seen the ferry method performed or were given step by step instructions detailing that method despite the fact that it doesn't work with only 2 pieces.

Moving on... PSGarak, while I agree there are fights that require an active approach I don't think that means that the other fights in this game cannot be approached in a similar way. Take the Illidari council, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to work out on their own a rotation as well as a system in vent or interrupt macros to make it efficient. Of course the raid leader could just assign an order and point them to a /kick macro or what ever and be done with it but I think this might be the less desirable solution in the long run.

I too enjoy raiding for the feeling of overcoming the challenge/obstacle that blizzard has set in my path. I've often wanted to see how raiders would react if I told them that all loot from first boss kills would be DEed. I know that's counter productive since improving gear is both helpful and necessary for progression but I think you'd learn a lot about why people raid from their reactions.

The point I was making is that there is always a correct set of answers to a boss encounter and this is not always transparent to players because of limited understanding of how these things are designed or because not all players are interested in problem solving. I quite agree that leaders need to plan things out before hand as I said, and this is why I think I would have trouble implementing the system mentioned in post 9: I think telling people that phase 1 was tank and spank, then trusting them to figure out what to do themselves would not work (for my guild, I imagine it works for some) because some people do not see the fight in terms of abilities and counters - or at least, not beyond a basic level. I would be very interested in ways of encouraging players to think for themselves, but as I see it it is most effecient to give people directions then trust them to complete their personal exam correctly.
This is basically the opposite of what I said. I said that we use explicit instructions and hope that players follow them to the letter, then we win. This does mean spelling out exactly what the rotation would be and it's always the raid leader that does that. I can see that the way we organise raids like this is contributing to the problem of some players being unable to figure out even fairly simple things unless told, but I can't see the alternative - a free form learning phase - leading to much more than anarchy.

I like this topic.

In my old guild (I'm currently taking another break) I was most happy with those strategy discussions where our leader would do this or something similar.
It has the huge advantage of bringing simplicity to complexity (our brain can't handle more than ~7 items at once so the complexity problem hits us way sooner and way more often than many people believe) and this way people can put the structures to use which their brain created when doing other similar encounters. Categories or on a smaller scale comparisons are definetly the more efficient approach than explaining the whole thing in detail. Especially when you hit the boss for the first time you want players to know what the most important aspects are at any given time without cluttering their brains with less important details.

To get a deeper understanding of the theoretical preparation of an encounter it seems like the best approach to first make a distinction and call the part where you break down the encounter to analogies or categories in order to give the raid a general direction the strategic part and the indepth discussion of the execution the tactical part.

The importance of each part depends somewhat on the encounter and the "skill" of the individuals in your raid: the more skilled it is, the less you will have to deal with tactical stuff.

In general the skilled players will be bored by the tactical part and the not so skilled players (be it inexperience or whatever) won't find the strategic part that helpful.
I think a good leader knows the skill of his raiders very well and what type and amount of input they need to work well.

So depending on what raid you are in and what kind of encounter you are facing you might have to lay out both the strategic and the tactical part in detail, however I'd start with the strategic and try the boss once without consumeables then go over the tactical part (and maybe afterwards the short strategic part once again so people don't forget what's important from the information overload) as I think the tactical part can only be understood and put to good use once you have actually done the encounter and know the little problems that come up (as you actually have a picture in your brain about what will happen. The written and spoken language is quite abstract and way harder to grasp for our brain and it gets a lot easier when you actually experienced the execution part of the encounter).

But its still very important to keep the tactical part short and well structured. No human being can keep more than 9 "items" in their head at once so you have to make sure that you structure it the right way. When you structure the information right people can work with a lot more than 7 items as they can acccess a different set of items once the next phase starts. But this is pretty obvious stuff as thats just how our brains work so most raids will do something similar from intuition (and blizzards encounters are designed around these human limitations anyways). An example would be something like this:

phase 1: tank and spank with random meteors [strategic part]
Healers: LoS the mana drains and focus on the maintank and when the meteor hits you /dance afterwards heal up the raid where x and y stay on the MT
Melee: 1) use CloS/Iceblock/Divine Shield when the meteor hits 2)... 3)...
Tanks: ...
Ranged DPS: ...
phase 2:

And in many cases it would be way better to lay out the tactical part with video tutorials or minigames (think teron gorefiend simulator).

I also have a slightly offtopic Question I have been wondering during a lot of raiding sessions:
Is there a good way to give instructions to relevant roles only? I think its confusing, annoying and a waste of time that you get detailed tactical information about healing when you are a melee DPS which can work 100% fine with just the strategic part. I know the class/role leaders could do that but it needs quite a lot of coordination to split the raidlead to a point where the raid leader does basically nothing but the strategy part and the tactical part is split among 4+ persons. We did it occasionally (on council for example) but it didn't make things much easier due to the extra coordination required.

And I'd like to point out to that a few very different things are discussed here and I dont thing that we will get far on any aspect unless we are a little more restrictive on what this topic is about. For example I don't think how raid leadership or raid motivation works fits here.

