This. It's one of the skills of being a good raid leader, to work out whether a given challenge is appropriate for your team. So a lot of people who will say 'just try it' mean that by having a try or two, they can gather enough information to make that decision. It's what I'd do, and I'd take opinions from the rest of the raid also if I wasn't sure.

The other tried and tested method is to ask someone whose opinion you trust who has already completed the encounter you are considering, see what they think and decide if their basis for opinion also applies to you. Where progression is clearly marked (ie. sapphiron to kel'thuzad) you can also apply logic. If you can clear the rest of Naxx, chances are that you are well enough geared to kill the last boss. (In fact, experience says that gear will definitely not be the issue in this case, but that's why it's sometimes worth asking around.)

From a theoretical high level standpoint, I don't actually think that's an unreasonable goal. Each segment of content (in some cases a segment could be a series of bosses, like Plague Wing, in others it could be a single boss that has a different requirement than those around it, like Brutallus) would need to have established requirements and modifications to those requirements. For example, Patchwerk requires X raid DPS to kill before the enrage timer, Y effective health for OTs, and Z HPS output from the healers. You feed the tool a representative WWS of one of your raids and the armory profile of your tanks (maybe, or simply input total health/mitigation numbers manually, or a be.imba link), and it scans the data and compares it to what it thinks the requirements are. In a hypothetical Patchwerk-esque fight where ranged has to move around to avoid some environmental effect, the tool could adjust your WWS to multiply ranged DPS by 0.8 to account for 20% time not spent DPSing. It shouldn't need to go to the specifics of determining if you have enough cooldowns to rotate on your MT for your raid to be able to handle Sarth+3, because if you're seriously planning on trying it you should have already worked this out, but it could tell you if your tank has the gear to even consider it as a possibility.

I certainly would include WWS reports instead of basing it solely on armory/be.imba lookups. The latter will be indicative of whether your tanks, especially, and healers to a lesser extent, have the gear, but it won't in any way account for player skill. Be.imba might think someone is geared for Sarth+3, but if the person still struggles to break 1500 DPS on Patchwerk, you're going to have some problems getting Tenebron down fast enough. I'm not sure if you could build a tool sophisticated enough to estimate player skill, but one potential avenue for doing so might be by submitting multiple WWS--one of a Patchwerk fight, one of a Thaddius or Heigan fight (for lack of a better example off the top of my head). Players who are at a lower gear level might get shoved to the bottom of the DPS charts on Patchwerk, but shine on Heigan because they can handle the dance while still keeping up their DoTs/debuffs/whatever and getting the occasional cast-time spell off. Those fights would also have the advantage of being able to report who "stood in the fire."


As for my own strategies for determining if my group is ready for something... it varies. I do a lot of "raiding around," as it were, because I have a lot of contacts on my server who I used to raid with seriously before I went casual. They'll pull me in for things my guild hasn't gotten to yet, so sometimes I benefit from a working knowledge of content ahead of the raid I actually lead. Other than that, it's a combination of "just try it" and WWS mining. Sarth+X is an example of something you just have to try--unfortunately you can't just look at someone else's parse and say, "Oh, yay, our DPS can average over 2500, too, so we can do Sarth+1!" but I don't know that such a tool would really help on complex fights like that. It can tell you if your raid has enough health to get through Vortexes, but not who will get so flustered by avoiding flame waves and void zones that their DPS drops to less than half what they're normally capable of.

Anyway, general thoughts aside, what information would such a tool need to know about each fight to estimate a raid's preparedness?
- Tank gear level
- Healer HPS output
- Healer efficiency
- Raid DPS
- Raid Max Health (Vortexes, etc.)
- Raid DPS enhancements (spores on Loatheb)
- Raid DPS reductions (movement to avoid Flame Waves)
- more?

Seems to me it boils down to three, four elements, depending on how you count it. These are in rough order of importance, although there is some interdependence.

1. Do you have a strat for the boss. Measuring your team against the boss isn't really possible, measuring against the strat is. (eg, in Sarth3D you need to know what the plan is for the burn order of drakes, adds in order to know if you have the right raid mix for the next three elements. Your group may dictate a particular strat)

2. Can we keep the tank(s) alive. Is the tank geared enough, do healers have enough muscle/throughput/awareness. Several sarth+3d strats require quite a lot of the tank, Malygos ph1 also can as can Patchwerk and a few other fights.

3. What is the raid DPS under the conditions of the fight? Will it burn things down fast enough if nobody dies? What about with X% attrition. This can be a hard enrage as with Patchwerk, Thaddeus and Malygos or it can be something like "if we can't burn a drake down in xxx seconds, we can't attempt Sarth+3d but maybe can do sarth+2d if we can burn it down in yyy seconds". AOE dps might also be a consideration. How long does the raid take to burn down adds with XXX health? In OS, the trash might give you the latter, the individual drake kills might get you the former. Add together, subtract expected attrition/situational awareness stuff and compare to the time it takes for drakes to arrive and adds to accumulate.

4. Is our raid capable of handling the fight without losing a lot of it due to attrition during the fight. This is a mix of situational awareness, healing throughput, cleansing/decursing and gear/buffs.

Some examples from real play over the last couple months will illustrate this. I'm guessing at thought process of the raid leaders, but some of them talked through it a bit when encouraging us.


1. The raid is failing or doing poorly with this strat. We changed strats on 4H, Thaddeus and Sarth which improved the other three elements. In 4h, we changed the healer position so they didn't have to move, mostly, and put ranged dps into a better position to control their marks. In Thaddeus, we changed to a strat with less movement on the safety dance, both for attrition reasons (#4) and raid dps reasons (#2). In Sarth, we were having trouble with adds obscuring void zones and dps having safe places to stand. Separating the drake tanking more from the boss tanking and doing some clever things with melee positioning helped tremendously. Ph3 Malygos also proved very problematic until a lot more of the raid got better at stacking dots and staying alive. If we sucked at ph3, ph1-2 had to be flawless.

2. The healers can't keep tank alive. We have not had much trouble with this beyond an early 4h strat, although once we swapped both maintank and healer on Patchwerk and had a couple wipes before they worked out the right timing for the opening of the fight.

3. The raid is struggling for dps reasons, but if everyone lives math says we can burn this guy down. Mostly we had this problem with Thaddeus early on, where many of us were in greens/blues. This is pretty easy to calculate. However our choice to move to 2 and 3 drakes on Sarth were also based on how fast we could burn a drake down. Mostly as raid dps increases, the amount of perfection required in strat execution, attrition and pressure on healers goes down.

4. Survival of most raid members is key to a lot of fights. We had some early issues with Saph, 4H, Thaddeus, Heigan, some of the nastier Nax trash, the various hazards in Sarth and having enough people alive for PH3 malygos to finish the job.

Stuff was easy enough that the raid leaders were usually able to say "we can do this if XXX"

Where "XXX" usually fell into #4 category "everyone live through the fight" but sometimes was #2 "everyone live and do the dps you're capable of". They called off fights where the raid dps was demonstratably not high enough even when everyone survived or when it was clear that this day we just could not get the fight mechanics down. Mostly if we struggled a lot on a fight, the raid leaders got us through it that day but looked hard at the strat (#1) so the next time it would be easier.

Bottom line...you can measure raid dps and you can observe deaths. Deaths will usually get better with practice, "glasschewing" a boss. If it isn't getting better with practice, look at your healing strategy or your overall strategy. Raid dps..you just look at a fight where the raid didn't die, compare it to the boss health and timers and say "damn, even if we did perfectly, we'd still lose". That usually requires more gear from the farm bosses, although something like waiting for heroism to come back online or swapping the buff mix can sometimes help.

Okay, but doesn't this require a certain level of experience with the encounters in question? What is one to do when that experience is not present? My suspicion (due to the accessibility changes) is that this is increasingly the situation of a larger segment of the population than it's ever been the case for.

Maybe I'm incorrect about that experience being necessary. But how do you decide whether you're ready for Malygos if nobody in your group has ever seen Malygos?

