What makes a good raid leader?
Basically the title!
[A bit of background]To delve into story mode, a few months back I inherited a raid group with a host of problems. We had a raid leader who clearly held the less-skilled part of the raid in contempt, who publicly called out and ranted at his own friend for making a mistake, and who didn't seem to really research the boss we were banging our heads against at the time (Council of Elders).
We bled raiders from his group of friends, and the atmosphere was forever tense due to a clash in wants and expectations between most of the raid and two of our longest-standing raiders (raid leader and, as it happens, the very friend he'd torn into). I took over as raid leader when the existing one realm transferred, and talked the other problem member into departing for somewhere more in line with what he wanted from a raid.
Since then, we've struggled for people and had to bring in a lot of new, untried raiders. There have been lots of wipes, and progression has slowed (we're working on Megaera now). We have, however, regained the fun atmosphere of before. People are laughing in Vent, injokes are sprouting up all over the place, and we've been able to encourage and reward a lot of helpful people.
That was really my primary aim as a raid leader: cultivating that good atmosphere. Now that it's done... well, I'm not sure what actually makes a raid leader awesome. Last night, one of my raiders who also raids with a 12/12 guild mentioned that his other raid leader calls out raid cooldowns more often that I do, and suggested Hermes to help - I've downloaded that and it looks brilliant, but it really woke me up to the fact that I don't exactly have any good raid leaders to model myself on. :P
Does anyone know of any good raid leading resources to read through? Any tales of good raid leading would be really handy to hear about as well! At present I use strategy guides and our WoL parses and various forum discussion threads to try and tailor our strategy to our raid composition, and I try to make a point of asking people individually if they're happy with what they're doing in each fight - although sometimes these queries seem a tad generic and thus not quite as useful as they could be.
[A bit of background]To delve into story mode, a few months back I inherited a raid group with a host of problems. We had a raid leader who clearly held the less-skilled part of the raid in contempt, who publicly called out and ranted at his own friend for making a mistake, and who didn't seem to really research the boss we were banging our heads against at the time (Council of Elders).
We bled raiders from his group of friends, and the atmosphere was forever tense due to a clash in wants and expectations between most of the raid and two of our longest-standing raiders (raid leader and, as it happens, the very friend he'd torn into). I took over as raid leader when the existing one realm transferred, and talked the other problem member into departing for somewhere more in line with what he wanted from a raid.
Since then, we've struggled for people and had to bring in a lot of new, untried raiders. There have been lots of wipes, and progression has slowed (we're working on Megaera now). We have, however, regained the fun atmosphere of before. People are laughing in Vent, injokes are sprouting up all over the place, and we've been able to encourage and reward a lot of helpful people.
That was really my primary aim as a raid leader: cultivating that good atmosphere. Now that it's done... well, I'm not sure what actually makes a raid leader awesome. Last night, one of my raiders who also raids with a 12/12 guild mentioned that his other raid leader calls out raid cooldowns more often that I do, and suggested Hermes to help - I've downloaded that and it looks brilliant, but it really woke me up to the fact that I don't exactly have any good raid leaders to model myself on. :P
Does anyone know of any good raid leading resources to read through? Any tales of good raid leading would be really handy to hear about as well! At present I use strategy guides and our WoL parses and various forum discussion threads to try and tailor our strategy to our raid composition, and I try to make a point of asking people individually if they're happy with what they're doing in each fight - although sometimes these queries seem a tad generic and thus not quite as useful as they could be.