Posts with tag morale

Ready Check helps you prepare yourself and your raid for the bosses that simply require killing. Check back with Ready Check each week for the latest pointers on killing adds, not standing in fire, and hoping for loot that won't drop.

It happens. Your raids are doing well, you're making good use of your time, and progression is happening. Then, all at once, you have a bad night. The exact reasons you have a bad night are wide and varied. Your tank might be having trouble picking up adds, your healers might be out of synch, or maybe your DPS isn't pulling the numbers needed for the boss fights. Raiding is complex enough that there are plenty of moving parts to go radically, radically wrong.

A bad night isn't much of a challenge, in and of itself. The lost time isn't the end of the world, and you can always pick it up another night. Sure, if you're racing for a realm first or something, you could lose ground. But for most raids, that kind of competition isn't really an issue.

The real danger that stems from a bad night is its harm to morale. Especially if you have raid members who take each raid night very seriously, then the mistakes and painful moments get overanalyzed and picked apart. Analysis is good, but dwelling on a fluke failings can wreck a good environment.

So when you have a bad raid, the morning after becomes incredibly important.

This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

Welcome to the doldrums of summer! This miserable time of year, when we see interest in raiding melt away as the temperature rises, can be a stressful time for even a well-established guild. A good way to combat the stress is to gather the remaining troops for a bit of a morale boost in the form of a little light-hearted, fun event such as a scavenger hunt. This article provides the able morale officer with everything he or she needs to know to prepare and run one such hunt, a variation called the Azerothian Riddle Hunt.

The Azerothian Riddle Hunt combines 10 cheesy and not-quite-literarily correct rhymes with player knowledge of original Azeroth and the challenge of swift (or not-so-swift) travel around Azeroth, in order to create an event that can be both amusing and challenging. Once unraveled, each rhyme tells the player where to go to answer the question given in the rhyme's last line.

The fallow times are upon us. Your guild has cleared Icecrown Citadel, or at least the end is in sight. Guild members are growing restless, uncertain if they're up to logging in to farm epics in the face of no further content to use it in. Guilds who've been slower making the climb are having a harder and harder time finding raiders willing to commit to the final stretch. Everyone's worried how the expansion's changes to raid drops and incentives are going to affect the guild's motivation and team spirit. The community is holding its collective breath, waiting for Cataclysm ...

How is your guild holding itself together during this time of transition? WoW.com is looking for an article on how guilds can keep from disintegrating during this pre-expansion period of transition. We're looking for thoughtful strategies and suggestions, between 500 and 1,000 words, on ways that guilds can successfully survive the period linking the end of Wrath with the launch of Cataclysm. What is your guild doing? What alternatives are working for other guilds and raiding groups? Preferably, you're the GM or an officer of a guild or the leader of a regular raiding group (although we won't discount submissions from other types of players). As with all guest post call-outs, only the best submission will be accepted.

Here's what to do: read up about the Seed guest writer program, sign up and then submit your article (you can't see the article page unless you have a Seed account). Unfortunately, we are currently only able to take submissions from individuals living in the United States; we hope to be able to accept international submissions in the future. We'll accept submissions for this call-out until 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, May 13.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press.

The "A Team" -- in WoW, it's not a bunch of guys in a van who help people by . . . shooting other people. Rather, it's your best players grouped together to the exclusion of other guild members. Most guilds don't have the numbers to fill two 25-player teams, so this issue usually relates to 10-player runs. The forming of a 10-player A team can be riddled with drama. This week's e-mail asks whether allowing an A team is the right choice.

I enjoy reading your perspective on guild leadership. I'm hoping you can give us some ideas on balancing progression versus inclusion.

We are an established raiding guild that works on the top tier of content. While we are not a guild that makes server first kills, we steadily progress through the content and see hard/heroic modes on 25 man difficulty. Our raiding core is pretty solid, although there are levels of skill, from very high to adequate. We typically complete the ten man content, and use the ten mans as a base to gain experience on the twenty five mans.

Our problem mainly rests on the makeup of our ten man groups. One school wants to have the maximum number of people get in the ten man groups. This school spreads our best players among multiple groups. All of the groups have some success, but because there are weaker players included, these groups usually hit a wall on harder fights (Heroic Anub or the Wing Bosses of ICC). There is a lot of frustration on the part of our best players when this happens.

Karl, writing over on the WoW Livejournal, has an interesting set of thoughts about hard modes and just how they work with raiders' morale. Hard modes are designed to give raiders something extra -- if you've conquered the normal modes of raids like Ulduar, hard modes are put in there by Blizzard to offer you some extra risk for a corresponding reward. But as they've become more and more routine, some raids are taking on the hard modes even before they've cleared the whole instance, leading up to a night of wiping on early hard modes, and then wiping on later progression. And wiping all night is never good for any raid's morale.

Of course, this is one of the causes for the way the Crusaders' Coliseum in patch 3.2 is designed: instead of having both hard and normal modes constrained to one instance, you can run a 10 or 25-man instance in normal mode all the way, leaving the Heroic mode open when you're ready to do some wiping.

But then again, think about what the mindset is here -- players are throwing themselves on early bosses' hard modes even when they haven't beaten the end bosses yet. It seems like most raids will take any opportunity they get for more loot, no matter how tough it is, and that's what's leading to all of this "glass chewing" Karl is talking about. Even if Blizzard gives players the option to run a normal instance without worrying about hard modes, won't players still just run Heroic anyway, for the better gear?