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Pros and Cons of Recruiting the Raid Leader

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recruiting-raid-leader

This is the most important position you’ll ever fill throughout the entirety of your guild’s existence. In fact, it is so important, guilds will often disband if there isn’t a competent nor capable one. If working on farm content, raids can typically get by with zero to minimal guidance. Everyone runs by the same playbook and routine strategies are done without any problems (usually).

But once you hit progression content, you’re going to be stuck. If your raid is leaderless, it’s going to be painful and you need a plan.

So, do people really recruit raid leaders? In many cases, the guild leader and raid leader are one and the same. There are some exceptions (such as in Conquest where the positions are separated). But back to the original question: Do people recruit raid leaders?

Typically, most raiding guilds do not. Raid leaders are usually promoted from within. There are two basic things I look for when deciding on a raid leader. Without these two qualities, I skip and move on entirely.

  • Competency: Now this encompasses a wide range of leadership skills. I just lump them all together in here for the sake of simplicity. These are things including but not necessarily limited to skills, charisma, vision, tactics, and so forth. Basically, does this player have what it takes to lead and deliver the necessary results?
  • Desire: Do they actually want to do it?

And that second point is a super important question. That raid leading wannabe you want to quarterback your raids might be the perfect person to do it. But if she has no interest or desire, it’s not going to work.

Where do I go to get raid leaders from?

In a nutshell, either you have a sleeper raid leader within the guild who emerges to take the flag when things look grim or you look outward and see if you can fish up one.

Option 1: Promoting from within the guild

These are usually the players that have stood by you for a long time. The existing raid leader left a void to fill. There could be people from inside who are looking for a chance to step up and take a larger role within the guild. Or it could be that they sense the guild is on the road to failure unless someone takes over and that person wants to be the one to do it.

Again, your group may run into the problem of not having the right person who can do the job. A skilled player who is familiar with the game and their class might not have the appropriate leadership qualities. Or maybe they work in a management type job and doesn’t want to deal with that level of responsibility on their off time. If your search for a raid leader comes up short, you’ll need to come up with options. Try to figure out why that person isn’t a good candidate. You can’t change their desire. However, you might be able to help improve their competency.

Ultimately though, hope for the best. Be prepared for the worst.

Pros

Familiarity with guild culture

Players used to the leader’s personality

Intimately familiar with players and capabilities

Cons

Might not be anyone qualified from within to take the job

Potential prejudice or favoritism to specific players

Option 2: Recruiting outward

This isn’t exactly the most common approach. You don’t see many guilds advertising for a powerful position like this one either. I suspect the main reason would be on trust. Everyone in the guild has had time to get familiar with each other. Not only would you be introducing an outside player, your guild is being asked to follow their commands. That bond between raid and raid leader just isn’t there yet.

It’s like a new manager being brought in. No one really knows who she is. Is she lenient? A hard ass? Accommodating? By the book? No idea!

Don’t forget that having a new player calling the shots from outside the guild means they’re largely unaffected by any guild politics and will have a fresh perspective on raids. Of course, you never know what you’re getting. If you truly plan on going this route, raid leading applicants need to be screened a lot more carefully.

Pros

Fresh perspective and new ideas

Unaffected by any guild influences

Cons

Players have no idea how to react

Lack of initial guild chemistry

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When my raid leader hung up his claymore months ago, I was in a tight spot. The short list in my mind for replacement raid leaders had no desire to do so simply due to other responsibilities. There were other players I had considered asking, but I didn’t know if they had the skills to pull it off. The only way to know for certain is to assemble a raid, pass them lead and say “Here ya go!” and one of the senior raiding guys who had been with us for a long time wanted to give it a shot.

It was a leap of faith. Either he would sink or swim. To my delight, he did a pretty darn good job after he shook off a few raid leading jitters during the first few days at the helm. But it was to be expected.

Had he not spoken to me beforehand, I would have had no choice but to turn outwards and look off guild for someone to help coach the raid. I can’t honestly think of any moment in my experience in the game where I’ve read about guilds specifically recruiting raid leaders that were outside their organization. What commonly happens is a player either gets the nod up from management to take over or the guild implodes due to lack of interest and focus. The latter is not an option for me. I’ll admit, it would have been a remarkably interesting process (and experiment) to start off raid leaderless and end up with a fully situated quarterback acquired outside the guild.

It’s like hiring a new coach for a team. Players are so used to certain plays and systems. The new coach comes in and throws things out the window.

How About a More Graphical and Public Ban?

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I caught some news recently on Massively. Before playing World of Warcraft, I used to engage heavily in Guild Wars (won a sigil once with my team in the Hall of Heroes before we stopped playing).

