 I’ve been really busy this last week or so. Haven’t got as much beta testing done as I’d have liked, but there are only so many hours in the day when I can play the game. Many times, I can write articles or forums posts most easily. I wanted to highlight a few key things. EJ For over a year and a half, Suno has been maintaining the DK tank thread at Elitist Jerks. He’s done well and I August 17th, 2010 | One comment |
 From: Addons, Guild management, Raid leadership in general |  Tags: ej, kahorie, leadership, raid leader, rawr  We’re chatting in my guild forums about killing the Lich King last night, and the question was asked how tough that fight is relative to others in WoW history. I haven’t killed every boss (didn’t do much Black Temple, for example, and no Sunwell at all, since my casual guild at the time was behind on progression). I answered the reason it’s a hard fight is because it’s a Type C in Tobold’s classification. To recap, saving you to June 11th, 2010 | One comment |
From: Boss strategies | Tags: leadership, lich king, performance, raid, raid leader, strategy  My guild, Axis of Dath’remar, a 10-man raiding guild of one night a week, tonight, finally killed the Lich King. I was so very happy about it. Axis is made up of a former hardcore guys who’ve now got the balance right, like four-day a week raiders in previous expansions. I must say our raid leader Dakas is superb, and this makes a big difference. He’s constantly calling ‘defile coming, away from middle’, or the reverse, making the decision June 11th, 2010 | 15 comments |
From: Raid leadership in general | Tags: leadership, lich king, raid, raid leader, strategy That is some heavy news, eh. Look how huge the response is. MMO-C had 1100 replies when I read the blue this morning, Australian time. At least 10 bloggers I have in my RSS reader already have posts. Here’s the pwnwear forum thread to discuss it, where I’ve put my thoughts, including that Strict 10 will become largely meaningless. April 27th, 2010 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, leadership, raid, raid leader I have mentioned this great addon once before, Boss Notes (back in Sept 09). Those guilds going up against Putricide you might find it helpful. Saves alt-tabbing to whichever website you use. It can learn boss’ abilities (make sure you turn this on; it’s off by default). This gives you their spells (with tooltips), in a handy notebook, into which you can also write your own tips and reminders. Includes simple written strategies for all the older bosses, too, January 7th, 2010 | 2 comments |
From: Addons | Tags: addon, boss notes, heroics, raid, raid leader, review, strategy I really paused for thought after reading Tobold’s classification of raid encounters. Looking at the title of his post, ‘raid encounter classification’, you might well think his answers would describe the mechanics of a fight like this:
I used Naxx examples so everyone can relate to it. But in fact, what’s so clever, is he looks instead at where the pressure is placed, and who needs September 25th, 2009 | 3 comments |
From: Raid leadership in general | Tags: hard mode, heroics, leadership, performance, raid, raid leader, strategy This deserves more discussion. One of the difficult balances a leader has to manage is the number of tanks required in a raid, or the guild, as a proportion of the total guild. The problem is largely caused by the ratio required of tanks to others:
That’s half as many tanks for 25-man raiding as for 10-mans. The problems this brings are manyfold:
Also tanks need to be amongst the better players in your guild. They need more situational awareness, better reaction time, often more leadership personal characteristics. Luckily, you don’t need a lot of tanks, but good ones can be hard to find. Tanks tend to stick with their guild, they’re not chopped and changed so freely as deeps, which in turn means a tank will guard his raid slot more. He’ll try to attend more nights and be more active. No doubt, dual-spec helps us all with this problem, but doesn’t solve it. Tanks want to tank. Personally, I don’t enjoy dps. So this complicates the roster management for leadership, since you are juggling people’s personal desires too. Point is: the divergence of ratios between tanks:rest whilst a guild is growing from 5, 10 to 25 man raiding is a pain in the ass for guild leadership. Here’s the blue post that reminded me of this prevalent issue. » continue reading September 18th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: Guild management, Tanking in general | Tags: dps, guild, healers, raid leader, roster, tank I was tanking Utgarde Keep on my reroll DK ‘Industry’ earlier. Did it because I saw “LF1M tank, UK” on general chat. I really enjoyed the run. I was in my blood dps levelling spec, so I had just a few tanking talents to draw on. Went fine. There was a funny moment. The party did wonder about me, when I suddenly died before even zoning in. Dead tank outside the zone Anyhow, clearing UK got me wondering, September 14th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: raid leader, tank I like this addon, Boss Notes. Gives you an in-game notebook for each boss. Comes with dot-point reminders of the key things for Ulduar bosses, for example, and you can enter your own. These can be broadcast to a channel you choose.
Another example of what a warlock might put in a personal note for a boss:
It also knows and learns the abilities that boss’ cast, so you build up a reference September 14th, 2009 | One comment |
From: Addons | Tags: addon, heroics, raid, raid leader, review, strategy Matticus, a raid leader and prolific blogger, has written up his GUI which comments on the addons he uses. This is a great write-up because he’s a raid leader and uses many tools specifically for that purpose. Read the article at nostockui. Some people can listen to instructions on Vent and get it, others are kinesthetic and the fight won’t click in their heads until they’ve been in it. Thanks to youtube, visual learners can watch a boss fight before they have to try it themselves. I love diagrams but sadly they’re not so commonly used in strategy guides nowadays. Raid leaders should remain aware of the way people learn differently, and bear it in mind when you judge their performance For some time, I have used Boyd’s OODA concept as my model for how decision-making works during a fight. It’s observe, orient, decide, act. Boyd was a superb US airforce pilot, one of the best dogfighters of his era and became a leading military theorist. “… the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent.” His work is worth reading more. Wikipedia’s article is a good Having a raid leader or officer watch the debuffs on a boss can be a good idea. Back in the old days of 40-man raiding, debuff management was even more important that now. I haven’t used a debuff monitoring addon for a while. Now, to move into hard modes, I’d like to improve and monitor our dps so will start using one. The point is to have an at-a-glance review of which debuffs are missing, more so than what June 8th, 2009 | Leave a comment |
From: Observe, orient, decide, act | Tags: addon, debuff, raid leader, review This is a topic I’ll come back to a number of times. Below I outline a few tools which give the raid leader crucial information in real-time and post-mortem. Real-time raid DPS (not personal dps)
June 6th, 2009 | One comment |
From: Observe, orient, decide, act | Tags: addon, debuff, leadership, logs, raid leader |
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