Cock Blocking

I recently experienced the trauma of "cock blocking"

But what is it? In one sentence, cock blocking is where for some inexplicable reason your raid team keeps dying to a boss and you can't figure out why. Tensions rise, officer bitch in officer channel, raiders lose motivation and guild morale PLUMMETS. Then, you figure it out and the fight is a piece of cake!

Longer version.
We recently cock blocked on Sarth 3D. Our strat was right, but for some reason we simply kept dying at the third drake. The results on our guild culture were startling.

Officers noticed who was our strong and weak members and why. Weak members were ones that we noticed DiedInAFire more often, or were "unavailable" to come along. But they didn't always notice when people improved, and only noticed the failures. Officers were complaining in officer channel about what we were doing wrong, what was wrong with the strat, that the healers were failing, or the melee were failing, or the tanks were not tanky enough or the wrong tanks were available, that we shouldnt be bashing our heads against this without the "optimal" team. In all, it got very negative. How do you combat officer negativity? You keep the discussions impersonal. Ensure that no officers take offense at comments aimed at their team. Keep the strat conversations constructive, stop the whining and ask questions about how to improve. Take officers to task for simply saying "We are failing" yes we are all well aware of that, please say what is failing and offer a way to fix it.

Above all - ensure that even if the officers are disagreeing in officer channels that TOGETHER they present a united face to the guild. That the officers are seen to support one and other no matter what. Failure to do this will result in the guild members fracturing and morale plummet even more as their leadership isn't doing their job.

Guild members will feel that this is all for nothing. That they are wasting their time and money. There are simple ways to combat this. One we used was putting down a fish feast after a Good Attempt to save personal expenditure. Another one was the GBank sending out gold for repair money after a Good wipefest night.

Something we also did was not reward bad raiding. An issue with the way content is structured for "hard modes" is that you can always bring the notch down a level and kill the boss. We stopped doing this. You want Phat Lewtz? you need to bring your game face because we are not doing this with 2 drakes this week - only 3.

There is also a curve of ability on a particular raid night. There is a warm up as people get back into remembering how to do a progression boss. That might take 1 or 2 attempts. Then you will notice a steep improvement over the course of the next 5 or more attempts until there is a peak. On that peak morale is high, people are seeing the end in sight, they are working hard and trying their best. Then BAM someone does something stupid and the momentum is gone. This will become evident after 1 or 2 attempts. Identify this point and stop raiding for the night before it destroys your progression.

Also, get raid analysis going. WowWebStats and WowMetersOnline are both excellent sites to see who is doing what. Both offer differing statistics and I know I try to use both.

If you can keep up the momentum, eventually you will work out the piece of the strat you are missing and all of a sudden everything will fall into place and the fight will be easy! You will wonder why on earth you had such an issue with it for so long and the cheering on Vent will be deafening. Everyone in the guild will siddenly be on a high and proud to be a member of your guild!

That makes it all worth it, if you ask me.