*** Work in Progress ***

What I've written is mostly focussed on leading a large raid, although it can apply fairly well to a 5 or 10 man group. It's intended as guidance and reference but not as gospel.

1) Prepare
Preparing to lead a group means a lot of things. You need to know what you are leading the group into. Ideally that means ‘having done it before’, so if you are going to lead a group into karazhan for the first time, the best possible thing is to have been there with another group. Second best is to have read up and watched vids - and often this is all that is open to you. Don't need to go overboard with research, but trying to get an understanding of how things should work, what the important strategy elements are, what key requirements must be met will save you wipes later.

Preparing means ensuring that you have a group capable of beating the encounter in hand before you start. Making sure signups are done, that signups include a healthy balance and any key minimums (e.g. X tanks needed, or X tanks with X resistance gear, Y healers and at least 1 of Z class). Understand the difference between essential requirements and nice-to-have's. There is normally more than 1 way to skin a cat.

Preparing means making sure your character is raid ready, has all the necessary consumables, is fully repaired, properly specced etc. Making sure you have teamspeak and a working mic. Making sure your addons are working. You can't expect your raid to do these things if you don't do them yourself.

2) Delegate
The first job when you actually start the group should be to offload as many jobs as you can to others. Start as you mean to go on - the first person you invite to the raid should be “raid inviter guy” who will help you do invites, and from that point forward you should look for as many people to help you as possible. It is all too easy to end up trying to do everything. All this ends up doing is stressing you out.

Key tasks to hand out: master looter, main tanks, main assist, DKP tracker.

3) Sort the Groups
The performance difference between a well organised raid with class synergies playing off each other and 25 guys thrown in random groups is massive. There is rarely “1 right way” but this is how I do it:
- Start with the tanks. Know which tanks need buffs like warlock imps, pally auras, resto druid buffs and place them first. Don't assume that every tank needs to be in a ‘tank group’ - often an offtank will be switching to DPS, won't be taking too much dmg etc, so can go in a DPS group.
- Know the constraints of the encounter. If certain characters need certain group buffs (hunter auras at hydross, imp buffs at maulgar) then think about those. If the encounter requires the group to be spread out, you may need to balance parties rather than go for optimal synergy (e.g. lurker islands, leotheras spread)
- Evaluate your major group buffers - shaman, shadowpriests, paladins. Then to a lesser extent, warriors, hunters, resto druids. Start thinking how you might place these to benefit the raid.
- Build your groups. In a 25 man raid, typically you'll have a 2 tank groups, a physical dps group, 2 caster groups (mixing healers + ranged dps).
- Sanity check. Ask others if they think the groups are right. Explain your reasoning for placing key players if necessary.

At the start of the raid, balance for general performance. At each boss, evaluate what changes need to be made. If you need to be sorting the groups to suit the encounter, you could get someone else to explain/recap what's going to happen while they wait for you.

4) Communicate the Plan
Speak. Talk in a slow clear voice and explain what you want to happen. If you can type fast enough, you can supplement instructions with text. This is useful if you have an accent that others may have difficulty understanding.

Place marks. The raid marking system makes things a lot easier. I have my number pad set to mark targets which makes it a nice and quick to throw targets on. You can set up these keys in Key Bindings using the default interface. Doing it this way makes it easy to have a repeatable sequence of marks. I count up with tanks, down with CC (e.g. 1 (star) is MT1, 2 (circle) is MT2, 7 (cross) is CC1, 6 (square) is CC2). But whatever works for you, make sure you find a way to quickly and efficiently mark targets. Make sure everyone knows what they are targeting, make sure that at least the main assist knows what the kill order should be. Encourage your main assist to throw Skulls on the current kill target.

For boss fights, you may need to go into detail on what is about to happen and how the raid should handle it. Refer back to your guides or experience, overview the key phases of the encounter and the main roles that need to be filled.

5) /Readycheck and Go
Don't over use /readycheck. Get a raid status view (I use xRaidStatus) that shows raid health + mana, use your judgement for trash packs. Don't leave the pull in doubt. Instruct the puller to go when you think the raid is ready. Trumpet sounds on TS works too…

6) Evaluate what went wrong
OK, so maybe you just killed everything and everyone is fine. If not, you need to understand what went wrong and what can be done to improve it. Even if 1 out of 25 died, it is worth finding out why. If you don't see what went wrong, ask others - including the victims. Encourage people to give feedback.

When things do go wrong, do not start blaming others for making mistakes. Stay Calm (this can be the hardest part). Start with the assumption that it is YOUR fault… that you forgot to assign a role or explain a point of positioning. If someone didn't do something they were told, it's because you didn't explain what they were supposed to do clearly enough. Maybe what you've asked them to do isn't easy and will take some practice, so encourage them and ask if they need help. If the same people are making the same mistakes repeatedly, then there might come a time for stronger words.

7) Keep pace, Keep order, Keep up Morale
The natural state of a raid is to stand around waiting. It's the leaders job to keep things moving. This is one of the main reasons for offloading jobs onto others, so that you don't become the reason the raid is running slow. Liberal use of the phrase “Chop Chop” works for me. In a longer raid, recognise that people need to drink/eat/defecate and announce 5 minute breaks… but set a time by which people should be back and chastise the tardy.

If things aren't going very well, you'll need to keep up morale. Positive words, the odd joke or ramble on TS might help. Switching from that annoying wipe learning boss to an easier farm boss might work too.

Keep in your mind how much of the raid time remains. Don't be tempted to quit early because it's less hassle. Don't be afraid to extend the raid a little to get that last attempt in, but remember that the raid spans multiple time zones, includes working people, family guys and youngsters, and don't be surprised if some players simply can't stay longer than the planned raid end

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