If this gut call doesn't actually require experience with the bosses in question, then this may actually be getting close to the topic we've been talking about for a few pages now. Instead of transforming a stand-in-the-fire raider to a reacts-correctly-to-surprises raider, how do we transform a no-clue-what-to-do-next raid leader into a good-judge-of-when-to-move-up raid leader?

(And as an aside, there are ways for these methods to take those intangibles into account to some extent, if your full combat log is part of the data being analyzed. Essentially, you can say "take for granted that they're going to stand in the fire x% of the time, react to boss emotes only after a y% delay, and be out of range of the healer z% of the time", correlate, and scale. Basically you're turning individual skill and style into a range of multipliers on someone's raw theoretical potential -- "on some fights (eg. Patchwerk) this player performs at 97% of potential, but on others (eg. Heigan), only at 26%" -- and using the range of calculated values instead of the actual raw-potential value. But I don't want to get hung up on this if there's a more useful discussion to pursue.)

Yeah, thinking about it I believe we need to refine the concept of "experience" with the concept of "expectations". Then there might be cases in which you have neither experience, nor expectations. You won't have expectations if the content is absolutely new (top raiding guilds testing bosses in the PTR, or something like that) - and then experience is moot anyway, since it's not available to anyone and you have to build it from the ground up (although if the leader knows his/her group s/he will be able to use his/her general experience to make choices regarding who might be better suited to task x or y depending on what the group is facing).

But usually you're not facing cutting edge content. You're facing content for which there are raid guides, boss mods, EJ threads, etc. Then a raid leader will use that general experience I mentioned above to arrive at certain expectations when the raid faces something new. A good example is Sarth +3: discussion has established that you probably won't have a chance if your 25-man raid doesn't have enough DPS to kill Tenebron before the 2nd set of whelps. This is an expectation that most raid leaders should be able to make, and fairly easy to test as well. Of course some other cases are much harder to evaluate, but then the raid leader must know how to match theory with reality, so to speak - is my group performing the strategy well? If not, why not? If it is, why isn't the boss dead?, etc. and work from there. But this kind of experience, well, has to be experienced.

About attempts at quantification, they might possibly be done, up to a point. But the effort/reward ratio might not be worth it - people might invest a lot of time crunching numbers and stats to arrive at the same conclusion a very good and experienced raid leader might get after one night of wiping. Incidentally, that's also my problem with this thread's title - I don't think it's possible to arrive at any sort of raiding "theory", if by "theory" one means the traditional "hard" concept of theory: a set of generalizable and consistent statements about a certain domain of reality. We might arrive at something if we adopt a "softer" concept: non-generalizable, context-dependent propositions which might illuminate certain aspects of raiding. In a way, that's how this thread has developed on its own.

If you want to look at it as a statistical problem, it's actually very easy with a small number of assumptions.
1. Gather data on how geared people are when they first beat a particular encounter (or achievement or area). Not just an average, but a full distribution. In the simplest case, this is some weight of time spent practicing and average ilevel of gear, for a binormal distribution.
2. Find where on your distribution you tend to lie based on the encounters you have beated, probably in terms of standard deviations from the mean.
3. Find the corresponding point on the distributions for encounters you have not beaten.
The average is easy to find, the spread can probably be found with some Bayesian analysis. The major issue at hand is that a dozen encounters isn't necessarily a solid enough data set to get good data, but maybe. Also, to make sure you're not gumming up your initial data, make sure that you only include data in (1) that has data available for (3), so you're comparing yourself to the same groups in both cases.

This is one of those naive methods that ignores what you think actually matters and only looks at statistical performance. I have mixed feelings about that sort of theory, but they tend to work pretty well in a large number of domains. If you want, you can split fights apart by, say, DPS-checks, healer-checks, mobility fights, etc, but then you start having not enough encounters to find your average performance with any statistical significance.

Try it out. Wipe. Learn. Repeat.

Eventually you'll learn what to do with sparks. Pretty soon you'll want to stop them from getting to Malygos just to avoid his powerup. Then you'll learn they add to dps. You'll learn that you need a strategy to avoid most of the group from being breathed on after the vortex, and to keep health high due to vortex and other aoe damage.

Eventually you survive to phase 2. More trial and error as you work out what the discs do, and the bubble dynamics.

