I personally believe it's all about modulation.

You get the best results from people when you explain something in their terms, while keeping people who are unrelated to that particular part of the encounter entertained. (Think explaining an interrupt rotation on RoS).

I was in a guild where I was not the raid leader, and the RL of that guild macro'd all healing assignments, position assignments, etc. It led to very quiet raids most nights, though the guild was marginally successful (until it imploded).

In my experience since leading raids, the more you expect of your players the more you get out of them. My healing assignments are done over ventrilo, given out once, and done fairly quickly. Same with positions, dps assignments, etc. Keeping things fast-paced helps to keep people involved.

It usually ends up with a bit more chatter just before the fight, but I feel like my players are more involved. And I feel it's a heck of a lot better than a raid leader quizzing random raiders on "What do you do when X happens?"

In a game like Warcraft, you don't have much of a stick to swing. At work, in the military, heck even on an adult sports team (think adult rec hockey, etc) you have a lot more direct influence on your peers' performance. In WoW, you don't so much. I think that's why a lot of people end up in a dictatorial role - it's simply easier. It's easier for the leader to just bark orders, and it's easier for the players to just "listen to one guy" and get their purples. It's why people put up with a lot of in-raid abuse, and I think it eventually filters down to why a lot of guilds have no problem "forcing" specs on players. Eventually, it's a system that I think will fail. Easy is almost never right.

Simply put, players that are having fun play better. What defines "fun" for one person vs another is a subjective topic, but I think you can make some general statements about it, and base a leadership style off it. If your leadership style is rooted in some specific ideas, no matter really what those ideas are, you'll be in better shape. Once you get your leadership style down, everything else is just numbers and phases. There's not really much the developers can throw at us at this point that we've not seen.

Maybe a better title for this thread would be "How to be a better raid leader." Either way, I really like this topic.

I think there are a lot of general rules for leadership and that the dichotomy of business/management is completely useless for finding these as its just trying to fit actually existing guilds into a scheme with no actual purpose besides showing that it can be done.
It would be a lot more helpful to concentrate on the general rules of leadership, I mean everything that the raidleader(s) will have to do typically to make a guild work well. So it's not about what they actually do it's about what leaders should do to become good.

Being at that point I'd like to point to http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t16955-i...id_leadership/
as the discussion might become relevant for the thinktank.


I. What is leadership? I think it's the ability to get people to do reliably what you want them to do, with their consent (I think this is the difference between leadership and authority).

II. What a good raidleader needs from my view:
1) Knowledge:
a. Ingame: about everything relevant for raiding especially encounters (stragety and tactics), classes and specs
b. General: about humans (in general and as individuals) for example their limitations and weaknesses, how to work around them and which can't be worked around.
2) Social skills:
a. Motivation: The ability to adapt to the social situation like being strict, funny, relaxed or whatever the social situation asks for it. You also have to actually care for your raidmembers and have a good sense of justice.
b. Authority: Being able to make sure your rules are followed.
c. Communication: Being able to communicate precisely what you want to others in the most efficient way and being able to tell which is the most efficient way for example by taking into account your audience.
3) Organization skills: This is mostly about efficiency. I'll just use examples here. Create an effective set of rules for your raid. Create the structures necessary to communicate your wishes to the raid efficiently. Create structures which allow you to take a break when you need to without problems. Create structures that are (time-) efficient. Get the right tools (addons, wws...) that make your job easier and more efficient.
4) Other Personal traits: Time, patience, willpower, strictness (example: you have to be willing to kick people if they don't fit in your raid), ingame skills (if you are the laughing-stock of your raid then you will generally have a hard time maintaining your authority), intelligence (especially being able to analyze situations and draw the right conclusions).

If you want to develop a comprehensive "theory of raiding", I think the focus should be on exactly that. Of course, we should make explicit our definition of "raiding theory". The dictionary definition of theory is sufficient:

"A systematically organized body of knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena."

