angryraidleader.com

A couple of day ago I decided to get a little more traffic to my blog. I’d been averaging about 100-200 hits a day, and I think a lot of those were from my fellow guildies hoping to see their latest screw-up mentioned. Friday night I put a couple links up on MMO-Champion and World of Raids.  Then followed those up with links on the WoW General forums and Curse.com.  I had over 3000 hits both days and like 250 other sites linked to here.  So thanks for that.  Guess I better keep posting as often as possible or I’ll lose all my new readers!

A few things I’d like to clear up….

• Please don’t bother making death threats.  If you’re really that upset by what I wrote, maybe you shouldn’t read it.  Plus it’s silly to threaten people across the Internet.  For all you know I might be like 6′7″ 350 lbs and spent the last ten years cracking skulls in nightclubs, strip clubs, and bars.  (btw, I am, and I did)
• Just because I don’t list all of a classes abilities, doesn’t mean I’m not familiar with them.  I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading up on all the classes and specs, and playing most of them.  When I’m not sure about an ability, I ask someone in raid.  Yes, I know BM hunters add 3% damage, it doesn’t magically stop them from being retarded.  And no I don’t think all hunters are.  I just think the class is so easy, that a lot of people who play hunters never learn to play them to their limits.  Just today, an old hunter guildie rejoined us, and he used to crush the dps charts.  Glad to have him back.  I also know the SW:D is a great spell in the hands of a careful Shadow Priest.  It’s also a loaded shotgun pressed up against the chin of a stupid Shadow Priest.
• While it would have been nice to form a guild with 24 real life friends, I only have two who play the game, and they don’t raid much.  So we’re a bunch of refugees from other failed guilds who got together and we’ve made it work.
• No, this isn’t an act.  I really do get pissed off.  I’ll record vent one of these days and you can all have a good laugh.  :>

Thanks for all the new traffic, keep those comments coming!

One of the problems that my guild had in BC and I’m sure we weren’t alone, was making the transition from 10 man to 25 man raiding. From my observations there were two ways to get there:

1. Run one Karazhan group. Get through as fast as possible, then dive into Gruul’s Lair and wipe for a month or so.

2. Run two Karazhan groups. Take a little longer to get through Kara, but be better prepared when you start Gruul.

I’m sure there was some massive guild out there that ran 3 or 4 Kara groups a week, but we didn’t have that many people. We went with the second plan. But we ran into some problems that I think we’ll see repeated in LK. When you have two ten man raids doing an instance each week, you have to make a choice. Do you want to progress quickly or make sure everyone feels like they’re getting equal treatment? If you want to progress quickly, you stack one raid with your best people so it will progress quicker and learn the content faster, and you put everyone else in the other raid and let them stumble through some fights and get geared up. If you want things to be equal, you balance your raids and make slower progress, but no one feels like you’re picking on them.

I don’t really care if I hurt someones feelings so of course we went with a stacked raid. We called them the Progression raid and the Learning raid. Some of the people who weren’t allowed in the Progression raid were horribly offended and quit the guild. They sucked, so no big loss. For the record, no one who quit the guild over being placed in the learning raid ever progressed past Gruul. I like to keep track of our former guildies, so I can use their failures to point out why it is a bad idea to quit a raid guild over stupid shit.

We cleared Kara in six weeks and were looking to start Gruul. This is where we ran into problems. To support a 10 man raid we needed about 12-13 people. Any more than that and people were sitting out more than they wanted. Any less and we were too short to raid. So between the two raids we had about 25 people. There were still a couple weeks where due to absent raiders, only one raid cleared Kara. Once we got ready for Gruul, we ran into two problems.

1. Not enough raiders - 25 people were plenty for 2 Kara raids, but it takes about 30 people to get started in 25 man raiding. You are always going to have a few people absent, due to real life stuff, and there are always a couple of whiners who can’t handle wiping all night while you learn new content, so they stop showing up or mysteriously lose link and never return.

2. Raid balance - A starting kara raid is 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 dps. Once your all wearing great gear, you can drop a healer, and eventually even a tank. Hell I’ve tanked half of the bosses in there with an elemental shaman in T5. But when you first finish Kara, you’re using the 2-3-5 build. So two raids means 4 tanks, 6 healers, 10 dps. Your extra 5 raiders are probably a mix, maybe another tank or a hybrid like a feral druid, a couple of healers and dps. So let’s say you have 5 tanks, 8 healers, and 12 dps. That’s fine for High King, you can always stick extra tanks on Olm, but when you get to Gruul, you have three tanks sitting in melee range blowing everyone up and not doing any damage.

