Don't Panic: Next Week it Will be Easier

I often get whispers from people asking me for some advice on one boss or another.  The addition of flex means a few more people are raiding and those were people that are not really raider so a lot of the little things I take for granted are new to them. 

While I am by no means in a fast progressing guild or have massive amounts of experience, I have something many people do not and that is a willingness to explain.  Oddly enough, as I hear quite often, I am also a very supportive, upbeat raid leader that helps make people feel they can accomplish anything.  Who would have guessed right?

It is because of my willingness to teach and my upbeat, and completely honest assessments, that people come to me for advice and right now a lot of those people are new raiders trying out flex, or normal,  for the first time.  I talk with them and give them ideas and go over what they have, what their numbers look like, and take a peek at whatever logs they might have and I will give them an assessment on if I think they can get the job done.

More often than not I will tell someone, I think you can do this, and they end up wiping over and over again.  It makes them feel a little down and as if they can never get it done but I know, from experience, that with some practice, they can get it done.  I will be honest however if I see there will be an issue and tell them what they need to work on before moving no however, it is not always "you can do it" roses and sunshine.

For all those new to raiding and trying to step up their game I welcome you to one of the hardest lessons you will ever learn when raiding.

Don't Panic:  Next week it will be easier.

This is a lesson all raiders learn at one point or another.  With the changes to the game it seems that everyone thinks a wipe means the group is bad.  While that is quite possibly true, that does not mean the fight is undoable.  It just means you need practice.  The fine art of progression is lost on new raiders. 

People seem to have a fear of wiping, it is always, lets come back when we get more gear and can over power it but you will never get better if you always fall back on that as your main source of progression and in a world with no valor gear, where exactly is that gear going to come from?  Get out there, wipe, get better, learn, and kill.  That is how you will get your gear.  Time to teach a new generation that there will be fights you wipe on, a lot.

In the past few years I have seen many new raiders come through my ranks and stay for a little bit and suddenly disappear, oddly enough, as soon as the going gets rough.   They have no tolerance for wiping, no tolerance for letting people learn, no tolerance for mistakes when learning, they just want to come in and kill and leave with loot.

If we were talking the LFR I would agree with them.  I keep saying the LFR needs to be nerfed down to the lowest common denominator.  It should be designed for the bad players so even they can do it without wiping and if they get lucky and a few decent players are there, awesome, it will be faster.  Get in, kill, collect loot, get out.  That is how LFR should be and I would agree if people wanted that super easy.

But that is not the way of organized raiding.  That takes time, that takes dedication, that takes a willingness to learn, wipe and get better.  While I have written of countless bosses my guild one shot the first time we saw them, there are also a number of bosses I have written about that we wiped 100 times or more on, like horridon.

Don't Panic:  Next week it will be easier.

The lesson I would like to teach these people asking me questions when they are wiping is that sometimes you have to wipe to get better.  You have to wipe to learn how to deal with things.  You have to wipe to understand how to work better as a team.

Like horridon and dozens of bosses before him and most likely dozens of bosses that will come after him I have wiped countless times on bosses that it seemed like we would never be able to beat.  Each time when we finally beat them we were left with a sigh of relief at least until we realize that we need to get past him again next week.  And that is where this don't panic post comes in.

Don't Panic:  Next week it will be easier.

Like horriodn and tortos in ToT that gave us fits, or the ship with all those adds in DS, there have been countless fights where we wiped over and over again, more than the normal learning time type of wipes, only to come back the week after and one shot it.

It is what I call the "get it" moment.  Sooner or later a group that works together long enough to beat a particular challenge will reach that moment where they finally "get it" as a team.  If they don't, well, they are not raiders, even the slowest of raiders will get it sooner or later.  I always say that is one of the differences between the normal and heroic raiders, heroic raiders "get it" a lot faster, it is part of the reason they get further.  The thing is we now have a new version of "get it" for flex raiders and new raiders and they need to learn that their "get it" time will come.  You will go from wiping over and over again to killing the boss with no problem what so ever each and every time you are in there.

Using horridon as it is in recent memory for my example I will explain.  It took my guild 5 weeks to get it down.  As I said, we are not a great group, but we kept trying.  Once a week we would get together and we would go face to face with that dino for 2 hours and each week he ended the night besting us.

We started that first week not being able to get past the second door.  We had no one to take care of poison, so we had to work around that.  We assigned people to targets for burning and interrupting.  The more attempts we threw at it, the better we got at it.  By the end of week one we were sometimes getting past the second door, without ever seeing one drop of poison spill.  Second week, we had that door down, sure we wiped a few times to mistakes, but we were getting it.  We started to work on the next door and the week after we started getting to that last door.  On week four we had actually gotten to the boss a few times but were in bad shape and never quit got the kill even if we did come close a few times.

We wasted a lot of time talking about what we would do, plus because the fight was so long we did not get a lot of pulls in each week, but we worked it out, it was a process that I was hearing other guilds disband over, more than half the guilds on my server to be exact.  Guilds that finished the first tier clearing all bosses were dissolving due to horridon.

On the fifth week we went in there and used all that slow process of door to door learning and started our journey to make us some dino skin boots.  We did not go in and down him first attempt, no way, we did wipe a few more times, but we did down him that night, finally.

It was the end of the night and we only had 30 minutes left so we decided to clear the trash to the next boss and hoping for a drop.  When we got to the next boss we decided to get one pull in before calling it a night, still high on our excitement from beating that dino to death after he had done the same to us for five weeks, and with little to no explanation we pulled and one shot the next boss, the last for our night leaving us on a huge high for the evening.

So what is this all about?  It is about you not panicking that you are wiping, as long as you are learning from your wipes, making adjustments as needed and getting better with each attempt, you will get it.

Don't Panic:  Next week it will be easier.

And it was easier, the next week and the next few weeks after we went in and one shot horridon.  Yes, after all those wipes for five straight weeks the group finally "got it".  We "got it" so well that during the fight we were just talking about movies and what we had for dinner.  If you were listening in you would say, this does not sound like a group that had spent entire nights wiping on this boss only a few short weeks ago.

Once you down a boss the next time there is so much easier.  Don't panic, it might seem like you are caught on a boss right now but you will down it if you do not give up.  And once you down it when you come back it will be so much easier.  Almost as if those nightmares never happened.

This new raid has a few bosses that will be like that, most actually, but if you keep trying and more importantly keep realizing what you did wrong so you can do it better next time, you will eventually down it. When you do eventually down it, it will be easier next week.

While it might be easy for us to think, "lets extend so we do not have to get stuck behind horridon again", that should never be an option.  It should always be, "lets go back in there and show him whos boss".

Right now the boss I am getting the most question on is the third one.  What order do we send people in?  I can tell you we wiped about 12-15 times before we found an order that worked for us.  But it is a hard one to give advice for.  Each team is different.  My team settled on one tank / one damage dealer, one healer / one damage dealer, two damage dealers and then the last damage dealer and by then it is well into burn phase.  But while that might work for my group it might not work for another.  It took us a dozen or so tries to get our order down, then another 2 or 3 to actually down it once we found the order that was best for us.

Since then we one shot it without even thinking.  I do not even need to assign who goes in, they all know, because everything gets easier.

I hear some of the people talking to me on vent, whispering me, all feeling down on themselves and their group having issues with one thing or another and all I can say it don't give up, stick with it.  You will get it down if you try your best and get better with each attempt.  And remember, it will be all worth it in the end because...

Don't Panic: Next week it will be easier.