When it comes to failing to learn basic mechanics over four months of farming, a large factor is the personal motivation of the raiders themselves. The quantitative factor of the number of attempts is out of their hands, but how much they grow isn't. A focused raider intent on doing better even when the outcome isn't hanging in the balance will improve dramatically on farm raids. Anyone simply coasting through isn't likely to learn anything all, especially in the current climate where healing can easily make up for mistakes.

It essentially boils down to how much a person wants to invest versus the severity of their personal obstacles. For less obvious skills such as raid awareness or hotkey layout/muscle memorization it's a tough sell. Learning those takes concerted effort in what amounts to a game or hobby, and doesn't tend to produce the same kind of stimulus as big DPS numbers or whack a mole healing.

A notable portion of players who can't seem to "get it" are the result of these motivational issues. It's not that they're incapable, it's that the difficulty is greater than their interest or that they don't know in a concrete sense why these skills are important.

Your right in that it's a matter of goals, and general guild attitude.

And I don't disagree with you from a logical stand point, but it just doesn't seem to work like that. Assuming perfect raid attendance on every person's part, I'd push really really hard to have a group of 25-28 great players to steam roll content, much like i assume the best of the best raid guilds do. The thing is, no one has perfect attendance, so you have to have more like 32-38 players available to fill out the roster. Some people will just straight up be better then other regardless of how much time they raid, how much they are taught and how many chances they are given. Given a choice between a great player and an average one on a new fight where a player's ability to adapt and learn are put to the test, I don't see why i'd ever choose an "average" person for that. It might be fair to Mr.Average, but it's not fair to the other 22-24 people that can get their stuff down way faster and it's really unfair to the great player I'm sitting for Mr.Average.

Logically? No. Realistically? Yes. People get pissed off wiping, especially to stupid crap. I don't know if you ever had to go through learning Archimonde, but that's a perfect example. We had 2-3 people wipe us for an entire raid night once, and the other 20+ people just wanted to quit. What's the point of trying your best if you know someone else will fail and undo all the effort you have put in? I actually had to sit one of our officers on Archi one night because he was playing so bad, and we killed him that night with 23ish in the raid. Hell, when we were learning 3D sarth, we had a rogue, a REALLY REALLY good rogue no less that we had to gboot because he was being a jerk. He refused to flask because "If you have people in the raid that keep standing in void zones and screwing the attempts, why should i waste my time and gold when no matter what i do won't make a difference?".

I say all this, and i would LOVE to boot them and get "better" players, but good luck with that. We aren't a top 100 guild so even getting mediocre recruits is rare, and the odds of getting someone with equal or better attendance AND more skill is a 1 in 30 or worse shot. I'm a bit of a jerk like that, and am more of an Elitist then is warranted in our guild.

Maybe my definition of average isn't right. These aren't BAD players. I'd take them in a second over any PUG or non-guildy, but they aren't quite as good as the best. They take longer to learn stuff and plateau earlier skill wise on new fights. They aren't ALWAYS the ones to stand in the void zones or do something retarded, everyone is capable of doing that, they are just more likely to be "that guy". Some of it might not even be skill, it might just be latency or technical issues. We have a couple mages from australia for example, and they are ~800-1000 dps behind our top mage on patchwerk. They still manage 5000+ dps, but if i had to choose 1 mage to take, guess which i'd choose?

I often PUG raids on my alt, and even the worst DPS in one of our raids is by a large margin better then the best pug.

Edit; Apparently i type slow. Nice to read your Archi experiences were similar to mine.

I can see taking the second string in for post-kill learning nights, as long as you've got more than one full raid group. Even doing some of the harder ten-man (or even heroic) achievements can be incredibly frustrating when you've had them for months and you just want to do the fights. Even just having bad nights is annoying - knowing that you're sitting the people who could actually get this done is a good way to breed resentment for the second string.

