Raid-leading guide (for guilds starting with raids)

This is a work in progress, but I wanted to open it up to the public

1. Organisation of raids & DKP
2. Group make-up and minimum stats
3. Reagents
4. What addons are recommended for starting raid leaders?
5. Task/Joy division
6. Raid targetting
7. Types of tanks
8. Invite time
9. Before you start: a checklist
10. Boss encounters: Tactics
11. Boss encounters: Evaluating
12. Your attitude, and: motivating your team
13. Problem players
14. Other useful websites

Organisation of raids & DKP

When it comes to raid organisation, it's best to leave the organising and possible DKP usage to guild management. But what to do if you ARE guild management?

Quite a few guilds have broken up over the following pitfalls:
* "I'm never allowed to go to Kara"
* "The raidleader always chooses the other hunter over me"
* "My guild has 2 raid groups and I'm in the B group which struggles"

True 'raiding' guilds will prefer a static group (with always the same team members playing), where more casual guilds usually prioritize keeping everyone happy and giving more people a chance. For both types of guilds above problems are a challenge to avoid, so before you and your guild even start with raiding, it is very important for you to consider how you will want to organise your runs.

* Web or ingame calendar: First come, first serve (some people will never get a spot and people might get annoyed with eachother for signing up first)
* On the fly: See who is online at a certain time, and invite away (more prone to people getting preferential treatment)
* One of the above combined with priority system: More stuff to manage, but 'fairest' if you have a large raider-pool to fish from.

For an example of a priority system, check my guild's website about our KIL system (Karazhan Invite List).
http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/21

We apply it to our Karazhan runs since day 1; and even though at times people have been confused about the rules, the consistency with which we have applied the rules to everyone (also to guildleader and officers) has gained people's respect. When people don't get to go, they shrug because they know it'll be their turn again soon.

Group make-up and minimum stats

You want a strong team to do your raids with, but when is a player ready to be part of it? Posting a list of gear requirements (or, 'what stats people should aim for') can be of tremendous help in asking people to take responsibility, in helping them prepare the right way, and in motivating them to be 'critical' about their gear when they're not (it changes the attitude to 'oh hey, an upgrade' in a random instance, to 'what can I do to improve these pants'). It also helps some people who are a bit clueless about stats to figure out what loot is good for them, and which isn't (because basically every raidgroup has their DPS-clothie who wants to roll on healing-gear )

Our stat-lists can be found here:
Karazhan - Gear to aim for : http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/19
Gruul - Gear requirements : http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/539

We're a bit stricter with 25-man content than with Karazhan as we have high experience to make up for 'new' players in Karazhan, and really need certain numbers to make Gruul's Lair work for us. But these are just an example.

What you can do is make a post on your website with *your* requirements, and a few links to the following websites:

http://www.warcrafter.net/ - Like the armory, but faster and with more info!
http://www.freewithmats.com - ask your crafters in the guild to upload their recipies, so potential customers can find them through this nifty little website. It also has an enchant and gem wizard to advise your guildies which gem to choose.
http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/532 - head, shoulder, leg enchants, an overview by Mirakuli
http://www.wowgemfinder.com/cut_gems/index - An overview of all gems in the game

Addendum: Class/Role balance

It has been suggested to me that I forgot to mention something about the class/role balance in raids. This differs per raid and I suggest that you check wowwiki's pages about raid instances to find out what is generally recommended. For my guild, the following goes:
- Karazhan: 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 dps
- Gruul's Lair: 4 tanks, 9 healers, 12 dps

Suggested reagents

This is a list of reagents you can recommend to your raiders to bring along. It depends on your style whether you make any of these mandatory or voluntary.
This is a very, very basic list and not by far complete.

Livejournal user Myste_UK gave me feedback on this via the WoW_ladies community: "There are a number of useful ones omitted, and the best flask/elixir to use can vary quite a lot depending a lot of factors.
For example I am a druid tank, and my preferred flask in most situations is Flask of Chromatic Wonder; there are some circumstances where I would choose Flask of Fortification (which is actually the preferred flask for most warrior tanks i know), and other circumstances where I would consider flask of the titans (but rarely), and sometimes Flask of Relentless Assault is the way for me to go."

