raid

Build Your Own Guild Part 2: Rules of the Game

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In this second installment of the Build your Own Guild series, I am going to teach you how to establish the rules and policies that will help your new raiding guild run itself. Well, that’s an exaggeration. However, without a clear set of rules, your guild will always be rudderless. Before one person signs that charter, you need to lay down the law in black and white. The post outlines the three types of policy that you should establish before your guild even zones into its first instance. The following tips assume that you will have a guild website (after all, we play an internet-based game, right?). These documents and policies need to be the core content of that website when it first goes up.

1. Guild Charter

In Part One, I encouraged you to meditate on your goals and desires for your new guild. Now you must put pencil to paper and share your vision with your members. In my opinion, the more the guild expects to accomplish in terms of raiding, the more important your mission statement is.

Your charter should answer the following questions:

a. What is the guild’s goal?
b. What is the guild’s attitude?
c. What is most important to us?

I’ll quote for you one of my favorite passages from my guild’s charter. It really shows who we are as an organization:

“We value kindness, fair play, and respect for others over loot or in-game success. Our policies work toward ensuring a positive environment in which everyone can enjoy the fruits of our labor.”

I welcome you all to read the entire charter and even use it as a model, but I will warn you that it’s out of date. Since the original charter creation, we’ve decided that we’re a real raiding guild after all. The long road between Gruul and Illidan changed us as an organization. I should take my own advice and adjust the language to our current practices!

You don’t have to create your charter from scratch. Many guilds make their websites accessible to all, and if a guild is recruiting, sometimes you can even create a user account and view their policies. I recommend doing a bit of snooping around–find guilds you admire and know are successful, and copy what they do. The tone of your charter should suit the mood of your guild. My own guild operates in a rather serious mode. If you prefer a raucous, no holds-barred environment, use irony and humor when you write that charter. For an excellent example in this mode, I’ll direct you towards the hilarious charter of a guild named Dread Lobster, as quoted by fellow druish blogger Runyarusco. I laughed so hard, I (almost) wanted to join.

2. Code of Conduct

Even the most laid-back guilds have certain expectations for their members’ behavior, and you ought to explain them either in the charter itself or in an appendix. Collateral Damage sets a very high standard, and unlike many guilds, we restrict profanity (well, in guild chat anyway) and chastise members severely if they disrespect one another. If you want your members to act in a certain way, let them know from the very beginning. That way, if you need to g-kick someone for a behavioral issue, you cannot be accused of unfairness. On the flip side, if you want to foster an open environment where insults and un-PC jokes fly thick and fast, let prospective members know that.

3. Conditions for Membership / Raider Status

If your guild intends to raid seriously, you need to have some means by which you determine who gets to raid and who does not. This type of policy will not seem important to a start-up guild that can barely scrape together enough tanks and healers for an introductory instance, but as you start to have success, you will have to deal with over-crowding. My guild chose not to put in a Raider Status from the beginning, and I have always regretted it. We have always walked the razor’s edge between being inclusive and optimizing rosters, and I know it’s cost our raid leader hours of frustration and worry.

Raiding guilds typically fill their scheduled weekly raids according to one of two successful models.

Model A

Everyone who is a regular member of the guild is a raider, and a Raider Rank would be redundant. The guild is small and does not recruit beyond the minimum number it needs to do the raid content.

Model B

The guild has members who raid and members who do not. These “casual” members may be friends and family of raiders, or they may be longtime members who have had a change in status. When you have two such different constituencies, it is only natural that at some point, one or more of your “casual” members will want to raid. At that point, the concept of Raider Status comes into play. Raider Status can typically be earned through attendance and performance, and it comes with the privilege of being on more raid rosters. It should also be possible to lose Raider Status through consistent poor attendance, bad behavior, or sloppy play.

Given a choice, I would go with Model B. From a management standpoint, it is more difficult to handle a larger, more complex guild roster, but you have a better chance of running all your raids. With Model A, if two of your players go on vacation, your raid is toast. Collateral Damage has a large number of members, and we have been able to run all of our scheduled raids this summer except for the one the Sunday before Labor Day. That’s a pretty awesome ratio considering the rash of expansionitis that’s been going around.

If you DO set strict conditions for membership or Raider Status, you need to define these specifically. Your attendance policy should require not only a percentage, but also tell how often that percentage will be re-calculated. For example, you might require 75% attendance over any two-month period. That allows your players to go out of town every once in a while. Moreover, never be vague about your raid preparation requirements. Instead of just saying “come prepared,” do as Catal, our raid leader does and spell it out in no uncertain terms:

What you should bring:

– A good attitude – We’re going to wipe… a lot.
– PvP trinket and PvP/Stam gear – The focus will be on survivability.
– 2 flasks of your choice.
– Lots of health/mana pots.
– Lots of reagents for buffing.
– Have decursive loaded if you will be responsible for dispelling Grip of the Legion (curse).

This set of requirements applies to our attempts on Archimonde this week. Every raid sign up comes with one of these, and you may find it useful to have a general set that would apply to every raid.

Conclusions

Phew! Now you have three basic documents that your members will be able to refer to when they have questions about how the guild is run. Believe me, they will hold you to what you say, so always keep your policies up-to-date. For Collateral Damage, things didn’t turn out according to our first design, but they worked out all right nonetheless. However, I should /pinch myself for not updating the charter. These documents are a contract between you and your members and it is in your best interest as guild leader to hold up your end.

For next time, we’ll be looking at the fourth and arguably most important policy that a new guild needs to have in place: the Loot System. You must choose a system early, because the first thing most recruits will ask is how your guild handles loot. Next Wednesday’s post will outline all the sordid details of loot distribution, and I’ll tell you some choice horror stories of loot QQ, I promise.

If you still haven’t satisfied your appetite for information on guild managment, I’ll refer you to Auzara at Chick GM, who is the guru of guild-mastery and all related issues. I always find it beneficial to take into account multiple perspectives on important topics.

Deciding Who Gets to Pick IDS

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Candle

Image courtesy of alexkalina

When Priests get to the upper echelon of raiding, they’re going to eventually run into one extremely important question. It’s pointless to have more than one Priest pick up Improved Divine Spirit. Joveta did an excellent feature showcasing the differences between the two specs. I’m not here to regurgitate what she illustrated. I’m here to help you decide which lucky monkey gets to go IDS.

The Supremes is a raiding Guild with 3 Priests, 4 Mages, and a handful of Resto Druids. It also has miscellaneous DPS.

Raid times:

  • Tuesday, 4 hours, farm content
  • Thursday, 4 hours, farm content
  • Sunday, 7 hours, progression content

Let’s assume you’ve got 3 Priests:

  • Steve McQueen: Always shows up, never missed a raid, sports 2350 healing
  • Stevie Wonder: Can only commit to 2 of the 3 raiding days, sports 2100+ healing
  • Steve Harvey: Able to only come on the last raiding day that Wonder isn’t able to attend, sports 2100 healing

Optimizing for Time

When you’re deep into raiding, it’s either CoH or IDS. You don’t need more than one IDS. From this perspective, you want to pick the most stable Priest who is able to come every day. This will ensure that every raid you go into has the IDS buff. This is the best bet since raids will go that much quicker. Just look at Joveta’s post for all the numbers. Go with Steve McQueen for guaranteed IDS.

Optimizing for Performance

On the other hand, one would argue that farm content doesn’t necessarily need IDS at all. By making Steve McQueen pickup IDS, his healing output does get slightly diminished. Another solution is to make Steve Harvey go IDS. This ensures that progression night raids will have the buff. If you really want to pick things up, you can ask Stevie Wonder and Steve Harvey to grab IDS. This way, you don’t handcuff Steve McQueen’s all star performance.

Picking out volunteers for IDS is never easy. I’ve rarely ever encountered an individual who wanted to do IDS. I myself had to respec IDS because our Priest corps is no longer as stable as it once was. One of them took off for college, the other’s having computer issues. I’m the current lynchpin Priest and I swallowed an extremely bitter pill in order to pick up IDS knowing that our floater Priests can stay IDS.

