Matt’s Misplays: The Cardinal Rule of Raiding

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Welcome to this edition of Matt’s Misplays! It’s been quite warm and toasty this past week in my area. This must be what it’s like in Aberrus with all the fire and lava everywhere. Now that we’re progressing into Mythic raid, things are going to get interesting. I’ll start off with a recap and then let’s breakdown some incredible individual effort followed by some amazing lessons to learn. Big gains this week as we advance to 3/9 Mythic!

  • The cardinal rule of raiding: Our GM frequently emphasizes this lesson frequently during raid especially if we die to it. In most cases, the best way to survive a mechanic is to not get caught. If I die to a breath, or a puddle, or a fire, I can hear that booming voice in the back of my head, “Position! Position! Position!“. Did you die to an ability? If so, chances are, it could’ve been avoided had you been in a better spot. This goes back to a recent post about climbing up to the CE level raider. Focus on movement and positioning, and everything will become easier.
  • Almost in tiers: This was our second week of full clearing normal and heroic. We jammed both raids with 30 players to maximize loot drops. We asked friends and alts from other teams to come in. They get an easy crack at vault slots, but they would have to surrender all dropped gear. Normal was cleared in about 55 minutes and Heroic took us a little over an hour. Every player with the exception of one is now in possession of 4 piece tier. It was impressively efficient.
  • Big early progression: We cleared 2 additional bosses on Mythic and we’re sitting pretty at 3/9 with Assault of the Zaqali and Amalgamation Chamber cleared! After these first bosses are cleared, there’s a big step up in difficulty.
  • Recruiting: We’re looking to add a Warrior as well as some ranged DPS (Mage and a Hunter). Check us out here!

Anyway, let’s check out some lessons for this week!

Kazzara is the first boss here and we didn’t get any looks at it last week partly because we just blew it up so fast that any errors were just washed over anyway. On Mythic, that isn’t much of an option. Lines that touch other lines or smaller fire puddles will explode so you have to communicate with the team and indicate which direction you’re going.

Here’s the thing. Like I’ve told many an ex, I’m not psychic. If I can’t figure out what restaurant my ex wants to go to, then I can’t tell which player’s going where or which puddle they’re trying to take their beam to. This encounter mechanic will expose players who may have brute-forced their way into mythic guilds in the past by virtue of overloading on gear. This early in a tier, not only does everyone need to play mechanics and survive, communication is just as important.

In this example, range players are instructed to stay further out to draw puddle spawns and lasers away. There needs to be some space between puddles to allow for lasers to get dropped. We have enough raid damage that we don’t need to maximize spawn locations, and yet the team was ingrained in trying to minimize gaps. However, at this stage of the fight, the range players are playing a little too close. Sure enough, the raid gets punished. GM was not happy about that. We all knew better. We’re going to explore a strategy change though to see if we can alleviate some of the positioning stress and give more room for everyone to work with because we can do better. No bubble tea for anyone (yet)!

On Experiments, Neldris has a Rending Charge that will force him to cut through specific players in sequential order. Depending on how they are positioned, it is possible for the same person to get hit more than once. In this clip, 1 goes to the back which forces 2 to get the bleed twice. Although it’s possible that Neldris manages to squeak through both the diamond and the triangle players it looked extremely close. What should happen here is that the first hit needs to be on the mark closer to the middle guaranteeing that each player only gets struck once with one bleed application each. This is a small positional blunder but easily resolvable.

Heroic Sarkareth with 30 people is like healing in a slow-moving Powerpoint presentation with a more fierce-sounding Clippit calling positions and cooldowns. This one was a bit of a brain fart. Our poor Monk gets Infinite Duress but confuses it with a bomb and goes to stand in a puddle! Big oops! Luckily, he realizes his mistake and runs to the edge but it’s too late. The dispel is cast but he takes lethal damage and dies a true Monk’s death – Not with a bang, but with a whimper. This is revenge for all the Divine Hymns that were sniped by Revive!

You absolute ding dong!

I demonstrated this one last week. Can’t get cut off here, even if it’s the phase 2 into phase 3 transition. You’re missing all that damage uptime! C’mon man, you should know better. Good effort by the Mage to blink in but gets bounced off (twice, I think). Really though, the moment the rock walls were reforming, stop what you’re doing, and just get in position ahead of time. Stop being greedy! This is not the time to be greedy!

