Raiding

It’s Not What You Preach, It’s What You Tolerate

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We had a raider recently who didn’t even realize we’ve been using raid plans the entire season.

Slide numbers were being called out, cooldown assignments had been posted, and key positioning diagrams had been up for every major encounter. Yet somehow, this person (who had been with us for multiple weeks) acted like it was brand new information.

Look, mistakes happen. Miscommunication happens. But this wasn’t a one-off moment of confusion. It was part of a larger pattern.

And it reminded me of a concept from the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin: the “tortured genius.”

The Problem with “Tortured Geniuses”

This isn’t about someone dealing with mental health challenges or emotional instability. In the context of leadership, a “tortured genius” is the person who’s talented but toxic.

  • They never accept responsibility.
  • They always have an excuse.
  • They point fingers the moment something goes wrong.
  • They’re too good to follow instructions, but never at fault when things break down.
  • And they assume their DPS or logs are enough to justify any lack of accountability.

These players are a trap. They often look good on paper, and they might even be “top performers.” But they are absolutely corrosive to your team if left unchecked.

What You Tolerate Becomes the Standard

One of the most powerful lines in Extreme Ownership is this:

“It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”

You can talk about standards all day. You can write raid plans, post cooldown assignments, link guides, and review logs. But none of it means a damn thing if your actions don’t match your words.

If you let someone show up unprepared, ignore instructions, dodge feedback, and stay in the raid team week after week, then that becomes your standard.

The rest of your team sees it. And whether they say something or not, they’re thinking:

Why should I bother putting in the effort if that guy doesn’t have to?

Red Flags: How to Spot the Behaviour Early

Sometimes you don’t realize what’s happening until the damage is done. Here’s what to look for before it gets to that point:

  • They aren’t in Discord for strategy discussions.
  • They never reference or acknowledge raid plans.
  • They need constant reminding of their assignments.
  • They respond to feedback with sarcasm, excuses, or silence.
  • They do well on meters, but that’s where their contribution ends.

If you’re seeing this, you’ve got a “tortured genius” on your hands. And it’s time to deal with it.

How to Handle It (Without Nuking Morale)

Start with a direct 1:1 conversation. Be clear, but not confrontational.

“We’ve noticed a consistent pattern of missed prep and dodged feedback. That’s not going to fly on this team.”

Lay out your expectations: reading plans, owning mistakes, showing up to strategy sessions, and staying engaged with the team. These aren’t optional, they’re the baseline.

If they want to improve, give them the tools. Offer a second chance. Track their behaviour over a week or two. But if nothing changes?

You already know what needs to happen.

Removing a high-output player who’s dragging down team culture is addition by subtraction. You don’t build a CE-calibre team by tolerating passengers with attitudes.

Culture Over Numbers

Cutting someone isn’t about drama or proving a point. It’s about setting the tone.

If you want your team to value preparation, ownership, and collaboration, you have to reinforce that with actions. That means cutting loose the ones who refuse to buy in (even if they can crush a target dummy).

Culture on a team can be fragile. If you let one person ignore the standard, that standard crumbles.

It’s not what you preach. It’s what you tolerate.

Ask yourself the hard question. What are you tolerating right now?

If You Aim for Nothing, You’ll Hit Nothing: Goal Setting for Raid Teams

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“If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit nothing.”
– Wise Auntie from Shang-Chi, probably not a raider, but definitely right.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a raid leader is that without a clearly defined goal, your team will drift. People will show up, pull bosses, and maybe even have fun. Without direction, they won’t improve. They won’t grow. They won’t know what they’re working toward. One of our community teams, which has historically been an AotC team, is looking to advance upward into some Mythic progression. I applaud that, and it’s refreshing to hear that they’ve already laid out their goals to get started.

If your team isn’t aiming for anything, it’s going to hit… nothing.

Know What You’re Raiding For

There are all sorts of raid teams in World of Warcraft:

  • Social teams who raid casually for fun and vibes.
  • AOTC-focused teams who want to clear Heroic each tier.
  • Mid Mythic teams who want to push beyond Heroic and have the skill to do it, but don’t want to invest the effort to go beyond the first several Mythic bosses.
  • CE-pushing teams who plan their season with spreadsheets and sigh deeply when they see someone under cap on crests.

All of those are fine. What’s not fine is not knowing which one you are.

Your team’s culture, recruitment strategy, loot rules, bench policies, and expectations all stem from one thing: that team goal. If your goal is CE, you should build and operate like a CE team. If your goal is fun and friends, structure the team to reflect that. Teams aiming for playoffs will have different goals compared to teams vying for the Super Bowl.

