Day Um four?

Today I will be talking about raid leading. Now all guilds will raid at some point or other and there are many different approaches to how guilds do this. Some guilds have 2 or 3 people sharing the responsibility's others have worked as a team for so long that all the team have input, but by far the most common way to raids is to have one person appointed as Raid Leader to direct and help the other raiders thru the fights.
Personally I set a system in place that combines this to a certain point. Within the guild we run we have four raid leaders. for each raid one of these leaders will be appointed to lead the raid and make the final decisions, with other raid leaders having input throughout. each Raid leader... RL for short, will be watching out and looking at how the team is moving. they then feed that info to the one in overall charge for that raid and this helps to build a fuller picture from a fight.
However raid leading doesn't just start when invites go out. A good raid leading team will meet up in some way, be it on a voice server or just in a party in game, before the raid is due to start and will go through the available sign ups and choose the best balanced team to take that day. for our guild it tends to be anything up to an hour before raid invites go out as this gives us time to review the fights we will be doing and what team is best to take into them. It also helps to deal with late cancellations and enables us to share info from the previous raids if need be.
Now I'm sure that you will have seen many posts on how hard being a RL can be. Well tbh don't just sweep them under the carpet as it is a very stressful job. The thing is that you are trying to get up to 24 other people to move and interact as seamlessly as possible, unfortunately numerous things get in the way of this, be it lag, Dc's, misinterpretation and just plain bad look. The ideal thing at these points is to keep calm if as a raid leader you stress then you will transmit that to your raiders. Don't get me wrong I am not the calmest dood in town and often get that stressed with a fight that I'm just relived I have vent set to push to talk. However there will be times that the RL boils over and takes his (or her) frustration out on the raid. This is the time for all other members to remember that these outbursts are not personal. To be perfectly frank if you start to get upset with your RL for shouting at you, remember they are not shouting at you, they are shouting at a few pixels on a PC screen. When you look at it that way it becomes quite laughable.
However the raid again do's not finish at raid end for RL's. Many guilds run some kind of DKP. (dragon kill points) I will explain this system in a later post, but basically for the moment think of dkp as money that is earned that then gets spent on items that drop from the boss's. After the raid many RL's are also responsible for keeping a record of dkp and what was earned and spent within that raid. I can still remember when that job used to take up to an hour after the raid had finished to complete. Thankfully we have got an officer that is quite happy to do this job instead of the RL's and the website we use has a built in addon to help deal with this, cutting a long job down to about ten min. however if any urgent issues, changes in strategy needs to be discussed then the RL's will still be on and talking about them.
The best advice for any budding RL's out there is, keep your cool, share the load and be prepared with knowledge of most in game class's and fight strategy's, and above all have fun.
Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my ravings and ill be back soon with a DKP post.