Friday, June 27, 2008

Leadership

Last night was the first night I got to fulfill my new role as healing lead because the regular healing lead wasn't online. I learned a lot last night and have a better understanding of what I need to do, what to watch for, and when I need to step up to take charge.

I don't have the mental coherency right now to go in-depth, but let me sketch out various events and my thoughts on them.

Inviting healers to a raid: Luckily, not too difficult in our case. We have pretty much the exact number of healers we need online at the start of raid. The unfortunate part is that sometimes those healers are somewhat sub-par. Right now, nothing to be done about it.

Arranging healing assignments: I have Black Temple covered. I can do that. Mount Hyjal on the other hand? Not so much. We one-shot Council tonight with two of our best healers missing and one healer who had never seen the fight before. Then we wiped on Anetheron because there was some terrible issue with the way I assigned healer positioning.

Now I have a better understanding of what needs to be taken into consideration when assigning healers. You have to be willing to take risks (i.e. having an essentially untested priest to solo heal the mage tank) and you have to have some understanding of what your healers can do.

Replacing healers: We had to replace two healers tonight because of disconnecting issues. It's hard to find new healers and it's even harder to step up and tell the other officers what to do (at least for me it is). This is something I will have to work on.

Other things I need to work on:
Paying attention to what the healers are doing during boss fights. I have terrible tunnel vision when I'm healing. I focus on my little green bars, everything else be damned. I need to be more aware of what's going on across the raid to make sure that everyone is doing what needs to be done and that healing is covered if something isn't working right.

Calling out battle rezzes, reincarnates, and bloodlusts. Seriously, I need to be better at this. I really, really need to be better at this. I can't expect anyone else to make those decisions. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to learn those skills.

And I know there are issues that haven't even cropped up yet that I will need to learn to deal with. What happens when I have to ask someone to sit because they are underperforming? There are so many things I need to learn...

Additionally, we seem to have a vacuum of leadership. There are things that need fixing, but I don't feel comfortable enough with my position within the guild to step up and make those suggestions. It's such a difficult place to be in! I learned my lesson about taking on too much responsibility with the Earthwalkers. I don't want to end up as raid leader or de-facto guild leader or any such thing in this guild. I'd rather not have my life revolve around a computer game, despite what my mother seems to think.

No comments: