The Hidden Raid Problem No One Talks About: Instant Defensiveness

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Here I am in the middle of a week, watching Max undergo another reclear before the Diablo 4 expansion was slated to launch. He gets to a part where he’s watching another guild go through their kill of Midnight Falls. But take a listen and watch what happens.

This raid just cleared the entire tier and secured their CE.

Instead of celebrating, players immediately started defending themselves about misplays or other errors.

“Yeah I died there because…”
“That wasn’t my fault…”
“I got screwed by…”

No one really paused to acknowledge the kill. That positive moment just seemed to dissipate and fade out.

The raid went straight into deflection. If you’re seeing this in your raid, it’s not just a one-off behavior. It’s now a team-wide cultural issue.

The Instinct to Defend

This type of behaviour doesn’t come out of nowhere. Players don’t wake up one day and decide to deflect responsibility after a kill. It usually builds up over time for a variety of reasons:

  • Fear of being called out: No one likes to be criticized in front of everyone else.
  • Fear of losing a raid spot: No one wants to get permanently benched.
  • Past experiences with harsh criticism: We’re talking harsh, toxic environments, making the game generally unfun.
  • A culture where mistakes are punished instead of being learned from: This can range from being made fun of or teased mercilessly.

So what happens?

Players get conditioned to protect themselves first by justifying what happened or blaming things beyond their control. It happens even in moments where it doesn’t matter anymore (like killing the final boss).

Why This Is a Bigger Problem Than It Looks

At first glance, it might seem harmless. Who cares if someone explains why they died after a kill? We need to take a step back though and re-examine this.

If your team feel the need to immediately justify themselves, it means:

  • They don’t feel safe making mistakes
  • They assume blame is coming
  • They prioritize self-preservation over team success
  • They’re mentally stuck in “defense mode” instead of “growth mode”

That has consequences. Teams that operate like this will end with one (or all) of the following:

  • They learn slower
  • They communicate worse
  • They take feedback personally
  • They spend more time assigning blame than solving problems

You can’t build a high-performing raid like that, and you end up with a raid team that’s stuck in early or mid mythic without the tools needed to progress past that.

The Missed Opportunity After a Kill

Post-kill moments are important.

They’re when you:

  • Reinforce good habits. Highlight positive game play from people and recognize them when they’re correctly done.
  • Identify real learning points. Show where people “got it” and spread it to the rest of the team.
  • Celebrate progress. The team got a new best (even if it’s a new phase or a lower percentage).
  • Reset the team mentally. From despair to excitement.

If your raid immediately turns into a courtroom, you lose all of that.

Instead of:

“Nice job, clean that up the adds next pull, and we can see more.”

You get:

“Let me explain why that wasn’t my fault.”

Now you’ve wasted everyone’s time.

Freedom to Fail Is a Competitive Advantage

One of the things Max mentioned is that they had to actively correct this behaviour early in their guild’s history.

They made it clear:

  • It’s okay to die
  • It’s okay to mess up
  • Not every mistake needs a full breakdown
  • If it’s not new or useful, move on

That’s the key. Say it with me!

Not every mistake deserves airtime.

If the team already understands the mechanic and what went wrong, rehashing it doesn’t help. It just slows you down and creates tension. High-end teams don’t obsess over every individual mistake. They focus on patterns and meaningful improvements. I don’t know how long your team raids for, but both of mine only go for six hours a week.

What Your Team Should Actually Be Doing Instead

After a kill, your raid should look more like this:

  • Quick acknowledgment of the kill
  • Identify one or two real issues if needed (or flag it for next week)
  • Move on

That’s it.

Not every death needs a speech, and not every mistake needs a defence.

If it’s something new, sure, call it out and learn from it. Absolutely make it a learning lesson for everyone, especially if someone died in a completely new way or missed a mechanic that’s crucial the first time. Go over it once, and talk about it as a team so they know what to expect and how to handle it if it ultimately does happen again. Certain things are worth drilling and repeating until the team gets it, but that doesn’t apply to all mistakes.

If it is already understood, it is wasting precious raid time.

How to Fix It in Your Own Raid

If you’re seeing this behaviour, it needs to be addressed directly.

1. Set the Expectation

Tell your team clearly:

  • You don’t need to defend every mistake
  • Not every death needs an explanation
  • Focus on team improvement, not individual justification

2. Change What You Reinforce

If you constantly call out individuals harshly, players will naturally start defending themselves.

Instead:

  • Focus on solutions
  • Keep feedback concise
  • Avoid turning every mistake into a lecture

Actually, call out the positives. Talk about what you liked. Name players individually who did something good (even if it’s during the pull), and recognize their effort or moves.