But what is raiding? It is the process of defeating WoW bosses through individual ability, motivation to use one's ability, and making an explicit plan to accomplish all of this. In other words: knowledge of how the game operates and how one's class operates. Having a reason to even bother to play well. Establishing standards to follow, which is equivalent to establishing how a guild operates. None of the parts of the definition of raiding can be left out, they could not exist without the other parts.

There's been a lot of discussion about leadership and how to motivate people to do things. But I think people are missing what to me is an even more important question. Why are there motivated players who are also unskilled, the players who want to kill Sapphiron and show up everyday but keep standing in the blizzard? Wouldn't having motivation to succeed also imply figuring out and learning to play better?

Anyone can be motivated to be better, be it from a personal improvement point of view, or be it from a pure greed "I want epix" aspect. Regardless that does not mean they are capable of learning how to do the Heigan dance.

They may want to get better, but the process escapes them. They are incapable of being better regardless of how much coaching they get from raid/class leaders.

Well I think you need to include the formal requirement of being in a raid (and maybe even being more than one person... I'm not sure if it is right to call soloing onyxia a "raid"). I'd also replace the term "WoW bosses" with "PvE content" as to not exclude pure trash farming nights. I'm not sure wether making the plan is really part of the raiding or just preparation for raiding. Motivation isn't really part of raiding either: Even when I'm totally unmotivated I can be raiding. But lets not discuss this any more.

And what that definition actually means depends on your perspective so what you do will greatly depend on your role (class and spec) in the raid and your role as a member of the raid (raid- / classleader) and on the raid itself (hardcore or casual). A more elaborated version of a Raiding theory will take these perspectives into account.

Ultimately I think an approach where you just define what raiding is seems rather pointless so I guess this "raiding theory" is not so much about what a raid is but about how you raid "well".

However unless this thread gets a clear direction soon it will be gone, I guess.

I think to establish a clearer direction we need a somewhat better definition of "active" and "static" raiding. As it stands the fundamental principle of "active" raiding appears to be decreasing how much of an encounter is explained in lieu of assuming that players can fill in the gaps on their owns through previously learned mechanics or observation during the fight.

However, this strikes me as less a theory of raiding a more a theory of raiding leadership. I know that when my guild first encountered Hex Lord Malacrass the first words I said were, "This is Moroes, but harder." Reducing the amount of time spent explaining a fight and boiling it down to the most essential facts has been a non-trivial but nonetheless fundamental aspect of leading raids as long as I've been raiding.

It is very much like being a teacher. You do not teach the material to the different classes in exactly the same way, but tailor your presentation to the needs of the students. In some cases you can simply set them on their books and they do the work for you, and in others you need to go through multiple examples and explanations before a hushed, silent confusion settles in and there's nothing to do but move on.

If there are people who launch into the most detailed of possible explanations regardless of who they're leading then this theory may be news to them, and in sufficient numbers it may be worth reporting, discussing, and bringing to the attention of the larger populace. Unless I'm missing something about the theory, or the WoW populace, that doesn't immediately seem to be the case.

OK, in an effort to direct this thread I'd like try and focus this discussion a bit. Specifically to the topic of what you can do as a raid leader to create more "active" raiders. I've presented one idea on the first page, are there others? Are people in agreement with me that it's preferential to have more active raiders? Is the raid the right level to achieve this?

If you want to have raiders that are more involved, you're going to need officers that are stellar in their roles.

Its a lot easier to hold your melee to a higher standard, for instance, when your melee officer consistently rocks top dps on fights he's supposed to and generally doesn't die to retard checks like fissures, or lava walls and what not.

The same goes for casters and healers.

Once you have leadership by example in place, you can slowly increase your recruiting standards and start culling players, be it actively or through attrition, that don't meet your criteria.