Once you make it to ph3, you'll know how far down the enrage timer you are, which gives you some idea how much dps you need to really have enough time in ph3. You'll learn about the stupid vehicle phase and somebody will remember that Aces High has a similar vehicle where people can practice.

Realistically though, only the first few guilds have to do it that way. Because of the internet, eveyrone else will have somebody on the raid who read a writeup somewhere so they have a basic idea what's going to happen. They'll still have to try it out to learn about tank survivability in ph1-2, raw raid dps in ph1 and all the ways to screw up the strat in all 3 phases that can lead to deaths.

But really..if you poke it and Malygos enrages in ph1 when the whole raid has survived, you don't have anywhere near enough dps. If you can't keep the raid or tank alive in ph1 when nobody is blowing up the raid you don' t have enough healing or sturdy enough tanks. The rest is just a learning experience for the raid on how not to screw up. This sort of thing you can pretty much get from wowhead. The damage Malygos does with his breaths is known, as is that of the adds in ph2, the area damage in ph1 from raw aoe damage+vortex etc. You should be able to gauge if that's too much for your healers based on past performance on other fights. His enrage timer and hitpoints are known, as are the limitations of the dragon mounts in PH3. That should give a sense of raid dps needed in ph1-2.

Ph1 is complicated by sparks. But you can look at something like Loatheb to get a sense of how good your crew is at taking advantage of those kinds of mechanics and assign some kind of multiplier to your patchwerk dps. PH2 seems to me the hardest to time, as it's highly dependent on your strategy for getting melees onto discs and how likely it is your ranged dps can actually target the stupid fliers while running around in bubbles. I can't think of another fight similar enough to that to do anything other than try it out and see how it goes.

The problem you're facing is that a "good indicator" is subjective and specific to your raid, your players. You could hypothetically compile a database of all guilds measuring these things, but ultimately you'd get the same generalizations you get anywhere else, with even less accuracy.

What you seem to want is, effectively, a purely binary answer to the question "Will we kill this boss if we attempt him now?" You're asking for a level of prognostication that no one but a veteran raid leader experienced specifically with your group of raiders can give you, from a tool which can't possibly understand the human elements in the system.

While the ideal of the resource you describe would be useful, realistically you're asking for the impossible. No matter how accurate we could make it you would still lack the concrete metrics you seek.

Maybe I am missing something, but you are going to be ready for Malygos when you have cleared Naxx. Sure, it might be hard if you are moving fast but you are ready to try. There is generally a pretty linear progression route and things like the Sapphiron quest are usually in place to make sure you don't do it the wrong way. Further, the bottlenecks on the path are generally very apparent; bosses with a harsh enrage for example. If everything else is dead and Malygos is the next boss on the list then what else are you going to do?

This sums it up for me; 'glasschewing' is exactly right and this is how you figure out if you can beat a boss. The most transparent and useful metrics for estimating success are going to be the broader ones like 'number of deaths' and 'average dps'. Tools like WWS and Failbot help a lot here. I really doubt that this would highlight different players than the very specific metrics that Douglas suggests. Although I would suggest 'number of times died in a void zone at KT or Sarth' and 'number of times died on Thaddius' as pretty good moron checks.

So far in WotLK, Blizzard has done a good job with this, but that's not necesssarily historically accurate. Take the end of BC--yes, when Sunwell came out, guilds who had been farming BT for months were ready, but was a guild who had just downed Illidan for the first time? Unequivocally no. It remains to be seen how much Naxx/Malygos gear is "sufficient" for Ulduar, but a new fresh 80 guild at 3.1 who sweeps into Naxx and clears it probably won't be ready for Ulduar on the same reset.

My point is that there's always a "gearing up" stage between progression plateaus. Those plateaus may not necessarily be the end of one raid and the beginning of another--early bosses in one raid are often easier than the end bosses in the previous one. To use my previous example, the real "gear plateau" was Brutallus, not Kalecgos. The idea behind this is to find out whether you've spent enough time gearing up to reach the next plateau, instead of wasting a night or two of 10 or 25 people faceplanting on a boss they're physically not ready for, but didn't really know without trying.