Most Valuable Panda

But it wasn’t all terrible this week. We’ve got some solid plays as well.

This one might be hard to see, but here’s a look at Amalgamation Chamber. We’ve just entered the second phase and there are individual circles that need to be soaked (left). The Death Knight urgently alerts the team and starts heading over there. He correctly deduces that he has the movement speed of a slug and calls for help, “Need a solo soak, [back side purple]”. Our Demon Hunter quickly pounces on it thereby saving the attempt and preventing a wipe. The combined efforts of these two get a gruff nod and a grunt of approval.

Positive, impactful plays don’t necessarily show up on the meters. Sometimes it isn’t about who blasted out the most damage or who outright crushed healing. An innocuous communication like the above example demonstrates teamwork that is just enough to secure a progression kill. Without that call and that reaction, this is a wipe. Hope you enjoyed the highlights and the lessons from this week!

 

Matt’s Misplays: Welcome to Aberrus!

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Welcome back, everybody! It’s been quite an eventful week with the season 2 launch of new dungeons! Of course, with a new season means a new raid and we step foot in Aberrus, the playground of Neltharion.

Or something.

What an opening week for Death Jesters though. We spent the past two weeks preparing for Aberrus and it paid off in a big way. We cleared 9/9 in normal, then followed up with a 9/9 Heroic, and finished it off with a 1/9 Mythic kill. This was all done in 6 hours and did not require another day. I can’t remember the last time I secured a week 1 Ahead of the Curve achievement. All in all, we distributed over 110 pieces of loot. Sadly, no tier for your favourite Panda Priest but that’s okay. Priority to the DPS first. The faster stuff dies, the less we need to heal.

Anyway, let’s get into it, shall we?

It’s a new raid. There’s new bosses. There’s new mechanics and new abilities. I’ll go a little easy this week.

… Or will I?

Let’s move up to the third encounter that is the Forgotten Experiments. We tackle the dragon versions of Larry, Moe, and Curly. We have the last dragon (Curly) in the air about to strafe the raid. We manage to survive the initial run, but then run back in and manage to bait it back on the return trip.

Oops!

We should have waited on either side for the dragon to pass by and reach the end. Then we can visually track it and see which lane it picks (hopefully one of the outer lanes keeping the middle free). Instead, middle gets strafed again and you can see a few of our players get essentially get bodychecked because they did not keep their head up. The lesson here is to keep your head up and track where the dragon is at all times.

Here we have Rashok and I guarantee you every guild has made this mistake at least once. As raiders, we’re so ingrained to maximize location economy that overlapping circles next to each other so that we have real estate to work with in the arena. Unfortunately, Blizzard likes to remind us that they can break the rules. Here you can see a Rogue deploy his Grappling Hook out into the wall but he just barely misses making the side step adjustment causing the circles to touch and detonating the raid!

Needless to say, we have not made that error since.

Keep your circles at least one panda away from each other.

Here is the Amalgamation Chamber. Players on the Void side get targeted and drop off a giant purple circle. We have our multi-dotters in the middle hitting both the flame and void elemental. Of course, our genius Shadow Priest gets a circle and then… proceeds to travel in the direction of Middle Earth.

Take it backwards, my dude! Missing out on potential damage by dropping that circle off far away like that.

Look at this idiot Panda who completely whiffs a rock throw in Assault of the Zaqali. Either that, or the Zaqali Spiderman just shrugged off the rock I dropped over the side. Anyway, I guess the boulder is thrown in the column based on where the player character is as opposed to where the character is facing.

Let’s move onto Echo of Neltharion which might be the first real, uh… wall that a raid faces. Not everything listed is going to be a misplay. If I recognize a great play, I’ll point that out too. Here is a risky move that paid off. Due to an earlier misplaced fire patch, the raid has no room to go to stay out of the impending fire circles. Our lone Evoker makes the quick thinking play to pop defensives and proceeds to stand in the fire. I did track that and managed to slam as many heals into him before he was able to fly back to group safely.

That is a raid-saving play. But as a team, we should have never put him in that position to begin with.