Anyway, they’ve implemented some pretty cool stuff in the game especially against cheaters. Dhuum is the god of death in the game (a Hades-esque figure). After ArenaNet banned 3700 accounts for botting and other cheats, they’ve decided to take a more public approach.

Any player that gets caught cheating gets a visit by Dhuum, who then proceeds to completely destroy the player (and their account gets banned as well).

It looks pretty darn awesome.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Blizzard implement something like this in WoW personally. Which NPC would deliver the killing blow, though? Perhaps it could be Arthas who emerges from the ground and cleaves a player. In Cataclysm, maybe Deathwing appears and can swallow a player whole.

I don’t know if this would actually deter players from violating the ToS, but at least they can go out in style.

The Sue Sylvester Method to Raid Leading

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sue

She is ruthless.

Unforgiving.

Merciless.

Sue is the cheerleading coach from Fox’s Glee. She certainly knows a thing or two about winning and what it takes to get to that national spotlight. As raid leaders, we try to be accommodate and work with the players available. Sometimes it just isn’t enough.

This is where we can take a page from Sue.

Never takes her eyes off the goal

Whether it is adding another national title to her impressive trophy case or crushing her opponents, Sue never wavers in her pursuits. Set goals and figure out the best way to attain them. Don’t immediately discount every option. You just might have to be creative to find ways to get the job done if the obvious method isn’t apparent.

Be fanatical about your desires as it will rub off on other players.

Openly critical

Get right to the point. Sue never hesitates in sharing what’s on her mind. She says things openly and honestly. Of course, she could be wrong but know that she’ll never sugarcoat failure. If someone screws up, she’ll whip out the megaphone and bellow who it was and what they did. Not only does it inform them what they did wrong, it also sets an example for everyone else. You don’t need 25 players experiencing a defile to understand that it is a bad thing to stand in.

It’s good if a player learns from their mistakes. It’s even better if everyone learns from a player’s mistakes.

Gives people a chance

Sue doesn’t outright say no to anyone who wants to be on the squad. She gives them a shot to prove to her that this is where they belong. Depending on what your guild does, keep an open mind when it comes to applicants. Don’t outright reject anyone unless you have a solid reason to do so. You never know when you’ll find a diamond in the rough.

Reward them

Champions need to be treated like champions. The Cheerios work hard to get where they are. They take care of Sue’s aspirations, and Sue in turn, takes care of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if her budget for the cheerios dwarfs what the entire school gets from the school board. Give your players access to resources that will help them play better. Offset repairs a little. Provide consumables for their usage. Enchants, gems, and other augments should be offered up. Any players stand out in a particularly rough kill? Recognize them.

Killer instinct

Whether she wants to blackmail the principal or destroy tht blasted glee club, when Sue has her mind focused on a goal, she does her utmost best to see it through to the end. This is the kind of cutthroat, no holds barred attitude that slowly seeps to the rest of the raid. If this type of fervor to take down a raid boss can spread, you’ll notice a difference right away. After all, if your raid isn’t motivated or lacks that proper killer instinct, you’re going to have other issues entirely later on.

A Fond Farewell to AVR/AVRE

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I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now. In patch 3.3.5 Blizzard intends to intentionally break AVR/AVRE. It is not the first time that something like this has happened, but it does strike me as a bit odd as to the reasoning behind it.

If you missed the full announcement here it is for you

Bashiok — AVR Mod Broken in 3.3.5

This is a notice that we’re making changes in 3.3.5 in attempts to break the ability for the AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) mod to continue functioning. For those unaware, this mod allows players to draw in the 3D space of the game world, which can then be shared with others who are also using the mod. In some cases this manifests itself through drawing/tagging/defacing the game world, but more popularly is used to give visual guides for dungeon and raid encounters.

We’re making this change for two reasons. The invasive nature of a mod altering and/or interacting with the game world (virtually or directly) is not intended and not something we will allow. World of Warcraft UI addons are never intended to interact with the game world itself. This is mirrored in our stance and restriction of model and texture alterations. The second reason is that it removes too much player reaction and decision-making while facing dungeon and raid encounters. While some other mods also work to this end, we find that AVR and the act of visualizing strategy within the game world simply goes beyond what we’re willing to allow.

