All the Small Things - How to Improve as a Raid Leader

Tuesdays are great - server reset and a scheduled Naxx 25!

We got 7 bosses down without too many problems. The purpose of this post is to organize my thoughts regarding leadership.

I was one of the primary leaders for that raid and afterward, I thought about how to improve my leadership skills. Here is a long list of my goals as a Raid Leader in a casual raid setting:

• Minimize downtime, keep up a good pace
• Make good quick decisions during encounters under pressure while still playing my role to the best of my ability
• Enable a social and friendly atmosphere, but not let this hinder raid performance
  
• Make appropriate assignments based on class/spec strengths
• Consider assignments based on player gear and skill
• Be able to concisely describe and summarize all encounters in a short period of time
• Delegate the right tasks to other Raid Leaders
• Develop a consistent predictable system for kill order, groups, etc.
• Listen to suggestions, be able to modify strategy on the fly
• If someone else is leading, assist without getting in the way
  
• Have fun and keep up morale!

Starting a Raid

I keep a notebook and a large collection of spreadsheets and text documents that track performance, strategy and remind me of certain tasks. For starting a raid, I have the following reminders: Promote Assistants, Assign ML and ML threshold, Set Instance Difficulty, Set MT List, Start EPGP (our DKP system) addon, Remind Players about Resistance Gear and Consumables.

Minimizing Downtime

Since I usually lead as a tank, I can set the pace for pulling trash and bosses. My goal is to chain pull a whole instance, this will shave off many minutes of downtime for each raid and prevent people from getting bored. Where I think there is a lot of downtime in my guild's raids is when I am discussing strategy in tells and in the Raid Leader channels. Most of the raid can not see these discussions. From my perspective, there is an active conversation and productive decision making, meanwhile the raid is quickly losing their enthusiasm.

There are a few approaches to this problem. One is to anticipate downtime and let the raid know that there will be a 3-5 min break. I don't mind doing this before a boss, but I no not like doing it between boss attempts. Another way is to contemplate alternate strategies and plans before the discussion starts so that decisions and alternate strategies can be made quicker. A good way to keep up enthusiasm is to simply let the raid know that the Raid Leaders are having a quick discussion so that they know something is being done and it's not wasted dead time.

Quick Decisions

I'll use an example from the raid last night to address this topic. There were seven Druids in the raid. During encounters like Heigan and Razuvious where many players died, I had to call out battle resurrections. What I felt like saying was "Dear Druids, I am currently getting smacked a 20 ft tall Undead while running across a lethal exploding poison floor. Rez whoever the @#$% you want." Of course, there is usually a world of difference between what one wants to say and what one should say. I made a bad call telling a Druid to rez a DPS instead of a healer (I hadn't noticed that the healer had died). On Razuvious, there appeared to be an infinite cycle of Druid resurrections.

Since I was paranoid about from Heigan about getting all the healers alive, I would say "Druid A, Rez Healer B", then Druid A would say "Druid C is down, I'll rez him and then he can rez Healer B". When Duid C is battle rezed, then conveniently Druid D would die. "Hey, how about Druid C will rez Druid D who will rez Healer B". Meanwhile Healer B is probably wondering why he didn't get a rez 2 minutes ago. You see where this is going.

To improve these quick calls in a raid, I can adjust my UI to see cooldowns more easily and adjust raid frames so I can see more information in a glance. Heigan isn't really that bad, but maybe if I am tanking dance fights in Ulduar, I can delegate those calls to a Druid (who would have thought?). One thing to keep in mind is awareness. Near the end of a raid, I tend to be less aware of what is going on and have tunnel vision on my tasks at hand. I need to think about all the calls I may need to make before the encounter begins. I also need to be aware of my wavy attention span as the raid approaches its third hour (and this is usually when good calls are needed the most).

Anyway, I am just putting these thoughts in a more organized manner. All this crazy raid stuff is what makes leading fun and interesting to me. I'll discuss the other points in future posts. If anyone reads this, feel free to make suggestions!