When we first started this guild I was trying to figure out how to measure success in raiding. It seems to me that relative progression is dependent on other people and therefore a poor indicator especially given our late start. With this in mind, I decided I’d measure success on if I thought we were capable of killing a boss with the experience and gear we currently had. We have Kalecgos to 14% and I think we should have killed him last week; but we didn’t. So I’ve spent a large portion of the past 3 or 4 days figuring out why. Since this research took me away from blogging for a bit, I figured I’d try and make it up to you by documenting “Auz’s OMG Why Haven’t We Killed This Yet” strategies and analysis tools.

Let me preface this by stating my perceived credentials AND lack of credentials - I am not a raid strategist. If I were a raid strategist I might do this differently. I do believe I have an excellent understanding of raid healing and healing teams and that this understanding is in some ways linked to a fairly good understanding of tanking (though I’m a terrible tank) but when it comes to DPS and what to CC for the trash etc, it’s just not my thing. Thankfully I have an amazing raid leader in my employ to do those things for me and let me do “the healing thing.” I also have 6 years of statistical analysis under my belt and I’m not afraid to confuse you with it.

So for me the first step was to limit myself to my strengths and go find someone to look over the DPS for ways to strengthen that. Sure I could poke my head in the DPS numbers, but I know my lack of experience and understanding will just make me look like an idiot. So I started with asking my amazing raid leader AND my amazing fury warrior what they thought of the DPS. Their feedback bore out what I was seeing too, that the DPS is not currently what is keeping us from winning this fight. With that in mind, I still asked them to look over their DPSers for any improvements they can make in anticipation of Brutalus and because despite some boss mechanics being designed to challenge one aspect or another of a raid, all raid roles can help compensate for each other. I also asked them for their perspective on the tanking and healing regarding threat generation and early DPS deaths. I learned that threat gen was fine and the few early DPS deaths we’d had were mostly avoidable by those DPSers.

So with the concerns of the DPS heard and knowing the DPS was in more capable hands than mine, I shifted to what is my focus, healing. Before we continue, I’d like to take a moment of silence to mourn the lose of my Assessment death reports to the combat log changes and point others who share my woes to GrimReaper (from WoWAce.com) as the only semi working in-game death report mod I’ve found since 2.4. For “what went wrong” from a healing perspective, a death reporting mod is the quickest way to find out why a tank died. That being said, I had no such tool for our Kalecgos attempts, so I started by crawling through our WWS logs and manually finding tank deaths. Hours later I emerged from my hole muttering about demons, dragons and looking for Advil. I also had a sheet of paper noting the first tank that died for each of our attempts, what healers were in that tank’s side, what spells they were casting, what damage the boss was doing to the tank, and what tricks if any the tank has used to aid in his survival. I promptly put that list down and took a break.

Once I’d recovered my will to look at Kalecgos information again, I started drawing conclusions from the information I’d gathered. We were taking 9 healers to this fight. 3-4 Shaman, 2-3 Priests, 1 druid and 2 Pallys. We were using either 4 shaman, or 3 shaman and 1 priest for raid healing and the rest as tank healers. I noted the following things seemed to be true for most of our tank deaths: healers were in the process of being ported from one side to the other, our druid was on the tank side or pallyA was on the tank side. I noted that PallyA was mostly casting Flash of Light. I noted that our druid was pretty much exclusively casting Lifeblooms. I noted that my healers that typically cast big heals were generally on the other side when tanks died. And I discovered one of our tanks was not making any attempts to save himself.

Okay Auz good job, have a cookie! Nope not done yet. I’d figured out how we were not killing it, but now it was time to figure out what guilds that are killing it are doing. So I went WWS hopping. If you don’t know how to do this, just go to their site and browse by boss. The first thing I did was pop over to damage in and see how many tanks they are using. Since my illustrious raid strategy dude pulled together a 3 tank rotation I decided to ignore the 2 and 4 tank reports I saw. It seems counterintuitive to teach my raiders a new rotation strat this late in the game.

