Raiding

How to be an Effective 21st Raider

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What exactly is the 21st Raider? Mythic raid sizes only go up to 20! Think of the 21st raider as a coach. No doubt you’ve heard of some of the top end guilds utilizing the position of a 21st raider to help with encounters. We use this extensively in DJs and it’s been beneficial for us. An orchestral conductor will often cue various sections during key entries (like the brass in Raiders March from Indiana Jones) even though they should already know this if they’re keeping time. That emphasis helps ensure that everyone is in sync. Likewise, the 21st raider can function the same way and help remind the raid what’s about to happen and how they should respond. It’s one less mental load that raiders need to keep at the forefront. I remember back during Shadowlands when we were progressing on Stone Legion Generals that there was often confusion between the big shared soak versus the individual solo soak (that involved running out and dropping circles). Having a reminder would have helped cut down on the number of pulls until we had it ingrained.

What you’re not there to do is to tell each player how to play their class unless it’s an integral part of the encounter (like Warlock gates or reminding them of defensive CDs). The big advantage of this is that it removes some of the thinking required for players and allows them to fully focus and commit to their rotation while staying alive. They still have to do some of the mechanics (because you’re not in there to do it for them), but a prompt or a reminder can go a long way, especially when progressing on a new boss. Encounters are getting increasingly complex, especially at the Mythic level.

So what does it take to be effective in that role?

Before we start that, we need to over the setup. Someone needs to stream their perspective to you so that you can see what’s going on.

How to Stream a Point of View Efficiently

Make sure the selected raider has a fast and stable internet connection with a great upload speed. This will allow them to stream at a high quality. They’ll want to stream at least in 1080 or higher with 60 FPS if possible. We use Discord for this.

Screenshot of a UI showing raid timers, ability bars, and available CDs.
  • Have Raid Notes Displayed: Your MRT window with the note should be displayed on the side somewhere. I like to position mine on the far left portion of my screen.
  • Show Raid Cooldowns: The raid caller will need to see who has what available in case they need to audible a defensive in the event a player dies or boss ability timing changes partway through the encounter. With MRT, it has the ability to display raid cooldowns. I personally use a combination of Weak Auras for this with Zen Tracker (Zera DF Update), and the ZT Front-End Textual. I can never remember what raid icons correspond with what abilities and I prefer having the names of both players and abilities.
  • Boss Ability Timers: This one’s obvious. In order for the raid caller to do their job, they need to see what’s about to happen. Place your Bigwigs or DBM bars somewhere prominent. I prefer using the Raid Ability Timeline Weak Aura which condenses all the abilities into a timeline view but it can still be done with bars.

What information is important to call?

As the group progresses through the fight, the 21st raider’s responsibilities might change from phase to phase or as the group gets more progressed in the encounter. Balance important and relevant information with minimalism. Brad Pitt once told Matt Damon to not use seven words when four will do. So channel your inner Brad Pitt!

Critical abilities: Figure out what’s important and what isn’t. As the group first learns about the encounter, certain abilities have to be highlighted to remind the raid what’s about to happen and how to respond. But as they get more familiar, these types of calls can be reduced because of the ingrained muscle memory. After 4 or so pulls, you don’t need to remind people to line up pillars on Terros or to always drop puddles behind Eranog.

Examples

Terros: “Stack for soak, line up pillars”
Eranog: “Puddles behind boss.”

Upcoming cooldowns: As your players start learning the damage patterns, it helps to reinforce which players are using raid cooldowns next. All it takes is a gentle reminder. Name the player and the spell so that they know. You may have to be prepared to call an audible in case that healer isn’t able to commit their defensive cooldown to it. Maybe they died early or you phased ahead of schedule and the spell isn’t available yet. Get creative. It’s not just cooldowns here because consumables play a part and even at this level, players often forget they have it available or choose not to use it (I call this the Megalixir effect).

Examples

Council: “Next Fire Axe is an Aura Mastery.”

Raszageth: “First shield in 3, this is DPS potions and Matt’s Divine Hymn.”

Terros: “This tank slam is a Health Potion.”

Raid movement: Another good one to mention is for upcoming player movements. You’re directing traffic and reminding the team where to go to drop off any important debuffs. This might also involve instructing when Warlock gates need to be used. Not just that, but this is great for any stacking or spread-out motions. On specific fights, you can wave off the group from soaking (like Kurog if a Mage has the frost bomb that they can Ice Block).

Examples

Sennarth: “Wait for Chilling, then take gate up the stairs.”

Kurog: “Freezing Tempest, stack in now.”

Dathea (Mythic): “NO MORE dunks on blue, all dunks on green.”