Ten-mans represent a much better way to practice most of these concepts for a twenty-five man guild. You're a lot more likely to be able to get pretty much the whole second string into a group to do the fights, and in some cases, it's even better practice. (hai sartharion)

Really, though, the biggest thing that will improve their learning curve on fights is knowing their class rotations better. Very few fights add a lot of complicated maneuvering - most are just "stay out of the fire" with "while doing as much as you can." The less you have to think about "doing as much as you can," the better you are at "staying out of the fire." It's not a coincidence that the people who can do more damage on Patchwerk-type fights are almost always the people who can avoid void zones and fires. They're not thinking about doing DPS (even while they do it, and do it well). They're staying out of fires. Even if they're doing content on farm, they can practice their DPS rotations - and the target dummies are always open. Tanking and healing aren't quite as automatic, although the threat rotation tends to be similar to DPS rotations and healers usually have fewer spells with obvious applications, but they're easier to get practical experience for, too.

While this holds true in principle, in practice I've always found there's a stark difference. I've assisted guildies in practicing their DPS rotations against dummies for hours at times, only to have them do less DPS on a boss.

It's analogous to juggling. A couple of balls are relatively easy for anyone to do. The moment you add a third ball it suddenly becomes extremely difficult. Essentially the difference between a Patchwerk fight and anything even slightly more complicated is larger than is necessarily intuitive.

That's partly because adding something such as the need to switch targets actually introduces more than one new element the player must deal with. The player needs to learn how to efficiently switch to the right target, minimize downtime between targets, and hit the ground running on DPSing the new target. If the only practice the player has had is beating away at the Heroic Training Dummy they'll lose DPS to those factors.

They also have to learn to pay attention to more than just damaging the boss. Because Wrath rotations tend to be relatively complicated, this isn't a simple task. The necessary awareness is not commonly an instrinsic attribute, and must be learned.

I'm not attempting to disparage anyone from having their underperforming raiders work their rotations on dummies. Rather, I'm pointing out that perfecting a rotation against a dummy does not necessarily translate into a perfect rotation against a boss.

I think the problem I am having with this second string idea is that if your group is interested in progression then you really don't have any place for a true second string and you are better off just changing their title to Guild Friend and be done with it. Making them sit off to the side as perpetual second class raiders just strikes me as uncomfortable for everyone and demoralizing for them. Outside of some really exceptional groups (if even those) there will always be different levels of skill in your raid and people that have weak spots in specific types of challenges. But every single person in your roster should be at least good enough to deserve a spot in the raid and a shot at the loot along with everyone else. What exactly "good enough" means is going to be different for every group.

For me the issue isn't really about how long you are willing to invest in training or what your techniques are. It's about what you do with those people that don't make the cut once you are sure that's the case. If you actually need these players than you probably should invest in the time to make them better (however you choose to do so) and not just stamp Defective on their foreheads and wait for them to get fed up and leave or something better to come along.

That's my bottom line too. If I'm progression raiding, that's the kind of group I wanna be with. You're either good enough/learn fast enough to be on the team, or you're off the team. (my attitude to loot is similar. I don't give a crap who gets the uber DPS weapon as long as somebody in the raid gets it and will bring it to future raids. It's nice to get it myself, but I'm almost as happy for anyone else to get it, so I like simple loot systems and a social environment where you pass on marginal upgrades till it is clear nobody considers it a big upgrade. Any loot system that leads to haves and have-nots would drive me nuts...I want the whole raid to approach same gear level as rapidly as possible, with those behind naturally catching up)

If I'm "casual raiding" then I expect to be in a group that accepts some underperformers and does whatever it's capable of but doesn't stress too much about a fight that's simply too hard for their composition. (and for loot I pretty much expect it to be "don't be a jerk" and some kind of simple need/greed system beyond that concept)

I actually can't raid with a group that has a permanent first string/second string concept. When my progression raiding group started down that path I had to walk away. It wasn't any fun for me to be in the first string, and would have been even less fun to be on the bench, so what's the point? Competing with my own teammates for playtime is != fun. I'd rather instead learn from and teach my teammates so we all do better.

Hm...re-reading above comments. I also require my progression raid group to have a bit of patience. Wiping on one boss for a night shouldn't be cause for anger and immature behavior. It should be cause for reflection, strategy changes, attemtps to figure out if we're improving or not. People who really are burned out could of course ask to be benched because it's no longer fun for them...that might be a healthier solution than to bench the guys who want to be rostered until you can "drag them through".