I have, at some point in my raiding 'career' had a raid leader that had a habit of setting bonus goals or bets for us rather than just killing stuff, with substantial rewards (mostly just substantial amounts of DKP - like three or four times the value of the encounter, or free repairs at his expense). This was way before the achievements, heck, even before the Zul'Aman bear. The objectives were rather simplistic (kill the bat boss in ZG without getting heals through, kill the spiders before they grew for the whole duration of the fight, don't blow up anyone in the raid, and so forth), and are rather similar to the what achievements do today.

Surprisingly, it worked out quite nicely, but I attribute this to the fact that we had about 35ish people, for a 20 man raiding guild, and it was really hard to get an edge on DKP (actually, we didn't even call it that, we called it 'tokens') when we had massive rotations each night.

That's why I'm guessing that the unique rewards that achievements provide now should be better incentives in their own right, once people start to get used to the instances. But, even more, these achievements can give a raid leader leverage over the guild. For instance, you know who you're going to take for a 21 man Sartharion/Malygos during the weekend, and anyone who isn't happy has the whole of Naxx to prove themselves. I know, it's arbitrary, it may be considered harsh, but to be quite honest, a cold shower every now and then has proved to be benefical more than once.

I would definitely like to encourage more active raiders and I would like to hear more practical suggestions for how to get people thinking for themselves. Officer motivation is clearly a major factor here and I wonder how much can be done outside of raids to help people prepare.

In my opinion the major problem is that some people - who may be excellent players otherwise - do not see the mechanics of the fight, or understand priorities beyond what they have either been told or witnessed as it applies to them.

A lot of boss encounters do have a rather opaque design, for example on Sartharion a random melee player might never see every aspect of the fight for themselves, or might have no interest in understanding the fight as long as they know what mob to attack first. This leads to players who cannot react if something goes wrong and who can't offer advice if they see someone else do something wrong. I think one solution is to attempt to get everyone involved in boss discussion outside of raids (rather than just linking to bosskillers and EJ and hoping people read them) but this, as well as going through WWS parses, is something people will often skip over.

I also wonder about making sure all players have the right addons and tools to be active. Setting 25 people loose on a boss encounter with no more information than 'this is a tank a spank phase' then asking them why they died only to hear most people say they have no idea is not useful. A lot of people even still use the default UI, or dont have their combat log showing.

I suppose what I am saying is that there is no introduction to raiding section in the manual, and a lot of players will simply not go to the same lengths as others to research it for themselves. Asking these players to be more active would be dropping them in at the deep end and I doubt it would get results save for more wiping. Again, these are not always bad players in terms of reactions or performance on meters so culling or replacing seems dramatic to me especially as progress can be made with a rigid boss strategy and vocal raid leader, but progress could certainly be faster if these people could be encouraged and motivated to get a deeper understanding of why they are actually doing what they are told to do.

Ill start off topic, i think a 3rd classification of raids is needed, something like Communist. Everyone has a general idea of the goal and is motivated, with an elected leader who at times exerts full authority. Hybrid if you will. I have been in several of these types of guilds, although the results usually werent stellar.

After a 6month break from a 'Military' guild and a server transfer, i found myself involved in a casual organization of well motivated but inexperienced players. After reading an article about "leading from the front" i took it upon myself to try and teach each player. This failed, utterly. And I am of the opinion that this is for the most part human nature, to 'follow orders but not learn' when told directly what to do. So, i adopted what i'll refer to as a 'Volunteer Squad' which i lead by example. The goals are set high, but impartial, and well backed up with theory and practical application. Rather than forcing raid strategy and 'you do this here and then', the attitude of I expect a good performance and for you to be aware of yourself and the strain you put on the raid.

Being mostly inexperienced, the concept of 'dont stand in fire mmkay' was innate for some, but like speaking chinese to a dog for others. In the end, i dont think you can ever 'teach' "dont stand in teh fire tards" past spouting about them dying and awareness. The best you can hope for as a leader is that you find some way to motivate each player to reach the common goal. Prod the epeen of the dps, reinforce the caretaker complex that some healers get, delegate authority and task management to your officers. It makes them better and it makes raiding less stressful on you.