Some further unfortunate miscommunication here leads to the raid getting split in half. Let this be a lesson in heavy movement encounters to telegraph or direct traffic in advance if you have to make a change. There’s no way we can handle traversing the big fire patch and now we’re cut off away from everyone else resulting in a wipe. This is an example of the raid needing to do a large move fast to get in front and we failed to do that here.

This above is what should happen. Tanks hulk smash their way through a wall in the direction they want the team to rush through and then drag Neltharion back in the other direction to minimize the fire patch. Keep up this same pattern during the phase 1 push.

There are two examples above here. Again, further miscommunication on our end. We’re instructed to “get inside, get inside!” but we interpreted that as getting inside to the center whereas the intent was to get inside the rock walls where the raid needs to go before the walls come up. Check your terminology here and find a way to distinguish between the rock walls (that are breakable) and outside walls (which is the arena room walls). Make sure your raid understands the difference because if you tell someone with the purple arrow to run to a wall, they need to know which one it is. In most cases, it’s going to be the outside wall since you won’t need them to break any of the rock walls.

Clearly state what your intentions are for the raid by being simple and direct. Phrases like “move to green marker” or “move away from blue” are simple and will work. It also helps to actually have markers down to direct traffic.

Oh noooooo! We left a man behind! When you start seeing the larger orange swirls appear, that is your cue to stop what you’re doing because the walls are about to come up momentarily. You cannot greed your casts in this situation or else you get punished by being isolated from the rest of the raid.

It’s okay, the walls came down about 30 seconds later as we changed phases. This one’s on me.

I did have an opening to grip him over with plenty of time but I just… didn’t.

Every Holy Priest’s worst nightmare comes true here. A Divine Hymn is scheduled to come up during this soak and I proceed to start the channeled cast, but I’m forced to move and interrupt it in order for Hurtling Barrage to be pointed outward.

Actually, I think I had time here before the barrage would come through. So this is on me for taking it too safe and not being greedy. I had time to finish the Hymn then move out. Alternatively, wait for Hurtling Barrage to target, then cast it.

Let’s analyze this phase one death for a second because I see this situation come up often. The player has a Mass Disintegrate and they need to stay still for their team to get rid of their Echoing Howl. A fire is about to land on them and they risk lethal. But if they move out of it, they risk messing up any players that have to clear.

My play would be to rotate character 90 degrees and strafe left (this would move me away from the boss at 100% move speed instead of simply backpedalling at a slower speed). I don’t know if immunities would move the Distintegrate to another target or something.

In actuality, this was a miss by healers because we did not burst this player to full health fast enough causing them to get zapped by the beam (but the fire would’ve melted them anyway if they weren’t going to move). I need to add a frame glow for the target.

It took me about two pulls before I successfully wrapped my head around Infinite Duress. Most healers are quite trigger-happy with their dispel but that’s a mistake. In this example, I get bailed out here by an evoker. I knew I was supposed to run that out, but I mentally spaced and ran it in the wrong direction. Had I been dispelled here, it would’ve knocked the rest of the team off the platform. Instead, I get positioned in such a way that the dispel knocks the team further inward keeping them safe.

I love this moment above because it actually proves that contrary to popular belief, Ret Paladins can think! Watch as our intrepid wannabe warrior steps out and realizes that getting dispelled in his position is going to knock the raid into the two circles. He shuffles over and the dispel is clear to go off resulting in the team getting knocked to safety.

You can figuratively see the gears turn in this one. He literally stops, pauses, and then moves.

At the same time, I have to point out that this is the same man who randomly just speed horse’d into the Terros hole for no reason.

However, not to be outdone, our resident Enhancement Shaman learns from the previous play and beelines it straight to the safe spot. He’s a chess master and has already thought 3 moves ahead. He reached that conclusion way faster than our previous Ret Paladin did. This is an example of learning from other player’s mistakes.

It’s unfortunate that they’ll continue to be overshadowed and recognized primarily for their use in raid as a glorified Windfury dispenser.

That’s all the misplays for this week! I hope you had a good chuckle at a few of these, but more importantly, I implore you to learn from our mistakes. I’m here to help teach you to become better decision-makers in raid. All in all, this is a fun instance with mostly single targets. Great raid to head into the summer with. In the mean time, we are looking to recruit some players to help us in the summer months for Aberrus. We’re looking to add a Mage and a Hunter. Check us out and apply here!

