Raid leading

Last night our usual raid leader couldn't make our Tuesday 25 man run. So I took over leading. I know the fights pretty well, I'm willing to talk, I'm pretty good at leading 10 mans. One problem: I hate leading large groups.

Leading a 25 man is stressful. So many people to watch, so many details to worry about. Is the hit-challenged prot warrior in a group with a draenei? Do your healers have enough mana before every trash pull? What do you do about the disconnecting mage? Are you pulling trash too fast. Or worse, too slowly? Does this group have enough DPS to burn through the boss the easy way or do you need to do fancy kiting? Are people having fun? Etc etc.

Fortunately our guild has done the content together enough times that the raid mostly runs itself. And other officers dealt with loot distribution and invites, leaving me to mostly just worry about strategy and pacing. We even got a couple of achievements for the first time, including Patchwerk in 3 minutes. Yay!

The most frustrating thing is that being responsible for the group made me personally play poorly. There's no way I can attend to the cat DPS rotation while also watching the whole raid and calling out anything urgent. Bear is a lot easier, so I ended up off-tanking a lot and just sort of chilling out. I think I enjoy the game more when I get to selfishly focus on myself but pay enough attention to help the group as a whole get better next time.

By contrast, leading a 10 man is a joy for me. Last fall I worked with a group to learn Zul'aman well enough to get bear mounts. It took about 6-8 weeks of dedicated attempts before we beat the timer and it was an accomplishment I'm proud of. The nice thing about a 10 man run is they really require personal responsibility, every player has to play well for themselves. There's less assigned jobs, more room for creative play. Suits my leadership style better. I'd like to work on Sartharion + 3 Drakes in 10 man now, but boy is that fight hard.

PS: loot distribution in Naxxramas is by far the worst thing about WoW raiding right now. 45 epics to hand out in 3 hours = 1 loot every 3 minutes. We do loot council in our guild, people express interest and the officers assign loot. It can take awhile, particularly when discussion is required. So we keep pulling trash to the next boss while one poor officer stands by the corpse using the terrible master looter UI. And everyone's attention is divided between loot and game-playing, sucking some of the fun out of it.

Comments

[Karthis]

For what it's worth, you did a great job! My only complaint was that we couldn't pull trash faster.... but that was mostly because a healer was the master looter, and thus we were essentially 4-healing an AOE-fest. Badness.

I also enjoyed a chance to NOT TANK... and had a fun time competing for top DPS overall :P I think pre-Naxx I had that goal met (including trash, which is almost cheating with berserked kitty swipe) but Malygos didn't like me, and focused on me twice in a row at one p[oint, thus killing my rotation. Will be fun to look at the wws when it is put up.

[Vak]

Flyv,

I must thank you again for taking care of last night. And I do agree, not having to lead or think about leading once I came in it so much easier to dps, I never noticed, but a couple of people were talking and I actually looked at stats. 10-20% over my best nights, I will sacrifice that to lead every time, but for me it was nice to know the other officers could step right in and do the stuff.

Thank you,