I think at times some people forget that your guild is populated by volunteers. Yes, some come for community, other for loot, and some for the stroke of an epeen. But learning how to set standards and goals rather than beating people over the head with a raid leader stick will yield better more adaptive raiders. It may take 3 months to teach that priest the Heigan dance, or 5 wipes in a row to convince your warrior that it really is a good thing to intervene the pally... but once the people learn for themselves, the fruits of that 50g repair bill will be a more effective and mature raider.

The raid leader needs to decide what he wants "his" raid to do. If he wants an active raid that is a clear goal and definetly better than none at all. You can't be an excellent leader if you don't have a clear vision where you are leading to.

But most raids don't have such a clear goal and thus have a mixture of players. This is sometimes a source for trouble.

I have always been an active raider but this didn't always do me well so I think it's helpful to give my perspective on this topic.
If you top the damagemeter constantly with inferior gear, almost never die to the fire and know a lot more about the game than the raidleader you will sometimes draw different conclusions from him and do it your way. And then there is always "that guy" who thinks people aren't supposed to think for themselves unless your guild specifically encourages this behaviour and tell you something along the lines of "WTF U ARE DOING HAVENT U LISTENED??!?!" even if you did your job better than if you had followed the instructions from the raidleader to the letter. This is typically from those people who would like to be better than you but just aren't or have an overreaching sense of duty. Plus you have to constantly bug officers and leaders with your improvement suggestions which might not be heard since you aren't in charge.

For me personally, I think, a raid consisting only of active players would be perfect in the end. But this isn't for everyone. For this to work you will really need most of your raiders to share that attitude and they also need to be able to make the right choices in a short amount of time. And you need your raidleader to be able to still keep authority over the whole thing. But since I haven't been in such a guild I'll better not speculate about it anymore.

I also think it's a pretty long way from being a passive raider to being an active raider as this is greatly determined by your personality which isn't shared by everyone in the same way. If you are curious about your surroundings, always trying to become better, have a love for theorycrafting, a decent amount of self-confidence and the time to put all those things to ingame use chances are you will be an active raider in the long run.

I see a fair bit of commentary about leadership in this thread and while I agree that it's critical to a successful raid I don't know that it can be boiled down to a nice neat theory of raiding that can be applied to a failing raid like a plaster on a barked shin. Leadership is one of those areas where what works for one person will not work for another. For example I can lead a not very serious Naxx 10 on an off night and command reasonable amount of attention to detail by a combination of unusual accent and a tendency to use unusual/complex words. My raids have been know to keep a running count of new words learnt that night even if we are not playing particularly well. However if you don't naturally have an "exotic" accent and a comprehensive vocabulary this technique would not work for you. Instead of paying attention to your message they will be thinking "Who is this ponsy git?". To be a successful leader in any endeavour you can't be something your not, people pick up on that very fast and you loose all credibility which is why you can't simply copy someone else's leadership style and expect it to work.

The success of a leadership style also depends on the societal norms of the people being lead. This is why in this thread alone we have several different leadership styles discussed. Despite what some here have suggested being the most skilled or having an encyclopaedic knowledge of technical details is not actually required for being a successful leader. To draw an example from history the officers of the Napoleonic period British army were frequently ill versed in the tactics of the day but they were effective leaders because the showed unflinching courage and acted in the manner that the soldiers they were leading expected. This meant that despite sometimes appalling levels of technical ignorance they could effectively lead their troops to success. In wow terms such a leader would be someone who provides his raid (guild) with a vision of what the guild would achieve and would successfully sell this vision to his team. However he would leave the day to day details of execution to trusted sergeants such as the healer lead or the tank lead who would actually give the specific instructions but who may not be able to inspire equal performance in their own right.