Build Your Roster Around Your Goal

Your roster should match your ambition:

  • Want CE? Then you need reliable attendance, motivated players, and a clear process for holding people accountable.
  • Just looking to chill and clear Normal/Heroic? Then don’t burn out your team trying to copy Limit’s starts or min-max every comp detail.

Misalignment between your roster and your goal leads to frustration on both ends. Raiders feel like they’re pushing too hard (or not hard enough), and leadership gets stuck in an endless cycle of plugging holes instead of building something lasting.

Set Micro Goals Along the Way

Big goals can be scary. “Get CE” sounds great until you’re 120 wipes into a mid-tier boss, wondering if your sanity is still intact.

That’s where micro goals help per boss:

  • Improve Phase 2 positioning consistency
  • Increase overall raid survivability percentage (that would be the deaths tab in Warcraft Logs)
  • Reduce deaths to whatever boss mechanic over the next raid night
  • Pop Mug’zee mines with no deaths, and ensure all soaks are accounted for

These give your team something measurable to work toward each night, and they help keep morale up even when progression is slow.

Communicate It Constantly

Once your goals are set, talk about them. A lot. Drill the team relentlessly over the course of the raid night. Reiterate them during recruitment. Remind your team in Discord. Post them in your strategy doc. Goals lose power when they’re vague or hidden.

People can’t commit to something they don’t understand. If you make the goal visible and consistent, your team will start moving toward it (even if it’s slow at first).

Final Thoughts

Your raid team doesn’t need to be Liquid. Or Echo, for that matter. But you do need to know what you’re aiming for. A shared goal gives your team direction, unity, and purpose. These are the foundations of any successful group, whether you’re pushing CE or just trying to have a good time on raid nights.

Aim high. Aim clearly. Just don’t aim for nothing.

Manaforge Omega Raid Preview: First Look at the First 7 Bosses (PTR Testing)

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Spoilers ahead on the new raid.

Patch 11.2 is almost here, and I got a chance to jump into the Manaforge raid on Normal difficulty during PTR testing this weekend with my new guild, Death Testers. We previewed 7 of the 8 bosses (Dimensius was not available for testing), and I’ve compiled my thoughts, early impressions, and videos for each. Use this as a scouting report as you prepare your raid team or just want a peek at what’s ahead.

1. Plexus Sentinel

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Introductory level boss. We start off in a confined room without a lot of space to work with, and the raid will need to progress from chamber to chamber.
  • There are circles (with red player arrows above) that need to be taken to the outside. These drop a puddle that seemingly eventually despawns. I expect these to stay longer or even permanently in harder difficulties. Important: Don’t drop them by the entry wall.
  • Big group soak mechanic: Eradicating Salvo, we just grouped under the boss for it.
  • About 60 seconds in, Protocol: Purge starts with a knockback. Dodge giant bubbles and rotating lines before reaching a slowly moving wall that you’ll need to use your Reshii Wraps through using the Extra Action Button (seems to be an 8-yard blink, 8s cooldown).
  • Phase ends after blowing up the shield, then rinse and repeat.

2. Loom’ithar

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Big fuzzy spider vibes.
  • Kill an add to break through a shrinking wall early in the fight. Place a marker or designate a spider right away.
  • Lots of dodging with circles and movement-heavy mechanics.
  • Frontal cone needs to be soaked, and you may need to split players into two groups.
  • At 30%, Loom’ithar becomes mobile. Movement and positioning become critical from here on based on how much of the room has been covered.

3. Soulbinder Naazindhri

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Adds are locked in prisons, and you’ll need to aim beams to break them out. If the prisoners are not broken out in time, then the ads will eventually break out on their own. Encounter seems to be about ad management and deciding which ones to break out to defeat over the course of the fight.
  • Edge-of-platform fight: easy to get knocked off. No guard rails
  • Remember Kyveza lines? They’re back, but these orbs move slower.
  • You cannot use the prisons as cover, so plan knockbacks accordingly.

4. Forgeweaver Araz

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • More adds! You’ll be splitting your raid for soak mechanics that spawn enemies.
  • Collector Pylons emit orbs, and dodging becomes important here.
  • Random players spawn adds that should be spawned under the boss to cleave.
  • At 50%, we switch to a new phase focused on the pylons, before reverting again.
  • At 25%, a giant black hole pulls the raid while damage ramps up heavily. Use a Warlock gate near the back of the room to help stabilize movement or as an emergency to port back to the front and buy time.

5. The Soul Hunters (Optional Boss)

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Fight against 3 Demon Hunters (cool design twist!)
  • You can skip this one, oddly enough.
  • DPS them evenly, or you’ll fall behind.
  • Each has its own toolkit and expect lots of individual responsibility.
  • Magic debuffs remove puddles, and dispelling the debuff jumps the effect to a nearby player. The afflicted player just needs to walk into a puddle to remove it.

