NOTE: this post is largely catered to guilds that raid in some form, but based on the comments from my last  Wrath post, it’s a process a lot of you are looking for some help with.

In a recent post, I discussed the opportunity for change that Wrath is bringing, and the ease with which people can change their goals, class, etc. So with all this change, how are we supposed to make sure we have what we need for Wrath raiding? Or perhaps a more accurate question would be “How are we supposed to raid with 25 death knights?” It’s may seem overwhelming but in reality this follows much the same process as normal recruitment; identify your needs and then fill them.

Identify your needs:
Repeat after me; “I will over recruit for the expansion.” But wait, Auz over recruiting is bad. Yes normally overrecruiting is bad, but I promise you that some of the people who want to try this new raiding thing/class won’t like it, some of them won’t be good at it and some of them are going to get tired once they realize that Wrath is the same old thing in new paint and quit for War or something. So just trust me and recruit 20% more people than you think you need.

Your Wrath needs are not going to be the same as your BC needs. I’m not in Beta (curse you Blizzard) but several of my friends and co-bloggers are. From what I’ve heard the ratios are largly the same for tank, healing, dps raid slots with slightly less varition in number of healers needed per fight. (I’m not putting too much faith in this because Karazhan didn’t vary as much as Sunwell either) So count on 2 Main tanks, 3 dpsers who can tank if needed, 7 to 8 healers and 12 to 13 pure dpsers for a typical raid mix. The real difference in Wrath is that Blizzard has worked very hard to make sure no single class provides something irreplaceable to a raid. Now I’m not about to get into the whole “Blizzard is making us all the same” debate, but what that means for your roster is that you don’t need to break it up into 1 hunter, 2 rogues, 1 shaman etc. You can break your roster into Tanks, Healers, Melee DPS and Ranged DPS. I’m will admit that my expertise is really in the healing area and so I trust other people to determine our guild’s needs for DPS and tanking.
My desired Wrath healing roster is broken up like this.

• 2 Priests
• 2 Druids
• 2 Shaman
• 2 Pallys
• 6 Really solid healers of any class
• 4 DPS players I plan to give preference for off spec healing gear in exchange for the ability to borrow them for healing heavy fights. In return I intend to give my dpsers 4 healers they prefer for dps offspec gear and they may also steal in a pinch.

NOTE: This will give me 14 dedicated healers. My guild requires 75% attendance so 12 healers should be enough to ensure I can draft 9 healers on any given night. However I’m taking my own advice and looking to go into Wrath well stocked.

I’m not going to give you a list of what your roster should include for Wrath because that is largely dependent on your guild’s attendance requirments and your members expectations for how often they should sit.

Fill your needs:
I believe it is unrealistic to assume that everyone in your guild will want to remain the same class or role for Wrath. With the gear reset there is no need to require them to do so. That being said most guilds cannot allow everyone to just level whatever they feel like and be expect to field a functional raid. Regardless of how much guidance you give your raiding core everyone’s first step should be to gather information about your guildmates intentions. To gather this information for our guild I made the following request in our guild forums:

I then took the responses and entered them into a table so that our leadership team may begin building our Wrath team.

My guild intends to do our best to accommodate the people who want to change classes and met our expectation of skill in their desired class. Depending on the nature of your guild you may or may not be in a position to guide your guildmates as they decide what class they intend to raid with in Wrath, but at least you’ll know what to expect and what needs you’ll have to fill outside of your current guild members. You may also let your teammates know that 14 of them intend to play death knights and while you might not be the type of guild that makes demands of it’s members the competition for death knight slots in raids and death knight gear will be high so they may wish to reconsider those plans.

Mini Ask Auz:
In my last Wrath post Kyrilean asked in a comment:

My answer:

Sorry for being quiet, it turns out that away from this mystical land of intarwebz there are demons that via for your time and attention. I just faced down an elite one, and as I’m a holy priest (and I was caught in my healing gear) all I could really do was put my shadow word pain on it and heal myself and wait for it to tire of me.

So aside from the intro that probably means I’ve been reading too much Ratters, we were able to test my Brutalus healing strat Monday night. Like any good strat it took some tweaking. Like Runycat suggested, I pulled in one additional resto druid and tasked him with HoTs on the Burn victims (The holy pally and resto druid were then put into a team I called “The Burn Unit”) and when possible toss some HoTs on the active tank or on a transition the next tank. My pally IS amazing, but the burn damage ended up being a little more than he could handle on his own (which honestly was the most presumptive part of my strat.) Once that was in place, the healing strat looked pretty stable. We had some wipes due to healers getting used to what to expect from Stomp damage, some due to tanks figuring out the best time to taunt, some due to soakers that didn’t understand Burn plus refreshing your Meteor Slash = dead DPS. (It’s the increased fire damage for those of you who also don’t read closely) But at the end of the night we were getting solid attempts with stable healing, which to me means a successful healing strat.

