Use that Motivation-Booster
A raid’s motivation most of the time is a fragile thing that may rise or drop at any time. Usually it’s based on how encounters go, and thus on progression raids can be a real problem some times. But there’s always a booster, and nothing gets your raid up and running as well as a clean, smooth kill.
We are working our way through Ulduar (10) these days, currently the keepers are where we stand. Hodir is pretty much farm after three consecutive kills, but that’s as far as we got. We had two tries on Freya, but our time is limited (3-4h, 1 night a week), so as we clear out all the other stuff time is dripping, and usually for the last 20 minutes we’ll not start a new boss.
Last week we wanted to give it a more straightforward shot: Skip all the optional bosses and bang our heads against Freya. The plan was a focused speed-clear of the required stuff and then working on Freya for five intense tries. Needless to say, things didn’t go so smoothly.
We had deaths on every boss fight. We wiped on Kologarn (which, after the last patch, is quite embarassing) and we wiped on Auriaya twice. Motivation was down to a knee-level and so we decided to not start Freya-attempts, but instead go back and kill the easy bosses.
Razorscale and Ignis were the usual one-shots, but – quite frankly – not without deaths. Which is annoying and tells a lot about the mood that started spreading. It wasn’t for particular faults or a bad attitude, it just wasn’t a “good night”, some people were in for the first time at all, some for the first time with us (we’ve had the luck to pick up two more healers lately).
But then things changed.
We proceeded to the iron council which, in my opinion, is a quite intense fight. Not so much for particular difficulty, but it’s an endurance-test on all terms. Until the first boss is down healing and dispelling is absolutely crucial, positioning is an issue and it’s a race against time. I figured that, regarding how the evenening had been going, we would need some attempts, probably not even making it eventually.
But the kill was clean.
We had our fury warrior die on the very last arcane explosion after he lived through the two others (which also hit him, and him alone, all jokes on him, haha), but other than that the execution of the fight was flawless.
With that kill in our heads we went on to Hodir. There were only 10 minutes left on the planned schedule, but using ready-checks we did 4 tries until Hodir went down, with no one wanting to quit. Motivation skyrocketed. Mood was good. People started to fool around again.
What to take away from that
If you happen to work on a particular boss, there are skippable encounters on the way and you want your raid to be psyched, I suggest you clear the way and then kill other bosses until you get that flawless kill. Use the easy encounters, it really doesn’t matter, but get people into a solid and constructive mood.