DPS Priority Targets: This one’s an easy one to miss especially for melee players. There are going to be bosses where adds will appear and they can show up in a part of the map that isn’t quite so obvious. On the flip side, it’s also necessary to issue stop DPS instructions in case you want to slow down damage so that you don’t enter a phase you’re not quite equipped for yet.

Examples

Sennarth: “Spider spawn in 3, get ready.”

Dathea: “Need to move Infuser, all stop DPS.”

Battle Res: Not every player that dies has to get resurrected right away. When the group progress is getting close to a kill, it might be better served to hold one in reserve just in case a more critical player dies (like a tank or a healer). This also applies for Shamans because they might have died in a bad spot and they can’t use their own self resurrection. If there are multiple players dead with a limited number of resurrects, it’s time to decide who will be more valuable alive. Maybe you don’t need the extra healer on their feet but you have to have extra DPS instead to help with the final push. Or there’s two DPS players down but one has offensive CDs available and the other does not. Lastly, not only do you want to control who takes the res but also when they should take the res. I’ve seen instances where the res is cast in a bad position or there’s an ability about to occur that makes it unsafe. Be prepared to say wait!

All that being said, work with the raid group to see what information is and isn’t necessary anymore. I hope this helps you become better at helping your raid. Players might find as they’re getting better that specific calls are getting redundant and don’t need to be mentioned. You’re there to function as a guide and to help reduce some of that mental load until it becomes second nature.

A Tale of Magery

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Last time I wrote something, we were 3/10 Mythic in Nighthold. Now we’re 3/9 Mythic in Tomb of Sargeras. Sisters is giving us a hard time but the worst boss is often seasonal. In fact, I’d wager most guilds have had to deal with it at some point or other.

I call it the summer raiding boss.

We’ve experienced some roster turnover the last few weeks with players going on a hiatus due to burnout or just getting bored of the game. For the first time in forever, we actually have slots open for melee. Usually those spots were hard to get into. Alas, we don’t have a guild front end so if you’re interested, drop me a line on Twitter or go through our profile on WoW Progress.

Mages

Most players my age (oh my god, I’m almost 30) have read Harry Potter at some point. I maintain the belief that just about every guild has that one “Defense Against the Dark Arts” class. For whatever reason, that guild has a hard time retaining anyone playing that class (or spec) longer than a few weeks. In our case, it happens to be Mages. We just can’t get Mages to stick at all regardless of their class.

Allow me regale you with a tale of one of our recent Mages.

Let’s call him HelmsDeeps. He came in and trialed with us on Tuesday, which was our standard Heroic clear night. Nothing outstanding there. Wednesday is an optional night that was mostly just to knock out normals and try and complete anyone’s missing 4 piece sets or get lucky on the titanforging. We usually loot master these to maximize and direct pieces to anyone still missing their bonuses. Mind you, most of the raid group is already sporting Heroic quality tier (915s) and a few with Mythics (930).

After many spike eruptions from the floor, bowling ball launches, and that sort, Goroth is cleared. As we’re distributing loot (and by distributing, I mean mostly disenchanting), HelmsDeeps pipes up wondering why everything is being master looted and if that continues to be the case, he wants to drop out for a chance at the tier helm from Demonic Inquisition and joining a pickup group with personal loot enabled. Our officers gently explain that master looting is how we’ve always handled these nights to allow for targeted loot. Guess that wasn’t acceptable to HelmsDeeps and he subsequently dropped raid and then dropped guild. He lasted about a day.

The rest of us shrugged and moved on. Clearly he had a different loot and guild philosophy or that he didn’t comprehend the group that he was raiding with had players who literally did not need a 900 tier helm on the Vanquisher token.

Then again, he might’ve been on to something. After killing Demonic Inquisition, we ended up with two Protector tokens and a Conqueror token. Technically, he made the correct play. But if one of those had been a Vanq, it would’ve gone to him.

Part of me is glad that this was addressed early on. No telling what sort of loot issues might’ve arisen later had he stayed. For a player to part ways with a guild like that early on in a trial period is actually good for both the player and the guild with neither wasting the other’s time. As much as I’m bewildered by the move, at the same time, I can respect how swiftly the player realized that the environment wasn’t a good fit for their ideals.

Anyway, we still have a Mage. Hoping he lasts. The odds don’t look good right now, sadly.

Archimonde 2.0

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I remember the first time my old guild breached the Mount Hyjal raid back in Burning Crusade. It was breathtaking to play that iconic mission finale of Warcraft 3 from an MMO perspective. Instead of being the base commander, I was in a position where I had to repel the attacks as a character. We faced hundreds of wipes during the period working on Archimonde. Every time, we started our initial position on that little rocky outcropping facing west where Archie was. We lost a ridiculous amount of time because players would sometimes forget to get their tears. I’m glad that tears aren’t a thing this time around.