This is the most important thing to consider. I've played with a good majority of my raid group for the better part of 2+ years, so I'm very aware of what things certain players are good, or more importantly, not good at. Even if you're running a PuG, you should be able to get a good idea of what you can get away with a certain strat/boss after a couple attempts. This allows me to evaluate attempts on a new boss and pinpoint what is causing a wipe. When learning a new boss my priorities are as follows:

1) Keep the tank alive. A function of both healer capabilities and tank gear. This will allow you keep the fight going long enough to actually see any Important Mechanics(tm) even if you don't do the fight correctly.

2) Execute the strategy. This involves movement, positioning, assignment, and kill orders as needed.

3) Refine the strategy, Troubleshoot. If boss HP is still above 0%, go to Step 2, otherwise Go to Step 4.

4) Distribute epics, cheer wildly if boss was hard, laugh at Bob again for dieing, kill raid members with your opposite charge, and/or laugh at people looting badges in gas clouds/blizzards.

Step 2 and 3 are very important and will be the sole factor in answering the question: "Can we do this?" Answering it correctly takes some experience, and no amount of math modeling is going to answer it for you. Also, refining a strat doesn't end after a guild first. There is always room for improvement.

Alternatively, you could take the Homer approach: "Well, boy, you tried hard and you failed. The lesson here, never try."

[e] Not to take this too off topic, but a guild could most certainly progress in Sunwell after their first Illidan kill (yes, even Brutallus).

I disagree. My guild had killed Illidan about a month before Sunwell came out, for the first time. We were definitely "ready" for the content at that level-- we needed to practice a lot on Kalecgos, but it was definitely an execution issue rather than a gear issue. Had the guild not collapsed, we were on track to hit the DPS benchmark of Brutallus around the same time that our healing execution was pulling together. We wouldn't have spent any more time improving our gear while on Brut than we had learning to click our portals. Or learning Illidan, or Archimonde, or Bloodboil, or Kael, or Vashj.

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Completely disagree here. Transparent metrics do not exist.

Just using the Sarth example, I completely disagree. As a raid leader I've never viewed 3D Sarth as a DPS race. It's entirely a survival fight. Once people are easily able to avoid flame walls and void zones, the fight is about adds. Having a tank, or two, extra to grab the adds keeps people alive, and, as opposed to other fights, 3D Sarth gets easier the longer you stay alive.

There is no key to knowing whether or not you can do any single fight. You need to try, and adjust. I think "on the fly adjustments" are a key part to successful raiding, whether during a fight or in between wipes, changing people's jobs, making minor switches(We killed M'uru after switching the sides our tanks were on, because one tank just needed that extra distance to get adds under control and the other didn't, and killed 3D Sarth after moving our Sarth Tank as far away as possible to give everyone else more room), deciding when(and who) to battle rez, all of the little active things are very important as a raid leader. Anyone can explain a fight or read a Bosskillers strat. Good raid leaders adapt to the situations put infront of them.

hey I dont' really know where to ask that but since this thread was entitled "raiding theory" i thought that could be the place , feel free to indicate me if i'm wrong and plz where I could find my answer

Here's my problem :

I'm in a semi hadcore guild .We raid 12 hours a week, been clearing pretty much everything ( we're working on reg OS with 3 drakes alive atm).

My question concerns group composition. We cover every buffs every raid, we got a good mix of healers, dps but our tanking team consists of 3 warriors and 1 feral druid. Recently , one of our warrior decided to play his hunter since we find that we lacked some diversity with our tankin team.

Right now, we are facing two choices to promote one DK or to promote one Prot pally.

The DK asked first a long time ago but some people are saying that anyway tank or dps there's no point of promoting him since he could bring the same buffs and will provide aproximatively the same amount of threat than the prot paladin while the prot pally will give our raid Greater Blessing of Sanctuary.

Since I never played with either class as a MT or OT in a heroic raid, I'd like to have some insights on this very sensible question.