So every guild goes through this annoying month, where you have to recruit more healers and dps, and your tanks who worked so hard to get you through Kara find themselves getting sidelined. I have a player in my guild who started out playing a tank, did a wonderful job, but wasn’t getting in on as many fights as he wanted because there were three tanks who outgeared him, so he switched to a healer. He did an awesome job healing, but we’ll be losing him come LK, because he wants to tank again, and we’re full up.

So what is the root cause of these problems? Blizzard can’t do math. You start out doing 5 man instances with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps. Then you go to ten man instances where you need 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 dps. So unless one of your dps magically turns into a healer, someone gets replaced. Then you switch to 25 man raiding and things get really fucked up. They put in just enough trash pulls and boss fights (Al’ar, Fathom-Lord) where you need 4 tanks, so you keep them around, but they get rotated out a lot, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to be short healers once you switch to 25 mans.

So why didn’t they follow a much smarter progression, and make end game raids 20 man instead of 25? 5 x 2 = 10, 10 x 2 = 20. You’d still have extra tanks, but I’ve found most tanks willing to switch to dps and back as needed. Plus, then I’d have five less people to piss me off. Instead of angryraidleader.com, maybe I would have named the site slightlyannnoyedraidleader.com.

I have a guy in my guild who posted on our forums today that he is quitting the guild as soon as we stop raiding pre-LK. His reasons boil down to:

1. We have too many people in the guild.
2. We aren’t progressing fast enough.
3. I don’t treat the healers with enough respect.

Translation - the raid leader sucks. Yeah, I’m terrible at the job, and look at the big line of people waiting to take over for me. Oh, what’s that? No one else wants to lead raids? Wonder why.

Yes, I chew out the healers. Why? Because tanks die on simple trash pulls, AOE classes don’t get healed on AOE pulls, or the main tank dies in the first five seconds of a boss fight. 90% of the time, these can be blamed squarely on the healers. Yes, there is the occasional unlucky parry or crushing blow, and sometimes AOErs jump in too early, but it’s been my experience that it the healers either casting too slow, or they’re not paying attention. Hyjal is a perfect example of this. When I’d give the healers a pre-pull pep talk before we started a series of trash waves and told them to spam the crap out of their heals for the first 30 seconds while we get CC and kiting organized, and the tanks pick up the rest of the mobs, the tanks almost always lived. But if I didn’t make a point of saying, “Abominations incoming, healers wake the hell up!” tanks died constantly. Coincidence? Nope. And it gets worse on boss fights. Healing the tank is great and all, but how come you can’t keep yourself alive. It never ceased to amaze me that healers made up 1/3 of our raid when we were fighting Archi, but not counting main tank deaths, they made up more than half of the deaths during the fight. Any raid leader that has a had a couple priests and paladins die at the same time on Archi with the resulting Soul Charges can attest to how frustrating it is. Our healers have also displayed a great love for standing in place after being teleported by Mother Sharaz and dying in the first couple minutes of that fight. So yeah, I chew them out. Pre-BC I raided as a healer, so their complaints about how hard it is for them to heal and avoid standing in fire like a bunch of condemned witches fall on deaf ears.

Apparently the big problem is that instead of singling people out, I just say, “Healers, you suck like a five dollar crack whore.” or something to that effect. I know who my best healers are. When there is a problem with healing I never assume it’s them. I know it’s the people who half ass it. Do you think it would improve things if I singled them out everytime we wiped due to poor healing? We have never had the luxury of picking and choosing our healers. Another place that Blizzard cocked up their game design is setting things up so healers need to make up about 30% of raiders, when I doubt they make up more than 20-25% of the level 70s who want to raid. How bad is that 5-10% difference. Try killing a boss for the first time with 6 healers, when it’s designed for 8. That means we have to take whatever healers apply and then raid with people that suck. And if I constantly told them how bad they suck they would stop raiding altogether.

Last week’s Archimonde kill was a perfect example, we wiped six times in a row. Fed up with the tank dying over and over, I hearthed, respecced to healing, put on my healing gear which isn’t as nice as most of our healers have and then healed the shit out of the MT and the melee dps. We killed him on the next attempt. I was out of practice and had my hot keys all set up wrong, so I stepped in the fire once, but you know what I did? I moved out of it and healed myself! Neat trick huh? It would be nice if a few of our healers could master that one.

