The Dreaded AFK Beast

Our guild leader got back into town, and I finally had a chance to share with him my experiences from last week's raid, and ask about things I could do better, especially in terms of keeping AFK's to a minimum, and he shared some interesting advice that I thought I should share with you, Internet.

Share Your Raid Plan Early
The first thing he asked me was "Did you tell everyone what order you'd be doing the wings, at the beginning?" Of course I hadn't, I didn't know myself! I'm supposed to have a plan? Of course I am, and I should, because if I had told my raiders "We're doing Spider, then Plague, then Abom, then Deathknight" then they could've planned their AFK's for times that aren't right before bosses.

Take a Scheduled Break
Question number two was a real obvious one: "Did you break halfway through?" Huh, I totally forgot. "It's more efficient for everyone to pee at the same time" he told me, which strikes me as a creepy amount of scheduling, but totally true. Make sure that this break does NOT overlap looting, as you want to make sure everyone gets their smoke break, etc.


Start Planning Your Boss Fights Early
By the time you get to the boss, you should be ready to pull. Waiting to swap groups for Gothik is a raid-killer, because people take pauses as good times to wander off, so if you let those pauses fall just before boss fights, thats when they'll wander off, and you'll be forced to wait for them before pulling. Instead, while you're clearing trash, you should be doing any group rearranging you want to do, assign any roles that are vital (priests for Instructor, etc), so that during the last trash pull you can be giving any last minute instructions, and ready to pull by the time any re-buffs have gone up.

Carry Some Respect
This one isn't from my leader, it's something I've observed about him, and the groups he runs. The people we run with *respect* him, his skill in playing and in leading, and as part of that respect, they listen to him better, and complain less. I think that a couple more weeks of raids, with improvement each week, will get me no where NEAR his level of reputation, but at least start to build myself one of my own.

Good luck all you other newbie raid-leaders out there, it's a bigger job than I imagined, and takes a lot more coordination and patience than I thought.

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.