So I found 3 reports from different guilds that used three tanks. I took a look at the damage in and found something odd. For 2 of the 3 fights the damage the tanks were taking was 20% lower than our tanks. Looking deeper I found that our tanks were taking an average of 300 more damage per hit than those 2 sets of tanks and it seemed they were dodging more attacks than my tanks. These fights also lasted about a minute longer than our best attempt. I wrote this down on my paper and looked into the other one. On this one the tanks were taking slightly more damage than our tanks so this looked promising to me, what could these marvelous healers be doing? It turns out that guild took 10 healers and 3 shadow priests who were healing a large amount with their VT. Note to self: Bring more shadow priests! I also noted with pride that our DPSers kicked the shit out of the other guild’s DPSers and it made me proud. (I might need a bumper sticker or something)

So my end notes came out thusly:

• Tell druid more direct heals or pair a direct healer with him.
• Tell PallyA to use holy light.
• Ask for shadow priests to help raid heal, freeing more healers for tanks.
• Ask MT if he and other tanks are wearing avoidance or mitigation gear, ask about important tanking pieces our tanks might be missing - see about loot counsel assigning those piece to the tanks if needed.
• Make armor pots for tanks to be used on healer transitions (thanks fury warrior of awesomeness for the idea!)
• Speak to illustrious raid leader about other ways we can help boost our tanks mitigation.
• Personal note, I’d like my 4 piece set bonus.
• Blog about this process, maybe it’ll help someone else.

Lastly, holy jeebus people commented on my blog! I wasn’t really aware anyone else read it. Thanks Coriel for the link and thanks for the kind words guys! For the one that asked about the book, it’s a general “leading a guild requires the following tasks” book. It covers things like recruiting, websites, voice communication, leadership structures, loot distribution methods, choosing officers, etc. Thus far, it has 13 chapters, 5 of which are written in a readable format and 8 of which are notes scribbled in an outline format. I’ve found one editor who’s interested publishing the book when it’s completed but we haven’t formalized a contract yet (I have to finish it first!) I’m trying very hard to make it a general reference and leave most of my opinionated leadership philosophies out of it. The idea is that the book will help you think about how to accomplish the common tasks guild leaders face rather than be a lecture on how I lead a guild, kinda like a becoming a GM handbook. (I know I wished such a thing existed when I started guild leading!) I’m sure as I come closer to finishing it or it’s closer to publishing, I’ll blog about it more.

This excerpt is copied from a post I made in my guild’s Combat Log forums:
“We post combat logs because we belong to the school of thought that the more information you have, the better of a player you can become. The sole purpose of posting these logs is so that you can spend time evaluating what you did in a raid and think about how you can improve. We don’t care if you did 50% of the raid damage by yourself, there is always something you can do to improve your play.”

Meters can be a powerful tool for raid analysis, but tools have no value if you don’t know how to use them.

You cannot simply pull up the meters and see who is number one on the healing meter for the night and call it a day. Measuring a person’s overall output isn’t always valuable information. I’ve known many healers that can spam their way to the top of a healing meter and yet remain completely unable to keep a tank alive when push comes to shove. Meters mean nothing if they are not considered within the context of raid success. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a few things that I always check when I look over our WWS reports to evaluate our healers.

1) If this is a buff class how often did they cast their buff?
2) On a fight where dispells are important (Archimonde curses, RoS phase 1), how many dispells did they catch?
3) How often did they res?
4) What consumables did they use?
5) “Who heals whom” report - What were they doing when their assignment is okay? (also, if nothing is around to heal, did they dps?)
6) Tank Death reports - What spells were cast on the tank as he/she died? If you didn’t cast a spell why? If you did, why’d you pick the spell you cast?
7) Healer Death reports - Check to see who’s dead at this point, if it’s not a wipe check to see what killed them. Envenom + Flamestrike + Blizzard all at once might be unavoidable (actually happened me to me), 5 ticks of standing in doomfire is a really dumb way to die.
Specific Roles - in my raids healers have assignments, if you’re assigned to heal tank x and he takes 300,000 damage and another healer is assigned to heal tank y who takes 400,000 damage and tank x and tank y are across the room from each other, then it makes sense than you’re going to do less healing than the other healer.
9) Damage in - I check this report so I have a good idea of the varying levels of hps needed to heal certain targets. This helps me evaluate how many healers I really need for a given fight.

While WWS is useful for after raid evaluation it has limitations. WWS provides a compilation of total events. It weighs all events equally regardless of when they occurred. WWS does not discriminate between damage taken while a pull is active and running into a blizzard to kill yourself after a wipe is called.

What WWS doesn’t show and how to get this information
1) Who got that clutch heal? - This is the hardest thing to catch, but ask the tank often times they notice who healed them first.
2) Mana management - While you can see innervates, mana pots and trinkets, you can’t see the actual mana levels as the fight progressed. Litmus shows you the mana levels of whatever classes you choose to see and you can set it up to give you alerts when players reach a certain level. (I love litmus)
3) Priorities: How the player picks who to heal/dispell - Xperl Raid monitor, this can set up by class. Mine is small and unobtrusive and allows me to see who everyone has targeted and what spell they are casting.