We ran into an issue last week with Archimonde that had nothing to do with the encounter itself. Last week was the first time players could kill Gorefiend and complete the quest to jump the instance. I joined a pug earlier in the day just to get the quest completed so that when raid time rolled around, we could skip ahead and start on Iskar. That part worked and we secured our first Mannoroth kill that night. We made a fun pull on Archimonde since we only had but a few minutes left.

The problem occurred the next night. We were hyped to enter the instance and put in some serious work on him again but there was no portal to Archimonde. There was a portal to Mannoroth but nothing leading us there. A ticket was opened to Blizzard’s support teams but no resolution was made until the next day (which meant spending Wednesday night on heroic content instead). Thankfully, whatever they did worked and we were able to pull Archimonde on Thursday night. Managed to see phase 3 a few times though (under 40%) so it was quite a productive night. If only we weren’t locked out earlier in the week, we might’ve even seen a kill. Our primary strategy involves stacking and slowly working our way around the room to control the fires.

Never thought I’d ever have to contend with Doomfires again.

Now the next question is to figure out how many players to send in those portals on that last phase there.

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What’s Going on with Mythic?

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Indulge me in this observation.

It appears that a number of prominent guilds are starting to buckle and implode. These were once strong, proud guilds who had achieved success last tier during Siege of Orgrimmar. I can’t say for sure what the cause of breakups are, but it’s happening across the board.

Starting to wonder now if we’re walking in with too high expectations of ourselves and then getting hit with a huge dose of reality. Maybe it’s deliberate though since they want Blackrock Foundry to last a while before the next tier (which if history is any indication will be around during the summer or early fall).

Can’t even begin to surmise what’s going on here.

Is the extra difficulty level of Mythic simply too much?

Is it just due to the roster absences?

People getting tired and putting too much pressure on themselves?

I had a thought yesterday. All mythic guilds now were strong, heroic guilds last tier. But it does not appear that all heroic guilds can cut it as a mythic guild this tier.

We started the expansion strong with 27 players. Thank goodness for flex modes, because I feel lucky if I can even get 20 now. Trying to recruit and pickup raiders for a  guild seems insanely tough (and I still think transferring off might do the job).

Allow me to highlight two factors:

  • Too much competition: I’m not referring to other guilds. I’m referring to other difficulties. Between raid finder, normal, and heroic, players can now find the guild that’s raiding at the right pace and difficulty for them.
  • Too much accessibility: The group finder has been a huge blessing and a curse.

Take this nugget of logic below:

“Why bother going through an application and interview process in joining a guild when I can just take a few seconds to browse around on Group Finder or Open Raid and join a group at will?”

– Random Mage, 2015

Years ago, guilds were the only game in town if you wanted to defeat Arthas or tackle raids. No group finder meant if you wanted your moneys worth in the game, you had to join a guild. The only way to get picked up by a guild is by going through their process. The only way to stay in the guild is to not lose your edge and die to every third void zone on the ground. You had to be sharp, you had to be productive, and you had to be skilled otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see content.

The last bit above there ties into something else about individual performance. If you aren’t as skilled or astute with your character, there’s a raid difficulty just for you. During the old expansions, it was play and perform at X level or else don’t raid. Now it’s, why play at X level when I can play at Z level with reduced stress and pressure and still see the same bosses anyway?

Random Mage might be on to something there.

Maybe they’re the smart one. Because you’ve got GMs like me who are wracking their brain and desperately looking for ways to find and retain talent. Other GMs are closing up shop due to lack of resources, time, effort, interest, and so forth.

Take a look at this list:

  • Summit (6/7 Mythic, ceased raiding 1/27)
  • The Horsemen (US 25th during Siege of Orgrimmar for Heroic Garrosh, ceased competitive raiding during December)
  • Blood Runs Cold (6/7 Mythic in Highmaul, ceased raiding in January)
  • Vanlyfe (6/7 Mythic, ceased raiding in January)
  • Victory or Whatever (US 38th, 25 man, ceased raiding)

Admittedly a small sample size, but I’m sure they’re not the only ones that had high hopes and aspirations. But for whatever reason, they’ve stopped raiding. Maybe expectations or other life factors interfered here. Who knows? But something’s definitely going on here.

For the purposes of raiding, guilds are meaningless and may not mean anything significant in finding success in raids because you can still do the same thing via Group Finder.

Someone pointed me over to Stoove’s blog post on Mythic raiding and how it has impacted a 10 man scaling up. Mythic took the difficulties of heroic raids and amplified the difficulty immensely.

It might be time to take a hard look at the mirror and realistically figure out what kind of guild we really are.

