If I had to lead a 40 person raid…

Keeping with the theme of 40 man person (go listen to Justice Points ep.47 to get this one) raids, I started thinking about what it would be like to lead one of those these days. I did it way back in 2005 for a few months in Molten Core but back then raiding was a different beast and you could beat most encounters even with half the raid half asleep. As long as you had a few key players in each role, you were good. Plus, people were willing to put up with more militaristic style leadership and I had more time on my hands.

I don’t think I’ll be leading a 40 person anytime soon but I was curious to see what I’d come up with the considerable amount of raid leading I’ve done in WoW in various formats as well as other games since then. Plus, I’ve had to give training to others as part of my job so I’m hoping I learned something out of it that I can apply here.

This post has been going through a few revisions. At first I wanted to explain in detail the ins and outs but it turned into a 2000 words monster and I wasn’t halfway done. So, instead here it is in hopefully way shorter version.

• Sit down with the leadership and have a good talk about expectations. This has killed me in the past. Before I take charge of any large raid, I want to know how and what the guild leadership and guild at large expects and is ready to do to reach said expectations. I don’t want to make decisions about raid policies without first knowing what is expected of me and the raid.
• Inside the raid, I am king. With 40 people, I don’t want to have to debate during raids.
• Have helpers for the invites and for the loot. There’s a surprisingly huge amount of work that goes only into the loot and invites. I don’t want to have to deal with those on top of having to direct a raid.
• Instructions will be minimal. This is the most important to me. I believe in raid awareness. I believe that raiders should be able to play by themselves without hand holding. They should dodge fires by themselves. Some people like a more detailed plan but it’s not how I learned to play and I believe that raid awareness builds better raiders over time. Plus with 40 people, don’t want to spend 30 minutes explaining stuff before every raid.
• Raids will start on time! I swear, I will invite pugs over guildies if people are not on time. It was hell with only 10… don’t want to think about 40…

So it’s heavily summarized, but here we are…