Guide to leading raids

by Grimthor 22:03, 24 Mar 2005 (Eastern Standard Time)

Introduction

This guide is not intended to be a definitive "How To", but rather an introduction to some of my thoughts on leading and participating in raids. Please treat this in the spirit it is offered - it is intended to provide a framework to encourage you to think about raids and raiding, and how to lead and participate in raids. And of course this has a natural slant towards raiding in a Basin context.

What the heck do I know about it?

Well, I led the Amazon Basin's EverQuest guild for a bit over a year, which included running raids, and was also part of a fairly hardcore raid guild in EverQuest for 18 months or so, raiding very high-end content 4-5 evenings a week. I've also been playing WoW since April 2004, so I know WoW reasonably well too. Oh, and I've been in the Amazon Basin for about 5 years too.

What is a raid?

When I talk about raids, I mean any activity in a MMORPG that is undertaken by more than a single group. In WoW the definition broadens to include any one-group instance run, and most PvP activities that are not just one-on-one skirmishes. This guide has been written mostly from the point of view of PvE raids, but the general principles, I am sure, also apply to PvP.

It's a somewhat nebulous definition, and I apologise for that, but it kinda needs to be!

Organising and planning a raid

The Basin is a group of people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds with a variety of real life commitments. Raiding often involves planning around real life commitments in terms of when people can do it, and how long they can do it. If you wish to organise a Basin raid, therefore, you would be well advised to start planning and recruiting for your raid several days in advance. The beauty of the WoW instance system is that you can plan raids in advance, rather than having to move fast when you spot that a raid target is up as in most other games.

There are a number of Basin resources that are available for planning and advertising raids, and I set out some of them below:

Instance_guides - give pretty good guides to most of the instances in WoW
The Basin WoW Forums - especially the Meeting Place
The Basin WoW Calendar - also see the excellent Calendar_Guide
Wow_Raid_Signup

First you need to decide where you want to raid. I can't help you with that - choose somewhere you want to go see, or somewhere you need quests, or somewhere the items you want drop...

Next you need to advertise your raid, and start recruiting. You should create a Meeting Place thread about your raid, and a Calendar entry. Make sure people know about the raid in game also by using guild chat (but please don't let it become spam!) and directing them to the forums. A day or two before your raid, speak to an officer and ask them to put it in the Guild Message of the Day (GMotD).

In the meantime, try to find out about the target of the raid. Or if you are raiding to explore, try not to find out about it! But if the objective is exploration you should make this clear in the advertising for the raid so that people who want to whizz through and do quests are not disappointed.

If you get more signups than you need for your raid, you could try making a couple of groups to do the particular activity in parallel - it's nicer than turfing people out of the raid!