Patch 10.1 Day is Here

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Glad to see it’s arrived! Now we get to dive underground and meet some new, friendly NPCs. The Niffen are my new best friends. They sound oddly Canadian-ish. Maybe they should’ve been modelled more after beavers instead.

  • Barter Bricks: These seem hard to come by. I’ve been out farming rares and doing some of the events and I still don’t have enough to buy the transmute recipe with only 21 of those bricks.
  • Sniffenseeking: This might be my favourite activity. It’s like a one-person escape room. I love the way I hang on to Myritt and point the nose in the direction I want to smell. LOOK AT IT! Don’t you just want to protect sniffy boi here?
  • Aberrus Preparation: Still ongoing but we’ll have our pre-tier briefing where we outline the general strategy and mechanics for each boss as a unit. It shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes or so. It’s still up to individual players to determine what they need to do at the player level. I’ve picked out all the gear I’d want to get on my Priest from the raid, but I expect there’ll be some strong alternatives out of the M+ dungeons. It does appear that normal raids will be taken off of our scheduled raid times unless we hit a major wall in heroic. Expectation is to run normals when we can outside of raid.
  • Currency Confusion: Between all the crests and fragments, it’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. I’m sure players will get the hang of it after a while, but until then I’m keeping some spreadsheets on a side screen to ensure I know what I need to pursue.
  • Spore Tender Enchant: This has sadly been nerfed. I got to enjoy it for a whole three days. Back to Sophic’s I go.
  • Interfaces and Updates: Reminder to keep updating your addons and WeakAuras daily until things settle down. I expect this to continue for the next few weeks as dungeon and raid WAs get refined further. Updated my suggested addons and WAs page for season 2.

 

Matt’s Misplays: The Vault Farewell Tour

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Happy May, everybody!

Welcome to this edition of Matt’s Misplays. This week, we say farewell to Vault of the Incarnates. Not a bad introductory raid for Dragonflight, wouldn’t you say?

But hey, it’s official! I’ve officially received my 8/8 Mythic Vault of the Incarnates achievement. I insisted that really it was no big deal if I didn’t get Dathea down on Mythic. I could always come back to it in 3 expansions. But no, no, no, the raid couldn’t have that. They practically voluntold me in there even though I felt Dathea was worse than Rasz.

Let’s start at Terros.

In hindsight, this grip may not have been necessary. Broccoli over here looked like they were close enough to the portal, but Panda didn’t want to leave it to chance. There’s plenty time before the Annihilation where there isn’t a lot of action going on and range players have to get close and be prepared to hit the portal. Otherwise you run into situations like this where we have stragglers.

In this situation, an all in play has been called. The tanks have been instructed to NOT blow up the pillars because there may not be any defensives left to use and the concern is that Terros gets defeated before the pillar damage overwhelms the group. Unfortunately, this carries a risk. A slam is about to happen and the melee group is trapped. To their right is a wall of pillars. In front of them is a giant hole. To the left is a sea of brown dirt. The only safe move is behind them into that little sliver of safe zone goodness. Good players identify this fast and can move into there the moment the circle appears. Risky players pop a defensive and dodge left before returning to safety.

And then you have Paladins who just don’t care and pop bubble while shrugging off the damage anyway.

Moving on to Sennarth is another set of problems as there’s a greater focus on positional play.

The run up the stairs from platform to platform is often one of the trickier ones. On the first set of stairs, it’s possible for the spider grip to come out and snatch people to their doom. Great Priests knows to look behind and camp at the top of the stairs just to help catch any stragglers. A common Life Grip technique is to target a player ahead of time if you think they’re going to need it. In this example, I managed to fish out the Shaman behind the cyclone and then grip them to safety after they crossed my screen from right to left. If I grip earlier, I run the risk of pulling the Shaman into the cyclone.

Here’s another example but from the perspective of the gripped target. I actually think what happened is that the Paladin was pulled through the cyclone which launched them into the air. But Taurens are huuuuuge! It was easy to pick out a big, jumbo Tauren Paladin in mid-air as they go flying from one side of the monitor to the other. Not that I think they’re too large or anything, but they could afford to cut down on the boba tea.

