My guild, Exhumed of Shadowsong EU are trying to build a Mythic raid team for Warlords. This is no secret in the guild or outside and that goal is something I am not just saying to make people feel good. I am heavily invested in this goal as I play the game for raiding remove raiding from my game time and I'll stop playing WoW all together.

One of the current main obstacles is recruiting new people because Shadowsong has a tiny population and too many raid guilds. However, I'm personally working hard in game to get that happening for us so Exhumed isn't a casualty of the conversion to Mythic raiding and there will be guilds that die because of this. 

Recruitment is the primary reason we are putting together 25 man raids on a Sunday and Monday. Having experience from the real world of being a manager of people, I know that the best way of building a team is not to lose the team members you already have and to treat them so well that they not only want to stay, but they bring their friends here too because they're always telling their friends of what a great place it is here.

There is also a benefit to the team in keeping changes to a minimum and research has proven that teams, like individuals, experience a learning curve and as their members become familiar with one another the team becomes more successful and almost three quarters aviation "incidents" happen on the first day of flying together. I guess that is why our raid team does so well given that we only raid 6 hours per week.

However, you cannot always keep everyone happy enough for them not to leave for something better and if someone is set on achieving something we cannot offer them I'll gladly help them achieve their goal. But that means that they need to let me know before they go and sadly, that is something that didn't happen recently with one of our key raiders who left us because he didn't think we will be able to expand to 20-man, he may be correct but if I had known 3 weeks ago that he felt this way and was considering leaving I could have talked to him about why I think he was wrong and how I feel it can offer him what he would like to get out of the game in the future. If after that talk he still wanted to leave, I would have at least known and started recruiting specifically to fill the position while he was looking for a new guild, just as an employer would in the real world when you hand in your notice.

I consider all guildies friends and I'll always try to help my friends achieve their goals, even if it means having to wave to them as they leave. So I've asked my guildmates to speak with me if they're wanting more than the guild can offer them so hopefully we can work something out that means they don't have to leave us unless it is truly something greater than the guild can offer. 

Am I being reasonable? Should I expect people that act like friends not to do things secretively? I think the answer to both those questions is yes. But then I guess that just my old fashioned ways from another era.

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I have been looking at ways we are wasting time in raids lately and trying to trim off a minute here and there that will hopefully give us 15-20 minutes extra per raid.

The first step was the change to loot system from master loot /roll to using group loot which certainly I feel is a big contributor to the "wasted" time.

My new target is DPS. I don't give a care about individual DPS, HPS or TPS as long as bosses die quickly.

FACT: The faster a boss dies the better YOUR DPS is because the longer a fight goes on the less % of that fight you spent in the perfect DPS situation where all your trinkets and weapon enchants proc'd during heroism while you blew your cooldowns.

 Some people love to cheese the meters and make themselves look good to people that only focus on the DPS meters. A great way is to cleave on a council type fight even if technically that makes a DPS loss on the kill target.

Council fights come in 3 flavours a shared HP pool (Stone Guardians in MSV), each boss having their own independent HP pool (Council of Elders in ToT) and each boss having an HP pool that gets healed in one of the other bosses dies (Paragons of the Klaxxi in SoO).

In examples 1 and 2 cleave is godly, you should multi-dot and cleave as the bosses die much faster. There may be times when you need to burn through one of them for a short period of time but mostly cleave (not AoE) is good. The last example is one where cleave and multi-dotting is not godly. Sure if some light cleave actually boosts your single target DPS it should be done (thinking warlock rain of fire to generate embers for chaos bolts) but things like Chain Lightning, Sweeping Strikes and Blade Flurry should be avoided because it lowers your DPS on the focus target.

As an example I'll look at our kill of the Paragons this week where we failed big time:

1. Rik’kal the Dissector - 44m HP
2. Skeer the Bloodseeker - 61m HP
3. Korven the Prime - 61m HP
4. Hisek the Swarmkeeper - 54m HP
5. Xaril the Poisoned Mind - 54m HP
6. Kaz’tik the Manipulator - 54m HP
7. Iyyokuk the Lucid - 54m HP
8. Ka’roz the Locust - 44m HP
9. Kil’ruk the Wind-Reaver - 61m HP

That gives the bosses a total of 487m HP, the Bloods have 6m, Amber and kunchong 7m each and we kill one of each during the fight meaning we should do a toital of 507m damage if there is zero cleave which will never happen because tanks need to AoE tank, we have legendary cloaks and the genuine DPS boosting cleave. I'll assume that this is worth 15% of our total damage so overall we should be hitting around 583m damage on the Paragons. However our damage was MUCH higher:

In fact we did 20% more damage than we needed to. The issue can be seen when looking at the damage done to Karoz, Iyyokuk, Hissek and Kilruk who despite having a combined HP of 213m took a total of 392m damage to kill. Karoz took almot 3x his HP in damage!

Dealing this much extra damage means a MINIMUM of 20% extra time taken to kill a boss and places more strain on the healer team as mana does begin to run out and people take mopre damage from bosses. If all fights we're 20% shorter and people avoided the damage of doing dumb stuff to get an extra chaos bolt in we could 2 heal many more fights which would mean even faster kills and less time having to raid.

Shorter fights will also mean you do more DPS without having to cheat the meters and that makes you and your raid team better raiders.

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Raiding is a serious side of Warcraft, in fact any MMORPG you are part of a team and your 9-39 collegues are depending on you not to waste their time. We expect, nay demand that people show up on time, come prepared by having food, potions, elixirs, and any other buffs. We expect people to have their best gear equipped, enchanted, gemmed and fully repaired. We all hope that others have learned the strategies before seeing the boss encounters "live". 

We all play our game for fun, relaxation and a break from the realities of life but sometimes we forget this fact and tempers flare when people make silly mistakes and occasionally this leads to a bit of drama when we should be having a laugh about it and use them as tension breaker during stressful periods in game.

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