Month: January 2015

7 Things a Raid Leader Needs to Succeed

Kurn / / leadership, raiding

A raid leader’s job is terribly important when you look at World of Warcraft. The raid leader is, at least symbolically, the reason your raid team succeeds or fails.

Thus, the success of your raid team relies on the success of your raid leader. Probably.

Gathered from my own experiences, here, then, are seven things that most (all?) raid leaders need.

1) The desire, vision, energy and time to lead a group of individuals through raid instances. Seems a little obvious, I know, but if you’re missing any of these things, you will fail. If you’re not giving it your all, if you’re not doing everything you can to improve your raid team, you will almost certainly fail.

This means reading strats, tweaking strats, examining logs, explaining what happened on various attempts and fixing the issues that didn’t allow you to get the boss down. Perhaps it will be in the wee hours of the morning, perhaps it will be during your lunch break at work, maybe it’ll be while you’re supposed to be paying attention in class… It needs to be done. If you’re not ready to put in the time and energy, if you don’t have the desire or vision to drag people through, kicking and screaming as they go, then you probably don’t want to be a raid leader.

2) A great support system, both in and out of the game. If your guild isn’t supporting you, you won’t have a chance. Your guild officers need to work with you to build the team. Your officers are a huge part of the team and if you don’t have officers who are willing to work with you, who are willing to help research things or to help talk to people or to help organize people within the raids themselves, forget it.

You also need to be able to vent about your frustrations outside of the game, to someone who doesn’t really know all these people you’re dealing with. It can be a friend, a partner, a sibling, anyone, but the farther removed they are from the game, the better. It’s theraputic to vent.

3) A good understanding of the raid group. Look, you can only work with what you’ve got. If you have a resto shaman who never does anything apart from chain healing the melee, short of replacing them, you have to deal with them. That might mean just assigning them to stand there and heal the melee. Similarly, your group might be collectively terrible at encounters where you have to move (spreading out, collapsing, etc). You have to adjust for this. Change assignments, change requirements, change the strategy so that you give your team (your team) the best chance of success.

4) A good understanding of the game’s mechanics and past encounters. What helped me tremendously as a raid leader was finding similarities between different fights. So when I was fighting, I don’t know, Ultraxion in Dragon Soul, it was a lot like fighting Patchwerk in Naxxramas, with just the extra button push for Heroic Will. Being aware of how council-type fights work is a huge bonus. Understanding that jumping out of fire is generally a bad plan can be useful. Knowing the various cooldowns available to your team’s classes is key.

5) The tools for the job. By this, I mean something like Raid Buff Status, which is amazing to see who’s buffed, who’s not, who’s eaten or flasked, who’s not and the like. I also mean making sure you’re logging your fights, through a combat log parser such as (my preferred) Warcraft Logs. Definitely spend some time going through your logs. Analysis is key to improvement. (What are some of your favourite raid leader addons and tools? Comment below!)

6) The ability to let someone know that they’re just not cutting it. This is one of the harder parts of the job, but sometimes, you have to tell that resto shaman that they need to do more or risk being replaced. There’s no need to be personal about it, although it will almost certainly be taken that way, but rely on facts and be kind. You never know when someone will redouble their efforts because you let them know that even though they’re not doing the job right now, you believe in them. Give them a reasonable deadline to show improvement and if they improve, let them know how impressed you are. If they haven’t improved, at least you gave them a shot.

7) Raid team members to lead. Face it, without a raid team, you’re just another know-it-all in LFR who has no one listening to them. Always treat your members with respect, always emphasize that the team as a whole comes before individuals and know that you are just a few /gquits away from being That Guy ordering people around in LFR. What makes you a leader is that you are leading your team. Your team. Treat them well. Even that resto shaman.

Hope that was helpful! Share with me your suggestions for various addons and such a raid leader might want to use. Tell me a story about That Resto Shaman who insists on just healing melee with chain heal. What are some of your favourite raid encounters and why?

On Competition, Winning and Being Stubborn

Kurn / / guild, ramblings

If you’ve been reading this blog for even five minutes, you may have gotten the impression that I am a stubborn person.

If you’ve been reading this blog for longer than that, you know I’m a very stubborn person.

You may also have gathered that I am someone who tends to care about winning — at least in the sense of getting a team win. (Winning stuff as an individual, while I’m in a team, doesn’t really matter much to me. Winning stuff individually when I’m not in a team setting, of course, is nice.)

