Striking While the Iron is Hot

Ignis the Furnace Master is one of the harder bosses in Ulduar, the current raid tier available in Wrath of the Lich King. A couple of things make this fight tricky. If you’d like to see a detailed guide on all his abilities, the wowhead article does a great job of listing everything. Without getting into too much of the finer details, there are a lot of moving parts in this fight and a lot of raid damage. One beautiful thing about gaming is that challenges are tuned specifically with players in mind, meaning challenges can vary from difficult to easy depending on players’ approaches, attitudes, and experiences.

As my casual guild progresses along, many of our lower level players have hit the end game and are beginning to enjoy raiding content. We brought a few players into their very first raids this week and we still have to convince a lot of members that raiding is approachable for them. It takes preparation and patience to help our players along, and luckily the past few months I have slowly been gathering knowledge and experience to help us overcome these challenges.

One thing I have learned from leading many groups is how to handle the momentum of a group or how to plan ahead. For many raid leaders, it is difficult to not only assess what is going on or what is going wrong in a particular fight, it’s another level to be able to predict which parts are susceptible to failure. As leaders become more experienced with fights, it’s possible to fall into a comforting fallacy that all fights have similar experiences and outcomes. This is deceiving because many leaders lack the opportunity or awareness to appreciate different players and compositions. What happens if the few strong links that were holding things together suddenly disappear? There are additional skills like recruiting and roster management that can alleviate the problem of encounter variance. It nonetheless requires effort either inside or outside of the raid to produce reliable outcomes.

For many leaders, learning one particular strategy, building a roster around it, and sticking to that plan is their best chance for survival. One reason is because it is easier to be selective than it is to compensate for player inexperience or output. Many players do not like being given feedback nor do many like to be told what to do.

Whenever I lead, I tend to be a lot less selective and a lot more encouraging of players of all skill levels. This immediately alienates elite players who subscribe for a particular experience, one that is swift and painless. I myself enjoy swift and effortless runs as well, but get rather disheartened by turning people away. There are times where I have to remind myself that all business are not public services and not everyone is your target customer. Still, I try to be as welcoming as I can. This has led to circumstances where I’ve had to have difficult conversations or cuts and times where I’ve lost stronger members who lost their patience.

My casual guild encounters Ignis last night. Half of the raid is well experienced in this fight, the other needs to learn. After three failures, I hear clamors that we should table this boss and see more of the instance. I stand firm. “Everyone here is gaining experience and making the correct adjustments. We are on track for a kill. We must strike while the iron is hot. The time is now.” We engage for our fourth attempt and everyone survives. We down the boss.

I was confident in our ability to make progress. I can’t say I was 100% certain the fight was an inevitable victory. But what I can say with certainty is that the progress and momentum we had at the moment would be incredibly difficult to replicate the following or a different night. Teaching players and having them coordinate with each other takes not only instructions but first hand experience. I knew that to reestablish and rebuild what we had in that moment would be much more costly than fighting on. “Persist,” I said. And the raid did.