But Auz you said there would be evaluation! All I see is carebear happy stuff, where’s the numbers. Well I’ll be honest, when the raid’s successful I don’t dip so deep into the numbers. I did wander through every pre-wipe death in WWS and figure out what happened. (THANK GOD DEATH REPORTS ARE BACK!) What I saw bore out my thought to bring in the druid for burn HoTs. I’ve found that if my tank healers don’t chain cast through Stomp, the tanks won’t live. My Disc priest did a nice job making sure the two of us weren’t synced the whole night. Inspiration was on the tank about 90% of the night, leading credence to my raid leaders’s and my inspiration math. I’m currently trying to decide how to make that math available on the intarwebz. If I keep feeling lazy, you’ll just a get a link to spreadsheet you’ll have to download.

In even better news, Illidan finally dropped his car door for our main tank, so our attempts tomorrow will be even easier for our healers

So I’ve hesitated to post this for fear of being wrong and looking like an idiot, but I’ve decided this is part of what I do as a GM and maybe it’ll help someone. Also, after singing to you guys, I can’t really embarrass myself much further.

We finally killed the big blue menace on Tuesday and I’ve spent the past few days building our Brutalus healing strategy. I’ve looked over kill videos, WWS reports, and strategies that include listing of the boss abilities. I know that at my guild’s place in progression I could jack someone else’s strat and do no actual thinking for myself, but my EQ roots make coming up with my own plan a matter of pride. Also no one else knows my healers as well as I do, so I doubt their strats would be as strong as my own for my guild.

So here’s the plan for our guild’s initial Brutalus attack:
1 CoH Priest and 1 Shaman to heal Meteor Slash
1 Pally to heal Burn targets (With help from the meteor slash shaman at the final tick)
1 Holy priest, 1 Disc priest, 1 pally and 1 shaman on the MTs.

The shaman and I are going to spend some quality time together figuring out what rank of Lesser Healing Wave he can cast continuously for 6 minutes (fully raid buffed). In the fight he will stand still and continuously cast Lesser Healing Wave. The holy priest will be casting max rank Greater Heal to land in time with the main hand weapon swing (both 2.5 seconds, coincidence I think not!), and keep renew up and the Disc priest thinks on his feet and will alternate his heals but I anticipate at 4 casts in 15 second average. The pally is a Holy Light spammer.

The heart of this plan is maxing our inspiration/ancestral fortitude uptime to counterbalance Stomp. I’ve done some math with my raid leader and determined that with this configuration we can keep inspiration/ancestral fortitude on our tanks 94% of the time.*

So, that’s my initial healing plan. As my raid leader buddy says, “no good plan survives contact with the enemy.” I’ll check in after our first night’s attempts and let you know what worked and what didn’t work.

*I found that in my scouring of the intarwebz there is no Inspiration/Ancestral Fortitude uptime calculator or formula published so I had to make my own. It’s not perfect but it’s the best estimation I could put together without delving into derivatives. Using the math my raid leader and I put together I will be creating a calculator in the hopes of preventing someone else from having to do all that math.

I’m not a frequent denizen of EJ forums but this thread, Raid Healing Leadership, caught my eye. So there’s a good conversation going on there, and CLEARLY I need to put in my two cents. (I’ve posted 3 times now so they’ve actually gotten six cents) I finished up my response there and thought this is good stuff Auz, you should put it on the blog.

So Mondays asked:

Apart from that when i assign healing i get almost no replies from any of the healers and we usually end up wiping due too the healers not doing what they’re told. Not only that some of the healers simply do not read forums,enchant and gem their gear properly. Is it a lack of dedication and respect or do i simply fail? I’ve been healercl in my previous guild and i’ve never experienced this before so i’m quite frustrated.
Also the overhealing and the flash heal spam is freaking me out how can i tell people to change their gamingstyle in a non offending way?

The best way to get respect from your healers is to give it, and to be a resource of information. We don’t have any way to pay these people other than shiny epics, so I find positive re-enforcement works better than berating. Set yourself up to be their mentor and personal coach rather than their boss.