Interestingly people can walk away with very different impressions of the same events. You see this a lot in business communications too, or design discussions.

Example from real play.

Our second Sarth3d kill was composed of roughly half people who had seen the fight (at 0-2 drakes) for 4 months and half people who had seen the fight (at any number of drakes) for 1-4 nights of 1.5-3 hours of glasschewing, falling back on 1 less drake at the end if we didn't get a kill. The raid as a whole had worked on 3 drakes for about a month, getting its first kill the week before.

90 minutes in the raid leaders wanted to quit. One expressed that she was so bored with Sarth that she had to grit her teeth every time she zoned in. They were rather surprised to learn that the bulk of the raid (who had only had a few nights of glasschewing) not only wanted to continue, they were still excited about it. We got the kill 1-2 pulls later.

What seems to have happened here is that both groups projected their own experiences on the others. The "old sweats" who had long since plateaued in their ability on the fight and had nothing left to learn were bored and frustrated. The rest, who were learning the fight, and could see their own improvement from wipe to wipe, wanted MORE fights, not less. They wanted to keep going till they got it right. Indeed, those who died on the kill and were in that category expressed in the After Action Report a little wistfulness that they wouldn't get another shot at it for another week, cause it kinda didn't count for them.

Now this was a pretty mature group, all adults, of all ages. To their credit, the burned out people listened to the mood of the raid and kept going. Nobody acted up etc in the field, everyone showed self control. Still the competing desires in the raid leadership to "get this over with and on farm" and the newer raiders going "we want a chance to learn the fight" did in fact cause several people to leave the group.

It's just another failure mode I guess. I guess to me a "first string" and "bench" means the group is already experiencing this kind of tension and it's a warning sign for me before I join.

I just have to ask; when did 'glasschewing' become the term for 'excessive learning wipes'? I think I missed that.

This hits on a concern I have about the way hard modes are done now. I feel that the guild as a whole has to share a much closer level of motivation than before, which creates tension for guilds that are not at the top. For example, you've got X number of people in your raid who want to do the challenging stuff no matter what. It's for their ego, or for loot, or simply what makes the game fun. You've got Y number of people who like a bit of a challenge but any stress is just not worth it. Back in BC, these people would do relatively well together because if you wanted to see Illidan, you had to kill Bloodboil, you had to kill Reliquary. There was no option to simply settle for 2drake or not trying 6-minute Malygos because one of your strong healers was out of town that week and some officers didn't feel like pushing on with it regardless.

How does a guild deal with this? Unless you are one of the top guilds, I don't think expecting everyone to have the same level of motivation to a tee. Is this simply a matter of less tangible rewards resulting in less motivation? I think the Ulduar hard modes are a great step above any achievements or even Sarth3 in this regard, but the fact that there is still a normal mode to fall back on still strikes me as something that will hurt in the guild in the long run while causing stress along the way.

Well you could compromise and call it wiping with broken glass - that sounds way worse.

I think that's part of the point of having Algalon. If you want to kill the real end boss, you need to do the other stuff, either for keying reasons (watchers) or simply for gear (other hard modes).

I don't know. It is a term used within the raiding community I've played with since I started WOW and when I've used the term on these boards people seem to know what I mean. Also I have not seen any other term that sums up the basic idea bandied about...

Glasschewing = wiping as a learning experience, until the raid as a whole figures out the fight well enough to get it on farm. It's handy to have a one word term for that concept. Why that particular term, I have no idea. Where I play it doesn't have a negative connotation. It's an expected part of the progression raiding process.

Glasschewers = "the first team" in organizations that have the "first team" and "bench". Again, fairly obvious from context even if you have not seen the term before, I guess.

We had a term for the "bench" too but it kind of sugarcoated the idea. I think "second team" or "bench" fits better "Raiders who are only rostered for stuff that's on farm". Likewise there isn't any term for "wiping stupidly" as those two words sum it up well enough, and is probably what is used rather than "excessive glasschewing" when the wipes are no longer productive.

