Ok… look. I’m forced to admit every year that I’m getting older and older. No… I’m not some old fogey talking about the good old days and pulling out my cane to bang on the ground…. shake it at you young wiper snappers and mourn the changes. Its funny, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found that my memory gets less reliable.
Its not that I can’t remember stuff, but as you get older your brain gets filled up with lots of other concerns… what are the kids doing? Do we have practiced today or tomorrow? What was dinner tonight? What adjustments do I need to make to my 401k? Ok when did I need to submit that form so I can get some vacation time off? Wait… oh god they got me another project at work…. sigh… that will be another 50 hour work week….
We kind of keep filling up the spare spaces to the point that its harder and harder to keep things in memory long enough to cement them. So as a busy father of three, I have resorted to……
Cheat Sheets
When you’re a busy raid leader probably one of the best things you can do is create quick hit sheets that you can use to quickly reference on any given boss fights. This can be digital, pen and paper, hell you can write it on a dry erase board if you like. The point is to keep something close at hand that you can reference. The point is not to have every fine detail of the fight…. if you were going to do that, you’d have your favorite boss strategy page open on your second monitor.
For now I assume you aren’t well enough off to have a second monitor up. Generally I hate having to swap out to some digital source. I personally have printed sheets of paper (I know… how last century….) on my desk in a 3 ring binder. Its quick and easy to just grab the binder for the raid I’m running. If its a raid I don’t run very often I always have a quick reference guide at my fingertips to pull off and refresh myself.
Just the Facts Ma’am
The one key point that I want to make is that the cheat sheet you create needs to have the facts you need to get your job done. If you regularly need to let your raid know about the fine details of where to go and where to stand, then yes… include a diagram, whatever you need to refresh yourself on what you need to say.
If it helps for you to write out a script to say, then by all means, do it. Just make sure you stick to the fight at hand and don’t confuse your people with irrelevant details.
Number 1 With a Bullet
One rule I try to stick by is to use minimal paragraphs and stick to bullet pointed lists. This serves two purposes. First it forces me to think of things as stripped down as possible. In other words if I can’t say it in a sentence, then I need to break it down more. Second it keeps me from relying on reading a TON during a raid. The number one killer I feel for raids is wasting 30 minutes waiting on your raid leader to read up on a fight or regurgitate what’s written on Wowwiki.com or some other boss strategy.
Break it on Down
Here are the key points I try to use when breaking down my cheat sheets
- Key Boss Abilities
- Phase Break Down
- General Strategy
- Other Notes/special strategies
Its just another small thing you can do to keep yourself organized for your raids. If look at the top bar, I’ve added a new link at the top for my Cheat Sheets. As I convert them to the web I’ll start adding them in there. Enjoy folks.
Tags: Boss Strategy, Cheat Sheet, Raid Leading
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Just a personal preference, but I prefer to organize my notes by phase.
So each of your other bullet points are mearly subsects of each phase. It seems that each phase in Ulduar boss fights has its own unique strategy/abilities/positioning.
I organize it by phase if its relevant for the fight. For instance for a fight like Razorscale I have it organized by phase, but I only list the abilities once.. the reason being is that he generally still uses the exact same abilities in the other phases. When I get to Mimiron, I expect I’ll have lots of specific phase notes given that each phase is unique.
Back in the Molten Core days, I’d always thought that It’d be a good idea to Garageband the boss descriptions, and play them before a fight. Kinda like a movie trailer. That way, you get all the information in and don’t forget anything, and you can also make it entertaining. Of course, something like this only makes sense on 25 mans, and only if people are new or don’t know the fight. We rarely do more than assign tanks, healers, and groups these days.
Fights like Freya, Thorim, & Mimiron definatley need very specific plans for each individual person (particularily in 10 man) I have found that I have my notes sheet and I just write down who did what task the previous week (for the first few weeks) then I can easily make adjustments the following week to accomodate personell changes.
Funny you blog on this, I just wrote on a similar topic because I found wowraid’s Naxx guide has good dot-points you could use in a cheat-sheet.
Gravity´s last blog ..Naxx strat guide: hidden gem on wowraid