Raid Leading
A GM’s Perspective: Where Do You Find the Time?
1September 2, 2008
These past few weeks have seen my guild leadership work increase twofold. Nearly every waking hour between half-marathon training, sleep, work and school has been focused on leading the guild. The work has obviously come to the point where my blog and time for leisure has suffered.
Recruitment particularly has required more attention than previously. During our time working on Kil’jaeden, and shortly after the kill, my guild suffered a massive amount of attrition:
- 1 holy/disc priest: to focus on life. I do not wish to explicitly say why, to protect his privacy, but it’s a very good reason.
- 1 resto druid: to become a helicopter pilot.
- 1 resto shaman: as a commitment to his new wife. He is available on occasion, however.
- 1 holy paladin: to join the navy.
- 1 mage: to pursue a relationship and focus on life. He is available in emergencies, however.
- 1 mage: to focus on work and life. She is available in emergencies, however.
- 1 arms/prot warrior: to take college courses that occur during raids.
- 1 rogue: mostly because of time differences, I think.
- 1 shadow priest: for reasons I’ll leave unsaid.
- There’s also a couple who disappeared without really saying anything, though one of them explained why after-the-fact.
This means we lost eleven people total leading up to our defeat of Kil’jaeden. Of course, we did gain a couple people in this time, as well. But the predicament resulted in dropping our core raiding numbers down to a dangerously low level. And applications weren’t exactly rolling in, since most of the available people out there applied to guilds that were 6 of 6 in Sunwell, instead of 5 of 6. And those that did apply to us weren’t qualified or didn’t pass the trial. We also had problems where people would occasionally miss raids for summer-related activities like family barbecues, birthdays, short vacations, etc. Now that we have Kil’jaeden down, however, applications are rolling in at a decent pace.
At a certain point, when recruitment pools are limited, attrition makes it extremely difficult to set up a raid that can succeed in downing bosses. Even nerfed, M’uru still requires a good balance of DPS: enough melee such that each door can be taken care of efficiently, but enough ranged such that gravity balls during Entropius are less impactful if they spawn near and leash onto the melee. The fight is certainly a joke compared to the pre-nerfed version we killed back in June, but it is by no means easy to repeat every week. There were nights where we would be playing with only one experienced resto shaman and two formerly enhance shamans playing resto to cover for our losses. Or, worse yet, no experienced resto shamans, one formerly enhancement shaman playing resto, and someone playing an alt shaman. The situation certainly came to an extreme in this regard.
Luckily my guild in now in a position to recover from our losses, however. Already, I have a resto shaman and a resto druid queued for trial, we’ve been trialing a holy/disc priest, and we’ve picked up a mage. Furthermore, people have been expressing interest in the guild everyday. So I’ve found myself standing deep in leadership work with merely recruitment. It does beg the question, however: where do you find the time to lead? I’ve been so swamped with reading applications and interviewing potential applicants I’m simply overwhelmed!
Where Do You Find the Time to Lead?
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to simply lead a raid or a guild. Anyone can invite people and run raids on a superficial level. However, if you want to lead a successful raid, there’s a rather long list of daunting tasks to perform. Personally, after the departure of my guild’s previous “administrative assistant,” I was taking on all of these duties:
- Outside of raids:
- Assessing what classes we need, and making sure recruitment posts were created and updated on World of Raids, MMO Champion, WoWProgress, and the realm forum.
- Reading applications and determining whether or not a person is worth interviewing for a position in the raid.
- Interviewing applicants over Ventrilo if they warrant a further look.
- Deciding if an applicant passes the interview and should trial with us.
- Distributing epic gems.
- Distributing sunmotes.
- Evaluating attitude problems that might have occurred during or outside of raids and making decisions about them outside of raids.
- Updating the web site.
- During raids:
- Determining who is in and out for each encounter.
- Assessing some of our trials and recruits.
- Determining whether trials or recruits make the cut.
- Taking interest in loot, and putting in my vote as part of the loot council.
- Keeping people focused and calm.
- Organizing the healers.
- Sometimes organizing the DPS if it’s needed.
This comes between personal pursuits of blogging, training to run half-marathons (and eventually marathons), attending classes, homework, work, spending time with family or friends, and simply enjoying WoW for what it is. The latter point I think is important. What is the point of playing a game if you simply can’t enjoy it? Luckily for me, part of the enjoyment I get is in leading itself. I can sit back and laugh about the workload. However, I also like to take some time to just relax and mindlessly grind honor or levels at times.