I always find the "last attempt" trick very interesting. Starting with Illidan, later including Eredar Twins, and most recently 10 os3d, raid groups play exponentially better when the raid is about to end. Likewise, it is normally the first attempts that make the most progress. Recalling my experience from Kalecgos, after that long and grinding trash, my guild always put forth amazing effort in the beginning attempts.

If that first attempt was a wipe, it seemed like we would deflate a bit, expecting a night's worth of wipes ahead of us. Conversely, if it was a one-shot, the rest of the night followed suit.

In response to previous posting, my guild had members in World Top 100 kills of virtually every vanilla WoW boss. Our raid leader is a very conservative player, and he leads raids in that fashion. His ventrilo comments are a rundown of his own playstyle. "10 seconds to Ability A, keep those heals going, push dps, Ability A incoming soon, here it comes, etc" We also have the "bad cop" who will not hesitate to single you out and call you terrible. It's simply a matter of following good cop's instructions and avoiding bad cop's wrath.

Sadly if your not in the top 2-3 guilds on a good server your recruiting options are severely limited by the pool of available talent. It's not a case of simply waiting for the right diamond in the rough to show up it's more a case of "we need X number of Y class or we aren't raiding for the foreseeable future. This is especially true of rare roles such as healers and on my server shamans and warlocks in general. Of course you want better players but they aren't out there to recruit, lower guilds have to have an open accept policy and invest significant time from officers and veterans teaching them how to be raiders and wash out those that don't make the cut.

I've been contacted by some of the others present in the raid example I gave above and the impression I received was not the complete picture. According to those who were making the decision to call the raid, there were frustrated people in both the newer and the older raiders complaining privately. My own sample size was based on conversations afterwards. In hindsight, people who are surprised and feeling positive are more likely to speak up in public than those who are upset and communicating privately, so I had the wrong impression.

That changes the conclusions from the event somewhat but not entirely. The conflict between those who are burning out on wipes and those who feel progress is being made and want more attempts is real, but my correlation of it to times-on-fight was simplistic. People's tolerance for failure and repetition vary a lot. Everyone is going to be willing to try at least once, and some people will be willing to try forever. I also did not give sufficient weight to the limitations of my point of view as a rank-and-file raider, rather than being a raid leader.

What is true about that anecdote is some of the raid was wanting to give up, and some were utterly surprised by the idea of quitting early. Everyone experienced the same wipes, but their perceptions of progress were very different. Barring a mutiny though, it's the raid leaders perceptions that matter in the field, on whether to continue or quit/downgrade the challenge and also what to do next week about the challenge.

In addition, what I said about "caused a number of people leaving the raid group" was too strong, both in how I said it and the facts. Several people expressed concerns similar to mine when I left. Some of those people have since left as well, but their stated reasons for leaving were not this particular issue. A more accurate statement would have been. "lead to me quitting and may have been a contributing factor in the others that left shortly after."

It's not so much they have to be a certain skill level, as that they have to be a certain temperament. You can likely teach someone who's terrible but enthusiastic to at least be vaguely adequate--or at least you can try, and if they really do share your way of looking at things, they'll understand that they aren't cutting it if that turns out to be the case. You can't teach attitude. I feel quite strongly that more time should be spent recruiting for compatible attitude, and that's something you can do at *any* level, from once-a-week Naxx wipefest with lots of boozy off-topic vent talk, to tightly focused "50 dkp minus" stuff. (handle it!)

There's no question that the numbers dictate that if you recruit to a skill target you're fighting uphill unless you're a server-leading guild. I agree with that completely. But if you find compatible players, and they gain skill to the point where they're an asset, they're more likely to stick around, too, than people who were only brought in because of their fire-dodging prowess.

I wanted to comment on some posts earlier about bench members.


Put yourself in the guild leaders position. I am going to assume that the guild is not a social guild, it's a guild advertised as a progression guild. You have these things to consider -

1) You are a raiding guild. Raiding guilds raid, period. If you don't raid, your members will join a different guild to satisfy their needs - or they'll do something like level an alt on another server or just quit wow altogether.