I’m more amazed about this play myself. The hunter manages to disengage back on, but it might’ve been a touch too early or they disengaged into that tornado. It slowed them enough to fall into the abyss, but this Panda was able to target them quick enough to get them back to safety. I credit thousands of hours playing CS:GO and Call of Duty. Who knew clicking heads could translate to raid, right? Now had that player been a Gnome-sized model, they would not have had a chance.

A Priest who’s able to make player-saving plays like that consistently is going to be an asset on your raid team.

However, any raid leader worth their salt would be disappointed. The most important point my GM has ever drilled into anyone on the roster is to always be in the right position. A great raider knows to never be in such a vulnerable spot to begin with. The Warlock gate placed there is near the inside track close to Sennarth. With timers, players should be aware that there is a pull-in coming soon. Either accelerate your movement so that you’re safe ahead of time or if you don’t think you can make it up the stairs, quickly move laterally towards the outside to buy as much time as possible to fight the pull-in. Staying inside while applying boss damage up the stairs is extremely risky unless you have an out (such as an Alter Time) and can be punishing.

Can’t stop stressing movement fundamentals no matter what boss you’re working on. Players will periodically drop webs. In this example, the Evoker commits an error and just drops webs that cover the narrow portion of the bridge slowing people that need to cross (like our resident Panda). We instruct our players to try to handle this in one of three ways:

  1. Use a defensive and drop it in the same spot
  2. Make a small circle with it so you’re still moving and not taking as much damage
  3. Move in an east-west pattern (facing Sennarth)

What you don’t want to do is move north-south (from the back of the room towards Sennarth), because now you’ve slowed down and cut off the path for anyone looking to advance across the room. Expect more of these types of mechanics in future raids. It’s not enough to ensure survivability when dropping pools of danger. You have to consider how your pools will impact your team. Don’t be the guy that messes with the team and loses them boba tea privileges because you screwed up.

This is a look at the first phase of Kurog where we handle the fire altar. What we’re trying to do is stack together and bait all the fire pools in one area then move. We have just finished recovering from a Searing Carnage and you can see a Warlock coming in from the right desperately trying to get back with the group. Unfortunately, they were a touch too slow and you can see a fire pool does target them. Not exactly optimal for the soak person because now they have to run into that orb after they soak the neatly stacked orbs.

Another big no-no moment is you can see a player taking an early lead off (keep your eye on the range group and watch the left side) and moving to the left before the fire pools actually spawn. We get away with one here because we’re lucky they didn’t get a pool spawn and cutting off the range team. Our Panda should have held left strafe key, but was anticipating a pool drop on the left just in case and responded with a screen rotationg to the right, then strafe right for maximum speed to safety before rejoining the team after. This is the kind of thing raiders can get smacked with a rolled-up magazine over. Do not cheat and pre-move in order to bait puddles because you can screw up the raid. Had we been punished, it would’ve resulted in no boba tea for anyone.

With any kind of soak mechanic, we have a standing instruction. The first player that’s in the soak takes it unless told otherwise. Here we see a lightning pool spawn on Panda and a hunter coming in from right to left. There’s a thought process where the Hunter can take Panda’s pool, and then Panda can shuffle left and take that pool. Luckily, a Warlock sneaks up and soaks that one then it’s a simple step back for our Panda to soak lightning again. Early on in progression, healers were asked to never soak lightning pools because it ran the risk of the Thunder ad teleporting over to it and taking it out of cleave range. But with gear upgrades, that is no longer a factor as the Thundering ad will die before it gets another teleport off.

The double donut during the earth altar is where most groups tend to lose ground. It often boils down to tank spacing and tank timing. Our tanks are able to split the Earth ad and Kurog apart to give the raid optimal space to work with. One donut goes off first, then the other donut. Inexperienced raiders can panic as they attempt to try to process dealing with two donuts at the same time. However, a veteran raider will know to only deal with them one by one. In this sequence, Panda commits to the right side donut and allows that one to wash over before sidestepping into the second donut. Be patient, take these slow, and deal with it as it comes. Trying to do both at the same time is extremely risky and often unnecessary. But credit to the tanks for peeling away from each other and giving the raid maximum space and time to work with.