A lot of people who play World of Warcraft are competitive and enjoy “winning”, whatever “winning” means to them. That’s fine. That’s great, even. If people didn’t enjoy winning, people wouldn’t even play this game. Every time someone tops damage or healing meters, I’m sure they’re psyched because they “won”. Every time a boss dies, people have “won”. There’s a lot of competition baked into the game and the developers leverage that personality trait of ours, the desire to win, to get us to do all kinds of things.

However, the fact that so very many of us are competitive also works against us.

Winning Isn’t Everything

Winning isn’t everything, “they” say. Whoever “they” are, “they” are right. That said, it seems silly to think that there’s no reason you shouldn’t be winning regularly in World of Warcraft, right? I mean, once you get your gear and have practiced your rotation or your role or whatever, chances are good that you ought to win in whatever you’re doing on a pretty consistent basis, right? Isn’t that what farm bosses in raids are all about, after all? I mean, you work hard to get to the point where you know what you’re doing and then you win. Consistently. (Well, hopefully.)

Winning seems to be the very point of World of Warcraft, no? Races for world-firsts, server-firsts, top of the arena rankings, best challenge mode times… the list goes on.

Wanting to “win”, though, harms the communication process a great deal. As someone who can be inordinately stubborn (whether that’s because I’m a Taurus or it’s just a character flaw I embrace because a Taurus is supposed to be stubborn, I am unsure), I had a bad habit as a guild leader, of which I absolutely had to rid myself: I had a tendency to want to win arguments.

WRONG.

So wrong.

So very, very wrong.

This is wrong on the same level as a hunter wearing cloth spirit gear and wielding two one-handed swords.

This is wrong on the same level as not moving out of the fire.

So. Very. Wrong.

Why is it wrong? you may ask.

It’s wrong because, believe it or not, you are not always right.

Sorry. It’s true. I know this because I tend to be right a good proportion of the time, and yet I can still be wrong. So if I can be wrong (and I can be!), you can be wrong, too.

Unfortunately, the problem with being “wrong” is that sometimes you don’t know it. And because you don’t always know it, you may be tempted to dig in your heels and… yes, be stubborn.

If you want to do that in real life, go ahead. I can’t say you’re going to make a ton of friends that way, but it’s your choice.

However, if you try to pull that as a guild leader, raid leader, guild officer… that’s when you’re going to have trouble.

The Needs of the Many…

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. So says Spock. And we can’t really argue with Spock, can we? (No, we can’t.)

What this post is really driving at is the concept that, if you’re in an argument with someone about guild-related stuff, you need to step back and take as objective a look as you can and try to see if what you’re doing is going to benefit the guild.

Are you arguing because you want to be right or are you arguing because you want to do what’s right for the guild? These are not always the same thing.

Even more frustrating, arguments can get heated and suddenly, you’re pitted against someone else in your guild. Not only does logic typically fly out the window in these scenarios, but suddenly the argument becomes less about whatever it is you’re arguing about, and becomes more about beating the other person. That’s what we do, right? We’re competitive. We want to win. Winning means that someone else loses. Whether it’s a boss or a PVP opponent… or even our guildmates and fellow officers.

This is precisely the wrong mindset to have. As a leader, one needs to make quick shifts in mindset. One moment, you may be trying your best to down a boss, the next, you may be arguing with your officers about the best strategy to ensure people don’t inappropriately soak Twilight Barrages on 25m Heroic Blackhorn…


Whatever the case, you need to stop being competitive when you start talking to other people. You need to slow down, calm down and listen to what they’re saying and then, regardless of how much you don’t want to, you may have to concede that the other person is right.

It’s Not Easy

Well, it’s not easy for me. And if you’re remotely competitive at all, it’s not going to be easy for you. But this is why I recommend that you do not surround yourself with “yes men” as officers. You want that other perspective, you want that dissenting opinion, if only to point out that there are other ways of looking at various problems.

It can lead to tempers flaring, it can lead to that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize that you were wrong, but… if it leads to something better for the guild, isn’t it worth it?

Yup. It is.

So the next time you’re arguing with someone about guild stuff, take a second to look at the situation from another perspective. Understand why you’re digging in. Try to figure out if your wanting to be right, if your desire to win, is because you just want to be right or if it’s because that’s what you think is best for your guild.

(I promise you, it gets easier with practice!)