How to be a good raid leader

I'll be covering the following topics in this guide

• Raid composition
• Prepull preparations
• Overview during the encounter
• Communication during encounters
• Tactic tweaking
• Distributing loot

Your role in the raid
As a raid leader you are expected to take responsibility. I'll cover the main parts of the job of a raid leader below.

Raid composition
Before you can get your raid underway, a raid will need to be made. It is your job as a raid leader to set the best raid for the boss which you are going to be facing first.
There are 3 types of roles in a raid. Tanks, Healers and Dps.

There are currently 4 classes who's capable of tanking. These are Protection warriors, Protection Paladins, Feral Druids and Blood Death Knights.
Each of these four classes bring certain raid cooldowns to the raid, but in the current tier, Dragon Soul, I've found feral druids and blood death knights to be the more versatile tanks, making me want to prioritize having them in the raid over at protection warrior - or paladin.

There are 4 healing classes in the game currently. These are the Restoration Shaman, Holy Paladin,Holy/Discipline Priest and last but not least the Restoration Druid. The current winners here are the restoration shamans, holy paladins and discipline priests. They all have superb raid cooldowns while being able to put out immense amounts of healing when needed.

Lastly we have the dps. Every class in game i capable of dps'ing on a level that can compete with the other classes. Dragon Soul have been favoring rogues, mainly because the legendary daggers are so far ahead of every other weapon, and fire mages, due to cauterize. We'll get back to these later.

I say it again, every class brings something to the raid.
This is a link to a website where you can find all your raid buffs
This is a link to MMO-Champions raidcomp, where you can visually see which buffs you'd get with a certain raid composition

The ideal raid composition is in many cases as followed.

For 25 man guilds.

2 tanks (some fights only require one)
5 healers (some fights may require one or two more healers)
8 ranged dps
7 melee dps

Try to get at least one role of each class, except for tanks, when progressing in general. Some strategies may require higher amounts of a certain classes for the strategy to work.
For example Spine of Deathwing 25 man heroic required you to stack tons of arcane mages, in order to be able to beat the encounter.

For 10 man guilds.

2 tanks (some fights only require one)
2 healers (some fights may require one more healer)
4 ranged dps
2 melee dps

10 man raiding is much less demanding, raid setup wise. For example, warlocks were the weakest dps class on Spine of Deathwing heroic, yet we managed to defeat the encounter within world 30th, even though we had two of them.

Keep in mind that it is better to get the players than the good classes in most cases.

Prepull preparations

After you've set your and have moved to the instance comes the next job. Explaining the tactics so everyone can understand them.

For starters you want to do a brief rundown of the bosses abilities, and how to deal with them. After that you want to assign people for cooldowns or tasks.

These are the things you need to have assigned before the pull.

• Pick a mage or / and a shaman, and make sure they know when to use BL/hero/TW
• Assign the tanks - and healers cooldowns for specific healing or damage intensive moments in the fight
• Assign people for specific targets if it's a multitarget encounter
• Put floating raid markers for certain areas which are important during the encounter

From here on out it trial and error.

Overview during the encounter
When i refer to "overview during the encounter" i'm speaking of awareness. As a raid leader you need to watch the entire raid. You need to be able to correct people during the encounter and be aware of why you wiped. There are several addons who can help you as a raid leader, keeping tracking track of class - and encounter mechanics, which should allow you to focus more on the positioning etc.

The following addons help you keep track of class - and encounter mechanics

• Ora3
• DBM
• Bigwigs
• Omen Threat Meter

Learning to do your job perfectly while keeping an eye on the raid, and takes time to learn. So if you are new to raid leading, don't expect it to be perfect at the start. Find a balance and try to improve over time.
Currently the best "role" for raid leading is tanking. Simply because there isen't much for us to do in this tier, so we got a lot of focus to go around. On the healer hand, healers have got a very hard time trying to raid lead while keeping everybody topped up.

Communication during encounters
Communication during encounters should only be made by the officers and the raid leader. You wan't to avoid as much confusion as possible, which can occur if you have 10 people speaking over each other.

Tactic tweaking
You should always try to find out why you wiped. The addons recount, ensidiafails and fatality are all 3 good addons which can tell you how each raid member died and over how long of a time span.
After you've found the source of the wipe, you can either ignore it if it was a dc or whatever, or take a few minutes, sit down with your officers and figure out what to change to make sure it doesn't happen again.

This webpage can help you visualize your tactics if you prefer

Distributing loot
Every guild has their own loot system. It might be a loot council system, need before greed or a simple DKP system.

I've personally experienced all of the system, and can say that every system have their pros and cons

Loot Council
Pros

• Loot based on performance and attendance
• Loot is being given to the deserving

Cons

• Corruptable

It may seem like a fairly good system, and it is. Though it's very very very hard to find the delicate balance between if the loot is being distributed professionally or personally. You may have had an argue with one of the officer which might reflect on the outcome when though it shouldn't.

Need before greed
Pros

• No personal feelings involved
• No flame from the ones loosing the rolls

Cons

• Completely random

This system relies completely on RNG, which some would call fair, but can cause internal conflicts if certain people win a lot of rolls and some win none, and the gearing gets out of balance. The raid leader and the officers can ask the winner to give it to someone else, but then what's the point of the system. Overall a bad system to use.

DKP
Pros

• Loot based on attendance
• Posibility to offer more loot in form of more DKP to the players who stuck through progress
• Easy to track loot

Cons

• Trials have a very hard time obtaining gear when they are accepted, as everyone else have tons of dkp and they have none

Overall a very fair system, though requires a lot of work from the officer team, as there's a lot to keep track of. Trials will have a hard time getting loot, but then again, trials shouldn't expect loot when they join a new guild.

Conclution
Always be aware of your raid composition. 25 can be relentless, where as 10 man can be more forgiving. Try to get all your raid buffs on 25 man, focus mainly on melee or casters for 10 man, as you can't get all your buffs anyways.

Make sure the raid have a decent idea of what is going to happen, and have your cooldowns planned out before you pull the boss.

Try to watch what everyone is doing, as it'll make the analysis of what went wrong way easier and faster afterwards.

Keep ventrilo / teamspeak clear during combat.

Analyse what went wrong every time you wipe and make sure to prevent it from happening again if it can be avoided.

There is no "correct" loot system. It's all based on personal preferences and should therefore be something the officers decide as a group.

I hope this helped some of you out there. The guide is very shallow, simply because there's so much to being a raid leader.

Enjoy