Raid Start Checklist to Success! (or at least to increase the odds of success)

Where is the Raid Leader? (ie, playing follow the leader)

Target Mark yourself with an icon so all of the creeps can see you. It's far easier for everyone to keep up with you and not range ahead if it's obvious where you are.

Raid Organization

There are several thoughts to raid organization and here's a few combinations

  • Balanced groups:  Maintain an even distribution of of classes in each group.  A WL, reaver, BA, weaver, defiler, warg all in a single group can provide a lot of skills to that particular group as well as good sustainability.  Balancing the melee off with ranged classes lets the healers concentrate only on a few creeps and greatly eases their burden.  Additionally it allows the groups to be moved individually as complete teams to perform flanks or rearguard duties.  The problem with this is that if the creeps within that warband do not stay near the healers, they are out of range for support.
  • Range type groups:  This formation puts all the ranged with weaker (lower ranked) healers who can sit in the back and puts the best healers with the melee heavy warbands.  This is typically done when there is a R3 or lower WL or green/blue defilers and they simply cannot keep up with the damage taken by melee classes.  This also allows the melee group WL's to keep closer to the front line to provide aura of command and allows the ranged to back up while getting proper healing support.  The disadvantage is that the melee group healers tend to get very overloaded with AoE damage if present.

Rezzing

The Raid Leader or an experianced Warleader should be the one in charge of calling out which Warleader is rezzing and when.  Maximize the AoE rez by waiting for at least 4 creeps to be dead before having someone fire it off.  Carefully rotate the rezzes fired so you have one available at all times.

Target Assists

Target Assist is both a boon and a curse. Versus freeps and FM/CG's, it'll be extremely helpful in focus firing. So for these situations first, tell everyone how turn on raid assist targetting. Put experianced creeps on your raid assist targets (right click on their name, Raid, Add Raid Assistant Target). There are two schools of thought on raid assists, either single or multiple assists

  • Single Assist - There is very minimal confusion on who is being focus fired on. The disadvantage is that there is a 'blinding' of other possible targets due to everyone looking at one target. Additionally, when the target assist dies or has to run back, there is some confusion.
  • Multiple Assists - Multiple assists lead to redundancy for when a target assist dies/runs back. Additionally situational awareness increases if the target assists are looking for different targets. The raid can then suppress multiple targets or concentrate on the weakest of them immediately. The disadvantage is that there is confusion on who should be forwarded through, but in general, if you're going off of a target assist, you're not doing wrong. Also useful is to break the raid into fire teams, each given a target assist. This is highly useful when going against a heal heavy freep raid where focussing on one target is useless. Suppressing multiple healers at the same time can be more effective in these situations. Fire teams who have killed their targets can assist other teams.
    • For the curse side of target assist is that too many people use it on trash NPCs. It is VERY important to spread the aggro out of keep NPCs otherwise your warleaders will end up very dead from healing aggro. It's no good if everyone is on a sergeant when the other 6 coldfells hunters are shooting at the warleaders killing them off. Make sure your creeps know to NOT focus fire on trash NPCs.

Finally, unless you are a master multitasker, never set yourself as a raid targetter. You must be able to tab through targets and examine what is going on without people shooting through you. Leave that job to someone else, you have enough on your plate.

Targetting between NPCs and Freeps

There will be many times in keeps where you are fighting both NPCs and Freeps where the Freeps can't just overwhelm you but rather pester. In general, they are rather timid when outnumbered significantly and will hold their distance behind NPCs. One useful strategy here which is made upfront whenever expecting freep resistance is that melee keep killing NPCs by the raid, all ranged creeps will shoot at freeps focus firing through the ranged target assists to keep them off of the raid, they are NOT cleared to run forward and chase as this will inevitably bring more NPCs to the raid. This generally is good enough to force the Freeps to keep their distance, take a few potshots and duck behind a wall to recover.

Communication

Have everyone turn on voice if it is being used, otherwise have them unclick Standard on the filter of their main chat screen so that loot rolls don't scroll off important commands.