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Raid Leader Questions: Reset or Extend?

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Back in Wrath, right around the era of the Trial of the Crusader patch, Blizzard pushed out a new feature. It was a tool designed for raids who didn’t raid as often or who had trouble investing significant and meaningful hours in progression before the week reset and all their progression and work had been lost.

Yes, the lockout extension feature.

To my knowledge, it was one of those things that not many players really raved about but no one slammed it down either. It was completely optional and not many had the desire to extend it. Two expansions later, raids are getting larger, there’s more trash in the way, and time just seems to be a factor. This isn’t 5 years ago where I was in a raid that insisted on everyone going way past their bed time to get that much needed kill in. I was in guilds that asked much of their players to sacrifice sleep and hours for the sake of progression.

When Conquest was first formed, one of the key decisions was laying down our hours. In order to maximize the potential pool of players, I ensured that our times were west and east coast friendly. But this had the cost where we would not be able to go past our end times even if we had gotten a boss down to 1%. With Siege of Orgrimmar being the deep instance that it is, many of the players lobbied for more time on end bosses and extensions on the week to put in more work. It’s paid off because we secured kills on Nazgrim and Malkorok on the days where we normally would’ve reset.

At the same time, like other raiding guilds, we’ve seen our share of players come and go. This is the part of the expansion where many players are slowly returning back to the game. They’re smart and skilled players, but sometimes there’s nothing they can do to survive through a large explosion even with all their defensive cooldowns used simply because their health is too low. Or we’re not able to meet a DPS check on an earlier boss like Norushen and Sha of Pride.

It’s a tough balancing act between providing our newer players with the gear and experience they need now so they can be in a position to help us later versus ensuring that the raid has adequate time to work on progression bosses in the second half of Siege. Blizzard has announced the end of the Challenge Mode season coming soon to coincide with a new patch deployment. While there’s been no mention of a friends and family alpha, the patch signals that we’re one milestone closer to the next expansion and our time in Siege is growing shorter.

How long does it take to gear a freshly geared 90 and put them in a position where they are no longer a detriment to a heroic raid boss?

My estimate is 3-4 weeks. This includes running the raid finder, flex raids, using crafted pieces, and completely carrying them through any available farm content. On 25 man, that time could be cut to 2-3 weeks largely due to the larger pool of gear that drops from killing bosses (6 items on 25 vs 2 items on 10) and this assumes they’re diligent in farming their Lesser Charms on the island or via pet battles.

Reset please!

My original stance was to continue weekly raid resets. Until we’ve got a core group of 25-30 players who’ve been around long enough where they don’t need gear anymore, we’re going to need to keep that farming going. Every once in a while, we can pull in a player who is already at our level and ready to go to the point where we don’t need to gear them out. If we don’t funnel gear, eventually we’ll reach a point where we run out of players to bring in (because turnover, people leaving/quitting/new jobs/no time, etc). Our depth is amazing. It’s how we can even field raids sometimes. There’s always going to be a bottom end and we have to narrow that gap between top and bottom to help make it easier for us when we reach the harder progression bosses. It makes sense to do this at the beginning of the tier as well to really maximize all that gear coming in.

Now here’s the flip side of the equation.

Extend please!

When we get to a new boss, we need time to learn the nuances. We have to learn the new phases and mechanics that come with it. We have to wipe to it. We have to see it so that we can understand and then execute. This usually happens towards the end of the week because the first part of the week is spent clearing UP to that boss. Our ultimate end objective is to KILL everything in this instance. The fact that it’s the final tier in the expansion means that we have a silent countdown clock hanging except we don’t know what the end time is going to be. I’d rather err on the side of clearing everything early then clearing everything too late. I want to get these guys a heroic Garrosh kill. That’s what we’re all here to do. Just when it seems like we’re all prepared and ready to take down a new boss, we run out of time, and it’s Tuesday. We have to kill all that stuff again. And guess what? There’s days where our consistency and our mindset isn’t there and we don’t even GET to the new boss that we want which cuts in to our progression time, and then boom, reset again.

This is where we are at today. This is why I proposed the compromise of 3 pulls to get it done on farm or else we move on. It helps ensure chances on getting the players that need gear their gear while simultaneously ensuring that we have enough allocated time to work on a new progression boss. Problem is, that isn’t good enough anymore.

We’re still lacking on time. In the end, we’ve opted to switch to an extended week schedule. Week 1 is spent getting as far as we can, week 2 is spent extending to work on whichever boss we just cleared to. Any new recruits are typically brought in during week 1 to learn and get suitably equipped.  Our veterans and heavy hitters are brought in for the progression stuff.

I really miss winged instances.

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