Going In Blind: Raiding Brand New Content

Last night my guild tried out the new Vault of Archavon boss on 25 man for as long as we could before the next Battle for Wintergrasp began.  It was a bumpy ride.  Hardly any of our addons were working, there were disconnections, and I think most of us had a big case of the nerves because of the big changes to our classes.  Of course, none of these problems held a candle to the biggie… we had no idea what to expect.  There were no slick guides or comprehensive videos out there for this fella.  We did find some scraps of info on him, but we couldn’t even count on them being current, since changes from the PTR to live servers are common.  This got me to thinking.  What are the best things a guild can do to be successful “raiding blind”?

Unless you want to sit back for a bit and wait for others to forge a path before you, you’ll need some strategies for working through content without the knowledge base of others who have gone before you.  Here is some advice I have on how to make the experience more enjoyable, tolerable, and hopefully successful.

1)  Hope for the best, expect the worst.  If you are expecting to walk into a brand new, untested encounter and have no problems, or minor problems, you may have a success or two, but inevitably you are going to run into a boss or a game mechanic that will stump and frustrate you to no end.  When you become frustrated, you lose focus, decreasing your chances for success.  When a boss encounter is causing a wipe fest, do whatever you need to in order to abate your frustration, even if it means walking away from the encounter and saving it for another day.

2)  Stock up.  Progression content always requires more consumables as you learn the fight than farm content.  This goes double for brand new progression content.  You should expect many wipes, which cause lots of down time.  You can reduce that down time if you, and your guild generally, come over-prepared to handle raid damage with bots, rebuffs with reagents, and an overabundance of things like mana and health potions, buff flasks, raid food, etc.

3)  Be a tenacious researcher.  Sometimes you can find scraps of information out there about a boss, even at the very infancy of that boss’s existence in the game, if you are a persistent enough researcher.  This advice assumes that you don’t necessarily want to figure it all out on your own.  Check your usual sources for information, but then go further.  Do creative googling.  Do term searches at big sites like mmo-champion and WOW Insider to see if there might be posts that mention the boss that missed the attention of the googlebots.  Look through the WOW Official forum for the PTR to see if you can pick up clues there.

4) Survey the terrain.  Look very carefully around the boss area.  Examine the room layout for possible advantages or features that might help.  Investigate unusual features.  If a gear wheel pops up when you mouse over something in a boss room, chances are that that item is somehow instrumental in the fight.  Neutral or friendly NPCs might help you or might need your help. 

5)  Watch the boss’s and NPCs’ buffs and debuffs, as well as your own.  Keep an eye on the buffs and debuffs that show up for the boss and yourself.  Make a mental note of what they are, so that even if the attempt is a wipe you can speak up afterwards and have a discussion with your raid mates about what might have caused these buffs/debuffs; what their effects seemed to be; and possible strategies for either a) maximizing their benefit, or b) minimizing their damage.

6) Keep track of environmental changes.  Keep your eye out for changes on the floor (like the black, damage dealing pancakes around Lady B in 4 Horsemen), around your character (like the swirling red that surrounds you on Kel in Naxx or on the Drakes in Sarth), and from above (like the blizzards on Sapph.)  If environmental changes seem to be harming you (which they do the majority of the time), move out of them.  On the other hand, if they seem to be buffing you, let everyone know and try to maximize their benefit on future attempts.  Obvious?  Yes.  Worth a reminder?  Yes, again.

7)  Parse wipes.  If the raid wipes, don’t just go stampeding back to smack your head against the same brick wall without analysis.  Have a look at your combat logs.  Find out what killed you.  Have a little chat about what the mechanics seemed to be that made you take the damage that killed you.  Come up with a strategy for the next try based upon your discussion.

8)  Pay special attention after a boss emote.  Even if you have no idea what a boss emote might mean, it is still a clue that something significant is coming in the fight.  Try to assess what the impact was so that you can either avoid it or use it to your advantage the next time around.

9) Watch the boss’s cast bar.  Sometimes the worst boss abilities can be interrupted or avoided, but only when you see them coming. 

10)  Be flexible.  Try out different strategies as you work on downing a boss, and don’t be afraid to go back to one that seemed to work better than the course you’re on at the moment.

11) Communicate.  Talk to one another in vent.  Suggest strategies.  Speak up if you know why something went wrong.  Bring an extra dose of patience for your raid mates, as this kind of gaming can be frustrating and people (yourself included) may not be at their best after several wipes.

12) Remember your history.  There really are only a limited number of ways that developers can add challenges to a boss fight.  Sometimes they invent something unseen, but the majority of the time boss abilities are new iterations of boss abilities you have seen before.  If a boss has an ability that you recognize from elsewhere, let your raidmates know.  They may remember the fight that you are talking about and adjust more easily than if you just tried to describe what you think the ability’s effects are.

13) Redefine success.  Even if you don’t get a boss down, if you reduce his health more than you did on the last run, if you make it into a new phase, if you carry on the fight longer than before, if you learn one little piece of potentially helpful information, that is a success!  Each small improvement will move you toward the ultimate goal of downing the boss.

14)  Use the tried and true.  A new boss fight is not necessarily the best place to try out a whole new UI configuration, for example.  It is much better if you can be sailing on a tight ship, where spells are accessible to you by muscle memory alone, your information is accessible to you just where it always is, the only thing new is the encounter.

15) Know when to walk away.  Sometimes you just need some time to let the information coming in percolate, some time to think.  If you are hitting an emotional wall, take a break of 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 days.  Come back refreshed, having assessed the encounter in a less stressful environment.

I know that I will be trying to bring all of this advice to my own game in the next couple of weeks.  My guild is not a bleeding edge guild, so I have no doubt that by the time we reach several bosses into Ulduar there will already be the kind of guides posted that actually make boss encounters much more accessible.  In the meantime, however, it is fun to be tackling the unknown.  Best of luck out there!

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