I try not to tell my healers how to heal, but rather give them information that leads them to the conclusion. People tend to own more what they come to rather than what people tell them. (I call it the fine art of letting someone else have my way) “PallyZ I see that often when a tank that I’ve assigned you to dies, you’re casting flash of light but it seems like you’re losing ground on the tanks health, how can I help you fix that?” (Have links to WWS for the inevitable “nu-uh”)

Another pitfall I’ve learned to avoid is trying to cram a bunch of information in at once. I work with my healers and give them one task at a time to focus on. Once they’ve made improvement on that one thing, give them another “DruidQ I see that you’ve really mastered the rolling lifeblooms rotation we were talking about, I think now it’s time to shift our focus to how you can incorporate swiftmends into that rotation to help us recover from spike damage.”

Be clear with your healers regarding your expectations of them in raids. I don’t say “bring consumables” I say, “every healer should make sure they have 20 golden fishsticks or 20 blackened sporefish” 20 guardian elixirs and 20 battle elixirs or 2 flasks and 4 charges of weapon oil for this raid, if you are unsure about which of the available consumables are best for this encounter/your class, I’ll be happy to talk to you about it in tells BEFORE our raid time.”

Reward good behavior! When you write a wall of text healing strat, hide an easter egg in it. “Whisper Auz the red dragon flys by night for a 10g prize.” When someone blossoms under your tutelage praise them! When someone got that clutch heal and keeps the raid from a wipe puff up their little pixelated egos. When we were learning Kael, I went out one night and bought a bunch of cockroach pets, and at the end of the night I gave one to every player that didn’t die before a wipe was called that night. I told my raid “Be the cockroach.” When we killed him there were a bunch of cockroach pets running around the raid like a badge of honor.

Over recruit. Your healers have no motivation to do what you ask them if they know you have to take them regardless of their behavior, enchanting, gemming, etc. I keep a mental note of how many healers I need for the average encounter and make sure I have enough healers on staff to sit 1 or 2 a night. This allows me to maintain flexibility in healing composition, sit tired raiders and occasionally say “I see you’re having trouble getting that new weapon enchanted so I’m going to sit you tonight to make sure you have the time to farm for those enchanting mats”

And on the 6th day, I rest. (Sorta)

I don’t lead raids on the weekend. Some people can lead raids 7 days a week but I am not that person. I make myself available for one on one sessions with my raiders regarding raid performance, real life, personal interactions, gear plans, etc. But leading a group of 25 raiders, just drains me.

My guild, however, has become it’s own living breathing thing. With 148 accounts and 358 characters (only 38 of which are raiders) our guild has four hour raids five nights a week that are “official, ” and 5 Karas, 4 ZAs, 2 Mag/Gruul runs, and a smattering of pre-bc runs scattered in our off time. The runs are sometimes run by my officers, partner-in-crime and sometimes by random members that just stepped up and started running it. Sometimes they consist solely of members of my guild and some are a collection of people from various guilds.

Normally I avoid the ones my officers don’t lead. It’s hard for your guild not to look to you for leadership, and it can make the leader feel like they need approval for the things they would otherwise just do or say. This weekend however I decided to go to one. My baby druid is coming along nicely, and I thought she was ready for some 25 man content. It was interesting. I bit my tongue while some interesting healing assignments were made and watched my member as he made careful adjustments to his instructions. We ended up one shotting, High King, Gruul, and Mag with a group of alts and casual friends. He didn’t do everything I would have done, but we were successful. One time I was unable to contain my advice, so I whispered it to him rather than blurt it out. (Taking two very observant players off cube duty and instead having them watch nearby cubes as back up, if you were curious) He handled it with grace (namely listening to me =P)

I can’t say I was a perfect raider. I can say it was very interesting to be in the back seat, watching the raid from another perspective. It was also interesting to note how he established his authority, how he handled questions, how he put down rebellion and how the raid in general responded to general nuances of his personality. I’m thinking about using fraps to record myself in vent and the raiding effect. It would be interesting to see if I can recreate my observations and translate them to my own leadership skills. I can never hope to be unbiased, but maybe I’ll be able to learn something anyway.

On a side note, I’ve about had it with that little blue dragon. I’ve tried about all I know how to try from a leadership and strategy perspective. I’ve done indepth WWS analysis, made graphs, pictures, wordy explanations, set up captains, educated captains, worked on a one on one basis with those that are repeatedly not executing, recruited new raiders to replace the ones that are not executing, tried different strats, spoken to leaders of guilds that have killed him, spoken to members of guilds that have killed him, everything I know how to do. If we don’t kill him soon, I’m not really sure what to try next. We have the gear, strat, ability and desire, it seems we lack the focus and execution. All guilds have high points and low points, and we’ll get through this one too, it’s just frustrating to be in a low point.