3. Protect the Post-Kill Moment

Don’t let it spiral.

If someone starts going into a long defense after a kill, cut ’em off.

“Doesn’t matter. Boss is dead. We’ll clean it up next time.”

We use Warcraft Recorder to capture our game play. It’s not something that needs to be immediately reviewed and it can be looked at after the raid is over. Celebrate the wins, since that’s the tone you want.

4. Normalize Mistakes

Make it clear that mistakes are expected and understood especially in progression. If players feel like every error is being judged, they’ll always be on edge. The team needs to relax and play loosely when starting out.

And that leads right back to defensive behavior.

If your team kills a boss and the first reaction is panic and justification instead of celebration, something is off. That doesn’t mean your players are bad. It means that the raid culture needs adjustment. The best teams aren’t the ones that never make mistakes. They’re the ones that don’t waste time pretending they didn’t.

I’m fortunate enough that this hasn’t happened in my raids yet. But if my team starts pre-emptively defending themselves before I ask questions, I’ve got my lecture in the back pocket ready to come out. If I were to put money on it, I expect it’d be one of my healers trying to present themselves in a positive light but addressing their own shortcomings right away. My first response is going to be, “I didn’t ask! Simmer down! You goofed, that’s okay, this isn’t a deposition!”

Matt’s Notebook: We’re on to Crown!

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I can’t believe it’s May already. This last week just flew right by. Between the Diablo 4 expansion and Heroes of Might and Magic early access, there was so much for me to do. I didn’t even play any Battlefield this past week. It was another solid progression week, though. Let’s dive into it, shall we?

  • Death Jesters just started working on Crown of the Cosmos this week. We had one look into phase 3, which is the furthest we’ve gotten. There are a few scary overlaps, but with the upcoming nerf this week, we’ll most likely defeat it and start work on the big firebird soon.
  • Last Call makes some big strides this week and overcomes the dragons, putting us officially at 5/9 Mythic, and we’re over halfway to our goal of getting that CE for this opening tier. I felt that we should’ve killed it earlier. We came close to it a few times on Sunday night, but had some consistency issues. There are a few players who need to work on just general game sense and survivability. Having the awareness that not only is a fear breath coming and they have to get it out of the raid, but they have to find a spot to safely get to where they can be dispelled within range of healers. Our gloom positionings were great, and even if we had players go down, we were able to audible with backup players stepping in to help with those soaks.
  • We’re on to Paladins now, and we spent the better part of our second raid night just working on taunt swaps, positioning, and getting a feel for dispels. Our best pull was about 40%. Logs are showing that about a third of the kills here use six healers, while the rest are done with five healers. I’m a bit torn as to which way to go. We don’t have a dedicated sixth healer, and if we were to do that, I would have to step in and switch specs on my Shaman (who doesn’t have the stats or the trinkets to really go healing). My damage is fairly low here, so I’m just thinking about it. I don’t need to play at the absolute best, but if I can manage to help stay on top of dispels while contributing healing, that might be enough. I also wanted to give some well-deserved flowers to our bait team. They did a commendable job baiting out the charges once they got into a rhythm. There were a few charges that were missed, but they got the idea.
  • Now, the next question is at what point should we start considering raid extensions? I don’t know if we’re quite there yet. There’s still some lucrative gear. We didn’t even get any trinkets from Dragons today, even with all the bonus rolls that were used, which was disappointing. Maybe once we clear Paladins, we can start doing lockout extensions.
  • In Diablo 4, I made a Spiritborn. Campaign was great, probably one of the better storylines I’ve played in a long time. The end game is much more enjoyable. My only struggle is in finding a build that I like playing. I might switch classes and reroll to a Paladin or something instead.
  • Last thing I want to touch upon is Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era. Reminds me of when I was a kid again playing Heroes 3. Such a fun game and this new version is a lot of fun. Highly recommend it if you’ve played it before. The early access grants six factions.

I’m still looking to add some Aug Evokers to the team!

Matt’s Notebook: That AotC Full Clear

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It’s really hard to lead and call a raid when you’re sick, you know? I’ve been coughing non-stop for over a week on a diet of lozanges, tea, and Buckley’s. Not sure if people outside of Canada are aware of it, but it’s a cough syrup that tastes really awful, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t effective and relieves symptoms for a while. Alright, lets get to it shall we?