2) To satisfy #1, you must have 25 players online - ready to raid. 5-7 of them need to be healers, 3-4 of them need to be tanks. You're also going to want a pretty even mix of Physical DPS and Magic DPS. Other things won't work if you have excess of one particular puzzle piece (5 Rogues for example). In addition, there are less important (but still crucial) subcategories of getting the right number of buffs - you need Blessing of Kings, Fortitude, 10% AP Buff, Armor Penetration Buff, Misery, +%Crit Buff, Arcane Intellect, Mark of the Wild, Etc.

Granted, the content is easy enough that you can probably do without a couple of those buffs, but you want to have most - if not all - of them. Consider an environment more akin to Sunwell Plateau (or to use a more recent example, 10man 3 Drakes) - you absolutely MUST have your entire laundry list of buffs, healers, DPS, and tanks to be able to successfully down raid bosses that evening.

*Since 3.0 and in every subsequent patch, I am aware Blizzard has taken steps to smooth over things and make these requirements less lenient. The general concept still applies*



3) If you aren't a top100 guild or a top 2 or 3 realm guild (and this is a bit of a stretch), you're going to have a difficult time recruiting the kind of player you as a guild want. Even the absolute best guilds don't get the right kind of applicant they are looking for more often than maybe one every 2 weeks or so. To satisfy #2, you have to be willing to accept lowering your standards.



4) As a progression guild, you want to improve. You want to down bosses, you want to get better. You are always on the lookout for that "diamond in the rough" who will make your roster get a boost. But, keeping in mind #1-3, you know that you aren't <Ensidia>, people will miss raids from time to time. People will have a bad night from time to time. You know that having only 25 players on the roster will result in some raids being canceled.

Being a guild leader / raid leader means you have to many times play politician. You have to play mommy. Everyone's problems are now your problems. You won't make everyone happy all the time, but you want your guild to grow/succeed/etc and you will do things at times that isn't always in the individuals best interest, but rather in the guilds' best interest.



5) Therefore, you have players who are standby/bench players. Yes it sucks to be them. But they're bench players for a reason - they aren't as good as your main members. This is how the real world works. Not everyone gets that big promotion.

This really resonated with me.

I'm part of a mixed casual/progression raiding guild. The core of the guild are raiders who know each other irl, their casual friends, raiders we met online, and their casual friends. What that means is we have about 25 serious raiders, and as many, or more, casual/backup raiders who don't quite have the gear or skill, but want to raid on occasion.

I missed the first Sarth 3D kill, and then the next week we had a different comp (myself included), and we wiped all three raid nights, and ended up only doing 2D. Week after that, with the same casual/raider comp, we finally downed Sarth 3D, but the pull we ended up killing him, I died on a lava wave. It felt like a hollow victory, since I still died to newbiness on that pull.

It was only when I was actually alive at the end of the next week's pull that I felt I deserved my Twilight Vanquisher title.


I am a bit more worried about Ulduar, though. With Sarth+3D, it was fine to spend 3 hours wiping on the hard mode, because we already had 100% Naxx and EoE done. However, in Ulduar, any hard mode attempts on earlier bosses are being made at the expense of killing/attempting later bosses.

Is anyone else worried about how hard modes vs. # boss kills is going to work out in Ulduar? Especially with achievements for nobody dieing to certain bosses in a lockout, it seems that there will likely be tension in a lot of guilds over who wants to quickly push over the easy mode bosses and who wants to wipe a few times for the sake of hard mode progress.


On an unrelated note, where does this idea of either being a casual guild OR being a raiding guild come from? In my limited experience, this is setting up a false dichotomy. I'm assuming that even progression guilds must have social interaction... I can't imagine spending 10+hrs/week with people without engaging socially.

Why not extend your membership to friends, or other casual members who aren't raiders? Then, if/when they decide they want to step up and become a raider, you already know they're a social fit for the guild, and so you only need to worry about their gear/skill, not if they'll fit in with your current raider crowd. (This has worked pretty well for the guild I'm in, afaik. I'm not an officer, though.)

Fun topic

I have a tendency to ramble on when mentality stimulated, so I apologize in advance if I bore some of you senseless.

First of all, a guild's raiding MO is obviously going to be shaped by the GM and/or RL. With that said people are just different both as leaders and, as for lack of a better term, a member of the flock. Some people need their asses chewed out, and others need constant positive re-enforcement. Some people need to be creative and others wish to be told what to do.

