Improving your raid awareness

This post has been last updated on July 14th 2011.

I was at first going to write this from a tank perspective but as I was writing it I figured that it applied to everyone. After all, raid awareness is something that everyone needs in order to clear raids now. While tanking is one of the jobs who require the most raid awareness and made me research ways of improving the following applies to everyone. This is a very long post wich I divided in sections for easier reading.  There is a tanking and raiding philosophy in there that I know some people don’t agree with so feel free to not agree but this has worked for me.

1. The WoW Client, lag and you

Before even talking about raid awareness I want to take the time to talk about the WoW client and how it affects the game in raiding environment. It’s important to understand how  and why what you are seeing on your screen and what your raid members are seeing might be different and how it will affect you.

Basically, in order to not to overload the servers and connections, WoW mostly operate on the client side, on your own computer. Computations, graphics, pathing and mostly everything is done on your computer. So when for example, you move from point A to B, your computer is the one doing all the calculations.

What the server does is send your computer information about the environment. It’s the server telling your computer that there’s a dragon at location X. It’s also the server who tells what attack a boss is using. What the particular attack does tough is done by your computer.

It is vital to grasp this relationship. Let’s say for example that you are fighting Heigan in Naxxramas. After 2 minutes the server tells your computer that Heigan is casting his infamous dance. Your computer then receive the instruction to start executing the dance attack. So it will display the graphics of the floor erupting and check to see if you’re in the wrong spot when the floor erupts. The whole dance part is not done by the server but entirely on your computer.

Why is this so important? Because of lag. When the server sends the instruction to begin Heigan dance, every raider computer will start doing the dance attack. Lag, computer performance and a slew of small factors means that not everyone dance will start at the exact same time. My dance can start .4 seconds later than someone else. This is why sometimes you’ll see someone else in the raid be out if the fire and die and someone in the fire not die. On his computer he was clear because he started a few moments faster than you but your own computer isn’t there yet, creating a discrepancy.

In effect this “lag” between members doesn’t seem to go really higher than 1 second in the worst cases (Heigan dance being one). WoW servers constantly checks and evaluate everyone position to make sure that everyone is synchronized. It will correct small errors without you even noticing it but in the worst cases if can create the infamous rubber band effect.

So what did we learn here? We learned that what you are seeing on your screen and what others people are seeing might not be exactly the same and that it is what is displayed on your own screen that will kill you, not what others are seeing. Remember, in the worst cases this can reach 1 second. Keep that in mind as we go along.
2. Reaction time and Defile

The other big element in raid awareness is reaction time. Knowing that the average reaction time is 0.2 second, a good raider will try to find ways to reduce his or her reaction time as much as possible. And to do that the best way is to reduce the number of steps needed before you react.

To illustrate reaction time I will take Arthas very own Defile as an example. Defile is a spell cast periodically by the Lich King that will place a large void zone under the player feet wich will do crazy damage. It’s raid wiping ability with a short 1.5 sec cast time wich makes it one of the most dangerous spell in his arsenal. The normal strategy is to move away from the group during the 1.5 sec cast when your targeted and until your raid master that skill you won’t down Arthas. Needless to say a 1.5 second cast leaves no room for error and requires excellent raid awareness.

Let’s suppose for a moment that you’re used to raiding by following your raid leader directions. When something is called you do it, the rest of the time your focused on keeping that crazy dps up. Now that we know that there might be a slight lag involved let’s pretend Arthas cast Defile on you and that your computer is a bit faster than the raid leader one. Let’s look at the timeline:

11m00s : Arthas cast Defile
+0.01s : Defile cast starts on your computer (own Defile cast: 1.5s)
+0.03s : Defile cast starts on you raid leader computer (own Defile cast: 1.3s)
+0.05s : Raid leader press on his ventrilo key to call Defile (own Defile cast: 1.1s)
+0.07s : Ventrilo transmits the Raid Leader call (own Defile cast: 0.9s)
+0.09s : You react to the raid leader call and start moving away (own Defile cast: 0.7s)

Did you see that? You lost more than half the cast time before you even reacted, putting the raid in serious danger. Also, I was generous with the Ventrilo lag time. I’ve seen firsthand people having lags of a few seconds using Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. I remember clocking a raider who had a 3 second delay between my calls and him hearing it and it was causing big problems.

This basically means that if you play by reacting to other people instructions you are bound to wipe the raid again and again because simple lag will prevent you from reacting in time. Using the above example the correct way of doing things would be to react immediately to the Defile giving you 1.3 seconds to move away if not a little more with the cast animation.

What I want to convey here is that reacting on your own to what is going on is the key to perfect raid awareness. This is the single most important thing to do in order to improve your raid awareness.

3- Remove the crutches! The danger of addons

Ok, this is the part where my personal opinion comes in play. Numerous raid leaders and theorycrafters figured out long before I did what I just said above. Most of them asked the same question too, what could be done to improve a raider awareness to all the abilities a boss could do? How could you make sure a raider would see the debuff in time to move out without having to tell him to, thus wasting precious reaction time.

One of the answers was addons. If you add a big clonking alarm every time you get a debuff, it should be easy to notice it’s time to move out no?

Of course it’s easier… it’s also incredibly dangerous and let me tell you why.

The first reason is a practical one. Addons are coded by humans and as such they can be imperfect. How many times have you heard a raider say his addon was off or that her addon didn’t warn her of the big fire patch. Most of the time these addons problems are caused either by bad addon programming or the addon being out of synch with your computer. Just like in my first point, addons can get out of synch with the server info or your computer and add to the delays. In short, relying on an addon is dangerous because your are at the whims of someone else coding and lag.

Yet again, it’s your computer that will decide if you live or die and it won’t care for the addon timers, bells or whistles.

