Things I've Learned as a Raid Leader

I haven't done a huge amount of raid leading, especially lately, but I've done enough to figure out a few things. Leading raids is difficult. It's a pain to get groups together. It's hard to deal with people who are always late or sign up without actually showing up or are just generally annoying to play with. It's difficult because you're interacting with real people with different personalities. On the other hand, successfully pulling a group of 25 people together and killing a major raid boss is extremely satisfying.

I write this from the perspective of a raid leader who is also the main tank, mostly because this is my experience but also because a lot of raid leaders do actually also happen to be the MT. The reason for that seems to some combination of research (good tanks already know the fight and naturally guide the rest of the group) and tradition (people just seem to be used to the image of tanks being out front and leading). Most of this is also fairly obviously, but I write from the view of someone with a smaller guild who is just starting to lead, which was me not too long ago.

The role of raid leader various across guilds. It doesn't have to be the main tank or even necessarily the person whose chat color is red. I generally see the raid leader as the person who the group trusts to hold the raid together and push the group to boss kills. Sometimes it's multiple people.

The most important thing I've learned as a raid leader is delegation, so most of what I've written can be summed up with just that. It's insane for one person to take on everything, especially in 25-man content. Here are a few things I've figured out:

Don't get discouraged - Sometimes it's easy to get a raid group together, but other times it can be heartbreaking when you schedule a 25-man raid and log on to see only 9 people signed up. Don't immediately give up. Start spamming guild chat. This is also where your friends list comes into play. Your biggest hurdle is crossing the 10-15 people mark. Once you've got that, you should have momentum to make it easier to fill the rest. Don't be afraid to go ahead and run with 2 or 3 slots unfilled.

You won't be perfect - And your group will understand this. I was very anxious the first few times I led Kara groups and was totally stressed out the first gruul raid I tried to help run. While you should at least have a decent idea of the trash pulls and boss fights of the raid you're in, no one expects you to know everything. Don't be afraid to ask for help or ideas.

Let someone else ML- You should be taking a break during looting and also getting the next trash mob group marked.

Let someone else assign heals/misdirects - You should take care of tanking assignments and marking, but that's it.

Let someone you trust call out critical events in the middle of boss fights - As has been said before on other tanking blogs and forums, when your entire screen is filled with the crotch of a huge boss, you're not in the best position to physically see what's going around you. Besides, the tanking rotation is more complex than any other class, so you've got plenty to do without having to worry about making sure you tell your cube clickers when to click.

Don't lead every raid - Even if you don't notice it, leading raids takes a toll, and you're asking to get burned out if you never take a break. Every once in a while, do a raid where all you have to do is show up on time, follow instructions, do your thing, have fun, and leave with some badges. This also gives raid lead experience to others.

So what does that leave to be done? - Plenty. Things like:
-Inviting/organizing the raid
-dealing with all the whispers you get
-getting each trash mob group marked quickly
-keeping an eye on your off-tanks to gauge their ability for future reference
-filling open raid spots from members who drop or have to leave early
-deciding which strategies to use & explaining the plans to the raid

Every guild does it a little differently, but those are the best things that have helped me out.

My Mallet - Let Me Show You It

Won the roll for the sweet mace off lurker last night. Woo!

My WoW Experience

My first character was a Paladin. He made it to level 9 right before WoW's open beta shut down, a month before the game was released in November 2004. Apparently, 9 levels weren't enough for me to figure out that Paladins kinda suck, so once I bought the game, I rolled yet another Paladin. Fifty-five levels later (yep, that close to 60), I abandoned him for a Mage.

I immediately loved the Mage class, actually taking one to 60 on both alliance and horde over the two years of vanilla WoW. I have always been a fairly casual player. When I first heard about raids that lasted over 4 hours, I thought those people were insane; I never joined a raiding guild, so I just ran Strat/Scholo/UBRS over and over again trying to fill the mage class dungeon set. I think I ended up with only 4 pieces (but at least I got something to show for it!).

During the fall of 2006, I got a beta key for the BC expansion. I ran around a bit in Hellfire, but at the time, I was already pretty burned out of WoW in general. Most people at the time were just doing PVP until the expansion was released. Some friends of mine decided once BC hit, we would all roll new characters on a new realm - I was considering a priest or warrior.

A few weeks before BC came out, I actually did go to MC for the first and only time. I loved it. It was like playing a completely different game. I was also very intrigued by the role of a tank in a raid. When I saw the tank charge into the huge raid bosses all alone, I instantly knew I wanted to have a prot warrior for BC. I needed to know what that felt like.