Anyway, there’s many ways to pick out who should get IDS. If you happen to have a Priest who wants the job, by all means let ’em have at it! If not, I highly suggest coin tossing as an alternative. I hear dice rolling is an excellent choice as well. Now dart throwing is a revolutionary way to make decisions as is bottle spinning…

Death and the Priest

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bad-title

This week, we were given the option of a freestyle post.  I’m sticking with that, though I am using one of the topics presented in the competition to do it.  Matt, I’m sorry but I totally disagree with you when you advocate letting your dark side out and forcing a wipe. 

So Who Calls It?

Wipes happen, every group has been there.  It may be due to a bad pull, lack of focus, or simply the process of learning a fight.  It sucks, and can feel like a waste of time.  However, it is not the job of anyone other than the raid leader to determine when it is time to throw in the towel.  The raid leader is the person you agreed to listen to in raid, they are the person you hopefully trust to tell you what to do.  I’m not advocating a blind following of everything said to where you forget your own common sense, but the authority of the raid leader is totally undermined if one of the 24 other people in the group go over his head and make these decisions without him.  If you think it’s hopeless, poke the raid leader to call it, don’t make that decision yourself.  If you are making that decision, you need to ask yourself why, if you’re not going to let him lead, is he the raid leader at all?

Why not call it?

There are really only two kinds of wipes out there; the wipes that happen on farm content because of fluke or lack of attention, and the wipes that happen while you’re in some stage of learning a fight.  In neither of those instances are early problems reason to give up immediately. 

Everyone has experienced the shaky pull, where you lose one healer and a dps or two fairly early on, and still manage to beat it.  We’ve had Bloodboil on farm for months, every week is a one-shot.  But last night, we were running with 7 healers (where we usually run with 8 ) and lost one early on to Fel Rage (he was picking through the healing crew) bringing us down to 6.  It was stressful and crazy.  Then one of our warlocks got double-boiled because someone else hadn’t been paying attention.  You guessed it, he was the next Fel Rage target and died.  Bloodboil turned and Acid Breathed the tanks, costing us two of them.  With our highest-aggro mages and warlocks “off-tanking,” we still brought him down from 20% to dead with only our pally tank up.  It was a slow kill, but it would have wasted more time to wipe, rez/run back, and start all over from the beginning.  Problems are not a guaranteed wipe. 

As for giving up early while learning content, well, why show up to begin with?  Most bosses are not the type which look at you and fall over, offering up their shiny loot because you scare them so much.  Learning a boss can be hard!  You can spend weeks, 5, 10, 15 wipes, just trying to get a boss down once.  My raid group is currently working on Kalecgos.  It’s going slow, it’s frustrating, and it’s mainly due to the expansionitis that most raid groups are facing.  We don’t call it when the first healer dies.  We don’t even call it when the first tank dies, when we know it’s a guaranteed wipe at that point.  We still need the practice on when to move, keeping our portal rotation, where to stand, how to manage the details of the fight.  There’s a lot of learning that can be accomplished by pushing forward, even if you know you’re not going to win.  If you give up at the first sign of trouble, you are never going to improve.

Things to remember

  1. Discreetly forcing a wipe just means you have something to hide.  If you have something to hide, why are you doing this in the first place?
  2. Playing this off as an innocent mistake means you know you’re in the wrong and are looking for plausible deniability.
  3. Communication is key, as is trust.  Forcing a wipe totally ignores both of these things.

In short, if you have a problem, or things look dire, talk to your raid leader, don’t take over his job yourself.

The Care and Keeping of Recruits

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Welcome mat

One of the best bosses I ever had was fond of saying:

“Expectations without support erode trust.”

My beloved guild lets me handle pretty much anything to do with Priests, without making me be an actual officer. I do the recruiting and the interviews, I give input on Priest-related loot council and raid spots, and make the recommendation for full membership. I appreciate the respect and autonomy my Raid Leader and Officers have given me, and in return I make sure that our Priest-corps is always prepared to do the best we can.