6. Fractillus

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Tetris-meets-WoW. Favorite fight of the test.
  • Arena is split into six zones. Players spawn walls by running to their zone.
  • Shortly after, another group breaks those walls by standing in front of them. We gave tanks their own zone.
  • The challenge is managing space. Poor wall coordination means it’s game over.
  • Fast, punchy encounter with lots of movement and communication required.

7. Nexus-King Salhadaar

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Multi-phase fight, includes mounted phase with a dragon.
  • Reminiscent of Sarkareth—players start with debuffs and must cleanse them through mechanics.
  • Wraps are critical for jumping to side platforms to kill adds, then porting back.
  • Once the mount gets low, Salhadaar sacrifices it and gains HP back based on the mount’s remaining health.
  • Final phase: Meteor mechanics pull the raid toward them (again, Kyveza-style). You’ll need equal positioning to survive.

All in all, this looks like a fun raid to close out The War Within. Did end up playing Shadow and changed up specs a few times (you’ll notice I completely forgot about Void Form somewhere and I had to scramble to find it in my spellbook to rebind it — oops!)

Cutting Edge Isn’t a Bus Ride! You Have to Drive Too

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We’re Still Talking About Crests

Every raid leader knows this feeling: the team is progressing, you’re starting to get into the real meat of the tier, and you still have players wearing gear that should’ve been replaced two weeks ago.

In Last Call, we’ve run into this issue all season. Despite repeated reminders, despite planning raid nights around it, despite pinning resources, there have been some players still lagging behind on crest collection, gear upgrades, or renown. It’s a recurring pattern that’s become a real problem, and it’s time to talk about it.

The absolute truth is that Cutting Edge raiding isn’t just about being present. It’s about being prepared.

CE Requires More Than Just Raid Night Attendance

You can be a great raider mechanically. You can dodge swirlies and drop your soak perfectly every time. But if your gear is 12 item levels behind the rest of the raid and your trinkets have room to be upgraded, you’re holding the team back.

At the CE level, here’s what’s expected:

  • Farming crests every week to ensure your gear is fully upgraded
  • Running keys regularly to stay relevant and pick up key dungeon pieces
  • Capping renown for essential bonuses and power spikes
  • Managing consumables and enchants without having to be reminded
  • Investing time outside of raid to improve, even if it’s just an hour here or there

We’re not asking for perfection or no-lifing. We’re asking for effort.

We Don’t Have Time for Passengers

CE isn’t a sightseeing tour where you hop on, listen to the guide, and collect a souvenir achievement at the end.

It’s a rally race, and everyone in the car is helping steer, navigate, and keep things running. If even one person’s asleep at the wheel, the whole team crashes.

When a few raiders consistently under-prepare, it creates tension. The ones putting in the hours by capping their crests, running their keys, or even gearing by PvPing will start to notice. Eventually, they ask why they’re working overtime to compensate for someone else’s laziness.

That’s when morale takes a hit.

In CE progression, morale is everything. It sucks when you’re busting yourself grinding out keys, getting your rank 3 enchants, and ensuring your renown is at the top level while others have seemingly tapped out or can’t seem to get it done consistently.

Not Malicious, Just Misaligned

This isn’t about roasting people who can’t keep up. Some raiders just hate pugging. Others have limited free time. Some burn out quickly on WoW’s weekly checklist content.

And you know what? That’s totally fine.

But if that’s where you’re at, then CE may not be the right goal for you right now. There’s no shame in that. Not everyone wants to spend their time grinding crests or min-maxing gear. That’s okay. There are other ways to enjoy the game:

  • Raid on a more casual team
  • Focus on Heroic progression
  • Sub in when available or needed

But if you are committing to a CE team, you’ve got to meet the standard. If others are putting in the work, you need to show up prepared to do the same.

What Leaders Can Do About It

If you’re leading a CE-focused team, here’s how to reinforce this without becoming a tyrant:

  • Set expectations early. Lay out what “prepared” looks like each week.
  • Track progress. It doesn’t have to be public, but keep an eye on crests, gear upgrades, and renown.
  • Have private conversations. If someone’s lagging behind, talk to them one-on-one first. Don’t call them out in front of the raid.
  • Be flexible, but firm. Life happens. One off week isn’t the end of the world. But repeated weeks of underperformance? That needs to be addressed.

And remember, the culture starts from the top. If leadership and core raiders are showing up geared, ready, and prepared, it sets the tone for everyone else.

Final Thoughts

Cutting Edge isn’t just about mechanical skill or showing up to raid night. It’s about doing the work. You can’t hit CE just coasting. And you certainly can’t expect to earn it if you’re not keeping up with the basic requirements the game asks of you.

