Guide to Healing, Leading, and Progressing in WoW Raids
Hey everyone, I’m still in Seattle for the Labor Day long weekend. Needed to unplug and try to decompress myself for a bit. Got a great question in the email today.
What advice would you give a GM and their leaders who wants to make the jump from 10 man raiding to 25 man raiding?
I’ll add my thoughts to this in a later post. I’ve personally never had to engineer that type of jump before since I have mostly been in a 25 man raiding environment.
Good friend and fellow Matticast host Borsk has called it a career. Whether or not he’ll Brett Favre his way back in after another WoW expansion, who knows? After reading his thoughts on the game and his guild plans, I reflected a bit on my guild and what it’s long term plans are. I’ve recently made the transition to go from a “simple” WoW guild to a multi-gaming organization.
Let’s be real. These days, players aren’t confined to just one game anymore. Might as well harness that and set up a base that encompasses the interests of other players within reason. The community site’s being slowly revamped to include sections for WoW, League of Legends and The Old Republic. I am debating of getting into Battlefield 3. I know I’ll be snapping up Counterstrike: GO (and most likely investing in a public server for it because I love pub servers).
There’s something about Conquest where people that have quit the game or explored other guild options years ago decide that they want to come back. Even now, I’m sitting on several applications from former players who were part of our roster during Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader. I’m not the best or the greatest when it comes to this stuff. But you can damn well bet I’m the most motivated. The drive to keep working and keep going with all this management stuff hasn’t gone out despite the efforts of individuals who continually try to get me to throw in the towel (Sorry kids).
Be careful with your relationships in WoW to other players. Guys who I had known for years would just leave without even a courtesy goodbye. Of the things that upset me the most, that ranks the highest. It’s a chilling reminder that people who you treated as friends and brothers will just as quickly abandon you.
There is an extremely limited recruiting window during content cycles. It is during this window when the amount of players looking for guilds are the highest. This is a time frame between a new content patch date and 2 or so weeks after a new content patch is updated. Your guild has that narrow window where there are a plethora of players searching for guilds. You have players who are unsatisfied with their raids or maybe their guilds broke up due to boredom or something. Everyone out there looking for a guild is posturing and deciding which organization looks the most promising to join.
So what happens after that week is up? Recruiting dries up again. The best way to secure a stream of players applying is to take down the end bosses. Sooner you do that, the sooner you are more appealing to others.
I completely echo Borsk’s sentiments. Thinking about forming a raiding guild? Don’t do it. The typical chain of command has the GM on top of a pyramid (you have your officers, then your raiders and then friends and family or something).
I’d actually argue differently.
I’d say it’s the reverse with the leader being on the bottom of the food chain. Why? Because crap flows down. Everything is the GM’s fault.
Not enough recruits: My fault for not being able to bring an influx of players in.
Crappy play: My fault for not being punishing enough or having enough players to immediately replace the crappy players or for bad players not being able to do what they need.
Hurricane Irene: My fault for not having more players replace the ones affected by bad weather.
Progression: My fault for not being able to lift the play of everyone else around me and getting us further.
Depending on who you ask, some of these will be true and others not so. Either way, if you’re not prepared for the onslaught, it’s not for you. It’s one of the contributing factors as to why there aren’t as many 25 man raiding guilds today simply because the administrative headache of 10 mans is considerably less so than 25. The rewards of 25 man raiding with the additional gold, the loot, and valor points clearly does not appear to be enough to offset the efforts.
Chalk it to boredom. Chalk it to the atmosphere. Blame the lack of friends. There’s a large variety of reasons as to why players are suspending their WoW accounts. I can’t say for certain there’s any one factor. There is a segment of the population that I’m happy to see go. It’s the players who had difficulty transitioning to Cataclysm. You know, the ones that had a hard time with healing or tanking or other mechanics. They’re the players that you dread finding in the dungeon finder. I suspect some of those players have also decided to quit playing.
To me, that’s a good thing. As much as I’m all for trying to help players improve and get better, I know it’s not the case for everyone. World of Warcraft isn’t meant for everyone. To not have to deal with such players in the game in pug raids and other areas is a blessing for me personally.
Heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.[1]The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others” (p. 1127).
I did not realize there was a psychological term for this. However, this effect does not appear to be applicable in certain areas of the world. No where is this more prevalent in games like League of Legends. It’s baffling when you have an AD carry grab AP boosting items and then complain about how everyone else on the team is bad when their score is 1/16/4 (that’s 1 kill, 16 deaths and 4 assists). When trying to point out flaws in their build or the ability to play, an immediate defensive reaction occurs. Even some pointers and tips get blatantly shot down.
(To translate for WoW players, it’s the equivalent of a hunter gemming all Intellect and Stamina)
I’ve encountered many WoW players who also behave the same way and because of this, does not lead to any growth or improvement for them (and consequently, their guild). But what can you do? Nothing other than cut and recruit.
However, the effect does not appear to affect all cultures.
Regardless of how pervasive the phenomenon is, it is clear from Dunning’s and others’ work that many Americans, at least sometimes and under some conditions, have a tendency to inflate their worth. It is interesting, therefore, to see the phenomenon’s mirror opposite in another culture. In research comparing North American and East Asian self-assessments, Heine of the University of British Columbia finds that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, with an aim toward improving the self and getting along with others.
Clearly the solution is to recruit all Asians, right?
I’m sorry to see Borsk go. He’ll still be on the Matticast once we get back and going. By the way Borsk, I’ll be happy to take in any players of yours looking for a raiding guild *grin*.
It took about two years. It’s nice to be acknowledged finally though. I don’t hold any ill feelings towards the WoW Magazine or Blizzard.
