Raid Retrospective

The Good: We cleared everything in about 3 1/2 hours, give or take. We never (technically) wiped. We got GREAT KT loot, although if I ever see another Calamity's Grasp, it'll be too soon. Loot was distributed to folks who could use it, for the most part, and even our alt players got a little something for their time and effort. I had a group of folks who were from the other guild before the merger, and I'm happy with the amount of teamwork that I saw between people in both groups.

The Bad: The Wednesday night raid poached one of our tanks, leaving me to have to take a player who won't normally be able to raid with us, and who has proven to be a less than stellar tank. We ran into some massive lag at the start, supposedly due to Lake Wintergrasp. Also, I learned that if I invite someone to the raid, when they're not fully loaded, it crashes their client! Mwa hahaha. I had a lot of tanking loot go to that player, instead of where I REALLY wanted it to go, onto an alt with us who will probably become our replacement-tank when we get tight.

The Ugly: Our tanking was just plain bad, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Trash pulls weren't pulled back, whirlwinding mobs were tanked in the healers, adds weren't picked up smoothly, threat wasn't high enough to keep our fury warrior from being a pancake most of the evening. It was just a rough night, in terms of trash deaths, healer deaths due to pulling aggro... I even had a tank go AFK on the 4hm pull. One of the guys doing ranged tanking in the back picked the loose boss mob up and tanked him back to his spot, without dying. It was an impressive recovery, but not one that should've had to be made in the first place.

I also had a bit of trouble with discipline for lack of a better term. Folks AFK'ed a lot, and seemed to think no one would mind. I'm not sure if the right thing would be to yell at them, or what. What I ended up doing was leaving them behind. If you have to go, fine, take care of your shit, but keep it to a minimum, and don't expect me to wait if I can help it, at all. That was bad enough, but by the time 11:00 was rolling around and we were on Sapph and KT, folks were getting whiney as well. I had arguments over whether or not to attempt the 100 Club, and the KT achivement, after one of our mages kindly (purposefully) pulled a full cubby of aboms and nearly wiped us when the ranged didn't clear the skellies out before they got to the meleers. Add to that some portal roulette causing a TON of vent chatter while I was trying to distribute loot, and you had a cranky raid-leader, by the end of the evening.

Part of the problem, I think, is that while I'm an officer in function, I'm not the one making the judgment calls in the guild. We're a benevolent dictatorship, for lack of a better term, and our fearless leader is off skiing in Tahoe. Which leaves us with control, but very little actual power. We can say "yes" or "no" but we cannot really enforce it. I have no tools for positive or negative enforcement whatsoever. I can yell over vent and make people feel bad, but that's not really my style, and I don't think it's a good way to get folks to have fun playing the game, either.

Conclusions: I'm happy in general. We accomplished all the major goals I had for the evening, although somewhat at personal cost for a couple of our members. I think I need to maintain a little more control of some of our more unruly members, and if the tanks can't get things situated we may need to swap folks around. All in all, though, I'm pretty pleased with the first 25 man raid I've run without anyone else around to hold my hand.