Part V in a series of posts about how my guild was able to take casual raiding from Kara all the way into BT without selling our souls.

Raid leading isn't what I would consider fun. I was dragged into it because the person who was running our raids was a bit too...verbose in his explanations of fights. I started writing up cliff-notes versions of fights on our website, and spitting those out before the pull. Because I was the one calling targets and assignments and jobs, I ended up raid leading.

There are a lot of discussions about what makes a good leader. People skills, the ability to motivate, the ability to break down complex problems; all of these things are important. You obviously need someone who is knowledgeable not just about their class, but about the abilities of all the players. You need someone who understands the game mechanics, and can set up a raid for success.

This is also the single hardest position to recruit for. Very few people play the game WANTING to be in charge. Most are happy being a face in the crowd, or only handling warlock curse assignments, or some other small responsibility. But when it comes down to it, there has to be someone at the top. That's me.

First, I'll tell you the kind of raid leader I am. I'm easily frustrated. I expect people to do their jobs. I'm very organized. I have an ability to break down a fight to it's base elements, and lately, to get people to understand not their job in a fight, but how the fight works and what their role in it is. I've been known to occasionally go off a bit too much, to let my frustrations get the better of me. I'm improving in that department.

On the practical side of raid leading, you need to know your players. You need to know who you can count on to keep cool when it hits the fan, who can handle that hard healing assignment, and who can spot the things you are missing. This affects every assignment you'll set up on a fight. There isn't much to this one but time spent with your team to see who can handle what, and who steps up.

You need to understand the fights in advance. This means reading strats, watching videos, and taking in not just how a fight works and a strat beats it, but how you can adapt that to your raid makeup and your players. You need to not only know your job, but the job of the healers, and the tanks, and each player on the fight. It's a lot to absorb. Don't be afraid to take notes when looking things over. An example would be what I noted going into RoS for the first time. Phase 1: no heals, tank rotation, dispell. Phase 2: kicks, mana drain. Phase 3: tank threat, raid healing. When I walked into the fight, I had a quick reference of what I needed to highlight in my explanation, and what I needed to watch for during the fight.

Another thing that has worked very well on our past two kills has been to explain to the raid not what they need to do, but why. And no, I'm not talking about 'don't stand in fire because you will die' type cause and effect, but more along the lines of encounter design. This worked on Kalecgos. Once the tanks and healers understood what we were trying to accomplish with rotations between the dragon/demon phases, things worked much better. We still broke out which people needed to rotate when, but people seemed to do their jobs better when they understood why. I think a combination of explaining both the fight mechanics in general as well as what we are doing to overcome them works best for getting the raid started on a new fight.

Another thing that has always worked well is to macro out your assignments for a fight in advance. This helps speed up the process of explanation a lot. Instead of having to re-state the same information 8 times (because you know someone missed it) you can just hit a macro and spit it all into raid chat. For me it also helps to be able to see what I'm setting up. I usually set up the next fight just after a boss kill, or while we are doing trash. Which brings me to my next point...

Spread some of that responsibility around! I have me (raid leader), an officer that handles loot and DKP, an officer that handles healing assignments on farm bosses, and another that handles trash pulls. This leaves me with just handling boss fights and yelling at the odd raid member. I'm also not GM of the guild, which means I'm not the default complaint department. This helps stave off burnout quite a bit, as you know that you aren't alone at the top, and that some issues can be delegated out.

The single hardest part of leading is motivating people and keeping them focused. It's not a problem with a single solution. I've seen motivation by committee work, where the officers in general talk and keep the raid focused. I've seen good cop/bad cop work, where one officer berates the raid while another praises them. I've tried every management technique I've ever seen, from offering reward to the praise/critique/praise layout. I've been the nice guy and the asshole. I've given motivational speeches and disappointed speeches and yelled and kept quiet. I've had raiders thank me for a job well done one week, and curse me out and quit the raid the next. I don't know that there IS a single answer. Here's an example (yay story time!).

We were on Hydross, right at the begining of the night. It was still in that middle ground between progression and farm, one of those fights you are still working the kinks out of. We had wiped three times to stupid mistakes; people pulling agro, standing on the wrong side, stuff like that. Asking for people to focus hadn't helped, telling people to pull their heads out of their asses hadn't worked, so I had my stoke of genius. As we were buffing for our 4th pull on the boss, I started the night over. 'Welcome to another night of ST raiding. I apologize for the late start, but I think now we're ready to get this night going.' I swear I got about 8 tells from people thanking me for the reset in attitude. People in ochat were /cheering. The next pull, a hunter pulled agro, dragged hydross across the line, and wiped the raid.

The point is that not everything is going to work all the time. I've had nights where I've come in in a good mood, and have people ASKING me to yell at the raid 2 hours in. I've had nights where I come out the gate with a serious get-shit-done attitude, and fallen flat on my face. You have to find what works for you and your raid, and know that you'll make mistakes and have off-nights. It's a constant learning process, and a second job, and it can be a whole lot of fun.

Feedback time! I need more questions, things I haven't thought to cover, situations that people have run into. I'm thinking of turning this into a weekly blog once Wrath of the Lich King launches, chronicling our progression through the new raid scene. We'll likely be at the front of the curve as far as progression goes for casuals, so hopefully I can find and fix problems before a lot of people are running into them. What do you guys think?