Monday, June 13, 2011

My Raids not performing!!! What do?!?

So you've got your team, you know the fights, but it's just not happening

Quit WoW and break your computer, lol, nah just taking the piss. I've had to deal with this several times before and there really isn't a tried and tested solutions but there are a few things you can investigate to see whats going wrong.

Running Combat Logs
Is a great was to break down 'who's doing what' after the raid, site the like of Worldoflogs.com are great for finding out whats happening and when... or more impointantly, whats not happening when it should be, and why it isn't happening...
I'm no expect on reading the findings, but i've stumbled my way through enough of them to figure out where a 'pit fall' is many times.

Assessing (Auditing) you Raid Team
Making sure your team mates are Optimising their toons can mean the difference between a night of Single Digit Percent wipes and getting that sucker killed.  I've only ever had to do this once... and realistically i probably went well overboard when I did, but when we failed at Heroic Sindragosa for weeks upon weeks I seriously started to suspect that something was well eschew with peoples setups. That fight was well demanding for the best of players, but when things aren't quite right with a chunk of your group making sure that they are tweaking all their Stats, Specs, Gemming, Enchants and now Reforging can mean the difference between a Wipe and Success.

Revisit your Strategy
So we know that some bosses simply have to go down in a certain fashion, there are always slight variations based on Raid Composition but you generally can't ignore a mechanic until you Out-Gear the content. Make sure every member understands their Individual roll in the fight and that all mechanics are being countered appropriately. This really is less time consuming than Auditing your group, and really i probably should have put this before that because your Strategy is more likely to be the problem than a specific character issue. That said you want to be getting it All Right if you can.

Group Composition
Blizzard have said time and time again how this isn't a factor in raiding anymore... for some reason i suspect that the Devs mainly participate in 25man raiding, because having a well balanced group has never been more important in my eyes since the game conception ((with the exception of never taking a Warlock to anything in Vanilla) mainly from what i've read not experienced). Making sure you are maximising your possible Buffs and having specific classes for certain fights can and will make things a lot easier on you.
The big kicker is for smaller guilds that don't have the luxury of choice, my guild has been in this situation for a great big chunk of this Xpac so far, and this has only started to change in the last 2-3 weeks. Honestly it's something you either need to recruit for or try working on the other issues more... but I do feel that having more than 2 of any class puts you at a disadvantage (the majority of the time) in 10man content.

Harmonious Playing Environment
Yep... I never thought I'd talk about this and I will probably dedicate an entire post to it in the near future, but this really is one of the most important factors in having a successful raid. When Raid Leaders start getting aggro and stressing out about the things that are going wrong, it cascades through the raid, bringing the entire run into a wallowing rut of discontent. If you are Leading make sure you keep a Cool Head, flying off the handle at someone isn't going to help at all even if the problem should be obvious. Hell if you need to let off steam let go of the Vent button and take of your headset before you scream your head of at someone/something. They wont hear it, you'll feel better, and no one got hurt. But really keeping things constructive will help overall performance, if people are enjoying themselves they are more likely to be attentive to what is going on, and Awareness is about 70% of Raiding.


I feel like I should be drawing some insightful conclusion here, but really all I can thing of is Make sure you are doing your Job properly before you bollock others for not doing the same. Also keep your raid environment light and enjoyable, there isn't a need to be intense for all of your *insert raid time length here* raid, tell some jokes between bosses. Keep the medium between both of these and i'm sure you'll see great improvement in your raids performance.