About 7 months after BC came out, I hit 70 on my new draenei warrior. My awesome druid friend got us into a guild that was getting ready to start Kara. After a few 5-man runs where I got lucky to find some tanking gear, I switched from Arms to Protection. I remember the first level 70 5-man I ever tried to tank - Shadow Labs. I fumbled around the keyboard and almost constantly had a full rage bar because I couldn't figure out how to spend it quickly enough ("omg this global cooldown thing sux!"). I was a little apprehensive because I was the newb tank in the guild while there was already a warrior, druid, and a couple pally tanks all geared better than I was. The warrior tank (also GM) introduced me to some weird magical defense number(490). I searched the Internet for level 70 pre-raid gear guides and discovered the wonderful felsteel armor items.

Once uncrittable and ready to raid, I stepped into Kara. It's crazy now to think that we wiped over and over on Attumen's trash and how totally chaotic everything seemed at the time. On the boss fight, I was supposed to pick up Huntsman. I was definitely nervous. The first time, I obviously epic fail'd, and he took out both healers and a dps before I could get to him. Next time, though, I got it right. Once he reunited with Midnight, I suddenly discovered that I had picked him up before the other tank, and I was tanking him! It was my first successfully tanked raid boss.

A few weeks later, the guild main tank wasn't available, so I stepped in to clear trash up to curator. At first, it felt like I was totally naked standing in front of the other 9 people in the raid watching me. I was slow and unsure of the pulls since I had never done them before and because I was very much afraid of making a mistake in front of everyone. Gradually, the feeling passed, and curator went down that night.

Early on, we had our first big guild drama involving a mass exodus. It happened one night after I had gone to bed. Apparently, a lot of people decided we weren't hardcore enough. We got over it, though, and regrouped. I remained the off-tank to Kara, and we forged ahead to kill Illhoof and Shade and began making attempts on Prince (I sat out being the worthless off-tank for that fight). It sounds ridiculous seeing as how now Kara is pretty easily cleared in 3-4 hours or less, but it was difficult at the time because we only raided two nights a week for 2-3 hours, so we usually ended up at prince right at the 6 hour mark (no Nightbane or Netherspite either). We weren't very efficient.

A couple months after the first mass exodus, we had our next big drama event - our guild leader and his wife left the game. We were shocked, and a couple weeks passed without raid nights. But we regrouped again to go back to Kara. With the GM tank gone, it was my turn as the main tank. The first couple times through were slow and awkward. I wasn't used to being in control of the raid's pace and was constantly afraid of pulling too fast or too many. Several times I did pull too many. I felt badly for every wipe and death my noobness caused, but the group was forgiving. While I had seen the last MT pull everything before, watching someone else pull trash through an instance is just not the same as doing it yourself. I gradually learned every single piece of trash in Kara and worked on chain pulling. We never really achieved a speed run (no pally tanks), but we at least got up to a respectable pace. Looking back, I see now that I handicapped us a lot by relying so heavily on CC even after I far outgeared the place.

After a few weeks, I found myself standing in front of the imfamous Prince Malchezaar. Although I was getting quite comfortable with the rest of Kara, everything I had read about Prince and his fast shield-block-eating attacks made me anxious all over again. After 3 attempts, we got the infernal drops we needed and downed him. A few weeks later, we pulled a single long night with our best guild members, one-shotting everything including Prince, skipping Netherspite. We decided to ride the momentum and make a pass at Nightbane (at like 3am). Once on the terrace, we paused to replace a couple members, watch a video, and briefly go over the strat since only about 3 people in the raid had ever seen the fight before (excluding me). I hastily typed up my anti-fear stance dance macro and got ready to use it. We summoned him. 75% - first set of adds. 50% - second set. 25% - last set! We killed Nightbane in one shot on our first ever attempt. That was a high point in the guild.

Unfortunately, we stagnated for a couple months after that, except for the Netherspite kill we finally took care of. We had a lot of trouble getting past the 25-man hurdle. We would always get to where we could almost run 2 Kara groups, but then people would get tired of not always being able to go, so they would leave to another guild. Dedicated healing was always a major issue. Our best members became very weary of long Kara runs; we kept wiping over and over from stupid mistakes. People began bringing in alts instead of main characters, starting more conflict, especially in terms of looting.

Finally, we made our first attempt on Gruul. It was my first time tanking for a 25-man raid, and once again, I was nervous. About 1/3 of the group was PUG'd, though, and those guys really led us through. High King and Gruul went down easily. Later, we made an attempt on our own with only a few PUG'd. It was up to us to lead, and I was absolutely overwhelmed with trying to set up targets and misdirects for so many tanks and hunters. After a few tries, we were successful on High King. We still had trouble with Gruul, not being able to get him down before the grows became too much, usually a result of having to bring in people on alts or PUG'd members still in green quest gear. Occasionally we got it together and took him down, but it wasn't reliable.

We were also somewhat successful in ZA, downing the first and second bosses without too much trouble.