Picture this. You’ve retired from raiding. You have a nice, quiet home in the interior. Maybe there’s a river or a stream nearby. Everyday, you sit back on your Pyrium reinforced lawnchair with your fishing pole provided graciously by the Kalu’ak when you helped them out in Northrend those years ago. Some days you get a bite, some days you whiff and get nothing. It’s a peaceful life where you do nothing else but fish and drink beer everyday.
But you’re tired of it, aren’t you? You want to Brett Favre your way back into the raiding scene. Maybe Michael Jordan your way into the guild again. There’s a right way and then there’s a not-as-right way.
Go back in time for a moment when you explained to your leaders that you wanted to stop raiding. At the time, you probably figured it was a permanent thing. You had a new job, new spouse, or maybe you were just sick of the game. Whatever it was, you couldn’t commit anymore and your leaders understood, they wished you the best and said you could keep your characters there.
But then you said something like this:
“I’m going to quit raiding but let me know if you need me to pitch in for a day or something.”
Saying that doesn’t work for me. It’s nice of players to offer their services like that on a part time manner. The reality is that leaders have a hard time planning for unexpected contingencies. It’s not always possible to provide any kind of reasonable notice. If you happen to be online and the guild is desperate for a spot, sure you got lucky.
As a leader though, I don’t like being placed in that situation of having to depend on a person who has said they wanted to step back from raiding. Once I hear the plug pull, that’s it for me. I’ll still be friends with them easily and there will be no hard feelings. In my eyes though, when a player quits, they quit. There’s no inbetween. I’d rather pull in a new recruit and trial them in the raid. I would only pull in a retired player after every avenue was exhausted. I can tell you right now that no leader wants to rely on someone who said that they were quitting raiding.
Leaders prefer the safety and security of knowing that players will do their best to attend raids regularly. Having a question mark over the head of someone who decides to raid at their own whim doesn’t help the rest of the group.
Then say so.
Let your leaders know that circumstances have changed. Maybe your scheduling is different or your living arrangements allowed you to raid again (or you sacrificed something important to your significant other for the ability to raid). You need to explicitly sit down with the officers and tell it to them instead of constantly saying “Hey, I’m around in case you can’t find anyone.” That just doesn’t work and it leads to a bunch of misunderstanding especially if the raid leader’s trying to respect your wishes and not have to resort to you, the retired player, all the time.
I never really understood it. Either you can (and want to) raid or you’re not able to. Just being in between seems to be detrimental to the raid at best. Maybe one of you readers can shed some light if you’re in such a situation?
My blog is 4 years old today!
Thanks to all of you turkeys, clowns, gnomes and gators that have subscribed and put up with my insanity. Work must be that boring, eh? Hat tip to all the guest posters, the team and the supporters that have continued to give me the fortitude to continue writing.
So a quick informal survey. What’re you interested in seeing more of topics wise (or anything in general)? There are some days where I come up with a blog post idea and then realize I wrote about that back in 2009. Not that there’s anything wrong with revisiting old topics for discussion as long as I add a fresh perspective to it, of course.
Monocle smile.
EDIT: By the way guys? Your GMs called. They asked me to ask you to stop putting Amani Hex Sticks in the bank!
Hot out of Gamescom is the announcement of things we’ll see in patch 4.3
Sources: Kotaku, WoW Insider, Battle.Net
This means the thrilling conclusion to Cataclysm is approaching. What an incredibly short expansion cycle. I’m quite curious as to what type of bosses we’ll be seeing in Deathwing’s raid. Perhaps some elementals? Other black dragons? Select minions that we stomped out in Deepholm?
Who knows how many typos are going to be made? Transmogrify, not transmorgify. I’ll need to remember this. On the feature itself, I am really pissed. Why? Because it means I have to go on the tier 2 hunt all over again! For me, it’s either going to be tier 2, tier 5 or tier 6. I disenchanted all of my old gear as we went from expansion to expansion because I simply ran out of room. I believe both tier 2 and tier 6 had the entire outfit (all 8 main pieces). Thankfully, I kept all my weapons (Val’anyr and Benediction).
This means I’ll need to set up raiding expeditions into:
Damnit.
Finally, Chilton explained a new feature coming with the patch called “Raid Finder”. The Raid Finder essentially operates like a dungeon finder, automating the search for fellow players on the hunt for a good raiding party. It will be built into the game’s updated user interface when the patch hits, they said.
The current iteration of the LF raid tool isn’t the greatest. I daresay a majority of the community doesn’t know it exists and relies on trade chat to fill up their players. For me, when I’m on an alt randomly doing stuff in the city, I’m not actively scouting for a raid group to join. But when I see someone that advertises LFM 25 man BoT, need DPS/healers, I’ll whisper that guy and try to get in on the group. Now with the addition of the raid finder though, that’s going to automate the process entirely. I’m really anxious to see what it looks like. The possibility exists where the system can be “gamed” like the current dungeon finder where it’ll organize and invite players according to gear levels. As a raid leader, I can foresee using these for older raids (or at least, raids that are a tier behind us or so). I don’t know how desperate I would be to use it for current raid or progression content.
It’s not explicitly stated that the raid finder is going to be cross realm so we don’t know yet. If I were to hazard a guess, that’s a probable yes. It might give us the capability to raid with people we know from other servers.
Bonus: If it does go the route of cross realm raiding, that means the ability to raid with Real ID friends won’t be far behind. Pretty soon raid leaders can offer tryouts to players without the risk of server or faction transfer costs.
Would love it if this feature would be enabled for all previously discovered raids. Sometimes it can be hard to fill up older raids.