Common to All
- Heavy Netherweave Bandage x20
- Any reagents for buffing, poisons (rogues), sharpening stones necessary etc.

Tanks
- Flask: Flask of the Titans x2 (This is optional since the mats may be rather expensive, but ideal since it persists through death)
- Potions: Super Healing Potion x15, Ironshield Potion x5. Mighty Rage Potion x3
- Elixir: Elixir of Major Defense x5, Elixir of Major Agility x5
- Food: Spicy Crawdad x5, Feltail Delight x20 or Talbuk Steak x20 or Clam Bar x20

Melee and Ranged DPS
- Potions: Super Healing Potion x10, Super Mana Potion x10 (for Hunters)
- Elixirs: Elixir of Major Strength x10 (+ strength) or Onslaught Elixir (+ attack power) x10 or Elixir of Major Agility x10 (+ agility)
- Food: Roasted Clefthoof x20 (+ strength) or Ravager Dog x20 (+ attack power) or Grilled Mudfish x20 (+ agility)
Note: Guardian Elixirs such as Elixir of Major Defense are a plus!

Pet food:
- Kibler's Bits (or Sporeling Snack)

Spellcaster DPS
- Flask: Flask of Pure Death or Flask of Blinding Light x2 (Expensive, but persists through death)
- Potions: Super Healing Potion x5, Super Mana Potion x10
- Elixirs: Adept's Elixir x10, Elixir of Major Firepower x10 (Fire Mage), Elixir of Major Frost Power x10 (Frost Mage), Elixir of Major Shadow Power x10 (Warlock's, Shadow Priests)
- Oils: Superior Wizard Oil x2
- Food: Blackened Basilisk x20 or Poached Bluefish x20, or Crunchy Serpent x20 or Skullfish Soup x20

Healers
- Flask: Flask of Mighty Restoration or Flask of Distilled Wisdom x2 (Expensive, but persists through death)
- Potions: Super Healing Potion x5, Super Mana Potion x15
- Elixir: Elixir of Healing Power x15
- Oils: Superior Mana Oil x2
- Food: Golden Fish Sticks x20

What addons are recommended for starting raid leaders?

- Raid management: Ora2 (Ace2) or CTraid (shows your raidgroup who the main tank and offtank have targetted)
- Masterlooting: LootHog (keeps track of all the rolls made, and sorts them so you can see who won)
- Raid-event announce/bosshelp ingame: DeadlyBossMods or BigWigs (Ace2) (must-have)
- Threatmeter: Omen (Ace2) or KTM (everyone in your raid group should have one or the other, so everyone can see how much threat they have on a mob. You should recommend one of these addons to your raid to prevent communication-issues between the addons)
- Raid frames replacements: Sraidframes, AG_unitframes, X-perl (to have a better view on the raid, people's healthpoints and manabars)
- Damage meter: Recount (Ace2), SWstats
- Crowd control: CCbreaker (who broke those shackles??)

Tasks/Joy division

Leading a raid can be a stressful endeavour, especially if you hog all the important roles (marking, motivating, managing) yourself. Now, every raid leader has their own style and it depends on yours, of how you're going to divide these roles.

A possible setup that takes the most out of your hands:
- The MT: marking of raid targets
- The most experienced healer (assigned by you): assigns healing (usually on a seperate healing channel)
- Another officer/trusted guildie: masterlooter
- You: Answer questions in private, set the pace, announce bio-breaks and tactics

Of course, you can also decide to do the raid marking yourself, or other jobs. It is best to seperate raid leadership and masterlooting though; when you disconnect when you're both, it can cripple the group and prevent them from continuing without you. (Unless that is what you want ).

It can help create a positive atmosphere if you announce who does what in a fun, positive way. Not only good for a laugh, but also useful so people see who to whisper when they have a question.

One note: some guilds/raid groups have issues with people going for unnannounced AFK breaks. Best way to solve this is to announce when the next bio break will be, or have your bio's always set "before the next boss".