  • Death Jesters clears Vanguard. I was in for progression as relief a few times. This is a boss where it’s more ideal to play Farseer instead of Stormbringer. Ultimately, I wasn’t in on the kill but I did gain some first hand experience on it.
  • Last Call crushes Midnight Falls on heroic, and we get that coveted Ahead of the Curve achievement. We’re basically done with Heroic for the tier and can now strictly focus on Mythic from here on out.
  • After Midnight Falls, we popped back over to Voidspire Mythic to start working on Dragons. It’s much simpler than I expected it to be. Our best pull so dragons go down to about 23%. DJs killed it the first time within 13 pulls. I didn’t think we’d be as fortunate.
  • We had a spirited discussion on dispels on Imperator. I didn’t think they were a problem, but one of my healers was disgruntled about it. I looked into it further. We get six debuffs, but only four need to be cleared (two on the first add, and two on the second add). I can’t see any consequence to leaving up the final two or even delaying removing them. Whenever the player gets dispelled, there’s a 10-second dot debuff that gets applied anyway. In my mind, it’s okay to leave the final 2 dispels up and stagger them a bit to spread out the incoming damage anyway. No real resolution here, and it only came up because I was trying to trim from 4 healers to 3 healers in order to accelerate out of that fight quicker. The next dispel heavy fight with Paladins at least has a Weakaura (or M33kauras) that can assign and dictate dispels accordingly for people, thank goodness for that. But if this discussion keeps up, a definite attitude check is going to be in order here.
  • We’re going to need a second healing Monk for Vanguard. We’re fortunate that one of our healers is also quite alt-driven and happens to have a 280+ Monk lying around just waiting.

This is going to be a rough week for me. The new Diablo 4 expansion just came out last night. Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era debuts later this week. Not only that, there’s a new Two Point Museum DLC that’s releasing soon! There goes my time!!

Matt’s Notebook: Regicide (again)!

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We’re back for another edition of the raid notebook and some quick thoughts.

  • Another DJs reclear of Dragons: We managed to reclear Dragons again the second time around. Our first clear only took a whopping 13 pulls, which was far less than what I anticipated. For the record, I thought it would’ve taken triple that amount, perhaps in the 30+ range. They’ve left a blueprint for my guys in Last Call to see if we can follow. I doubt we can do it in 13, but under 30 is not impossible. We did end up putting more work on Paladins this week, but due to some logistical shortcomings (one of our players did not get the assigned Meekauras for Paladins as they were instructed, and another healer didn’t indicate they’d be away). This led to some tension in the raid because boss man was incredibly annoyed. I don’t blame him either, as I’d be pissed too.
  • Last Call knocks out Mythic Nexus King and Heroic Bel’oren: We ended up burning Vantus runes on Mythic Salhadaar with these back-to-back 4% wipes. I just wanted to get it down and over with. It’s a hard one with all of the orbs and everything on screen. Very possible to lose visual sight of where your primary orb target is, and I had to make extensive use of the boss frames to target and track it down. I started off with a Mistweaver but quickly made the substitution for a Resto Shaman instead for the extra Spirit Link stability. The Mythic Dreamrift reclear could’ve been better, but I’ve started rotating in newer people who have not seen it yet, so that they can get reps on it and open their vault up for Gazes. There’s still a lot of work to do in minimizing silly mistakes even on farm. We’ll still wipe to early Mythic bosses and it’s always something different, but it’s a result of just sloppy play or absentmindedness. One of my challenges is to try to keep everyone playing at capacity for 5 minutes everytime. We can’t coast through everything just yet. With the time remaining, I felt it was prudent to clear out March. Belo’ren took us about 3 pulls, but it was what I expected. It’s hard to script this one since there are a lot of random elements involved. With Midnight Falls, we saw the 2nd phase just once. It took about 20 minutes to troubleshoot the installs of the Northern Sky Lura map. We had errors ranging from incorrect file placement, or appended file extensions, etc. Crystal damage and grouping needs more attention and reps. There’s a lot of coordination that goes on here, but I’d rather do this now than come back to it later on Mythic (and be in a position to relearn Heroic mechanics on top of Mythic ones).
  • Questioning of progression order: I’ve never experienced so much pushback when I wanted to go pursue Heroic March. The feedback I received was that the team would rather continue goiing after Mythic bosses. I understand the sentiment, but I felt it was better for long term growth to at least clear and cap out the Heroic raid tier. It at least gets us that 9/9 Heroic credit. We’ve already started our heroic raid nights at Paladins (with the skip). We’d drop Heroic Dreamrift, but Gaze is still too valuable. We’re at the point where we can drop Heroic Voidspire altogether. There will be limited opportunities for the entire team to raid together as is (between the 3 Heroic bosses including March). I want to still do that to help maximize our team’s play time to that extent before it gets shortened as we progress into Mythic. I’ve never seen Sparty get this kind of pushback when he was laying out the direction for bosses to go after. All of us in DJs weren’t that opinionated about it, and we just did as we were told. The content wasn’t hard, and we’d streamroll it within a few pulls anyway so we could quickly get back to where we were on prog. We don’t need the extra gear to clear out the Heroic Midnight Falls, but we do need time to learn it. Gear from Midnight Falls is still relevant and impactful now (including rings, necks, and trinkets), so it can help our progression on the later Mythic Voidspire stuff before it gets outclassed by gear acquired from the vault. Our raid team is progressing faster than where we were last season with an all-new tank roster, a revamped healing roster, and half our DPS on turnover.
  • Raider Self-Improvement and Trial Feedback: I might have to expand on this topic later, but it was brought up internally about some of our newer players and the steps they take for self-improvement. Do we have knowledge that they are reviewing logs, and making the necessary adjustments to on subsequent weeks?

