Ahh yes, wiping. Something comfortably familiar to the topic of this article that gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

It's something I've long observed about my guild that while we aren't bad (like our entire server, we're way behind on progression, but we do meet the progression goals we aim for- first pull in a t5 instance last September to 4/5 Hyjal and 7/9 BT now [and Kael down before the attunement nerf] isn't all bad I'd say)- but we play so, so terrible some nights.

It's amazing. The day we first downed Mother Shahraz, our raid leader decided to make a few ill-fated attempts on Council, then go to Hyjal afterwards and kill some quick bosses (even though official raid end was well past). We wiped twice on Anetheron before we decided to leave well enough alone. How the heck do you down Shahraz and wipe on Anetheron?
and similar examples are to be found all throughout our raiding "career", such as wiping on Lurker when we'D already downed Vashj. Or spending a full 2 hours on Gurtogg when we 2-shot him the previous week.
That's the kind of wiping that's frustrating and demoralizing. Everyone expects to wipe, a lot, when you walk up to a new boss (with the exception of Rage Lootchill keke). Wipes that seem unnecessary drive people up the wall.

I only partially agree with the "famous last pull". Sometimes this works, but in my experience, a lot of the time people are just burned out, tired, and no longer focused, and even a "last attempt" comes to a swift end because of an "Attack of the Stupid"- and the next day, you walk up and 1-shot the boss. (This is what happened to us with Shahraz- we had wiped at 1% and thus kept going about 2 hours past our regular raid time trying to force the kill to no avail- then finally gave up. The next day, we did the first 2 attempts without a shadow protection cauldron just to get back into things, and bam! downed her on the 2nd.)

On farm bosses, the problem tends to be either a) people underestimating the "easy farm boss" and not paying enough attention or b) a big change in group composition since that boss was a progression boss. We for example have been having a lot of healer turnover, and that hurts- especially on, say, Gurtogg.

Trying to distill some sort of insight from this ramble, I guess what I can say is

- Preparation should be a given. Wiping because people haven't done their reading and watched their videos, or forgot their consumables, is irritating and hurts both morale and group cohesion. Plus the people who did do their homework will feel cheated and possibly not do it next time, either, leading to a cascade of suckage.

- Don't underestimate farm bosses. You might not need full consumables, but do pay full attention. Make sure any new people for whom the boss isn't a farmed bore yet know what's going on.

- Don't try to force things. Calling a raid with a boss at 1% may be preferable to wiping on it for another hour.

- Don't run from volcanoes/death and decay/infernals/fatal attraction in tree form >.>

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