Raid targetting:

- Skull: first to be killed target (offtank)
- X: second to be killed target (maintank)
- Other: for other crowd-control (same icons for the same jobs during that raid)
--- Shackles (of undead): priests
--- Banish (of demons and elementals): warlocks
--- Enslave (of demons): warlocks
--- Trapping (of everything): hunters
--- Sleeping (of beasts): druids
--- Polymorph (of humanoids): mages
--- Turn Undead (of undead, and after 2.4 has been implemented demons): paladins
--- Fear (of everything): Priests, warriors
--- Fear (of everything except undead): warlocks
--- Seduce (of humanoids): warlocks
--- Mind Control (of humanoids): priests

"Seduce only works on humanoids, and can be quite hazardous to use, as it is channeled by the Succubus, and it uses the succubus' mana. So if Succubus has no mana = no seduce, and if no Succubus = no seduce, and the hoot is: Succubus easily dies." ~ Fortunos

Types of tanks:

All three tank-types currently in the game bring their own qualities to a fight. It works in your favor to know which is best for what situation:

- Warriors: Rage-based aggro, excellent for main tanking
- Druids: Rage-based aggro, best switch to healing or dps with fights where just one tank is needed
- Paladins: Great with AOE and against undead, vulnerable to silence, best switch to healing with fights where just one tank is needed.

Myste_UK of livejournal community WoW_Ladies: "I think you need to include a point here about the fact that some fights are better suited to different class main tanks than others, although this is best judged by looking up a guide to individual bosses on sites such as Bosskillers."

As noted, in some fights you only need one tank on the boss. Try to make the most of what you have; if you have a warrior/druid combination, you can select one of the two to join in with DPS. If you have a druid/paladin combination, you can ask the paladin to assist with healing.

For this reason, it can be a huge asset to you if the paladins/druids/warriors bring a set for these alternate functions, so you can improvise and mix things around, as you like.

Invite time

Using ORA, you can set up a key word that people can whisper you for an automated invite. As far as I know, it doesn't convert a 5 man party into a raid, so as soon as you have one person in the group, turn it into a raid. Then you have a few extra moments to catch your breath and have a bio or a drink.

When you have invited a few people you can start reminding people in raid chat to come on teamspeak/ventrilo, have their bio's, get their reagents and repairs.. and if you see 2 people are in Deadwind Pass already, you can tell people summons are available.
When you've already started and need to summon someone over as a midway replacement, it's always easiest to assign two people to do it. This, so a) not everyone runs outside, and b) not everyone stays inside. Of course it is always preferable to have people tell you in advance if they need to be replaced, and have the replacements make their own way to the instance so they don't hold up the raid.

Once the raid group is full and summoned over (I always check the world map and click on Outland/Old World to see at a glance if anyone is still 'elsewhere') you can tell people to zone in.

Before you start: a checklist:

- Have you set CTraid/Ora (MT target, OT target)
- Have the groups been formed correctly? You can ask in raid chat if people are happy.
- In Deadly Boss Mods, is the announce enabled for the encounters you're going to do
- Is looting set to master looting, and loot on blue/rare?
- Are the other officers/your assistants raid assistants (so they can use /rw and set icons)?

- Is everyone on teamspeak/ventrilo
- Does everyone know what their CC icon is
- Have the healers got their healing sorted?
- If you have a warlock: Is soulstone up?
- Buffs

Boss encounters: Tactics

Part of being a raid leader is knowing the tactics to the bossfights you're going to do, and making sure the other people in your group know their part. As I write in the 'motivation' chapter, it depends on your style of how much responsibility you give your guildies in reading up on tactics. It's much easier on you as raidleader if your guildies come to a raid with knowledge of positioning and 'when to duck', but it requires a large amount of responsibility from your guildies.

If you expect people to read up on boss tactics, you need to tell people *which* tactics (which website). Ideally, you'll break down the main points people need to know for each role so they can focus on their part. The DPS doesn't need to know the boss hits for 3.000 nature damage each swing! The healers don't need to know the boss is immune to melee damage! The info might be *useful*, but when you're learning an event, too much knowledge usually just confuses people.

When you're in the raid itself, it is advisable to repeat the basics of the fight minutes before you start, and say what aspect of the fight people should focus on most.

Boss encounters: Useful websites:

http://www.bosskillers.com/ - Raid Boss Strategy and Guides. Links on to other websites.
http://www.ampwow.com - Has awesome positioning pictures (for Karazhan) and breaks down every fight into the different roles (tanking, healing, dps)
http://www.theoryspot.com/forums/raid-leadership-management/ - Theoryspot's raid leadership and management forums
http://www.wow-loot.com/ - A great resource for masterlooters; what classes is the dropped item best suitable for?