On Inoko's point about giving up on people I have seen several examples of where a raid leader gives up on someone prematurely who later becomes an effective raider when given appropriate coaching. Often this is because taking a martinet approach with some people actually makes them perform worse as they become stressed and tense up. However if you take them aside for some positive coaching in a friendly manner they can make great strides. Some people thrive on stress, others freeze up and choke. Again this comes back to a culture issue, would you treat the middle aged housewife the same way you would an 18 year old football jock? Both these people can be ace raiders if nurtured correctly but the way to get through to them is going to be totally different.

On the topic of getting people to become more capable raiders who don't take a million wipes to learn we probably need to delve into the whole messy (and sometimes controversial) area of learning styles. Some people can learn easily by doing, others by theorycrafting, some by watching while others grasp the idea fine simply by listening. For example if you have someone who constantly fails at standing in bad stuff you may need to figure out a training method that will work for them. Yelling at them to not stand in stuff failing as motivation? maybe they are not someone who learns by listening and they react badly to being shouted at. Try some practice run throughs in a safe and friendly environment such as getting them to dps a target dummy while moving out of the area of a flamestrike you periodically put under their feet. Once they have that down ramp up the practice by getting lots of other pyrotechnics and distractions going at the same time. Another way of addressing this is making good videos available for the visual learners to watch. They do sod all for my learning style but some of my guildies swear by them.

Overall I suspect that to fully explore the topics in this thread would require delving into a whole raft of academic disciplines including economics, sociology, group dynamics, Human Resource Management, Leadership, Management and given that this is a global game comparative cultural studies. The other thing it would require would be a checking of prejudices and preconceived notions at the door. For example a recent paper looking at participants in everquest found that "Contrary to expectations, women are more intense players than men, on average and among the most hard-core". How many of us would have picked that? Failing to do so could easily lead to a deeply flawed theory of raiding.

The reason why I think that the leader in a raid also needs to be a decent player is that he is having a dual role: On the one hand he is a raid leader and on the other hand he is just a normal raider doing exactly the same stuff as other raiders do (tank, dps, heal) as you need all 25 people to play reasonably well for sucess typically.
If he sucks in his role as a normal raider and keeps killing your raid by his actions people won't have much faith in him, baring very special circumstances.

At some point it might be possible to get to a raid just as a spectator, maybe with free camera vision and such. Then you could well have a good leader that isn't a good wow player but excels in original leadership tasks. That might even be superior at that point. But currently I'm not sold on that. At least I personally never thought much of leaders in WoW who don't play well themselves.

Its similar with knowledge: If you have no clue about wow what do you tell your raid? "Get the stuff done whatever it is"? Of course you don't need to be the best theorycrafter around to make a good raidlead. But you should basically be able to understand what this stuff is about or you will constantly make wrong decisions which will make you a bad leader. And if all you do is saying "Get the stuff stuff done whatever it is" or making jokes and directing all the rest to the people that know better, then you aren't a leader from my view. You are nothing more than a motivator.

Unless your goal is nothing but socializing or "learning new words". But I think a good raidleader will also want to clear the existing content in an efficient manner. If that isn't among his high priority goals he isnt a raidleader in my view, I guess. He might be a leader. But not a raidleader. And I think talking about other kind of leaders but raidleaders won't do much for the community here.

My recomendation is to find a leader that matches your style of raiding, or conversely, raiders that match your style of leading. Soldier-raiders under a professor-leader will tend to slack off; student-raiders under a general-leader will chafe at the control. Compound this with the observation that certain strategies for a given boss vary by raid type. I, for one, fit into different types of guilds depending on whether I'm a raider or leader. As I already noted, I'm in the game for the puzzle; this means as a member I prefer egalitarian and individualistic groups, but as a leader I get along better with players who want me to explain things to me (this doesn't mean they don't need to take some measure of responsibility).

Oftentimes, I think raid success has more to do with recruiting the players that do care and show effort than the leadership involved. Some raiders don't like thinking and just want to be told what to do. They simply choose the easiest route. In a game, it is pretty useless to actively persuade people who don't like thinking to play better. About all that can be done is to say "shape up or you're out".