I think there's a big difference between a non-intelligent player and a player with limited focus - that's why people stand in fire in my experiance. They can do X things at once, and their role in the fight involves X+Y. This is why there's no real predicability by role as to who will stand in the fire, but the same players can do it over and over while on other encounters doing very well, even ones with pseudo-fire events. Take Gruul - I didn't see Fire-Standers more likely to get Shatter damage, because they stop their rotation and focus on getting away. But the moment they're expected to rotate constantly, they stand in fire because they reach their limit.

Similarly, there's an effect where healers have this issue because their UI gets in the way - information overload.

Well every player has a limited focus (~7 items limitation) thats a human weakness. And they don't lack focus they just focus on the wrong things. If you are watching your perfect rotation, your trinket timers, procs and whatever bars then chances are your brain is currently "full" and can't handle the flamepatch on top.
To let people know what to focus on at what time is the main role of having a strategy.
Where the non-intelligence kicks in is when the player knows the strategy and still focuses on the wrong things be it on purpose or not.
A good example is on Archimonde where every strategy is based on the concept of staying alive and some idiot fury warrior won't move out when the flames come near him as he is so busy with topping the epeen meter.

For Healers there is generally an extra stupidity check: Obstructing your own view is quite obviously not a good idea.
Information overload isn't such a big problem in itself as long as you are focusing on the right things and aren't obstructing important parts of your view.

Obviously some people can focus on 1-2 items more than others but generally this weakness can be overcome by shifting your limited focus on things with higher priority or making macros etc..

Edit: I decided to contradict myself a little on this. It really depends on the circumstances and especially on what class and role you are playing.

I think I got hit hardest by focus limitations when I tried druid healing. This might be one of the things in WoW that is the most dependant on how much items you can focus on at once. Having different HoTs with a different amount of stacks ticking on different characters AND watching your surroundings AND yourself AND debuffs on the raid at the same time is not just a challenge for setting up your UI well.
Really I felt this was way too much to handle for me at once and I have played a lot of different roles in almost every encounter in WoW. Since I'm a perfectionist I just couldn't get myself to feel like I'm performing crappy whenever encounters get more complex. So I decided to not heal with a druid anymore. Kudos to those that can handle this kind of complexity.

I would go so far as to argue that there are more factors than accounted so far for individual raid performance.

Of course, the human skills (perception, coordination, reflexes) are the main limitation to performing better.
Then, there's the leadership and management skills of the people in charge of the raid, that can make a strategy work better, analyze faults, and motivate people.
But there are, of course outside factors (a lagging server, a bad connection, a slow computer, a monitor that can't properly display effects, even an inaccurate add-on). I have seen people substantially increase in performance with computer upgrades or upon realm transfers. While none of these are really significant enough to make for a new approach to raiding, they are factors nonetheless.

However, I have a feeling this thread can only really cover the second set of factors in this equation. And even if it ends up as nothing more than a collection of personal experiences, it is probably still worth gathering some bits of info from it.

One thing worth mentioning is that in a game such as WoW there are only two types of difficulty available to the designers.

Numbers fights. Do you have the dps/hp/interrupts to survive fancy ability X. These fights can be hell on wheels as shown by fights like original, overtuned C'thun or Original Muru. However these fights are very sensitive to gear improvements or better dps rotations and quite quickly become straight forward.

At the other end of the spectrum you have execution fights where the numbers aren't hard but the whole raid has to work as a team. These fights such as Vashj are far less gear dependant and will remain a challenge even if well geared. A group of 80's has to really work at failing Muru or Brut now but Kalecos and Fellmyst can still give a bad group fits because of the co-ordination required.

Any theory of raiding needs to include how a group interacts with these basic elements of design. Personally I suspect that most of what is being discussed in this thread falls into the second category but there are elements of numbers in there as well.

edit* There used to be a third strand of difficulty you could call logistics. The low point of this was original Loatheb, fortunatly the focus of design has moved away from this as it is not fun or interesting, even for micromanagers.

You people are confusing leadership with coordination.

Leadership is what gets people motivated. I thought leadership, especially in a video game, was bullshit until I saw a friend of mine take a group of 40 people who had beaten a fight before but were sucking it up on one particular night, talk to them for about ten minutes, and then we won the fight (majordomo in MC, for the curious). I can explain people's roles til the cows come home, but that guy could do it in a way that people actually started playing well. I've never seen anything that dramatic since. His life's goal is to become a college professor, go figure.

The distinction between leadership and coordination (or, in other contexts, leadership and management) is, in my experience, a productive one. Leadership is a personal, social, usually innate quality based on experience and motivation. Coordination is a much 'harder' skill, coming from rigorous analysis, and is trainable and teachable (though not always learnable). And about half of the previous posts can be collectively summed up as "some groups need coordination but not leadership, and vice-versa."


edit: in a similar vein, perhaps we extend the military/business classification by looking at types of leaders and types of leadership. People can similarly be classified by which they respond well to. Off the top of my head: entrepreneur, manager, general, coach, teacher.

I agree. I've been raiding pretty much since Molten Core and true guild "leaders" are very rare to find. You could have the best strategy in the world, but if it can't be effectively communicated to 25 people in a way that they will all understand, you'll fail. The lowering of raids from 40 to 25 man has made it a bit easier, but I think a lot of people write off exactly how hard it is to coordinate that many people at once.

Honestly I think it's all about how you explain fights. If you just list each boss ability before pulling, it's likely they won't fully understand what is going on in the encounter until many wipes later.