    No, it’s assumed.

    My stance is that we should make this information and feedback visible to them so that they are aware that they could do better. The opposing stance is that the players should just know and do their own work. I prefer a hybrid model because it demonstrates that we’re aware of their low performance and that we can offer some guidance on what areas to upskill themselves on. If we don’t say anything and take their performance at face value, it hurts both the team and the player because there’s no meaningful feedback. The rest of the team then gets upset and frustrated at each other. The affected player could just have no idea that they’re not performing at their capability. Sometimes the fix can be something as easy as being reassigned to a different target or adjusting their CDs to be more impactful. I don’t like the idea of just assuming and expecting everyone knows what they’re doing wrong. That may work well at a Hall of Fame level, but we’re no where close to that. We still have a myriad of players that are looking to make that AotC jump to CE and haven’t internalized how to self-improve. At DJs, the team likes to stick around after raid or during the week and go over logs with each other just for an extra set of eyes. We’ll even look at our raid videos to see what we could’ve done better on movement or how we can eke out more damage. I’d like to implement something similar, but I just don’t have the bandwidth or the smarts to really pull it off. I can’t expect the team to take me seriously when my Shaman’s damage is not as high as it should be either. I always start off strong out of the gate before the damage just starts falling off over the course of the fight. I have a suspicion it might be related to my bindings. I don’t know.
  • Mythic Flex: More on this later, but Blizzard did announce the next small raid is going to have a scalable raid component between 15 and 25 players. Pretty neat idea and is a nice way to bridge that gap for AotC guilds who’ve run out of things to do and want to take on another challenge. I have my own thoughts and on this, but I’ll save that for a different post later.
  • Last Call Roster: We’re holding firm at 25 players right now after we had that 2 week turnover. Our Evoker Healer has switched to a Holy Paladin. Now we’re entirely Evoker-less. I’d love to add a pair of Aug Evokers onto the team though. Those are also hard to come by.
  • New Patch: The big feature I’m looking forward to is that Voidforge stuff with the extra bonus rolls. I know I’ll mostly be spending mine in M+ for that damned Feather out of Windrunner on my Shaman.

Enjoy the new patch today!

Matt’s Notebook: More Midnight Addons and Progression Updates

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I’ve updated my addons page for Midnight. There aren’t any WeakAuras, but it feels like I’ve tripled the number of addons being used for this expansion. There are a few quality of life addons in there, but nothing absolutely required.

It’s been several weeks, and things have calmed down. The blitz to grind a bajillion keys has leveled off and returned to normal. Here’s the team update!

In DJs, we’re now 5/8 Mythic, having defeated the Dragons in 13 pulls. That one was incredibly eye-opening. It looked way more complicated on paper. The triple tank strat comes in clutch here with two Blood Death Knights controlling orbs. Moving on to Paladins means we need to activate that fifth healer.

Meanwhile, in Last Call, after having about 5 players depart the team, we were able to quickly replenish our roster. They helped net us an extra boss, which propelled us to 3/9 Mythic with Mythic Dreamrift cleared. We logged a lot of shots in on Nexus King, but could not close that one out in the last hour. From a recruiting standpoint, the last piece I’m absolutely looking for is another Aug Evoker. We haven’t even stepped foot into March yet, but now is the time. We were so focused on securing those Mythic kills early on and there weren’t a lot of gear upgrades from March. We’re in a good position to do it now since we can start taking more bosses out of Heroic Voidspire.

I’ll admit, I have not been happy with my own Shaman play as of late. I think I’m having a hard time with timing Master of the Elements. I’m so busy casting, I sometimes miss the procs and end up sending a Tempest without casting Lava Burst before it (to get Master of the Elements active beforehand). I usually open up with a strong start, but my damage tails off as the fight progresses.

Good luck with vaults!