However, that doesn't require getting angry or reacting negatively to anything bad that happens. It doesn't mean that good players don't need some direction. Leadership is necessary to keep things moving even when every players knows what to do. You need to encourage a process of admitting and correcting errors. Ask calmly "Why did you get cleaved by Malygos" and if the reason is bad, offer suggestions for fixing it. If mistakes continue to occur, you can safely conclude that the player doesn't know how to play and it's time for a raid removal at the least.

Carrot-on-a-stick motivation to play well is nice and all, but you need to create an environment where individual thinking and being skilled is of the utmost importance. An environment of self-motivation and self-improvement. Tell other guild members what you yourself do to improve your performance. Ask questions often.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that leadership needs to lead by example. Players need someone to look up to but not rely on absolutely. Consistent and frequent poor performance must be dealt with swiftly and must not be "accepted and expected".

This isn't as clear cut as you make it sound. You can obviously not employ a totally different strat than the rest of the raid, but there are many situations where you make small changes to your personal strategy and benefit the raid. The key lies in "even if you know your strat would work better". If you know that your strat would work better and are right, the raid will benefit from you using it. However, if 'you know' that your strat would work better and are wrong, the raid will be hurting from it. The problem is not when people smarter than the raidleader change their strategy, it's when the stupid people do. In many cases, the raidleader is aware of the fact that the strategy is not optimal, but he realizes that he will never make all the stupid people understand and use the strategy. He therefore explains the simple, slightly worse version to the raid, and remains quiet when he sees the good players adjusting their strategy.

An example of this is the shadow demons on Illidan. When the shadow tank gets one, a common 'strategy' is to have all melee ignore it and stay away from it, since the average melee player will just die if he tries to do anything. A good player can pop sprint, run in with cloak, shiv crippling, hit a sinister or two and run out without dying, thus making sure the demon goes down and not the tank.

What MatsT is talking about is going into the right direction. Of course you can't run a whole different strategy than your raid as an individual. That will never be better than just doing what you are told. And of course you can't have everyone do whatever he wants on most encounters.

However I see many tactical details as a recommendation, not something that is to be followed to the letter.
This is why I made the distinction between tactics and strategy. It's stupid to tell a great raider about detailed tactics in most cases. They will know the tactics when they have the strategy and saw the encounter.

On top the leader can't plan every detail in a perfect way. Even if he could and it was possible to execute in such a perfect way... where is the fun in that?

This might seem like a pointless argument if you are really into min-maxing, however I think this is rather shortsighted: Unless you trust your raiders and give them some kind responsibilities they won't feel important and appreciated and will ultimately be worse players as they loose interest. I consider this part of the social skills a good leader needs to have. Leadership is necessarily by consent and I'd even go as far as saying: you want your raiders to love being led by you.
Of course if you are happy in having your guild reform constantly as long as it works out somewhat long enough to see all content then you can go down other routes and be somewhat successful. But you certainly won't be as good of a leader as someone who works by these principles.

On many encounters our raidleader would tell us something along the lines of: If you can't handle the heat stay out of the kitchen but if you can... go ahead. That seemed like a pretty decent beginning to me (as I could always pick the kitchen for the extra challenge if I wanted to, with me being responsible for whatever comes out of it).

That's a good example. I like the distinction between tactics and strategy that Furion is talking about. Encouraging people to use their own tactics on the fly in support of the overall strategy of the fight does (or, at least, should--not all players will work well under this environment) cultivate an environment where players are more capable of reacting to Bad Stuff happening, which can turn a near wipe into a success. I just don't think it's always reasonable to expect every player to be attentive+skilled enough unless you're in a bleeding edge guild, so as a raid leader you need to provide an environment that allows those players to perform well, while not boring the ones who can and should be going about things their own way.