If you are working on Sarth+3D you should take the DK. Simply he is a better tank due to the number of cooldowns he has available to him to stay alive for the double breaths. Raidwide Sanctuary is perhaps overrated. 3% less damage taken is not going to save a healer who pulled whelps and doesn't get them taunted off. If you plan on trying to get sarth+3d take whoever is the better player, equally skilled/geared the DK will most likely be a better tank for the encounter.

Keep in mind, they already have a bear and it sounds like they're already working on 3 drake sarth, so I'm guessing they already have the MT situation for that fight covered. If that's the case, from a class standpoint it becomes a question of utility. I'm not really qualified to comment on that beyond the fact that either one would complement your existing tanks nicely as an AOE/offtank, but I will say that those considerations are probably overshadowed by the question of player skill and reliability. Ignore for a moment what class they play, and ask yourself which player you'd rather rely on.

This thread is fantastic.

One thing I wanted to contribute to the thread is my absolute dismay at the amount of critical mistakes people tend to make in this game. Before I continue, brief snippet of background info. I originally raided as a Rogue since day 1 of MC. My account was stolen, and rather than take a break during my retrieval downtime, I started filling in the shoes of our Molten Core and BWL raids when people weren't able to attend. Throughout the course of my entire first two years of raiding, I had access to over 30 accounts in my guild and had successfully tanked, healed and DPS'd every encounter up to Skeram. I retrieved my account and continued raiding half way through Naxx on my Rogue, before main swapping to fill the shoes of our retired Main Tank. I continued to Main Tank from Vanilla Naxxramas through to the end of TBC. I've since gone casual and no longer "raid", however i have attended pugs every fortnight or so and completed all current raiding content on my main and alts; including OS3D.

So, back to my original point. The first concern of mine is peoples' lack of priority management & attention. I remember wiping on Lucifron a dozen times each week because healers would stray from their assigned targets, with no explanation at all, whilst other classes would neglect decurses and dispels because they were busy doing other things. And I remember raids being cancelled after major patches due to the Decursive mod no longer working. I thought it was absolutely disgusting that I couldn't rely on our Mages/Druids/Paladins/Priests to raid without a mod. I remember the hours of writing guides on how to customise your CTRaid Frames to display only debuffs your class is capable of dispelling (god bless modern filters), and recording videos on how to decurse effectively. I remember recieving feedback on my video from a Priest which said, "Why do you have Dispel Hotkeyed as #1? How do you auto-attack?"

Moving away from bitter nostalgia, i've always historically visualised my raid members as these freaks of nature with twisted limbs, contorted into deformed masses of flesh with their heads turned towards the roof, eyes clenched shut and tongues flailing about violently and independently in unison with their mishapen tree-like arms as they assault their keyboard.
It was the only concievable explanation as to why I would see and hear the same horrifying mistakes, week after week. 99% of this game requires no foresight, no adaptation whatsoever. Each PvE encounter presents the raid with a set of pre-determined conditions, and as the player, it's your role to respond with the correct series of keystrokes in order to achieve victory. Having said that, I've never understood how a group of players can succeed once, and ever fail again. Very often, in some of my previous raids, it felt like each raid reset was also a mental reset for my group. Somehow that idiot Fury Warrior was never capable of simply standing still on C'thun. He'd be literally strafing side to side, as if he were the single bullet in a game of Russian Roulette between the players on either side of him. Even though I'd explain to him after 2 hours of wipes every week, we'd come back next reset and he'd be at it again. It blows my mind that even today, after over 4 years of raids, I still hear people asking other people, "What killed me?"

I can't believe the amount of times I heard myself saying on vent, "You did it last week. Why can't you do it again?!" It's not like the game constantly introduces new and unique concepts. Dispel the debuff. Kick the heal. Taunt the boss. AoE the adds. Move out of the fire/AoE. Avoid the really slowly moving beam. Spread out. Bunch up. Stop DPS. I'm pretty sure I just described 95% of the encounters since the dawn of WoW PvE. There's no reason why guilds shouldn't kill most bosses on their first attempt, especially after they've killed it once before. You know what to expect! If you've avoided 1 void zone, you should never die to one ever again. If you've dodged a lava wave, there's no reason why you should ever be hit by one. If you've completed the Safety Dance once, you clearly know what to do. I think back to which bosses caused my guild the most grief... and these are the ones that come to mind. Geddon Bomb. Chromaggus dispels. Kurinaxx sand traps. Mandokir whirlwind. Hakkar corrupted blood. C'thun red beam. Spreading out on Gruul. A'lar Flame Patches. Lurker blue beam. Netherspite green beam. Solarian bomb. Magtheridon cubes. Gorefiend constructs. Zul'jin whirlwind. Archimonde tears. Illidari Council Blizzard & Flamestrike. Kalecgos portals. Twins ledge. Felmyst breaths/beam. Sapphiron bomb. Kel'Thuzad void zones. Thaddius polarity. Ugh. See a pattern here?