The second reason is that it breeds bad raiding habits. Addons are supposed to be used as reminders or different elements of the fight. It’s there so you can check how much time you got left before the boss enrage or before the next phase. Yet a lot of raiders use it as a guide for the boss. Just follow the addons blindly and you should succeed right?

Yes, addons can be useful in analysing raid performance or keeping track of various timers for long fights. But even then, none of it is absolutely needed. Most raid bosses announce in advance when they change phase or when they do X or Y ability. There’s no surprises anymore if you pay attention to what is going on around you.

Ask the best raiders you know of. The ones who never fall into fires and always seem to know what is going to happen before it does. Ask them how they do it. Most of them will tell you it’s easy because the boss does X before the void zone or that he always chain a fireball after he lands or… even if they have addons they know what is going on and what signs to look for.

So if you want to improve your raid awareness the first order of business will be removing or at least disabling those addons until you can do the fights without them. The goal is to truly learn the bosses and to force you to pay attention to the actual fight and not to what your addons are telling you should happen.

4- Getting ready for war, setting up your computer

Now that we have removed most of the exterior factors that could hinder your raid awareness its time to remove the last one, wich is your actual computer. It’s hard to react to something if you cannot see it after all.

There’s two very important settings in the video options that you need to look at first.

-Spell effects: Spell effect is simply how detailed the spell animations are. This needs to be all the way to the top so you can see clearly what is going on. A lot of meteor spells for example have a mark on the ground to indicate where they will fall. If you have low spell effect that mark might simply not show up. Same goes for beams and fire patches that might look smaller that they actually are if you lower the spell effects. Do not skimp on spell effects for performance, ever!

-Shadows: Contrary to spell effect you actually want to lower shadows to help you out in raids. What you want to do is lower them to the point where shadows on the ground will show up as a circle instead of a full silhouette. Not only will that help out performance a lot but it will also allow you to see clearly where objects will fall by following their shadows on the ground. Incredibly useful for fights like the Blood Princes to track where exactly the orbs will fall.

Besides these two settings you can and should play around with the others to make sure that the game run perfectly even when in big raids. If ever you start dying to stuff that haven’t showed up on your screen fast enough or you’re lagging look at lowering your settings.

On the subject of lag, make sure your running the game without interference. If you’re downloading 10 gig of movies while playing don’t be surprised when you get one shotted by the wall of fire you never saw. Virus scans, downloads, little brothers watching porn are all things you want to avoid if you to have a good raid awareness.

5- Knowing is half the battle! research the fights.

Notice how long it took us to actually talk about what the actual bosses do and how to be better at being aware of it all? There’s a good reason for that and it’s because most people problems with raid awareness comes from exterior factors. They research the fights but keep dying to the fire and can’t quite figure out why so they think they must suck at reacting and being aware. In fact most problems are caused because of increased delays on reaction time and because of inaccurate information. Once you start trying to play on your own based solely on what is happening in the game then you’ll see your raid awareness skyrocket.

There is however ways to improve even further and the first and most important one is knowledge. If you know what is going to happen ahead of time it becomes incredibly easier to react and spot what is going on. There’s a ton of information out there on every fight so I’ll leave you to do your own research. However, here’s a few tricks you can use to learn faster.

-Learn the strategy as if you had to be the raid leader: My raid awareness increased a lot when I had to start raid leading because suddenly I had to know everything about the fight and explain it. Doing it this way helps a lot understand why you do things this way or another and how to react. There’s a difference between knowing to move out the blue flame and knowing that the blue flame spreads from the center of the room in a X pattern. Guess wich will help you the most?

-Learn the icons: Buffs and debuffs are always displayed next to the player/boss portraits. Often, stacks will even show on important abilities. I can track exactly when to taunt by tracking the debuff directly on the target of target frame for example. This way I know for sure when to taunt and I’m certain the addon is not off. But to do that I have to take time to look up wich debuff icon correspond to what and that can be done during research.

-Learn how the raid will wipe: Instead of looking up how to kill the boss look at the ways he we will your raid. Knowing what is truly dangerous for your raid and thus you, will help you focus on what abilities you need to be really aware of and what to do to avoid them.

6- Be comfortable, keeping the information manageable and your attention focused

Last but not least one of the great tricks of raid awareness is limiting the amount of information you have to deal with. With your rotations, cooldowns, positions, boss, raid members and all kind of stuff happening all at once you want to make things as easy as possible for you.

This subject could use a post all of its own with tons of little tricks and tips. Rather, I’m going to go over the two governing principles to having a comfortable raid UI that will help with raid awareness.

1-Keep the information minimal: You want only what is truly necessary to be displayed when your raid. You don’t really need a dps meter during the fight so that screen can be hidden. You don’t need non-essential chat so you can close these or do like I do and create a new window with only the needed chat channels. In short, everything that is displaying information that won’t directly help you win the fight should not be displayed.

This has two advantages. First you won’t be overloaded with information and this will lessen the chance of missing an important event. Second, it will free up more screen space so you can see better what is happening around you.

2-Keep it together: The more your eyes have to travel all over the screen the more likely you are to miss something. When I raid, nearly all of my information is situated to the left of my screen with the less needed stuff on the right. Thus, my eyes have to cover less space to see important info. Try to find a way to keep all relevant information close to each other so you never miss that important boss call.

Parting words

If you noticed there’s no big tricks in this post for improving actual awareness. No exercises to spot things or improve your reaction time. This is because raid awareness is not about being fast or having super human observation skills but rather it’s about playing smartly. Every single player I’ve helped with raid awareness during my time as raid leader had problems because of one of the above elements, not because they were slow or had poor perception.

Again, here’s the guidelines for better raid awareness. Don’t rely on others, research the fight and keep things as simple as possible. Simple as that.