I'd like to think that I have a fair amount of leadership time under my belt from different areas of my life. I ran a multi-million dollar company for 10 years and also coached high school and college sports. I am not a comfortable leader, but people tell me I'm good at it and I guess my results would state I'm not a total failure at it.

I was in a handful of raiding guilds, including a top 200 guild, before ending up the GM/RL of my current one. I've seen different leadership styles along the way, including what I would call the middle-management style, the military, the artisan let's just wing it, etc.

I think there is room for success for many different styles. However, for that to work the guild members expectations has to line up with the GM/RLs style. Just last week I had a long conversation with someone that eventually left the guild because he was pissed off other members couldn't play better. He insisted people needed to have their asses chewed out because that's what makes people play better. I said no way, and likened it to playing basketball for coach Knight. Yes, that type of leadership is totally legit if it's what people signed up for. You don't go play for coach Knight unless you are prepared to be treated in the harshest ways allowable by law and sometimes even beyond what's legal. The sensitive type needs to find a different leadship style to help them excel.

In any case, different leadership styles are legit as long as the expectations of those being led line up adequately.

I suppose it is possible that you can take a group of people and a leader will emerge out of them, but I think in most cases a raiding guild is going to start with a particular leader. So in the end any raiding theory, raiding MO, and guild social dynamics has to be true to that person, or it's going to be awkward and eventually probably fail.

With all that as background, here is my approach to raiding theory, and guild management.

It is very important that I find people that respect me and my style of leadership. Like the example above, if someone has a problem with how I run things, I will explain my point of view in hopes of them understanding, but in the end if they continue to disagree or cause waves it's just best that they leave... no matter how good a player they are.

I have very high expectations for everyone that wants to consider themselves as a core raider. If they do not meet those expectations I rarely publicly embarass them, I just stop inviting them to the raid. With that said however, I give people a very long time to grow into those expectations. I don't expect people to instantly fit in. Some say I'm way too patient, and maybe I am. However, I have landed some very, very good raiders that were absolutely terrible in so many ways for weeks and months before they got comfortable with our raiding style.

I expect raiders to take ownership in their raiding. I was in a guild where everyone was just a pawn at the RL's disposal. It was a terrible experience for me. I endlessly encourage my raiders to contribute as much as they can. Going into Ulduar I think I have around 15 raiders that know the strats and fights better than I do. I have asked them to pick a fight or two that they will co-raidlead with me. I refuse to explain boss fights in detail. If people have not proven that they want to contribute to our kill and even our strat they don't belong in the raid group. In the end, yes decisions have to be made, and I make those decisions. I try to model our raid group to be as much as a team as possible. I guess I'd like to consider myself to be more the captain of a sport's team than any sort of figurehead that barks out orders. And yes, at times I do have to be more authoritative to kill any drama, to kick a bad apple out of the raid or guild, but it's a side that I hate and you really have to push my buttons to get their. I'd rather earn the respect of the people around me than demand it.

There were some comments in the thread that you really can't wield any meaningful power as a GM or RL. I completely disagree, although a lot depends on your success. My guild didn't start on Naxx until the beginning of this year, although I had been around leading late night pugs on the server for a very long time. As a result we started with a lot of people in January that had just lvl to 80, a lot of them were wearing ssc/tk gear, etc. We quickly climbed the ranks. At the beginning I was much more at any individuals mercy, although I resisted as much as possible. They were able to push back on bad habits I tried to correct. That's all changed. Now I get dozens of tells a day from people wanting in to our guild, including people from the top guilds on the server. When people get selfish or lazy, it's amazing how much effect it has on them when I tell them they can find a new guild if they are not happy here. There are still people that have gotten whiny over loot, but after pointing out how well we've geared the guild and after kicking a couple loot whores out of the guild the whining has all but stopped.

I hate to sound like a sentimental woman, but I do believe in nurturing responsibilty and active participation first and foremost. I would rather have 24 raiders picking each other and me up, than trying to pull and carry 24 people up on my own. I guess I could liken it to a professional sports team. The ones that perform very well over extended periods of time have players that are constantly working with each other. For those that follow baseball, take a coach like Gardy on the Twins. He's not out there bitching at his players. He commands a lot of respect by who he is. He is their ultimate supporter. Sure he's setting the line up, making subs, and acting as the ultimate decision maker, but it's his players that are picking each other up and working hard to be their best to keep their spot in the line up.

In Ulduar, I'm not going to explain the boss fights, I'm not going to tell people to stop casting on flame jets. They are expected to know this stuff already. To help learn the fights we've been doing Ulduar trivial in gchat for the last two weeks. Anyone can throw out a question about Ulduar and anyone can answer it.

What I am going to do is tell them who is tanking what, hand out healing assignments, keep them on track, throw out encouragement, wade through feedback to tweak our strats, etc. On the more negative side, if people get get unrulely, tired, or whiny I'll be the one that has to send them home for the night or permanently.

In the end the chess game for me is not maniupulating my raiders like pieces on the board, it's finding the right people to play those pieces themselves better than I ever could do for them and offering them the encouragement to get to that point on their own.

As I said up top, I can get long winded. If you read all this, it must be patch day or something.

Been reading this thread for a long while and it is definitely the most interesting read on this forum. Just needed to get that said.

There is one key thing here that I can't recall having seen mentioned more than vaguely in this thread, but which I'm sure many of you know quite well. I still think it deserves mentioning: People's motivation for raiding.

I started as a raid leader out of boredom. Being in a guild that didn't even pull off 10-man raids in January I decided to start gathering my own raids. Eventually I sat with the in-game calendar, having a quite rich and constantly changing roster of people which were drafted for heroic Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum (I was leading these despite having nearly no experience of the above two even on 10-man) with a slowly growing core of raiders that had good attendance at that made it into something more than just a PuG.
Starting to get quite a lot of regulars I could start getting a bit picky with whom I let come to the raids. Especially among the tanks and DPS where we had more signing people than were needed. Arachnid and Plague Quarters are pushovers, with Heigan as the only real boss that can show if people are actually learning something or not, and Sartharion without drakes was swiftly slain as well. Getting into Construct Quarter and adding extra drakes at Sartharion we started see plenty of wipes however and the weed started becoming clearly distinguishable from the crops. The people that were just in for loot couldn't stand the wiping and weren't interested in becoming good players either.

There is a second group however that stays, and what is it that makes them stay? The sense of accomplishment. People need to be there and wipe. Often but not always to learn the fights well, but the only real reward for a raider that cares about raiding is to beat the content with which you have struggled. There is nothing more sweet than to see the sweat, tears and effort put into an encounter eventually result in victory.
People that never get to wipe never get any sense of accomplishment either. One hasn't accomplished anything at all if getting a free run through a raid with the regulars that can do the encounters while blindfolded.

A prime example is one of the new additions to the new guild I'm in. His shaman main is in one of the best Horde raiding guilds on my server, but he hadn't joined them until they had actually cleared the WotLK content. He is least to say so bored with that raiding he want to gouge his eyes out. He's got practically full ilevel 213 gear, is a really good player, but still don't have any fun at all doing the raids there since he never gets to accomplish anything. Joining my guild with his hunter that just dinged 80 he was doing 3000 dps with a level 76 gun and mostly blues for gear and suddenly spend hours and hours wiping on Thaddius because some people need to get their movement right.
Why did such a competent player join us that still haven't cleared Naxx25 despite having raided it since late January and that havent' killed Sartharion with more than one drake up? Because now he is actually DOING something. His contribution to the raid matters and there's a shared feeling of joy for each attempt that we do better than the previous.

For some people beating the existing content in two weeks, and then farming it until your eyes bleed for the next half year before more content is added to the game seem to be the way to go. But wouldn't it be worth to slow that a little just to let a greater portion of the people partake in the actual raiding, rather than just picking up the purple scraps that the 'real raiders' already have since long ago?

What's been discussed on the last two pages of the thread really got to me and I wholeheartedly agree that no one can learn unless they get practice. They are spat upon because they can't do the encounters, but still only have 5% of the practice, and the practice they get are when practically being boosted through the content and what they actually do doesn't matter at all since the other people in the raid could beat the bosses even if the player wasn't there.