Sometimes I fear that interface mods & add-ons bring equal amounts of good and evil into a raid environment. There are some fantastic tools out there which can really improve the quality of raiding. But when you look at those threads on your guild forums like, "Post your UI!", and you look at some of the garbage people tend to put together, it explains alot. Whether it's the Priest who has his raidframes distributed randomly around his screen, or the Mage who has Decurse bound to #9 on his bar... simple clues like this can make you slap your forehead and say, "Duuuuuh!" Then you find the odd gems who have a HUD (with artwork) and SCT add-on (with some ridiculous font) configuration populating the entire centre of their screen, and it becomes perfectly clear how Jimmy the Holy Paladin is always the first to die, without having used his bubble. One of my closet frustrations are people who use mods such as Bartender and insist on leaving their bags bar visible, especially when they're using a mod such as OneBag or Bagnon. And finally there's the people with at least 2 enormous chat boxes taking up at least 30% of their entire screen, with a 0% transparency black background... it's like sticking a pair of doormats to your car windscreen and wondering why you keep driving into obstacles.

The fact that there are (alot of) people out there who are entirely oblivious to basic common sense was the prime drive behind my retirement from raiding. Eventually you become so sick and tired of holding idiots' hands and repeating yourself. Sometimes I think that if you took 25 guild/raid leaders from any random server, and put them all together, you'd have the most efficient raiding powerhouse imaginable.

I cannnot agree more.
Last week we killed Sarth+3 the first time after trying it for.. 4 raiding days. The raid from the go seemed concentrated and focused, everyone buffed without me yelling (it´s oh so atricious if you have to remember the priests, mages, AND Druids to freakin' use their buffs!) and we constantly progressed in the encounter until the early kill that evening. Everyone was happy, yesterdays raid seemed to have a good setup, so we tried it again.
It was craptastic. I still wonder how 6 Healer don´t manage to heal the encounter. I struggle to comprehend how people can die BEFORE or just after TENEBRON lands. Especially if those were people present on the first kill last week. If you execute your read leading dutys while coming out top3 on DPS in the encounter without failing for 10 times in a row you just want to beat up that guy that doesnt' survive the very first Fire Wall / Void Zone.

.....

I start to fear 3.1 and the release of Uldar.

A lot of the above listed problems seem to be related to dumb raiders. If they can't be bothered to correct simple mistakes or assemble a UI in a logical way, then you either need to leave the guild or help recruit better raiders. 99% of problems in raiding guilds can be fixed by simply recruiting more. If a guy isn't improving from week to week and he's still making glaring mistakes - then why are you keeping him around? Why haven't you given a new applicant a try instead yet?

While I agree Jagiya on a lot of points, his experiences seem to indicate he's a masochist. You just sound so ... angry at your former guildmates. I have been managing a guild for a few years and if there's one thing I can't stand it's whiney raiders. They're typically among the better players in my raid and they just can't stop complaining about some of the mistakes that other players make. Sometimes, it's easy to fix - just swap this guy out for a guy on standby. Other times, it isn't "But if we remove him we won't have a Decurse - how are we going to do Noth now?



I feel exactly the opposite here. The faster you kill the drakes, the less damage your raid takes. The fewer elementals and whelps spawn. The easier it is to tank. Less of a chance of getting hit by a void zone or a fire wall. Less of a chance of the Sartharion tank not having a cooldown ready for the next breath.