Intermission 2 ads are straightforward. With the earth circles, Panda made the mistake of going in the same direction as the other two. When dealing with circle drop mechanics like this, and with no better option, try to park in the… uh, crack of the other two so that you don’t risk overlapping. What a heads-up play to get gripped back into the group though (I don’t know who snatched the Panda, but good job). It’s nice to get gripped and panda handled once in a while. Wasn’t expecting that otherwise would have gripped another player who had the earth soak on the outside back in as well.

Okay, last misplay here on Broodkeeper. I actually don’t know what happened here. Evoker just … dashed into a lightning circle?

Hello?!

Evokerbrain?!

Anyway, I thought that was kinda funny so I just had to include it.

That’s it for this week! No raiding for us as we take the week off and prepare for Aberrus. For you raid leaders, there are some new resources to check out.

 

Stop Saying Sorry: It’s Not Helping the Party

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We’ve all been there: You’re in the middle of a raid or dungeon in World of Warcraft, and someone makes a mistake. Maybe that mage pulled too many mobs, or goofed an interrupt. Whatever the reason, the immediate response from many players is to apologize, then explain what happened.

But is that really the best approach?

The problem with apologizing is that it can waste valuable time and tie up Discord communication. Instead of focusing on salvaging the pull, players spend time reassuring the person who made the mistake that it’s okay. I understand the desire to be considerate of others, but in the fast-paced world of dungeons, every second counts. I’ve run dungeons and raids with players who felt it necessary to say apologies, then follow up with a play-by-play of exactly what happened that led to the current situation.

Listen, I know you’re sorry but there are 7 bolstered, angry trash mobs about to beat the crap out of our tank. Let’s skip the explanation and help save the pull. While you’re on the floor trying to explain yourself, I’m mentally running through my checklist of how to react.

  • Guardian Spirit on tank? Check.
  • Psychic Scream to buy time? Check.
  • Priest Roots and tell tank to kite mobs away? Check.
  • Instruct the DPS Warrior named Zugzug to stop zug zugging long enough to hit Rallying Cry and get ourselves temporary health? Check.
  • Fervently request Druid to take a few steps away from Volcanic to fire off a Battle Res? Check.

But none of this can happen while you’re rapidly apologizing and I can’t butt in to get a word in!

So, what can you do instead of apologizing? Here are a few alternatives to consider:

  1. Acknowledge the mistake
  2. Offer a solution
  3. Provide important information earlier

Let’s take a closer look.

Acknowledge the Mistake

When someone makes a mistake, it’s natural to want to apologize. But, apologizing can give the impression that you’ve done something wrong intentionally when the reality is most mistakes are unintentional. Try acknowledging the error without taking the blame, then saying what’s about to happen. For example, you could say something like, “Oops, I goofed. Extra pull coming.” Remember what Brad Pitt told Matt Damon.

Don’t use seven words when four will do.

Offer a Solution or Suggestion

In addition to acknowledging the error, it’s beneficial to offer a solution for how to move forward. For example, if someone whiffs an interrupt, you could suggest a strategy for how to handle them. This not only shows that you’re engaged in the group’s success, but it keeps the focus on salvaging the pull attempt rather than dwelling on the mistake.

In Azure Vault, if you’re sitting and watching for Waking Bane, you should mention that you can’t get Ice Bindings and pray someone else in the group can interrupt that cast instead.

Provide Important Information

Finally, you can also provide information that may be helpful for the group ahead of time. For example, if you notice a specific mob that has a particular ability, you could alert the group to this and suggest an approach for dealing with it. This kind of information-sharing not only helps the group to succeed, but it also alerts them on what to expect.

In Court of Stars, I habitually inform my group when we get to Gerenth the Vile that I can handle the first four Hypnosis Bats with a Chastise, a Psychic Scream, a Quaking Palm, then another Chastise. Anything after that needs a stun.

Once the group has recovered, if you feel the need to justify and explain what went wrong, feel free to go ahead. At higher key levels though, it’s often quite obvious as experienced players can recognize what happened or caused the error in play.

Although apologizing after a critical mistake is a natural response, it’s not always the most effective. Acknowledge the error, with a solution or suggestion. By doing so, you can help to keep the group concentrated and save the pull attempt quickly and efficiently.