The raid leader matters

Considering my recent bitching about the one day–horror of horrors–I had to run a raid, I somewhat enjoyed the position I found myself in this weekend is a particularly gruesome Naxx25 run. It was late and I was pretty sloshed, and in hindsight the whole episode was an interesting case study on the following obvious point: a leader makes or breaks a raid.

Not to disparage the person leading the motley crew that assembled to run this outdated raid tier (so outdated that the healers were three Ulduar25-geared people with a fourth occasionally subbing in when the group had to split up), but he was in over his head.

A little less than half of the raiders were pugged, the rest being myself, the aforementioned three super healers, and then a bunch of undergeared folks. For reasons I’m not entirely sure we started with Military and then when that was cleared (three hours later!) we went to Construct.

Actually, I think Construct was my fault. It’s hazy, but I’m pretty sure I was asked which wing to do next and I just repeated whichever wing I was standing in front of.

An amusing moment: during 4HM I was tanking Thane who we burned down (dps was surprisingly good) and everyone ran over to Baron to kill that too. The Baron tank typed in /raid for me to taunt it off him and I kind of spaced out/just stood there (see earlier, re: my being sloshed) and didn’t notice until the Baron tank died. Eek. Got a nice “Rhidach wtf” for that one, too.

To bring it back to my original point: the raid leader wasn’t keeping a tight enough leash on the 24 of us. It took us (I repeat) 3 hours to clear Military, mostly due to time being spent waiting for someone to go afk, or for loot to be passed out, or stupid wipes because someone ran ahead and pulled when no one was ready. These were all issues that could have been ameliorated with some heel-clicking discipline.

I wish more of the normal 25man Ulduar crew could have been stuck in that slow motion hell. Might make them appreciate the relative efficiency of our raids a little more.

(Oh, obvious post script: no, we never finished. 6 hours later and we stalled on–of course–Thaddius. Never did Spider or Plague wings.)