How to help struggling dps

Wondering what you guys do when you have struggling dps in your guild. I’ve been playing for quite a while and while not the best, I can generally hold my own on whichever class I play (tank or healer generally). We’re currently barely clearing Rag weekly, but struggling to do so many weeks. A large part of this is that we’re short on members. On a good week, we’ll bring 25 people and pug a few more. Of those 25 people, we have a good 5-7 of our dps that are very far behind. As an example, we’ve got a lock that’s routinely running between 60 and 70 dps. This guy has been 60 for a couple months. The issue is not gear related, it’s player related. He’s not likely to receive feedback too well either based on his personality.

Trouble is, I’ve never played a lock at 60, nor have i dug into how they’re SUPPOSED to work. Our guild leader has explicitly stated that he does not want to “tell people how to play their class”, but there’s got to be a happy middle ground for situations like this.

Before you say to just find another guild, being in a guild like this has its benefits, namely that it fits my very tight schedule for raiding (3 kids and a full time job…). So I’m not looking to go elsewhere and would honestly stick it out here and try and help people improve. But we have a LOT of room for improvement, you can see some low hanging fruit on the logs, and we’re honestly at the point of losing some of our better raiders (understandably). In fact it’s already happening with many of them taking mains to other guilds’ raids.

Any tips on how to approach someone that’s this low on meters (I wouldn’t expect just wanding for the entire fight to be much worse than he’s doing)?

this guy doesnt sound like a member you want to have.

on retail, i’d agree because the rotations have nuance and whatever. but if your warlock literally just pressed shadow bolt, and nothing more, he would do way more dps. you don’t need to put in hundreds of hours onto a class in order to tell someone how to play.

6 Likes

Some people just aren’t going to be receptive to even the most basic criticism. A 60 warlock doing that level of dps is pretty atrocious. A level 55 in quest greens just spamming shadowbolt would do more dps than that. And yes, I am absolutely recommending replacing him with a level 55 if his attitude is that bad.

His job is literally maintaining CoE or CoR or CoS and using shadowbolt.

Check his spec. If you can’t inspect his spec, then something is wrong because he is missing addons.
Check his logs. If you can’t inspect his logs, then you aren’t running them and that’s a problem.
Check his hit rating.

If he is hit capped with the right spec, he is afking during your fights and you’ll find it in the logs.

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I spent about 5 minutes looking at his logs a bit a couple days ago.

He’s using corruption, drain life, siphon life. His highest uptime on any of them was 55%. Not a single shadowbolt cast.

To be clear, we have 4 or 5 other dps in the same boat. I out dps’d them on a levelling spec’d feral druid at lvl 58 in ZG.

To be blunt, what are your and your guild’s goals for classic at this point? Are you currently clearing BWL as well?

I mean yeah, you can clear MC with 25 people with a half of them parsing gray, but it sounds like you probably want something more than just doing that and ZG/AQ20, especially if your better players are taking their mains out of the guild to find better raiding experiences.

You basically really need to talk to the guys who aren’t playing effectively and figure out if they’re willing to try to improve their damage output, and then go on a recruiting binge to prop up numbers if you want to get to talking about BWL/AQ/Naxx.

A ton of guilds are dealing with players quitting post-coronavirus lockdown.

My guild has had to replace like a half of our main raid and alt raid over the past 2 months due to people going back to work or feeling burned out…

It sounds like your main issue is numbers; recruit pugs that run with you constantly and try to fill up to 35-40 on your MC even if you’re letting some gear leave the guild. Honestly, recruiting more people is more important for you than trying to fix problems with worse players.

It’s a lot easier to do that when you have 35+ consistent raiders. Once you have the numbers, it’s easier to force people to play better if they’re not pulling their weight.

So, here’s an idea. Take the top 20 of your guild, run half guild runs of AQ20 and ZG. Recruit from the pugs the top 2-3 per run. After a few weeks, you’ll have a new core. Bench people who refuse to improve because they’re just draining everyone else’s repair bills and time.

2 Likes

Probably a good idea to assign “Class leaders” whom have proven themselves to be reliable and seem to have a decent knowledge of their class and how to play it properly with your guild. These class leaders would have the responsibility of monitoring other members of the class and providing assistance and criticism when necessary.

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Well, once you hit the raiding endgame (at least in Vanilla/Classic), all but a select handful of specs across all classes become certified meme specs in that play environment, and then that is compounded by garbage gear itemization for quite a few classes.

I think the issue stems from a guild leader who doesn’t WANT to tell people how to play their class. But he’s got a solid core of 10-15 people who know what they’re doing and are very quickly growing tired of the clown and circus act that has become our raid nights. It really says something when a lot of your officers are running on alts because their mains got locked with another guild.

That’s a joke I do more than that in healing spec.

2 Likes

I am going to bring this up for discussion with our officers. Our guild leader has stated that he wants to move into BWL and AQ40, and also stated that he wants everyone to be able to play how they want. i need to better understand the last part of that statement. There’s a big difference between not bringing shadow priests to raid and being ok with the shadow priests you bring to raid not using shadowform to dps (not a real example, but pretty comparable to that lock from what I can tell). I’m not sure he understands that.

Also, the recruiting is a good point and one that we haven’t been active enough with. The people are fun, which is what keeps most of us around, but many of them also don’t seem to have a clue what they’re doing. That makes things rough…

Literally just press Shadowbolt. How are you bad at dpsing in Classic?

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Yeah, I’ve dealt with a lot of these issues (even though I’m not GM of my guild, I’ve seen many people come and go since we started raiding in October).

Basically, the way we’ve learned to deal with this is to fill our alt raid with pugs (usually 10-15 outsiders) and have raiding schedules on disc so that pugs can regularly sign up (that’s how you get people comfortable with joining you).

And even if we don’t “need” 35-40 for MC in the alt raid, we do like to fill it up because that’s how we recruit new players and eventually bring them into the main raid if our main raid loses people.

I don’t mean this as a criticism, but nobody should be running MC with 25 people if they’re struggling to finish it at this point. If you’re running MC with 25 people, it should be a crisp operation that bulldozes it because you’re overgeared and everyone performs at a high level. If you’re not in that situation, then you should change it up:

That means you need more people so you can clear MC faster (and clear BWL) and bring pugs in that will show up consistently and maybe even join your guild if they get comfortable with you.

It’s fine for people to play how they want (i.e. whatever class/spec they want as long as the raid comp is balanced), but ultimately nobody should be struggling with MC at this point because it’s just a numbers game.

And once you start adding players regularly, it will be easier to work on the ones who are lagging behind, and it will be much easier to get through BWL and beyond without losing raiders to other guilds.

70dps isnt “playing your character wrong”. This is just pure laziness. That player just wants to half afk and get loot which should be viewed as disrespectful when other members are buying consumes and doing their best to make the run as quick and smooth as possible.

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Guild leader here.

You’re in a rough spot. On the one hand, you don’t want to lose anyone, good, bad, or ugly, because warm bodies are better than no bodies when it comes to Classic raids. However, the picture you’re painting is one that will ultimately lead your guild to complete failure.

To get someone to play his class better, you can respectfully talk to him in Discord and ask how long he’s played the warlock, strike up a dialog, and suggest he watch a video or two on YouTube about the best, most efficient rotation for his class. 50-60dps is pretty abysmal.

Having 25 members at a raid is also an issue. Solution: open your MC to PuGs. This serves a few purposes.

  1. Most PUG raiders sound to me like they’ll be better than your average guildie (no offense, of course, you’re super casual).
  2. Getting people in there will possibly end up with the ability to recruit up to 40.
  3. Seeing other people do so well might motivate your guys to step up.
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Some good responses here. I’ve got some thinking to do to see how I want to approach the guild here. I know there are a lot of people (particularly the ones pulling most of the weight) who aren’t happy with the way the raids are going and want more. Personally I see 2 things that need to happen to get us further:

  1. Increase the number of active raiders we have.
  2. Make sure everyone we have is playing to the best of their ability.

Keep in mind that you can use warcraftlogs to see who is using consumes, what spells they are casting, where they are standing during an encounter. All of these things can be researched before hand so when they say “It’s cause I dont have good gear”, you can say something like " well i see you had 0 consumes or world buffs, also during the Magmadar fight I see that you only casted a total of 6 shadow bolts throughout the whole encounter and I think these are move of an issue than your gear" etc…

A lock using corruption, drain life and siphon life is using the same rotation he leveled with. Sounds like he hasn’t really raided before, or made the change into a raiding rotation.

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That’s part of what I want to know from the rest of the guild. I’m not going to put in the time to pour through his logs if they’re going to tell me I can’t provide him with the feedback. It took 3 minutes to figure out it’s at the very least partially a player issue. He went through the entirety of MC and cast a total of 10 shadowbolts…