It’s crucial to note the list of my duties doesn’t consider those my co-GM covers, which include helping with raid pacing, providing input as the other part of our loot council, paying for the guild’s web site and Ventrilo servers, distributing flask tokens, selling HoD’s, leading the tanks during raids, making sure we have extra consumables for the tanks in case they run out or didn’t have the time to farm for that day’s raid, and recruiting people through EJ’s benefactor bar. He also helps discuss and make some decisions outside of raids. It also doesn’t cover guild-specific tasks other guilds might have, such as maintenance of a DKP system.
To be blunt, it is impossible for one person to find the time to do everything on their own, unless they are retired or have a sponsorship that allows them to perform these tasks all day, everyday. Otherwise, it requires real life sacrifices many people aren’t willing to make–myself included.
Delegating to Find the Time
It is important for any good leader that doesn’t find all the time they need to delegate various tasks to others in the guild.
With the recent departure of one of our prominent officer figures, I’ve had to delegate some of the tasks to help make the raid more efficient. I am still in the process of refining this delegation, however. One of our rogues has been helping find potential applicants, and this has been a large part of the increase in applications we’ve received. As a highly respected member of the WoW community (the top rogue theorycrafter on EJ), people are keen in his advertisement for the guild. One of our shadow priests has been helping us track raids for several months. Furthermore, one of our warriors has now taken on the task of taking interest in loot when it drops and gathering information about people’s loot history, so we can make decisions while I simultaneously facilitate swaps for the next encounter after a kill.
That said, I have to talk with my co-GM about when we give them access to the officer channel and such. And I am still trying to decide who would be a good candidate for gem distribution. That way my focus will be primarily on evaluating and interviewing applicants or recruits, facilitating group composition for each encounter, leading the healers, keeping people focused, distributing sunmotes, maintaining a good atmosphere, and updating the web site. This is a manageable amount of work for me, whereas the three weeks before this one has largely been unmanageable.
How Much Delegation Is Too Much?
One of the things I’ve discovered over several years of playing MMO’s is that having too many people in various leadership, officer or officer-like positions actually has the potential to create a system that is too mired in “bureaucratic” stagnation. This creates a contrasting problem against the need to delegate tasks so you actually have the time to lead a successful raiding guild and prevent yourself from burning out.
Even in a co-GM system, where we primarily make the decisions, I’ve found there are certain topics too sensitive to act on before consulting my co-GM. For example, I am hesitant to kick or demote members without his consent. And what I’ve found is that he is extremely reticent to kick anyone. This means I often let issues of these kind drop and compromise by simply abstaining from putting people in if their attitudes are problematic. But his reluctance has admittedly prevented bad decisions. So it has slowed down the decision-making process, but it’s made it so both of us are not too mired in guild-based work.
I will say I think it’s important to have at least one other person who can fill in when the traditional leaders are absent or indisposed. However, I also think it’s imperative for a leader to exhibit restraint in just how many people they tap to help them. If minor stagnation occurs with merely two people leading a guild, imagine how much worse the problem would be if five officers all got together to hold a vote on various issues. The process would simply aggravate situations that require swift decisions. And sometimes you need quick choices and drastic actions to prevent further problems.
Raid Leading Guides: Healing Meters, Parses and Assessing Your Raid’s Healers
3June 17, 2008
I’ve always been a big fan of information. But it has also been my worst enemy. It frightens me the number of times I’ve seen someone take and use healing meters against people, despite the fact that healing meters illustrate neither an attempt at an encounter nor a raid.
Healing Meters at a Glance
Before you begin to dissect this parse, you should know there are actually six healers and two shadow priests (Shards and Lightofwest).
At first glance, it definitely seems like we either have awesome druids or terrible shamans. If I went to the EJ forums and asked what’s wrong with this parse, a lot of people would respond, “Your resto shamans should be outhealing your druids.” But, aha! That’s the wrong assumption to make.
First and foremost, it should be noted this parse comes from M’uru. In this fight, you have four different tanks in phase one: one for the void sentinels, one for the void spawns (who appear in the location where each void sentinel dies), and one for each set of “door adds” (there are two sides, each including a caster and two melee mobs). Some people do this differently, but that is how we do it. Typically, as well, someone other than the traditional tank might soak damage from the caster mob on each door. I would elaborate, but I’m cautious of my server’s competition stealing our exact strategy.
