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_guide_summary - gives 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!

Assembling your raid

I find it useful to advertise an in-game channel with the raid details, so that people coming to the raid can join that channel when they login to raid, and it is becomes much easier to coordinate travel to the raid-site. If you have a friendly warlock it can be very helpful to have them summon people up to the raid site, and that is easily coordinated through a raid channel. I tend to use a channel named "basinxxxx" where xxxx is the name of the raid location (eg "basinbrd" or "basinmc") which allows for multiple raid channels to be in existence at a time.

It also helps to give two times in the raid notice - one time for when you want to start the raid, and one time for when people should login and start travelling. This enables people who cannot make the earlier time to do their travelling and logout the night before at the raid site to avoid wasting time waiting for people to arrive. But please be warned - the set-up phase of a raid is always going to take longer than anticipated, so please be patient, and don't fill the raid channel with chatter - it makes coordinating much more difficult.

If you are relying on someone for advice on the raid, or on someone to do the pulling, it may also be worthwhile having a second chat channel for the leadership team of the raid. Depending on the raid target and size of the raid, you could conceivably have the raid leader (you!), the puller, someone who knows the raid well and the main tank in this channel.

If you are participating in a raid, please try not to be late - people will understand, but it isn't fair to keep a number of people waiting for you. If you can, try to get to the raid site in advance of the start time, as you will see there is much to do once everyone gets there!

Group-making

Once you are confident that everyone is on their way to, or at the raid site, you can start organising groups. The Raid feature in WoW is particularly helpful in this regard, and you should get everyone invited to the raid group as early as you can. This will enable you to experiment with raid groups by dragging and dropping, which is great. It also gives everyone access to the /ra channel.

Group composition is only important if you are doing something that involves more than one group. Different raid leaders have different ways they prefer to set up the groups. In WoW if everyone has the UI mod RaidBar, it becomes less important, but there are still advantages in having certain group make-ups as follows:

Main Tank group

Your main tank will need to have lots and lots of HP and AC, and at least one primary healer in his/her group. What this means is that you may want to have a paladin in the MT group so that he benefits from the Paladin's auras, and also a Priest/Druid for healing. The purpose of this group is to keep the MT alive and on aggro.

Casters' group

I like to put the ranged robe-wearing damage dealers (ie mages and warlocks) in a group together with a healer (paladin, druid or priest - no matter) so that they can stay together out of the danger zone and nuke away (while always watching their aggro), and can be healed if they to catch any accidental AE damage. This will need to change if you are doing a lot of AoE killing as each AoE-er should have a priest to bubble them (or two dress-wearers per priest as a maximum).

Aside from that, I tend to set up the groups so that they make sense for the situation and the class composition of the raid. When fighting a boss with AoE attacks, you need someone in each group that can do group heals, for example.

Buffing

The initial buffing round at the start of the raid is incredibly mana-draining. Liaise among the representatives of your class on a raid before buffing and split the duties between you. If one of you has the group version of your buff, then they should do the buffing, and arrange with the raid leader to be moved around the groups to do so. If you are not a buffing class, please be patient, and stand/sit still while this is happening. Many people buff by working around the toons, and if they are all running around it is very annoying and people get missed.

If someone dies on a raid they will need buffing following a rez. If you are a buffer, just hit them with it after they pop back to life - don't wait for them to ask.

On larger raids it may make sense for us to use class channels (basinpriest, basindruid, basinwarrior etc) or class type channels (basinhealer, basinmelee, basincaster etc) to coordinate buffing and other class duties and cut down on general spam.

During the raid

A few golden rules during the raid.

Raid leaders

1. Give clear, concise and descriptive instructions
2. To paraphrase the old diving adage: Plan your raid and raid your plan
3. But be flexible and quick on your feet if anything unforeseen happens
4. Post your raid rules (including loot rules) prior to the raid and summarise them at the start of the raid

Raiders

1. Listen to the raid leader and do what they say. If you have an issue with it, note it down and raise it with them afterwards
2. Try to keep the spam in the raid channel down so that the noise dowsn't drown out the important stuff. This includes stuff like "Healing xxx" unless you are doing something akin to a healing chain (Ugh! /shudder) and it is vital that everyone can see the timing of your heals.
3. If you have helpful suggestions or insights on the raid, try to provide them to the leader in a /w before the raid or during downtime on the raid.
4. Please be patient!
5. Don't roam far from the raid, unless you are asked to, even if you are a stealth class and want to have a look around.
6. Have fun!

After the raid

This is the time to discuss strategy and have a debrief on what went well and what didn't. If you have any personal issues on individual performance, take it up in a constructive way in a private manner, not in /g. And finally, don't forget to thank each other for a fun time.