It’s very easy when you don’t lead raids to play back seat driver and second guess every call I make. I’m not perfect but I don’t see anyone else volunteering to take over. Why have I let alts in raids? Because we average about 60-70% attendance from most of our members. This means, I’ve had to let people play alts that we might need at some point. Why have I let casuals raid? Because lately we have 20 people showing up to raid. Raiding isn’t perfect. But don’t blame that on me. There are 24 other people in the raid (on a good day). If I was able to pick and choose from a big pool of raiders, we would blaze through content. You raid with the guild you have - not the guild you might wish for.

Why do so many people assume that someone else will fix all the problems. Take some initiative, fix it yourself, or work with others to fix things. You don’t like stuff, fucking change it, don’t just complain about it. That’s what my blog is for.

As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t start my guild as a raid guild. Originally it was just a place to park a bunch of low level pvp twinks. Once we expanded we picked up a lot of people who were interested in doing five mans or Karazhan, but a lot of them didn’t make the jump to 25 man raiding. Either they weren’t interested or they didn’t play enough, or they just sucked at the game.

So when LK hits I’m cleaning house. People that don’t raid will be looking for another guild. Now I just have to decide how polite I am about dumping all the dead weight.

My goal in Burning Crusade has always been to finish Black Temple and down Illidan. My guild is close, we’re working on the Illidari council, but the closer we get to WotLK, the less likely it gets that we’ll kill him. People are starting to play less. I guess they need to take a break from the game so when the expansion drops they can play for 18 hours a day. A couple of raiding guilds that are just below us in progression broke up or quit raiding in the last couple of weeks and I’m sure they won’t be the only ones. Now I understand why all of this is happening, but goddammit people, I want to kill Illidan!

I’m moving back to Vegas in November and I’ll be taking a little break from the game when I get there, so I’ve got about six weeks to finish Black Temple. I’ll live if I don’t clear the place, but it would be nice.

I bet all of you absent bastards are playing the Warhammer beta, aren’t you?

Check out this Penny Arcade.

People leave guilds.  Boo hoo, it happens, get over it.  They pay their monthly fee they can do whatever they want.  But if you want to avoid being hated, follow these simple steps:

1. Let people know in advance.  Your typical raid guild tries to maintain a balance of classes and specs that makes raiding possible without having a lot of extra people around that whine about missing out on raid spots.  If you’re getting into every raid, and your raid leader rarely lets you sit out for a fight, chances are they count on you being there.  You probably know you’re going to leave in advance, so speak the fuck up.  Be a fucking grown up, give a little notice.  Unless you never grew out of being an angsty annoying teenager you probably give notice at your job before quitting, or when you move out of an apartment.  Show a little courtesy and do the same for your guild.  Unless it’s run by a bunch of little bitch boys, they’ll probably appreciate the chance to recruit a replacement before you leave.
2. Don’t be a loot whore.  If you know you are leaving your current guild, and some insanely rare item drops that everyone in the damn raid is after, pass on it.  If you happen to in a guild that uses a point system like dkp and you are way ahead, then you’ve earned it.  But if you are in a guild that uses loot council, like mine, chances are they base their decisions on what is going to help the guild progress, and you grabbing your loot and heading for another guild, does not help.  Trust me, when you leave your farewell, hope you all still love me, lets get together in ten years and give each other backrubs post on your ‘former’ guild’s forums, you will not get happy responses.
3. Don’t fucking lie.  I don’t really care when people leave my guild.  For the most part they are easily replaceable.  The ones that aren’t easily replaceable know I’ll fucking hunt them down and feed them their liver if they dare leave.  Yeah I mean you.  I know you’re reading this.  But the thing that pisses me off is when they give me a bullshit reason about why they are leaving.  “I’m joining my cousins guild, I really miss hanging out with him!”  So it’s just a coincidence that your “cousin’s” guild is the top guild on the server and they’re recruiting your class for the first time in a year, right?  Man the fuck up.  I’d rather someone told me they’re leaving because I’m an annoying prick, than to blow fucking smoke up my ass and tell me they have to switch guilds because their raid times fit into their busy schedule better since they spend so much time volunteering at the local food kitchen.
4. If you’re server transferring don’t leave a message about how you hope we can all stay friends.  That’s like moving to fucking Zimbabawe and telling your friends you hope they stay in touch.  Fuck off, I’ll forget your ass in a week.
5. Don’t encourage other people to go with you.  You want to switch teams, go ahead, leave the rest of my team alone.
6. When you find out it sucks in your new guild and or server, don’t expect to get back in.  You’re a disloyal little shit who thought the grass was greener on the other side.  I’ve had a couple of girfriends who cheated on me, I didn’t let those bitches back in my life when they came begging why should I welcome you back?  And on the off chance that I do let you back in, you’re starting all over.  You’re the new guy and everyone who has been in the guild for 1 minute longer than when you came back outranks your unloyal ass.