Sydera recently wrote a great article on how to recruit a healer, and the 10th step hit home: Follow up:

Your guild has a new healer, and you are the person she knows best. Serve as her mentor, and check in with her often. If the guild isn’t happy with your recruit’s performance, be the one to explain why. If it seems that the guild is a good fit, be her champion when the officers vote on whether she should be promoted to full member.

This is so unbelievably true, and I think is a huge reason that some guilds experience high amounts of recruit turn-over. They can get players in the door, but one or two epics later, they’re gone again. The reason seems to be that the new raiders never really found a warm welcome, or a sense of belonging – just a lot of high-pressure to perform with little feedback and even less help. Here’s how I avoid turnover with my recruits, and help them realize their Priestly potential.

Set Clear Expectations

This process starts in the interview. Be explicit with your expectations – gear, consumables, punctuality, and attendance. I tell Holy recruits that I’m looking for a Priest to take my place. I want them to out-heal me, to be more familiar with the class and fights than I am, and to teach me a thing or two. If they accept that challenge, I tell them I will help them gear up, adjust their UI’s and learn the fights – and invite them to my guild.

Give A Sense of Structure

Tell them what the Raid schedule typically is. Sure, they may know that you raid M-Th 6-10 server, but if you know that Monday is guaranteed to be a progression boss with no Trials in attendance, tell them. If you don’t know exactly what’s on the menu, at least give them the options for the next day. It could go something like this: “We’ll probably raid Sunwell tomorrow, so be prepared for that. If [Paladin] can’t come, it’ll be BT. You’ll be required for BT, but may have the night off if it’s Sunwell.” That way, they can plan ahead – they may need time to farm shadow resist gear, or different consumables. They may need to adjust their dailies for more repair bill or respec money. Be courteous, and give them the information they’l need to make a good impression.

Make Yourself Available

Let the recruit know when you’ll be available for last minute questions before the raid. Seek them out, and ask them what assistance they need – not if they need assistance. (A subtle but important difference.) Remember, you’re the recruiting officer of the big, scary progression guild – and that can be intimidating, even if the night before you told them to seek you out.

Make Sure They’re Really Prepared

At this point, you know their gear is okay from the interview. But raid-prep can get glossed over. Typically, I ask specific questions about a few things:

  • Do you have enough elixirs, flasks, and mana pots?
  • Do you have enough food?
  • Do you have enough cash for repairs and/or respecs?
  • Do you have enough reagents?

    • I also make sure that I’m clear about my definition of “enough”. Their old guild might have been okay with 10 elixirs and 20 candles. I carry full stacks of 3 kinds of elixirs and 200 candles. Don’t get me started on food, pots, oils, and flasks. The idea is to avoid any lack of communication that could result in your recruit being singled out as unprepared. You know what the expectations are, but they do not. Help them. Personally, I always bring enough consumables to a recruit’s first raid for both of us. If they forget anything or need anything, I want them to ask ME in a whisper, not the raid in vent. These small things matter, and a recruit who is nervous over something as minor as reagents will not perform at their best. Help them make the best first impression they can.

    Raid Mechanics

    Most guilds are pretty good about making sure recruits get a run-down of how the fight is done – even with a basically similar strat, most guilds have a few quirks that should be explained to avoid confusion. What gets missed are the details of how your Raid works overall. Make sure your new player knows any extra channels they should join (class channel, healer channel, etc.), what officer gives out the target-assignments, and how to bid for loot (& whether they’re eligible.) It’s not as big an issue with DPSers, but for healers, give specific healing assignments. “Heal Joe”  may mean something to you, but if it is really Joeblaze, the Warlock tank in Group 4, that could make a difference. Also, if you’re in a situation where tanks are passing aggro – think Netherspite, Hydross, BloodBoil, or Kalecgos – and calling on vent, make sure players know to say their names.”I’ve got it!” wastes time, but “Stefizzle, taunting” means new healers don’t have to guess whose voice goes with what .