If you’re someone who wants that CE title, then step up. Run your keys. Farm your crests. Keep pace with the rest of the team.

Because the bus isn’t taking passengers this time around.
If you want that achievement, you’ve got to help drive.

The Mug’zee Pivot: When (and How) to Change Your Raid Strategy Mid-Progression

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Although we killed Mug’zee last night in Last Call, I wanted to put pen to paper on a strategy change last week that didn’t ultimately work out well for us.

Our raid progression is never linear. It tends to crescendo and decrescendo. Your team strategizes, plans carefully, and yet sometimes the team hits a wall. That’s exactly where we found ourselves recently on Mug’zee.

With a fresh 3% DPS buff for our raid (15%), we saw an opportunity. Maybe we could shake things up, make an aggressive strategic pivot, and secure the kill faster than anticipated.

But the thing about strategic changes is that they’re easy to plan, but a lot trickier to execute.

Strategy Change Fundamentals

Before diving in, let’s cover why you might even consider shifting gears in the middle of progression. Generally, you look at:

  • Significant raid-wide buffs or nerfs (like we received).
  • Roster adjustments (for us, going from 4 healers down to 3).
  • Persistent performance issues or plateaus where your current approach feels stuck.

These pivots aren’t guesses. They’re carefully calculated risks that raid leaders take, hoping for a big payoff (like skipping an entire problematic phase, such as the 3 Gaol set).

Why We Made the Change

The newly implemented 3% DPS buff felt like our window of opportunity. We previously planned for a 4-minute DPS push on Mug’zee. But with the added firepower, a tighter 3-minute push strategy suddenly felt achievable, letting us bypass the notoriously dangerous “third jail set.”

To enable this, we made the call to drop from 4 healers to just 3, adding one more DPS to meet our new aggressive goal. It was bold. But the math checked out (on paper, anyway).

The Reality Check

Initial pulls seemed promising, but reality quickly set in. With one fewer healer, we felt the squeeze immediately. Damage was higher than anticipated, healer mana started running dangerously low, and our throughput suffered. Our mine popping was no longer consistent, and we suffered sporadic deaths.

Despite careful planning, something became clear fast: our margin for error had shrunk drastically. Mechanics we used to comfortably heal through suddenly became critical threats.

What We Learned (And Why It Wasn’t a Mistake)

Did we secure the kill with the new aggressive strategy? No. But we got something valuable: a clear understanding of our actual DPS and healing thresholds. We identified exactly what we needed for the faster push, and it gave us concrete data.

We pivoted back halfway through the night, returning to the safer, original 4-minute strategy, and immediately saw results. Our best pull got Mug’zee down to 0.4%, proving our initial instincts were fundamentally solid.

Timing and Feedback: What Could’ve Gone Better

One notable hiccup: we waited too long to fully engage our healers for their feedback. It wasn’t until our mid-raid break that we stopped to reassess and found ourselves burning valuable raid minutes sorting things out. In hindsight, quick temperature checks after the first few attempts would’ve saved us significant time. We should have asked healers more frequently (maybe every 20 minutes or so). We still needed to give them a few reps to get accustomed to the change in damage coming in.

Early and frequent feedback loops are essential during major strategy shifts.

Raiders Grumbling? That’s Normal (and Okay)

Naturally, not everyone was thrilled. Some raiders grumbled about the mid-raid strategy pivot, suggesting we should never have tried it in the first place. It’s always easy to say that in hindsight, knowing how things played out. But the truth is, strategic adaptability means accepting uncertainty while failing to gain knowledge.

I still stand firmly by our decision to try. There was undeniable value in the potential to skip an entire challenging phase. It felt mathematically possible with 3 healers, but achieving that strategy would’ve required an exceptionally high individual skill ceiling. Realistically, getting there would’ve taken far more pulls and raid hours than we wanted to commit at this stage.

Best Practices for Handling Strategy Pivots

Here’s how you can manage similar situations better:

  • Quick Feedback Loops:
    Check in with key players and roles (especially healers and tanks) after just a few pulls to gauge viability.
  • Clearly Defined “Pivot Indicators”:
    Decide in advance how you’ll measure if the new approach is worth sticking with. Set those benchmarks!
  • Always Have a Backup Plan:
    Know when to switch back decisively.

Final Thoughts: Adaptability is Leadership

Strategic pivots aren’t failures. These leadership decisions are designed to push the team forward, even if they don’t always pan out. We might not have achieved the 3-minute push, but thanks to what we learned, we were able to secure a clean (or dirty) kill using the original strategy.

Raid leadership is about managing calculated risks and adapting quickly. Even if you fall short, you’re still one step closer.

We’re on to Gallywix!