Because there are so many tanks, our healing strategy is such that our druids are rolling four different stacks of lifebloom on people taking near constant damage. Considering our gear, both mine (Lilume’s) and Siafu’s triple-stacked lifebloom ticks for over 900 each. Mine typically ticks for about 950 (per second). So four of my triple-stacked lifeblooms produce a total of 3800 potential healing per second (HPS). Of course, however, the actual healing is much less, considering there are periods where the tanks are topped and a lifebloom tick heals nothing. Furthermore, there is a second phase where there is only one tank, so we switch to spamming regrowth on the raid, which has a lower HPS potential in general, but is more reliable in terms of saving people who drop dangerously low in that phase. So, across both phases of the fight, my HPS averages out to about 1653. That’s certainly less than what a resto shaman can produce on certain fights like Teron Gorefiend, but it is also important to point out that the raid-wide damage on this fight is not as heavy as the raid-wide damage you see during Teron. So a resto shaman’s HPS is going to be somewhat lower than it would be on a few other fights.
Next, you’ll note that our shadow priests outhealed our holy/discipline priest. That’s not supposed to happen, right? Well, both of our shadow priests were running improved vampiric embrace (VE). And in any fight where the entire raid is taking a constant stream of damage, and the holy/discipline priest is assigned to a tank, you’re going to see shadow priests with improved VE outheal them if the VE can outpace the damage the tank is taking. Also, it would be irresponsible of the priest to try to pad the meters by healing other people, considering a lack of his attention can cause his tank to die.
In this context, it would be erroneous to make the assumption that our druids are awesome and our resto shamans are terrible, and a mistake to assume our holy/disc priest sucks. In truth, healing meters merely reflect the trends set by both the healing strategies and the features of each encounter. This is the one thing most raid leaders and recruitment officers fail to recognize and I cringe every time someone tells me “healing meters matter.” Yes, they matter, but the point at which they matter is very subjective. It’s very important to consider the situational strengths of each healer, the task(s) they’re given, and what tools they use to heal.
Mana Potions at a Glance
This screenshot shows the number of times someone used a mana potion. Now, considering Siafu and I performed similar roles, it can be argued that Siafu should have used three potions instead of two. Considering the fight lasts over seven minutes, he should have had more than enough time to chug another mana potion. We do spam regrowth for a solid 90 seconds in phase two, afterall, and using only two mana potions puts him at risk of running out of mana before the fight is done. So the optimization of using mana potions is extremely important, and he probably should have planned to have his third mana potion available either for the start or the middle of phase two.
However, it’s also important to consider what exactly each person in the raid was given to work with. For example, if one of the resto shamans had a shadow priest (and one of them did), it is likely he would have only had to chug one or two mana potions to remain at full mana going into phase two. This could have potentially provided him the opportunity to chug a haste potion for the final 15 seconds of the fight instead of a mana potion.
Miscellaneous Information (Using Innervate as a Specific Example)
It would take me pages upon pages to cover every single aspect a WWS parse can tell you about what your healers are doing right and wrong. You have to look at mana potions, water shield, mana tide, mana stream, shadowfiend, symbol of hope, trinkets, vampiric touch, gear choices, flask and elixir choices, gem choices, weapon oils, talents, innervate, etc. But, if you’re considering deaths, you also have to look at things outside of your healers’ control: healthstones, last stand, shield wall, shield block, shadow word: death, recklessness, deathwish, ironshield potions, etc. And this doesn’t include encounter-specific issues like people not standing in cave-ins during Gruul.
So, for the sake of simplicity, let’s look at the use of innervate from the same M’uru parse used earlier.
Only one innervate, which came from myself. At this point, the alarm bells should be ringing for a raid leader. There’s five druids in the raid (two resto, one balance, and two feral), and the feral druids weren’t tanking for phase two. But only one innervate was tossed out. There should have been at least five. Now, this was something we talked about after the attempt. And we did manage to rectify the problem the next time we saw phase two.
Much better, but not perfect. It should be noted that this attempt on phase two was shorter than intended. We made some errors on our positioning of the boss and this wiped us. So we never got a chance to use our fourth and fifth innervates. There was also some confusion because I had forgotten which person I assigned myself to innervate. So I innervated Dess, instead of Lightofwest. And the person who was supposed to innervate Dess was confused as a result, especially when someone else innervated Lightofwest. I also forgot about our balance druid and didn’t assign him an innervate. I probably should have assigned him to Caiyn, in retrospect.
