I am dancing this dance from the other side BBB. I am a new healer to a guild where I have extensive kara experience (from my mage) and they had only cleared attunmen when I was recruited. I find it to be a hard balance between letting them lead and find their own way to watching us wipe and wipe and knowing where we are going wrong. I try to just type a suggestion or two into raid chat, but that rarely works. There is no real way to give advice without sounding like an asshat when you are new.

But now you have me worried that I am being too quiet, dilemmas dilemmas.

Simultaneously, we have some guild officer who invited a ton of twelve year old kids demanding gold and DM runs within minutes of joining (and of course in barely comprehensible english). So the last few weeks have been a real strain for the guild leadership.

Lastly regarding WWS, yes you have to be very careful with the analysis. Dont go by total damage, group it into fights. To get a best glimpse, look at boss fights where you down the boss, that will give you an idea of a) how much total raid dps you have (take the boss hitpoints and divide by total time spent on boss), b) whos doing what in boss fights and c) what it takes to bring him down dps why. For dpsers like hunters, this stuff is useful. But the intagibles are still there. Did person X know to avoid boss trick Y. Why did person Z die thirty seconds into the fight? Those are harder to measure. Finally, take gear into account. For example, last night we downed prince. A similiarly geared but much younger hunter than I did 20 or 30% less damage than me. I used WWS to find the reason = his pet only accouts for 2% of his dps while my pet accounts for 12% of mine. So if he would just turn on certain abilities for his pet he would boost his dps to near identical with mine.

Another raider had similiar dps to this guy, but she hardly had any epics. So this sort of dps at the bottom of the field is normal and expected, not worth commenting on (except to say get more epics!).

And like Logan said, while we require all dps to run with a meter (and I encourage my healers, too), posting such information in any public channel is greatly frowned upon. The goal is for everyone to be in the same general range, not to show off that you’re on top.

I’ve been doing WWS and SWStats (haven’t used Recount in forever) for a really long time. I’m also my guild’s resident WWS analyzer, and not just healorz. If you need any help with any of it, just shoot me an email.

The Mag fight requires not only good raid coordination but it also requires a fairly high level of DPS to take down enough channelers before Mag spawns. It also requires active communication between raid members to ensure that all cubes get clicked, especially when a clicker dies (which WILL happen while you are learning the fight). This fight is both intensely frustrating at first and intensely satisfying when you finally down him. Unfortunately, with the removal of the TK attunement chain, guilds aren’t required to kill him. Many skip him in favor of the better loot from easier bosses like VR and The Lurker Below. In doing so, I really believe that guilds are doing themselves a disservice by not going through one of the better “team coordination building” bosses at this point in the game.

So yeah, when you get to that point, do yourself a favor and take the time to down Mag before you jump into the tier 5 stuff. Your guild will be better for it.

Second, I’ll add one more link for you. BigRedKitty also did a “how to WowWebStats.” Lots of overlap with what Ego and I said, but one big bonus.

Pictures.

’nuff said.

Since every time I try to embed the link it fails, I’ll just post the long one here – sorry.
http://www.bigredkitty.net/2007/11/10/how-to-wow-web-stats/

We started off with running 2 – 3 groups a week through Kharazan to build up team play and gear. This took several months to accomplish. Now that we have 50+ raiding level 70′s, we headed into Gruul’s to test our chops. By our third time into Gruul’s, we had cleared it. Then realized we were better than we thought. Our 4th and 5th trips in there were one shots of the both bosses. Pretty cool to say the least.

We directed the drops in Gruul’s to our Tanks and Healers. We then decided to jump over SSC and take on Void Reaver in The Eye, two attempts failed….then Third try this past Sunday night…Void Reaver down.

Basically with enough forward thought and preparation from your RL and Officer corp, amazing things can happen. Not to mention the raiders tasting success and being motivated to try anything.

When raiders have huge egos, they shape up or ship out in our guild.

Good luck with your progression, I know you will do great!

BBB, I wish you the best of luck with your move to 25-man raiding. It sounds like you’re keeping the right things in mind in your recruitment processes. Just make sure those uppity new guys know that their “experience” and input is always appreciated, but while they’re in the raid they need to defer to the raid leader’s instructions. Somebody’s gotta be in charge, after all. :-D

Oh and while tools like WWS can be great to break down fights and evaluate raid performance, I’d really suggest that you don’t make it a focal point of your early raiding. The skill and gear levels of guild members is so variable that agonizing over web stats is really secondary to players just learning how to best maximize their damage/threat/healing in the 25-man environment and to players filling in the gaps that are inevitably in their gear at this point in the game. WWS tends to add another layer of complication and (at this point) unnecessary structure to an aspect of the game that is new and a bit frightening to beginning raiders. I suggest keeping SW Stats and encouraging your other guildies to run their own damage meters through it, with the understanding that they are to use it for their own personal growth and NOT to brag/gloat. My guild actually prohibits the public broadcasting of damage meters in raid/guild chat for this very reason. If you find that one player is consistently low on the meters, talk to them and make sure they understand the encounters, their role in the encounters, and how to best maximize their damage through things like spell and attack rotations.

Just some suggestions that have worked for us… :)