Let the guild have a 'social' membership and a 'raider' membership or whatever. But to recruit raiders that never get to raid isn't good for anyone. It completely crushes the morale and even the purpose for those members to be in the guild at all. If you percieve you need to have 40 active members to know you have enough people for every 25-man raid, then let all 40 raid, not only 28 of them because they happen to have good activity. What if two of your main tanks can't come to the raid, or that all of a sudden three of your five main healers are gone for a raid? You are forced to pull in crap into the raid. People without gear and without practice. Of course they perform bad! No one has ever let them gear or learn the encounters.

Don't recruit more raiders than you need, and let all raiders raid. If you by chance would happen to be short of people anyway at some occasion I'm sure that some of the 'social' members will happy to step in.

The really good guilds will have all the gear and farm all the content anyway by the time the next content comes, even if they do it only half as fast as they do it now. But wouldn't it be worth having a whole guild where everyone is part of the same team, rather than to just have the 'A' team be happy, and the 'B' team wonder why they are in the guild at all?

Are you saying he still raids on his Shaman in the better guild and then rolls with his hunter in your guild on days where his other guild is all done with content? I would never allow such a thing in my guild. If I'm going to invest in a player, I want that person to invest in us. That scenario sounds like he's just using you guys so he can gear out his alt. If he quit his shaman altogether, then yea- great pickup.


On a more agreeable note, what the above poster stated is very true. Everyone in the guild has to want to be there. If their motivation for raiding is "I'm highest on DKP so I'll win the next Betrayer of Humanity," they probably won't put up with you guys after they get what they are really after.

Prior to 3.1, doing any of the hard modes was a chore to convince a lot of players to do because all they cared about was the drops and doing it the hard way doesn't change what drops. There was also a crop of players who only wanted to do the hard modes because the normal modes were just so boring. My guild even made up a few of our own "Harder Modes" just for the thrill of seeing if we could do it. Now that hard modes give better loot I'm sure more players will be putting up with wipes in Ulduar than wipes in Naxx

Late to the party, but I found the "last attempt" trick to be a crap shoot. On the one hand, you have the motivated player that wants to down the boss and will try harder. On the other, you have someone that is frustrated, tired, or just bored, and just gives a throwaway performance just to be able to logoff. Speaking from my Sunwell experience as a RL, anyway. YMMV

No, he is no longer raiding on his shaman (which least to say aggrevated the guild his shaman is in (or was in? I don't know if he's been kicked) but his hunter is his new main char non the less.

The idea of patterns - or creating a language - is interesting. This works in many other fields such as engineering, software development, etc.

Approach bosses from as high a level as possible and try an abstract an encounter. Describe it in these abstract terms so there is little confusion about what to do during a given phase. Reusable boss patterns is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how effective it can be, realistically and practically.

First, it requires people to think differently. Everyone approaches these things from the bottom up. That is, they describe fine details and how to react to them instead of generalities. Bottom-up approaches are, in my experiences occupationally and in video games, more natural to most people. I think this is because most people can't think deeply and have trouble abstracting things. This is why a lot of people are bad at math and therefore don't like it. (how many fallacy's of argument can a person use in a paragraph, lol) So, the "people problem" is the first road block.

Although, I think people do take this approach to a point. Raiders will point out to each other "At time 'X', boss 'A', does the same thing as boss 'B' so move. This would be a lower level (both through patterns and intellectually) than describing these things as the abstract pattern they are, but it is effective in communicating the preferred strategy.

Secondly, although a lot of encounters have similar patterns that emerge, many bosses have strict timing requirements that are unique. Or different strategies on how to execute a pattern. I think, anyways, Blizzard (or whoever) will constantly be trying to keep encounters new and fresh and create new ideas on how to play. Where as in things that effectively use patterns, many of the problems are reoccurring problems that are simply natural to the problem domain in general.

So maybe we could and should identify some encounter abstractions, name them and describe how they work. Obviously we sort of have with things like "Tank and Spank". The 1 pattern EVERYONE knows, lol.