    Give Feedback

    I’ve made my position on meters pretty clear. They’re a very visible part of my UI. One of the biggest reasons is that I’ve noticed the best way to improve performance is to give timely feedback, whether positive or negative. With Recount open at all times, I can tell if my new CoH Priest is using CoH 84% of the time, and not using ProM at all. More importantly, I can tell him how to modify his style to improve, right now. I can also quicky find out how much overhealing is going on, whether the right targets are being healed, what was responsible for killing someone, and any other information that allows me to analyse my recruits’ performances. (Personally, I also set the recruit as my focus – I pay attention to their casting bar, spell rank, timing, target, health and mana levels.) Creepy? Sure. Relevant? Absolutely. Telling a DPSer that they need 10k more output to catch up with the mage above them, or a healer that another 3k will top that Shammy gets results. They work harder and faster. When they do well, I’ll also link the meter in the appropriate channel. Nothing makes someone’s day like showing them in the #1 spot to the whole raid. (I usually just link the first or second spots to avoid high amounts of spam.)

    Back Them Up

    Sometimes, bad things happen. Players die, raids wipe – and in the spirit of fixing it, we all look for the cause. Be an advocate for your recruit. It’s easy to blame the new healer for the Tank’s death, but if you know the real problem was something else, speak up. What are sound reasons coming from you may sound like excuses coming from them. On the other hand, If the problem really WAS the recruit, you can help them fix it.

    When They Struggle

    Even the best applicants can turn out to be lackluster players. Be prepared to talk to them, either 1:1 or with your Raid Leader, about their perspective on the problem, and possible solutions. Provide resources outside the game for them to peruse and soak up information. In the end, if they’re not a good fit, or not talented enough to keep up with the content, you’ll both be able to make the best decision – no waiting to “see if they get better or whether they just need a little more experience”.

    If you’ve given them the help, environment, and resources they need to be successful, you can part company on good terms – and they, with a full understanding of your expectations, may even be able to refer other players who would be a better fit.

    And you thought the hardest part of recruiting was finding good players! The thing to remember is that different personality types thrive in different environments. Personally, nothing will make me perform better than a situation where I have to fight to prove that I’m the best – provided that once I’ve done so, the achievement is recognized. Others seem to need a bit more coaching, and relatively well-defined requirements and goals. Tailor your leadership style to their needs; don’t force them to conform to you. Just remember that although their job is to impress you, your job is to make sure that they know how to do theirs.

    Luv,
    Wyn

    The Utility of Utility

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    IDSvCOH2

    I consider myself to be an okay tank healer, but an excellent raid healer.  I love Circle of Healing, and when you catch me off-guard enough to admit it, I’ll say my favorite spells are the ones I can cast while pounding my spacebar and hopping around.  Yes, I am “that type” of raider.   I also seem to be in a rather unusual raid group where, up until recently, we had a surplus of single-target healers (paladins coming out our ears,  our only resto druid is a Dreamstate-wants-to-be-a-doomchicken Healing Touch spammer) and raid healing came from one Shaman and a few CoH.  We had no priests with Divine Spirit on our roster because we simply couldn’t afford them.

    Unfortunately for me, I’m also a spirit junkie.  I would LOVE to go into every raid with an extra +50 spirit, not to mention the +10% dmg/heal the buff gives as well.  Even though my group’s makeup needs raid healing, not to slot a priest in a tank heal, IDS utility spot, I decided to turn the question around (for purely selfish purposes, of course).  Circle of Healing is an awesome spell in T6 raiding, but if IDS is considered mandatory, what exactly will it bring to the raid?

    Spellpower

    One of the largest arguments against IDS is the fact that it’s only a significant buff to holy priests and tree druids.  None of the other healers or DPS have a spirit focus, so the damage or healing they gain is minimal.  I decided to check and see how minimal the gain actually is.  I used my guild as an example, and spent some time with the Armory and a calculator.  Unsurprisingly, our Holy Priests had the highest spirit out there.  We ranged from ~550-650 unbuffed spirit, and the gain from IDS gave each holy priest somewhere between 60 and 70 +heal.  What did surprise me was the fact our mages tied our DS druid for second place in the spirit race.  They ran from 250-350 unbuffed, which left them getting 30-40 more damage or healing.  This is roughly equivalent to nearly two Teardrop Crimson Spinels for the druid, and three Runed Crimson Spinels for the mages.  Paladins, Warlocks, and Shaman tied for third, each in the 100-200 spirit range, got 15-25 damage or healing.  If your raid group is heavy on priests, druids, and mages, IDS’s utility increases.