We did 3 Drakes the first time with 7 healers and 4 tanks. I think we had two waves of whelps and Shadron was only at 80%ish when Tenebron landed. This meant several minutes of dealing with Twilight Torment. Not to mention the DPS hadn't realized the concept of stop attacking so that they wouldn't kill themselves. Needless to say, it was a lot of raid damage and certainly stressful on the tank healers. You run the risk of your drake tank getting the dreaded "Double Breath + Double Melee Hit" - if you're not fast on your toes it always feels like he was one shot.

This week, we did 3 Drakes with 4 healers and 3 tanks. One of them was an elemental shaman who DPSd Tenebron. Tenebron dead before whelps. Shadron dead before Vesperon lands. No danger at all from twilight torment damage. No danger of the Drake tank getting Double Breathed because he was never actually tanking two drakes. No danger of the tank getting one shot because we never had to deal with Shadron Acolyte + Vesperon Acolyte. The fight felt like a joke.

Part of what makes the 10man so difficult is the fact that you cannot bring as many DPS as the 25man. You get a small number of healers spread very thin and they have to sustain the raid for a much more extended period of time because of the lower DPS.

Patchwerk 1.0 or Brutallus were DPS races. The concept is that almost nobody dies, but you can and will wipe if you don't meet a more or less steep output level.
Illidari Council, Bloodboil and Archimonde were all survival fights. The kind of fight you could do with 20 people, IF those 20 people lived long enough to do their jobs.
Geddon, Gorefiend, and others were gimmick fights. Small tricks that make your strategies for the fight.
Then there was Loatheb 1.0, Kael'Thas, Illidan, C'thun and the old 4 Horsemen. Those were, above all, coordination fights.

Sarth +3 is all of them. You need to be able to dodge a lot of stuff and still pull out some phenomenal dps for the first two drakes. Then there's the gimmick portals. And finally you need some people to properly respond to flame breaths if the tank is out of his; the off tanks to properly keep an eye out on the healers, the plate dps to grab the portal add first, and so forth.
That's basically all the 'magic' of the fight. It's a series of simple tasks, stacked together until they amount to some degree of complex environment.

It bothers me when people resort to referring to their raiders as dumb or gets angry at them for general incompetence. Aside from the fact that it almost invariably affects the morale of the group when the leader thinks they're all terrible, it completely prevents growth. The problem is very rarely that people aren't intelligent or skilled enough to get the job done because, as you say, WoW is not really that hard. The problem I see is generally that a player doesn't care enough, doesn't have the right priorities (discussed at length earlier in the thread), has some mechanical limitation (PC performance, for example), are stuck in a bad habit (like displaying a useless bar on their screen that just takes up space), or simply hasn't taken the time to learn exactly what they're supposed to be doing. Let me give you a case study to demonstrate the last point.

Early last year, my strictly 10-man guild teamed up with another guild to do some joint 25-man raids. One of the players in the other run was completely new to MMOs, and was playing partially to spend time with her significant other, also in said other guild. When we first started those runs, she was terrible. I'm talking 250-300 DPS as a warlock in mid-BC. Fast forward six months and she was top 5-10 DPS on her new guild's Illidan kills, and would sometimes be the warlock tank instead of just pure DPS. I don't think she'll ever be capable of top 10 world caliber play, but she honestly wanted to learn and do better and just didn't know how until some people gave her some direction. She's one of many players I've encountered who aren't bad because they're simply bad, but because they don't know any better and it just took someone who hadn't already given up on them.

Now, that's a different story than people who are still standing in void zones months into WotLK or not bothering to use their Decurse/poison/etc buttons, for example. However, I guarantee that (with maybe a few exceptions), each one of those players is capable of doing it right but either just haven't been given the right motivation, or they have their UI set up dumbly. I don't understand why, but "not wiping" isn't sufficient motivation for more people than you would think. Part of it is the extremely easy content causing people to be complacent and not paying attention because "Oh, the fight is easy anyway, they can deal with me being lazy." I think part of it is not wanting to expend that much thought and effort into a game they play for fun. For those people, it's up to the raid leader to find some new way to motivate his or her raiding force, either through fun challenges or whatever works for that specific group.