Casual Raiding: Forming the Raid

Casual Raiding 2: Forming the Raid

This installment in the Casual Raiding series will cover communication, scheduling, team goals, and recruiting. We’re starting to transition here out of the pure philosophy and into some practical matters…

Communication

Your raid team needs to be able to communicate both during the raids and equally importantly, outside of the raids. I consider the following communication channels necessary for raid teams:

• Raid Team Website Forums: You need to be able to communicate your team rules, strats, goals, etc someplace outside of game time that people can access at their leisure. There are free forum providers out there, as well as free forum software for your own hosted domain names. Future articles in the Casual Raiding series will go more in depth into the kind of information on your forums. Most likely you can just stake-out a section of your guild forums. If you don’t have access to forums already, here are some options:
  • I hear that ProBoards and Bravenet offer free forum hosting. I’ve never used either so cannot tell you how good they are in any way.
  • If you want your own domain name (www.YourRaidTeam.com) you’ll need to pay for hosting, but you can then get your forum software for free. I highly recommend Hostmonster – they give you unlimited space and bandwidth for something like $7/month and they have great tech support. They also have one-click installation of free forum software. The WHU is hosted through them, as well as many other sites that I run. They even give me a kickback if you sign up by clicking through from the WHU – what’s not to love?
• Ventrillo or In-Game Voice: in-game voice chat is not just for hardcore raiding teams — in fact it is more useful for casual raid teams. We casual raiders are more likely to need to remind people of what they need to do mid-fight. Besides, don’t you want to be able to chat with your friends?
• Custom Chat Channel: if your raid team is not all in one guild, you’ll want to create a custom chat channel to talk about raid team stuff. Just type /join ChannelName. You can make up anything you want for the ChannelName. My 10-man team is all in guild at the moment, but we still have our own chat channel to separate our discussions from the normal stream of guild chat.

Note one thing I didn’t mention is the in-game calendar. I don’t think this is necessary for raid scheduling – your website serves that function better anyway. No harm in using the in-game calendar however, and the auto-invite feature is a nice time-saver for 25-man raids.

Scheduling

You gotta pick a time to raid. For casual raiding that probably means 2 nights a week – or possibly even 3. One night just isn’t enough to make much progress, in my opinion, but what whatever works for your team.

I highly recommend picking a hard stop time for your raid. Three hours is pretty common for casual raids. This lets people plan their schedule and keeps the raids from feeling like an endless void that devours time and matter and sanity.

Team Goal

I think  it’s valuable for a team to have a stated goal. This will define your team and dictate what you should be doing. For example, MNK’s goal is to defeat the Lich King. Thus we know we have to be able to raid current content, and we have to get as much gear as possible to prepare for ICC.

Your goal might be to defeat hardmodes, or kill 10 bosses a week, or to collect achievements. I know I like to get raid achievements, but since our team goal is to defeat the Lich King, it gets hard to justify heading back to Naxx to finally pick up Undying. Thus our goal dictates what our raid does.

The goal also communicates to your raid team what kind of gear and technical skill is needed to be on your team.

As a final note on team goals, I do not consider “have fun!” to be a valid goal. If you really just want to get together socially and have fun, then go raid Molten Core or Black Wing’s lair. You’ll have a blast, you won’t wipe, but you also won’t really be challenged. I think raiding is about coming together as a team to overcome challenges. Yes it’s fun, but it’s also takes work and time. If all you’re after is the fun, then remove the work part of it.

Size Matters

It goes without saying that you need at least 10 people for a 10-man raid, and 25 people for a 25-man raid. Also in general you’ll want a bit of overflow. It’s usually not a bad idea to have up to 30 people for your 25-mans, and perhaps 12 for your 10-mans (depending on what kind of off-specs people are carrying to fill in the gaps).

The idea here is that if one or two people can’t make it to raid night because of RL issues, you’re still able to raid. As long as everyone on the team can usually make it to all the raid nights, try to cycle them as fairly as possible — avoid having a black sheep list of people who are only invited when you’re short a body.

An important issue here is that you do not want too many people on the raid team. Once you have more than 30 people on your 25-man raid team, you’re going to have issues. You’ll have a lot of people sitting each week, you run a greater risk of having “A” players and “B” players, there’ll be less loot for each person, and you’ll have people bitter that so-and-so never has to sit out, etc.

Little secret here: having too many people on your raid team is likely to cause or increase loot drama, in addition to all other kinds of drama. Keep your team at a reasonable size. Seriously. There isn’t always room for one more.

Recruiting

Okay, so you have your raid team forums up and running – perhaps as a subsection of your guild forums. In there you’ll have all your rules and policies posted. You’ll also have an application thread. Be sure that the thread outlines explicitly what information you want your applicants to give (link to their armory, offspec info, where they get their class information, personal info to get to know them, etc). Also be sure to let them know exactly how the process works.

Your forums aren’t going to draw applicants to you, but you’ll be directing all applicants to your forums.

In terms of actually going out and hunting down potential raiders, there are two primary options. The first is to go to the dreaded WoW forums to the recruiting areas and post some info and a link to your own forums. The second, quite honestly, is to pug it up a bit.

You already have a core group — so go to LFG and drum up the peeps you need to get a raid going (and go somewhere somewhat easy – totc, early ulduar, VoA). VoA is particularly good since people are used to pugging this one.

Let the people know that you’re building up a raid team and be sure your leaders know what they’re doing and reflect well on the team. Then after the raid talk to anyone that you thought was enjoyable to raid with and did well. Point them to your forums and let them know you’d like to have them try your team out for size.

Recruiting Reminder: You Need to Gear Them

Just a reminder that the odds of your as yet unformed raid team gathering up well-geared and experienced raiders are low. If you require people to already have TotC gear, you’ll drastically reduce your pool of candidates (after all, why do they need to raid with you if they already are raiding where your team has yet to go?).

Look for people whose personalities mesh well with your team, who are willing to do the work your team requires, and can follow instructions. Understand in advance that you’ll have to help gear them up (and you can expect them to do work on their own as well). This is where we have to step back and remember that this is a casual raiding team, not a hardcore team. And working together to help the team get geared will only help strengthen the bonds your team will need to work together to conquer new content.