Eventually, the volatility of the guild became too much. We seemed to have some kind of dramatic event once a month or more. The nature of the guild was casual, but there was always a battle for exactly how casual we were going to be, because several of us wanted to take the game more seriously. To make matters worse, the guild raided on a west coast time schedule, and I was always two hours ahead, which meant I was often staying up for wipefests well past midnight when I had to get up at 5:30 for work.

Early in July, I left the guild after being in it a year and followed my two favorite druid friends to another raiding guild which runs during the week and much, much earlier on an east coast schedule. It was difficult to give up a guaranteed main tank position, even with all the problems of the last guild. The first night of the new guild, I got to see Mag. It was immediately obvious that this guild was in an entirely different league. We killed him on the second try. While it was exciting, I was disheartened to go from boss tank to dedicated box clicker. After the warm-up of Mag, we headed to Hyjal that same night and took down Winterchill (guild's first). The next night I ran Kara with a group that cleared it in about 3 hours. I had to check and see if I was somehow playing WoW on cheat codes. Since then, we've cleared half of TK and are 4/6 in SSC. I never thought I'd get to see these places, but it's been pretty awesome.

So that's pretty much where I've been. We'll see where it goes from here. I was late getting to a lot of the end-game stuff in BC. I'm excited about being able to start over for WotLK and hitting 80 and starting the raids sooner.

Becoming the Champion of the Naaru

For the longest time, I had no idea how people got those weird titles. I never bothered to look them up because I figured it involved a level of raiding that I would never see. Now that I'm in a guild that's actually in SSC and TK, though, I did go find out how you get them, and now all I lack is a heroic SP run to turn in my last quest for the Champion title (yay!).

Several patches ago, attunement requirements were removed from SSC, The Eye, Mt. Hyjal, and even Black Temple. As a reward for players who still go through and complete the quests for those attunements, Blizzard put in two titles - one for SSC/TK attunement quests and a second for Hyjal/Black Temple attunement quests.

Champion of the Naaru (SSC + TK Attunement)

SSC
1.) Get quest from NPC in heroic slave pens (soon after making the big plunge into the pool)
2.) Kill Nightbane and loot
3.) Kill Gruul and loot
4.) Go back to heroic SP and turn the quest in


TK
1.) Do this really long questline in Shadowmoon Valley which opens up Trial of the Naaru quests from A'dal
2.) Get all the Trial of the Naaru quests from A'dal in Shattrath
3.) Kill last boss in heroic Arcatraz (Tenacity) while keeping alive the fiesty little mage prisoner from the final boss fight
4.) Kill last boss in heroic Steamvaults (Strength) and loot
5.) Kill last boss in heroic Shadow Lab (Strength) and loot
6.) Kill last boss in heroic Shattered Hall (Mercy) before all the prisoners are dead. Kill the executioner and loot. You should have about an hour and 20 minutes from the time you enter the gauntlet hall after the first boss. All you need is one prisoner left alive. Yes, this place still sucks on heroic without an awesome group.
7.) Turn in all 3 Trial quests and get the last one for Magtheridon
6.) Kill Mag and loot
7.) Turn in quest to A'dal


Hand of A'dal(Hyjal + BT Attunement)

Mt. Hyjal
1.) Fly to caverns of time and get the Vials of Eternity quest
2.) Kill last boss in SSC and loot
3.) Kill last boss in TK and loot
4.) Return to CoT and complete

Black Temple
1.) Do the long quest line in Shadowmoon Valley till you get to Akama's Promise which you turn in to A'dal
2.) Kill Karathress in SSC. Seer Olum appears nearby. Get his quest.
3.) Go back to Akama in SMV to get the next part
4.) Kill Al'ar in TK while wearing your quest item disguise
5.) Go back to Akama and get the next part
6.) Kill Rage Winterchill in Hyjal
7.) Go back to Akama and get the next part
8.) Go to Ad'al in Shattrath for the next part
9.) Go back to SMV and talk to Xi'ri for the next part
10.) Follow Akama to the entrance of BT
11.) Return to Xi'ri to complete

An Embarassing Tank Moment

While sitting in front of TK hoping for an invite to the guild's run on Void Reaver...

Guild officer: Do you have a dps set?
Me: Well…technically yes if you consider just having some random separate pieces a dps set. It kinda sucks, though. You can come over and check it out yourself.
Guild officer: *inspects* Go ahead and equip your dps stuff so I can see.
Me: ...It’s already on.
Guild officer: Oh.
Me: *flies back to Shattrath*

OH HAI

Welcome!

I've decided to join the many other tanking blogs and attempt to document some of my own tanking thoughts. At first, most of the posts will probably be pretty lengthy since I'll have a lot of things I've been wanting to write about and won't have the self-control to just wait and post gradually, but hopefully they'll get shorter as time goes on.

Hope you enjoy!