A new raid tier of WoW opened, and this week is week 0, the normal/heroic week. And now I think, when I had mentioned I probably spent 8 hours preparing for Kil’jaeden that first week of the Tomb of Sargeras raid, it may have been an understatement.

Yesterday I was given to understand that the first 6 out of 8 bosses of the current raid, called Eternal Palace, were easy, but the last two were significantly harder. So as soon as I finished work, at 5 pm last night, I went to look into them, and to look into the work Syzygy had put into them after their first raid night (they had killed the first 6 easy bosses, and were working on the 7th, the first hard boss).

I looked into boss 7 and boss 8. I rewatched the video of what Syzygy did, I watched video guides for both bosses, read carefully through written guides, making sure I understood every nuance of every mechanic (each boss probably had 15 to 30 mechanics across different phases). Then I went to watch videos of guilds that had already killed it this week, probably watching about 3 videos per boss, and thinking of the pros and cons of the various different strategies I saw in each video. Then I went to look at logs of the top 10 guilds for each fight, and really dug into the details of how they dealt with the especially difficult mechanics or times (something I had identified by this time). Digging into the logs included making queries to understand what was done at what time, and figuring out how well it worked: at this moment they sent how many people into which portal? Did they damage these extra mobs or did they ignore them? When did they start ignoring them? Which healer used which healing cooldown at what time and why did they choose to do so then? Where were they positioned at what time and why? Stuff like that.

When I looked up it was almost 5 am. I had forgotten to eat, forgotten even to feed quark and pico O.o. Forgotten to exercise. I spent 12 hours studying just two heroic bosses. That’s the sort of thing raid leaders do. And on top of that we spend time practicing in raids, I think this week shandare spent maybe 5 hours in pugs of the last boss just testing his weakauras.

This is the amount of effort a raid leader needs to put in for a decent raid, to kill things quickly. When raid leaders don’t do this, your rank can go from top 300 in the world to maybe 8000. When ranks drop people leave, and it’s harder to find more recruits. Everything is made much more difficult. I don’t know if people understand this. When raiders feel like they’re doing the guild a huge favor just by showing up for raid regularly and expecting to get what they want or have things done the way they want, it creates such a feeling of imbalance and dissonance in the mind of the raid leader. Things like this is what leads to raid leaders getting frustrated, burning out. I’ve seen it happen to so many raid leaders.

A similar thing happens to guild masters, since they are the ones who put in hours and hours of dealing with any random guild issues. I’ve heard about people having psychological problems watching all the negative trolly shit on the internet, in order to provide a filter for the general public. Guild masters go through a similar thing to a smaller degree. They are constantly taxed by the need to deal with any negativity arising from people who get frustrated (including the raid leader if the raid leader and guild master are different people), to deal with all the unhappiness and conflict that can arise from putting 25 adults together for hours a week and forcing them into teamwork.

I think when I originally started this blog, this is the whole reason I didn’t make it private. I felt, maybe some day someone who isn’t in a leadership position will read what I write, and it will help them be a bit more considerate of their leader. Maybe it will help them empathize with what the leader needs to go through. And maybe some leader out there who is burning themselves out for the benefit of their team will get some sort of relief, or be given a bit more understanding and support. And maybe this will give them the type of encouragement I had so little of but needed so badly before: the encouragement to persevere and succeed.