An Elitist Casual

“If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” - Sun Tzu

Being a raid leader, I have to remind myself of the direction I’d like to take a raid when working on progression. This is a quick attempt to explain both some prerequisite basics and the theory its self. Every raider is responsible for the following things…

Prior to the raid:

Being prepared to raid as long as possible with as few interruptions as possible. This does not mean ignoring real life. This means being repaired, having consumables, updated mods, and being attentive and proactive in preparations for the raid. Be the first to the instance, be ready to help summon, be ready to start before that ready check is made.

Bring prepared to bring as much to the raid as possible. This doesn’t mean you hand out consumables to the other raiders. This means you have your own consumables, your gear enchanted, and you have considered and worked toward accessible upgrades outside of the scope of the progression raid.

During the raid:

Preventing damage to others.
DPS, this includes interrupting abilities that can be interrupted, and keeping debuffs on as many mobs as possible.

Tanks, this means making sure your positioning is such that you don’t endanger others with your target’s abilities, and making sure you don’t overtax your own tanking ability in multi-mob encounters.

Healers, this means decursing damaging abilities, shielding or putting up damage reducing abilities before known damage spikes. These things go a long way toward making a difficult encounter manageable.

Avoiding damage to yourself.
DPS and Healers, this means always recognizing what is doing damage to you, understanding how to avoid it if possible, and acting on that knowledge in the future.

Tanks, this means gearing yourself with the understanding of the encounter. Different tanking strategy and gear works for certain scenarios. Even if it means swapping out one peice of effective health gear for one peice of avoidance gear, that extra 2% of dodge could mean a lot less incoming damage in AE tanking situations. Alternatively, that extra 2k health could mean the difference between an unlucky hit and an unavoidable spike combining into a kill or a near-kill.

Recovering from damage.
Most DPS classes have at least one ability that they can use to cheat death. Do not assume healers or tanks will save you! Treat your role in the raid as if you were soloing within the constraints of the encounter strategy. No one’s role is to be a corpse.

Healers, helping the raid recover from damage starts before they take it. It is your responsibility to understand who will be taking damage, when, and why, even before they do. This is the basis for proactive healing.

Tanks, understand the flow of damage, and how to mitigate spikes. Steady damage on a tank is expected and easily healable. Spikes kill. If you work to recover from these spikes as quickly as possible without any additional risk, the healers will thank you.

Dealing damage.
Now, this is the last (and most fun) part. DPS’ers, coordinate your own abilities such that they make maximum impact on the encounter. Save 5+ minute cooldowns for heroism burn. Use 1 minute cooldowns and trinkets religiously and in combination with other abilities that provide maximum burst damage. Cooldown management is a huge part of a good damage dealer becoming an exceptional one. Tanks, your threat is all-important. Healers, you too can help in the clutch! If something needs to be dead right now, if no one is in danger of dying, your 1k DPS could be the difference between a kill and being overrun by the enemy.

The practice of and focus on these concepts, in this order, means that there will be several phases to progression encounters.

1) Learning the environment - This is the identification of dangerous situations in the fight, and planning around how to remove them.  Progress to the next phase happens when each raid member understands what can hurt them, why, and how to avoid it. These attempts will often end with (seemingly unexplained) insta-deaths or otherwise unhealable damage being taken (awareness wipes).

2) Learning the encounter - This is the understanding of the flow of the fight. When is DPS all-important? When is mobility necessary? When do the tanks use abilities and positioning to minimize the damage they take? Are there special tasks to be done that need practice? All of this gets done here, as well as perfecting damage avoidance techniques. These attempts will often end with the healers running out of mana (atrophy wipes).

3) Stepping up to the challenge - Ok, now everyone should know how to stay alive. If any one raid member is consistently taking more damage than the others of their role, they are a liability. Everyone knows how to accomplish the tasks the encounter provides. If someone continually has to be reminded of a task, they are hindering the raid. Now, we have to extend our healing capacity and expend our DPS capability over whatever time period the encounter will take, in a manner that causes a kill. There are peaks and valleys in both DPS and healing requirements, throughout any encounter. Recognition of these causes efficiency. These attempts will either end with the healers running out of mana, or the DPS’ers running out of juice before an enrage (or other DPS-critical timer) one-shots the raid (efficiency wipes).

4) All of the above culminates in a kill-shot where tanks prevent and negate enough damage to themselves and others, DPS’ers stay alive and burn the boss down before enrage, and the heals are conservative and effective enough to outlast the damage the encounter provides.

In practical application as it pertains to the guild I am in now (love you guys by the way), this means that I don’t care what kind of numbers anyone puts on the DPS or Healing meters until everyone is staying alive long enough for it to matter. As a casual guild, we did a hell of a good job learning the Sartharion and 2 drakes fight quickly enough that we probably could have downed it in a few hours with a person or two in mostly blues, one that had never even been in OS before. In our progression, we need to remain focused in that learning an encounter and understanding everything that is going on around us is infinitely more important than anything else. In Ulduar and beyond, if we truly know the fight, everything else will fall into place.

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Gaming by Easttuth