    Talents

    If the results of IDS on mages is so surprising because they are not a class that gains much from spirit, what about the classes which have a spirit focus, or talents specifically relating to spirit?  That’s right, I’m talking priests and Trees. 

    For priests, those talents are Spiritual Guidance and Spirit of Redemption.  Spiritual Guidance increases dmg/heal based on 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% of the priest’s total spirit.  Spirit of Redemption, in addition to that whole “heal while dead” thing, gives a flat 5% increase to total Spirit.  Those two spells work beautifully together, and are a must for every healy-priest regardless of spec.  Both of these talents are also multiplicative, meaning the more spirit you have, the more you’ll get as a result.  We get the 60-70 +heal IDS grants at base, plus another 13 (25% of the 50 spirit of the buff for Spiritual Guidance) and 3 (5% of the 50 spirit of the buff for Spirit of Redemption) added on. In T6 gear, the average increase in +heal a priest gains from having IDS is 75-85. The healing Priests get from IDS is equivalent to the +heal to weapon enchant.

    For tree druids, there are also two talents which deal directly with spirit: Tree of Life and Living Spirit.  Much like with priests, these talents were designed to go together.  Tree of Life also increases healing based on 25% of the Tree’s spirit, but instead of the healing done by the tree, it’s healing done to anyone in the tree’s group.  Living Spirit increases spirit by 5%/10%/15%.  As we don’t have any trees in our guild, I can’t use guildie figures for this, but poking around other guilds at our level of progression, their trees seem to have spirit numbers on par with our holy priests.  That gives the same 60-70 +heal from IDS at base, in addition to another 7 (15% of the 50 spirit boost) to everyone in the tree’s party.  In T6 gear, the average +heal gained by the tree’s party is increased by 65-80.  Tanks in a tree group healed by holy priests with IDS using max-coefficient spells will see an increase in healing received by 140-165 per hit.

    Regen

    In addition to the healing gained based on spirit for both holy priests and tree druids, regen must be taken into account as well.  Both have equivalent spells.  Meditation for priests and Intensity for druids each give 10%/20%/30% regen while casting.  The formula for determining regen is the same regardless of class as well:  Mana Regen = 5 * sqrt(Int) * Spirit * Base_Regen

    regen

    All names slightly tweaked as I didn’t speak to them before posting.  Jadey is a tree, whereas the bottom four are myself and 3 other priests in my guild.  Both Int and Spirit numbers are unbuffed and pulled directly from armory.  OOC and IC refer to out of combat and in combat regen numbers.  OOC IDS and IC IDS show how the numbers change if we’ve got IDS up, and the final columns show the differences between buffed and unbuffed stats.

    Buffs

    Moving back to the general raid utility, because the gain in spellpower due to IDS is based on a percentage, the amount can also be increased by use of buff food and elixirs.  Blackened Basilisk, that favorite of DPS casters everywhere, gives 23 damage and 20 Spirit.  With IDS, suddenly it’s giving 25 damage.  If you use Bloodberry Elixir in Sunwell, in addition to buffing your stats, you’re picking up 6 extra spell damage.  Priests that use Draenic Wisdom will see an increase of 11 healing (versus the 7 they get from it without).  The buffs you give yourself anyway become more powerful with the addition of IDS.

    Is IDS awesome enough to be considered “mandatory” in today’s raid environment?  It’s really going to depend a lot on the group composition you have available.  If you have more healing priests and druids than you have paladins and shaman, or more mages than warlocks, you need IDS in your raid.  Find the raid healers, put a priest on tank healing so they can have the buff.  But… not me.  I’m going to be over here, hopping around and spamming my CoH button.