The change we’re making in attempts to break the functionality is light in its touch and approach. When blocking any functionality we run the risk of affecting other mods, but we’ve targeted the changes as carefully as possible. If we find that the AVR mod (or any mod attempting to replicate its functions) are usable after 3.3.5 we will take further, more drastic steps.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they are wrong to not want to see mods like this disabled, but they claim it is because of the invasive nature of the mod and that it allows altering and interacting with the game world. Well, we interact with the game world all the time don’t we? We kill a mob, that’s interacting right there! Silly statement I know but it is the truth. Simply by being in the world and playing the game we are interacting with the world and on some level altering the state of play for those around us. As far as calling it invasive or that it alters the game world, I don’t know. Is it any more invasive than any other boss mod? Take a look at most boss mods, they mark players that are affected by effects, provide warnings both visual and audio before a boss does an ability and effectively simplify encounters. Some even give you arrows telling you where to run from an effect, others include range finders to tell you how far away you are from other players in order to avoid making some boss abilities chain or augment. Mods like Auctioneer allow you to alter the way you interact with the auction house, postal allows you to modify how you access the mail in the game world, power auras allows you to be notified of every single buff and debuff in the game and mods like grid allow you to alter how you view the members of your party and allow you control over what information is filtered through and omen alerts you to threat compared to all other party members.

So what makes AVR so taboo? I was thinking about it and it reminded me of a funny story from my pen and paper days.

I was playing Dungeons and Dragons (tabletop pen and paper version) with a group of friends. Our party was supposed to set up an ambush to take out a band of mercs about three times our size. I was playing a halfling rogue at the time and was the party’s wet works guy. I would sneak around, spy on things and help set traps. Our fighter in the party was a tactical genius (the player has since moved on to a military career and it is very fitting for him as he honestly was a huge strategist) and came up with a plan that involved key movements at key points in time. My character happened to have a bunch of chalk, and came up with the idea of setting markers on the walls and floor to indicate thresholds for those lying in wait. It could indicate when to attack and after a point when to break off and regroup or attack from a different direction. The fighter loved this idea, and we set about marking the ruins we were using as the kill zone in markings the party would understand. We then set various traps and waited for our ambush to take place. As the mercs entered the ruins we watched from hiding as they breached the thresholds, we attacked. The mercs moved past another marking and we dove back into hiding and onto the next position. This continued until the band was no more. We took no casualties and had a well executed plan thanks to a series of chalk markings. The GM joked at the time of having allowed us to have such general items and them coming in so handy.

So, is AVR so different than the chalk we used in that game session? I don’t feel that it is when used to say, mark spots on the ground for people to collapse to or stand at during certain encounters. On a personal level I will miss it not because of anything it did during a boss fight, but I truly loved the way it interacted with Totem Radius in showing me the effective range of my totems in real time. That said I wont lose any sleep over it going away, but I think Blizzard may have been a bit hasty in their aggression towards this mod. Personally I don’t feel it is any more invasive than any other mod they currently allow in the game, and honestly once you allow mods or addons of any sort you are inviting a sort of intrusion into that which you created.

Did it make things too simple and remove player thought from the game? I don’t think so either, I’ve seen enough people with it installed still mess up quite frequently. It was not a guaranteed win for boss fights otherwise we would see a lot more people having downed ICC heroic mode when using this. In the end a mod is no substitution for attentiveness to the game and player skill. This one just happened to let us John Madden things a bit, and occasionally draw funny objects where they don’t belong.

So what do you think? Do you support Blizzard decision to break the mod? Do you think it made things too easy? Will you miss being able to draw stick figures randomly in ICC?

Bursting Bubbles

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This is a guest post from Dwynwen, a Discipline Priest with some lessons to share. Be sure to visit her blog!

I’m one of many burned out 25 man raiders who have turned to 10’s to help minimize raiding impact on ‘real life’. I’d been at loose ends for a regular but casual raid for a few weeks after an alt run I’d been tanking fell apart.

When the call went out for a healer to join a better-geared 10 man ICC alt run, I offered my priest without really thinking about it and almost immediately wondered what the heck I’d done. In theory my priest was quite well geared to start ICC, wearing mostly 232 and 245 with a couple of PVP 264. The real problem was that I’d never really learned to heal in a raid as disc, and I wasn’t looking forward to attempting harder content than I’d ever tried on her before.

dwyn2

I had two major problems with discipline. One was of perception, and the other performance. Disc isn’t widely understood, at least on the servers I’ve played on. While the information is certainly out there if you look hard enough, holy priests are assumed to be the default and it takes a little digging to pull out the disc information from priest threads dominated by Circle of Healing. Worse, those who don’t know much about the differences between two specs judge us against our holy brothers and sisters, against which bar for throughput we haven’t a hope. I’d had quite a few bad experiences at the hands of PUG raid leaders who judged me purely on healing done, which does make my performance look appalling. Lacking the confidence to challenge this assumption, I tried to adopt a throughput-focused playstyle by using Prayer of Healing, Flash Heal, and Greater Heal. I struggled with mana issues and still performed poorly, and had added quite a bit of stress and anxiety for myself into the bargain.