This is an example of how a single element can add complexity to how people perform in a raid, however. If you plan your innervates and someone expects to receive one, they often shift their approach to the encounter with this in mind. Healers will overheal more often knowing conservation isn’t as big of an issue when they will be the target of an innervate. Without one, however, the healer will run out of mana sooner than expected or will adopt a mindset rooted in conservation. This can then put the tank he is healing in considerable danger, with the healer either running out of mana or downranking to conserve.
Now, consider that innervate is only one element in an entire raid. Factor in all of the other elements, and suddenly healing data becomes so complex you can barely wrap your head around it. For this reason, I value specific observation of performance and evaluation of all the elements in a raid over simply looking at the meters, cooldown use, etc. If the tank someone was assigned to died, but the tank missed a spell reflection on a mob that hits with a 10K damage spell, I shouldn’t hold the healer responsible as a raid leader. I should first question what happened leading up to that death, and rely on things like player feedback and GrimReaper to provide information about what might possibly have gone wrong.
Basic Tips for Assessing Healers
1. Specifically watch a healer’s performance in conjunction with the performance of the people they’re assigned to.
Don’t just rely on healing meters and deaths to asses performance. While their placement on healing meters can be correlative to good or poor performance, this is not always the case, due to reasons stated in the earlier sections of this entry.
Check to make sure they’re adhering to their assignment and understand why they’ve been given that assignment. Make sure they’re properly timing and using their potions and cooldowns. Make sure they’re in a group that compliments their role if needed (if it can be afforded). Make sure they’re downranking and upranking responsibly. And make sure the players they’re healing are doing what they need to do to make the healer successful at his or her job. You can’t tell if a healer is playing well or not if your tank dies because he can’t find his shield block, shield wall, last stand, nightmare seed, spell reflection, or healthstone hotkeys when needed.
After this, watch them. If you see them standing there as their assigned target slowly loses health, there’s something wrong.
2. Make sure they provide feedback relevant to the healing strategy.
Healers who actively contribute feedback relevant to the healing strategy are an extreme asset. If they are finding it difficult to keep a tank up because they have to downrank to avoid running out of mana, make sure they tell your healing strategist. This can be important to making group adjustments that compliment the need to uprank further. Or, if what they’re doing is keeping the tank alive with no mana problems, make sure they tell you this as well. You can potentially free up space in group that would be more synergetic with somebody else therein.
3. Make sure they’re using the right gear for the fight.
If they’re complaining about mana, and HPS isn’t the issue, and they’ve stacked too much haste, figure out why. Maybe they don’t have the gear to swap in and out to shift their style more in the favor of longevity. Or maybe they had the opportunity to and they made poor gearing choices by letting stuff rot, or poor gemming choices.
The progression of your guild can make or break applicants in this regard. I know I wouldn’t want a healer who is wearing nothing but haste gear in Sunwell. It certainly has its place, but screw him running out of mana on fights grounded more on longevity than HPS potential.
4. Sometimes healing assignments are actually the problem.
There are fights in Sunwell where healing assignments have to be so finely tuned that anything your healers do won’t possibly be enough if you don’t micro-manage enough. So sometimes failure is at the hands of the assignments, rather than healer performance. That said, however, it is in your best interests to possibly recruit a good amount of healers or players in general that can help point out any oversights if you make a mistake.
5. Sometimes raid or group composition is the problem.
No druids on a high-mobility fight? No resto shamans or circle of healing priests on heavy raid-damage fights where players are in close proximity? These are two examples of raid composition problems. Your healers likely won’t be at fault for people wiping in this case.
Conclusion
Assessing your raid’s healers is never as simple as just studying the meters, cooldowns, downranking, and talents of your healers. Raid and group composition, healing assignments and strategies, and even the performance of non-healers play a part in your raid’s general ability to stay alive. If people can’t get out of cave-ins on Gruul during high growths, they’re going to die, regardless of how good your healers are.
When someone places low on the healing meters, it might not always be their fault. A priest spamming circle of healing is typically going to run out of mana eventually if they don’t receive a shadow priest or an innervate. But meters can sometimes indicate performance, so don’t ignore them entirely. However, you have to assess the entirety of the situation before you can understand whether or not the healer is at fault or if there’s a flaw somewhere else.
Assessing and directing your healers is a complex job, and not everyone is cut out for it. You really need a strategic mind to fully understand it and no amount of talking by me will fully teach you how to lead your raid’s healers and make judgments on their performance, especially because strategies change per encounter. On one fight, you might have ten healers, while on another you might have six because you need more DPSers to make the DPS budget.
It’s not an easy job, but these tips should help you get started.
