Remember the days in school where your favourite teacher was away?
Maybe she was sick or needed a personal day.
Then the sub would roll in with a giant, CRT television that was Velcro strapped to a cart and you thought to yourself, “YES! It’s going to be one of those days!”
Getting a substitute teacher is like a day off. Subs were mainly there to supervise and hand out homework. Sometimes they weren’t able to teach the lesson plans your main teacher already had in place.
Once in a while, you dice rolled into a teacher who unexpectedly knew their stuff (I once had a Caucasian teacher who spoke fluent mandarin and taught the class pretty well. Not bad).
In your raid, what happens when your raid leader’s out cold? Maybe he stayed up too late watching Starcraft 2 tournaments while excessively drinking.*
* That has never happened. It’s completely hypothetical.
Chances are you have several fall back plans at your disposal:
- Cancel raid – Worse case scenario. Wasted raid night. Players get to relax and have a night off.
- Delay – Not a bad option. Instead of tossing the whole night, you end up tossing 30 minutes or an hour. Dismiss your players and have them regroup at a specified time. This allows them to engage in other activities.
- Run a different raid – Could go knock out a specific raid achievement that doesn’t require a full roster or tackle another boss that has a specific drop that are still improvements for certain players.
- Down size – Only applicable to 25 man raid groups. Viable option if a progression boss is later on in the instance. You can speed up the process by sending in a small team to knock out some of the earlier bosses that aren’t needed. Downside is that this isn’t applicable to hard mode raiding because you’ll end up being saved to that specific lockout (and it applies to raid size).
- Run with someone else quarterbacking – Every raid leader needs a number 2. This is their chance to prove they can function as a number 1.
In most cases, the last option is the most viable. A 25 man guild is likelier to have other players capable of stepping in to lead compared to a 10 man
The problem.
Like the substitute teacher, the substitute raid leader suffers from 1 problem:
No one takes them seriously
The newly promoted raid leader is usually one of the boys who’s a raider or an officer not normally known to raid lead.
Guys!
There’s still a raid going on! There’s still internet dragons that need to be killed!
Just because there’s an absence doesn’t give you the license to mess around card. He might have a different style of running the show but you as a raid team need to give him that support! They may not have the months or years of experience that your primary raid leader has but give them a shot! It’s upsetting to see that when the cat’s away the mice will play. Most of you don’t raid 7 days a week and you have nights off where you can relax and do other stuff anyway. Of the nights where you do raid, your raid leader (whoever it happens to be) needs your undivided attention and focus.
Don’t just dismiss them.
Give them a chance to show what they can do.
Dragons don’t just spontaneously lie down. They still need you and your raid to work together.