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

by

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

by

“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.

Matt’s Notebook: Notes from the Frontline

by

Now that we’re officially entering summer, all eyes are on the upcoming raid. Over in Death Jesters, we spent part of our raid night diving into PTR testing and previewing boss mechanics for the new tier. If you missed it, check out the full preview post here.

  • Last Call had a heartbreaking 1.3% wipe on Gallywix last night due to a missed interrupt (on a VIP, no less). I’ll take full ownership of that one. Originally, I was assigned to interrupt the edge add and it was working fine. But we decided to try having a Warlock pet handle it instead to align with our range DPS ad assignments. In hindsight, that swap was unnecessary. I’m floating left side anyway and saving Ascendance for that group. Should’ve just kept things simple.
  • I’ve been wrestling with whether I’m micromanaging too much or not giving players the freedom to make their own judgment calls. We tend to thrive on heavily scripted fights (Sprocketmonger comes to mind), but really stumble when a boss demands individual decision-making and fast adaptation (like Stix, or now Gallywix). Watching players get knocked out of soaks or misstep simple mechanics is rough. It’s not just performance disappointment, but it’s realizing that not everyone has years of CE raiding reps under their belt, and this might be their first time at this level.
  • Honestly, I might be more frustrated with myself than anything else. Am I communicating the plan clearly enough? Am I making the strategic vision obvious to the team? Smart players don’t always need to be told what to do every second, but they do need to understand why. If we get that right, they can often figure out the how on their own. Right now, it takes us about 20 pulls to bake a mechanic in. I’d love to bring that number closer to 10. For comparison, DJs usually lock things in under 5.
  • Offseason planning is on hold until we clear Gallywix. I want a clear view of where we stand before evaluating roster changes and free agent targets. That said, we’ll likely backload raid nights to farm later bosses and get people their mounts and achievements, with earlier boss cleanup afterward. We’ve already got a few strong recruits waiting in the wings, especially from teams that couldn’t finish out the season or players looking to move up.
  • Last but not least, another raid-wide buff drops today, and we’re seeing an upgrade to the D.I.S.C. belt. That extra push might just be the edge we need to skip the fourth set of adds and finally bring down Gallywix once and for all.

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

by

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!)

Chasing Cutting Edge: Is One More Recruit Worth It?

by

It’s the final stretch of the raid tier. Your team is deep into Mythic progression (maybe even on the last couple of bosses), and suddenly, applications start coming in again.

New trials. Fresh blood. Players looking to make that late-tier leap.

And now you’re faced with a familiar dilemma:
Do we add new players this late in the season, knowing they may not see much play time?
Or do we stick with the current roster, even if a new recruit might help us push through that last hurdle?

In pro sports, this is known as the playoff push, a time when GMs and leaders have to balance fairness, performance, and long-term vision with acquisitions of players.

The Core Question: Can They Help Now?

At this point in the tier, there’s really only one thing that matters: Direct impact.

Can this recruit help us now?

  • Are they geared and experienced enough to immediately contribute to boss kills?
  • Are they better than someone currently on the roster?
  • Will they raise the team’s overall performance and consistency?

If yes, they may be worth displacing someone, even this late.
If not, then it’s probably not fair to either them or the team to bring them in just to warm the bench.

Loyalty vs. Progression

It’s a delicate thing to consider subbing out someone who’s been with you all tier, just to make room for a new trial. You risk hurting morale, creating resentment, and damaging team trust.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Sometimes, that’s the price of progression.

As raid leaders, we have to make hard calls. If the goal is Cutting Edge, then every pull, every death, every percent matters. Loyalty is valuable, but so is performance.

You can balance both by being transparent and respectful in how you handle it.

Best Practices for Handling This Situation

1. Be Transparent with the Team

Let your raiders know the stakes. Make it clear that:

  • You’re evaluating every spot based on progression needs
  • No one is “benched forever,” but performance matters now more than ever
  • This is about the team goal, not personal slights

2. Have Honest Conversations One-on-One

If you need to sub someone out, talk to them directly. Avoid group calls or public shame.

  • Acknowledge their contributions so far
  • Be honest about why the change is needed
  • Offer paths for them to regain their spot (if relevant)

3. Set Clear Expectations with Recruits

Don’t oversell the opportunity. Be upfront:

  • “You may not get much play time this tier, but we’ll evaluate you for reclears and next tier.”
  • “You’ll be part of our community either way, but progression comes first right now.”

This helps filter out players just looking for quick kills or Cutting Edge tags.

Thinking Ahead: Building Trust for Future Tiers

These playoff-push moments are stressful, but they’re also when your team’s values and leadership culture show the most.

How you handle this situation tells your players:

  • Can they trust you to make fair decisions?
  • Do you prioritize the team over individuals?
  • Will you own your calls and communicate clearly?

Get it right, and you build long-term buy-in, even if someone has to sit out a few bosses.

Final Thoughts

Bringing in new talent during the final leg of a tier is a high-stakes move. But if the player can contribute now, and if you communicate well, it can be exactly what your team needs to close out strong.

Just remember:

  • Be fair
  • Be honest
  • Keep your eyes on the prize

With Cutting Edge, every decision counts.