And one last thing. After you leave stop sending me tells asking how the guild is doing. Small talk in MMOs is stupid.

So last month we were getting ready to switch hosting services for my angry little blog when our previous hosting company decided to take my blog down four days early.  Oh and just for an added kick in the nuts they deleted it.

Luckily I was able to save most of my posts from Google cache, but I lost four posts, including one that was so amazing, so epic, so emotionally stirring that you would have cried you weepy eyed bitches.  Unfortunately I stayed up writing it for four hours then passed out without saving a copy on my computer so fuck it, it’s gone.  I don’t even remember what it was about.  Probably another insightful rant about about how much you hunters suck.

But, lesson learned, now I write my posts in Word, save them, then copy them over to my blog.

The only problem with this new hosting service is that I don’t seem to be able to change the date stamp on my posts, so everything I wrote from May to July is now listed as being written on August 28th & 29th.  Someone is going to think I was very bored for two days.

The great part about all of this is that now I have a whole month of people pissing me off to write about so tune in tomorrow!

Most of the time when my raid screws up I do the usual. Yell, scream, insult, threaten their families, etc. But sometimes I find it necessary to stop things, get everyones attention, and explain things as slowly and as simply as possible.

“Now, boys and girls, when I tell you that the tank is going to take a lot of amount of damage at the beginning of the fight, what are you going to do?”

“Um, watch TV?”

“No. Anyone else?”

“Heal him?”

“Yes! Very good! And when do we heal him?”

“When the monsters are all gone?”

“No. We want to heal much, much sooner than that. In fact we want to heal him before he even takes damage. That’s called preemptive healing. Can you say preemptive boys and girls?”

The funny part is. This gets through to them. When they screw up and I chew them out, I think they just screw up again to spite me. Bastards.

Over the last couple of weeks my guild has been having some problems. We’re stuck in progression right now and it isn’t going to fix itself any time soon. When this happens I know that the best thing to do is just be patient. Eventually new recruits will join, raiders will get better gear and learn the fights, and we’ll start progressing again.

But every time this happens to a guild, people freak out. “Boo hoo! This guild sucks! I’m taking my toys and going home!” Grow up, you fucking poofs.

The main complaint seems to be that I haven’t been spending enough time in the game. For the last couple of months, I log in just before our raids, and log out right after. I’m busy with work and other real life stuff like writing this incredibly awesome blog, so I don’t have time to doing the same boring ass pvp, instances, and daily quests which I’ve done a thousand times. I’ve also missed a couple of raids. And when I’m not there raids go to shit. I’ve apparently built a cult of personality instead of a raid guild.

I love how everyone feels like I owe them a certain amount of time each week. When did the guild become my whiny girlfriend? “We don’t spend any quality time together anymore? Don’t you love me?” No. I don’t love you. Oh, and you’re fat. Get me a fucking beer. Fatty.

Seriously though, grow the fuck up. So I’m not in the game 24/7. How exactly does that hurt you? Is there some quest I’m not aware of that requires me being online for you to complete. I’m the raid leader. That means I lead raids. I’m not your cyber buddy. We’re not friends. You don’t even know my real name. I have real friends, in real life, that I have real fun with.

Yes, I am also the guild master, but the guild has good officers, that do a great job running the guild day to day so I can focus on raids. That’s why guilds have officers.

But, apparently that isn’t enough. I’ve had several people tell me that the reason they liked being in this guild is how much fun it is to play with me? Why is that? I’m always pissed. I get pissed off when I’m doing quests with a group and people lag behind. I chew people out when they suck at pvp. I make people cry for god’s sake! I’m starting to think I’ve got a guild full of masochists. “Yeah! I’ve been bad! Tell me what a bad raider I am!”

Or… maybe they’re all laughing at me when I blow up. Bastards. I’m on to you!