In desperation, I respecced to holy expecting that to be the answer. I lasted half a heroic before teleporting back out to the trainer. I missed the powerful and dynamic playstyle that I’d fallen in love with in the battlegrounds, using every tool at my disposal to survive and claw my allies back from the abyss. I have the greatest respect for holy priests, but I regretfully concluded it was simply not for me.

Defeated, I stopped putting my hand up for raids. My confidence continued to take a beating from the usual abuse meted out to healers in LFG. Intellectually I knew full well the Paladin had killed himself by standing in a void zone, but with my faith in my abilities at such a low ebb I meekly dropped group to save them the trouble of a votekick and vowed to focus on PVP.

It’s probably understandable that after all of this I would be nervous about stepping into ICC. The first run I was healing with a druid who had a disc priest main. The druid took over healing assigns and she was confident in directing me. “We’ll get the Paladin to tank heal” she suggested, “so you can focus on raid healing with me.”

Raid heal? I didn’t think I could.

“Keep an eye on the tanks just in case we run into trouble, but focus on keeping bubble up on the raid.”

I followed her advice as best I could. The first four bosses passed without incident as I focused on learning this new playstyle. Without a healing meter that tracked absorbs I had no idea how well i was doing, but I soon found I felt far less anxiety and my mana problems went away. At first, my saviour complex had me leaping to direct heal DPS who were taking damage but I slowly learned to have faith in the bubble to hold them until the druid HOT’s could roll in.

To start with, I was quite sparing of the bubbles, only casting them over the whole raid when I knew raid-wide damage was about to occur. As started to see heal reports whispered from the druid that showed how powerful my absorbs were, I gradually learned the art of bubble spam. I modified my raid frames to show Weakened Soul, and aimed to keep it up on all members of the raid at all times. I made a mouseover macro for Power Word: Shield, and bound it to 1.

I learned to move almost constantly to keep myself out of damaging effects while still rotating through the raid, keeping up POM and throwing out Penance. I kept casting, throwing out Renew if I had nothing else to do. If I didn’t have mana problems, I pushed harder until I did.  I started to get better at picking the times when direct healing was called for. Bubble-Spammer I am, but as the only healer in our raid able to break both fears on Blood Queen I gloried in throwing caution to the wind, stacking haste procs, and exploding out in Prayer of Healing to get the raid through. If that’s what it feels like to be a holy priest, I think I’m starting to understand.

dwyn

If the mistakes I made were driven by the perception and attitudes of the community, so was the solution. I can credit good mentoring for most of my improvement. My druid friend gave me many tips, hints, and plenty of encouragement. Apparently this is as natural to her as breathing, because when I credited her with teaching me how to disc she scoffed and assured me I already could.

If only she knew.

There’s a certain truth however to what she says. I already possessed enough of the information I needed to raid successfully as disc, little bits here and there I’d gleaned in my wider reading. What I was really missing was the confidence to put into practice what I knew was right, and the numbers to back it up. Penance Priest, World of Matticus and Plus Heal have filled in some of the gaps for me here. The final piece though only dropped into place when I was provided with an environment where constructive criticism abounded in which to develop and learn.

I can wholeheartedly agree with "The ABC of Discipline Priesting" that playstyle makes far more difference than perfect stat itemisation, and I think it’s a message that many new disc can benefit from. I can assure you I could be gemmed with pure agility and still be performing better than I was before – and I’m not a bad player. I’ve raided 25 man content as progression over two expansions, and have always had a reputation in my guild as someone who hits hard above their gear level and follows direction well. It still took more than a few trial-and-error runs and a guide to gemming for me to finally shed my fear of disc’s perception and start learning to play well.

My gear is certainly not fabulously itemised at the moment – I’m high on haste and regen and low on crit according to the conventional wisdom, and the 200 hit rating and 150 resilience I’m carrying probably isn’t doing anyone any good. I had my reward for all my hard work and development though when, finally brave enough to enter a 25 man ICC PUG, I saw myself top the charts fight after fight against very geared healers. Winning the roll on Althor’s Abacus possibly assisted with the general feeling of benevolence to all humanity, but at the root I was thankful I could finally feel proud of my impact. Bubble is, after all, the ultimate heal snipe.

Of course, the meters don’t tell the whole story and that’s not really what I’m celebrating here. My sense of achievement comes not from indulging my saviour complex, or from the numbers on recount, but from a feeling of mastery of my class. Besides, it doesn’t matter how much you push to top the chart – you’ll still be outhealed by the hunter you killed with Mark of the Fallen Champion by meter-chasing instead of following your assigns.

skada

Oops.