Boss encounters: Evaluating

Again, it depends on your style on how you handle the learning-process. If you run into troubles downing a boss, it isn't very sensible to try the same tactic over and over again without trying to find where the problem lies for you. Sometimes, you can spot the problems yourself. By checking the threatmeters (did someone over-aggro?) and the damage meter (was DPS higher/lower than usual?) during the event, you can learn a lot about your teammates and what is going on.

The more democratic type of raidleader might ask after a wipe: "What went wrong?". Depending on your guild/team, this might either open up a can of worms and endless debate, or offer a very constructive analysis of the fight. In my own raids, I ask what went wrong, and discuss it at the same time in officerchat. People know their input is taken seriously, but I use my officer's feedback to determine the next course of action.

Usually, when I have the feeling a specific person just doesn't understand the encounter, I ask everyone in raidchat to whisper me if they have a question. Most people are afraid of being thought dumb or stupid if they ask a question in public. Showing you're open to questions can help a great deal in encouraging people to speak up, or even to admit their mistakes. (Being big enough to admit your own mistakes does too!).

Whatever your style and choices, I can recommend using WoW webstats to post combat logs to your website's forums after every run. This:
- promotes (friendly) competition and discussion
- shows how your guild improves over time
- enables evaluation of 'what happened'

http://www.wowwebstats.com

"With WWS, you generate and share reports of your raids, which include a tremendous amount of information and statistics. You can also see how other guild perform on a given fight : just search for a boss in the WWS database. This is like sitting among the best players around and studying their strategy!"

Your attitude, and: Motivating your team

One of the hardest parts with raidleading is sometimes not figuring out the tactics or finding where your strengths lie as a group, but motivating people to sign up for raids, keeping them happy throughout the raid, keeping the group focused and avoiding frustration between the more and less 'invested' people. Some raidleaders have natural people skills at level 375, some are still levelling it

Personally, I believe the best way to motivate people, is to treat your team respectfully (so no namecalling/humiliating in public channels when someone makes a mistake, but being tolerant of issues as long as people show a willingness to improve and admit errors) and to foster a little ambition in people to better themselves.
Of course, the nature of your guild also has a huge influence on how ambitious people are to progress and improve. If people are really interested in hardcore progress, you'd be better off telling people well beforehand what standards you will expect of them. If people are not happy, they will not sign up for raids, so you need to find where the point between "fun" and "serious" lies with your guild.

This also influences the way in which you prepare your guildies for raids. Do you expect them to read up on all tactics, or do you tell them during the raid itself what is expected? In other words: Do you share responsibility "as a team", or do you take responsibility "as raid leader" with 9 or 24 people following your exact commands? I can tell you the latter might have more control over the situation, but will be burnt out quicker!

On the US forums was a thread about raid leader styles and which type people prefer. Points are being made for both styles, and it might be a nice read. (Even though most commenters seem to think people who know their business are a 9 or a 10. You *can* be nice and friendly *and* constructive).
You can find that thread here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=0AB1A39E79CAD45...

"Problem players"

When I have my doubts about a player's performance, I buddy them up with someone who is more experienced, and send them one or two blue items (if their gear is lacking; can be a gem, or a replacement for a green item someone is wearing) with the advice of googling for a class/spec guide to find out where to 'shop' to get a nice gearset.

If someone does not exhibit any.. enthousiasm for improving their character but expects to go to Karazhan in greens, I have a chat with them in private to tell them they do not meet base requirements and am concerned they will be a liability to their guildies. If they still refuse to listen after a reasonable chat, but still sign up for runs, they have no feeling for responsibilities and team play and most likely will not be the most popular with guild leadership

Also: some people are just new to raids. Send them over to this excellent WoWInsider article:
http://www.wowinsider.com/2007/10/18/learn2raid-your-first-raid/

See also:

My guide to masterlooting using loothog - http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/537
Tinse's guide to melee DPS - http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/406
Addon troubleshooting - http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/?q=node/698
Lemmings of the Light Karazhan section - http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/node/16
Lemmings of the Light Gruul's lair section - http://www.lemmings-of-the-light.net/gruul/