I try to do both in my raids, but I'm definitely still learning and have a long way to go. I try to post readable strategies somewhat tailored for us on our forums for people to use to get a different look at fights from what they might get reading other strats. I've recently started incorporating "TLDR" versions, which boil the fight down into 1-3 short sentence fragments for those who don't want to / can't / don't need to know every aspect of the fight to succeed, and these are the versions I use introducing a new fight on raid night. Example for Thaddius: "Kill the mini-bosses at the same time, R&J style. JUMP onto Thaddius's platform. Change positions as necessary depending on your charge, always passing Thaddius on the right." Short, simple, and honestly all you need to know.

The other useful thing I've taken from this thread so far as a raid leader is the concept of priorities--if a person can only hold a finite number of things in their head at once, and they have more things than that to juggle, then they have to decide what the highest priorities are. One fight that I think really brings out the distinction between players who can prioritize properly from those who can't is Netherspite. It seems like everyone I know either loves that fight or hates it. The problem with that fight is that people have to completely change their priorities--healers have to prioritize someone other than the tank, tanks have to prioritize something other than their threat, and everyone has to have beam handling higher than anything else. I don't know how many times I've seen DPS standing around attacking Netherspite while complaining that he's healing, instead of finding the green beam and standing in it. Using the attention-priority point as a way to explain to people the importance of fight mechanics on execution fights (Netherspite, 4H, etc) might be a pretty good idea.

The other group I raid with on my "other" main is the one Inoko described above. While I'm not the raid leader for that run, I was definitely one of the ones who had given up on the two players who can never seem to live through the dance phase no matter how many times we tell them to figure out the positions of the poison bursts and to run ahead of others, not following them. One of them actually offered to stand outside the room or instance a couple weeks ago so the rest of us could get the achievement. (That one actually still hasn't lived through one, though we haven't let him stand outside for us yet.) From Inoko's point, it sounds like one potential pitfall for a raid leader (and one that I sometimes suffer from) is the assumption that if someone repeatedly fails at something, they'll either figure out what they're doing wrong on their own or ask for help. If it's something that's actually holding the raid back, I'll try to deal with it, but if it's only adding to their own repair bill and embarrassment, I assume they would want to do better.

You're reminding me of something I've seen certain decent leaders do... an encounter goes bad in some way (eg. tank dies), and the leader just says "handle it". And people do. People perform all sorts of tricks and pull it out of the fire. Builds confidence, gets people stretching their reactive brain muscles, makes for good stories to tell...

Makes me wonder how many of these "handle it" situations are actually engineered...

Which brings me to a certain kind of engineered run I've wanted to do in order to develop certain reflexes and abilities: a "Buster Keaton" run. The idea is, you do a "silent instance" -- an entire run with no talking. No voice comms, no typing in /ra, no /rw. Just built-in emotes and raid markers. No asking questions, no giving complex orders (but things like /point are okay).

I think the last time I really did something like this was 45min baron back in the day; when the team gets going, anticipating each other without saying anything, almost like telepathy and precognition... it's glorious.

RL: "$Player1, why did you die?"
P1: "I was trying to watch why $Player2 keeps dying"
P2: "Really? I was trying to watch what you were doing..."

I understand what you're saying, but at a certain point it has to happen. This is part of what makes a good raid/class/role leader - the ability to do whatever it is they need to do to perform their function in the fight almost as second nature while observing what other people are doing. That's why I generally prefer to lead raids as DPS--as a healer, while I see when people take damage, I don't always have a good understanding of what caused the damage, because my attention is devoted to life bars and my own surroundings. As DPS I could just let my fingers hit the buttons they were so used to hitting in a certain order and almost forget about my primary role and focus on seeing who wasn't standing in the right place, who didn't move out of the fire fast enough and whether or not it looked like just a latency effect, etc. I love the detailed real-time information you can get from Recount about who's dispelling, who's interrupting, who took damage from what abilities, that there were no HoT ticks on the tank for 8 seconds before he died even though your druid swears he was healing, etc., but it can't always replace actually observing what happened to cause the problem.