Raid leading and combat roles

[savagejohn]

Hello! I'm an officer in a progression minded guild, who currently plays a hybrid ranged dps, but is considering a reroll in 5.4 to a melee class. I'm wondering what the community here thinks about the best roles for leading raids. Personally, one thing that bothers me a bit about making this switch it that it might be difficult to see what's going on and effectively lead from a melee dps role. I did it long ago in vanilla, but things were a lot simpler back then!

How many of you have raid leaders who play melee dps? Tanks? Healers? Ranged? Any general opinions on what role is best for a raid leader, and how much it actually matters, are welcome. I'm just interested in the thoughts of the community here as I am trying to decide what I'm going to play in 5.4.

[Nobleshield]

I almost always see raid leaders who are tanks; speaking as someone taking over the raid leader role for Siege of Orgrimmar and is a tank, I'm more than a little concerned about that because the tank normally doesn't get the full picture of what goes on (even with camera at max distance), so I'm not sure how hard it's going to be to call things out like people swapping to an add that I don't see at first, or stacking for an ability that occurs off my viewport.

It almost seems to me that a healer or a ranged DPS would be better at being RL since they're usually in a position where they can see a bit of everything going on compared to tanks or melee, but it's most frequently a tank (and the "main tank" if you still use that nomenclature) that's the RL.

[Thiron]

I think it's personal.
I play all roles, and for me - Tanking and Ranged are roles when I can lead, but Healing and Melee are troublesome. Even though tanking/melee and healing/ranged are supposed to be closer, for me it's separated other way.

[Orion Antares]

A ranged player will always have a better overview of the field than someone in melee. If you're sitting in melee, about the best you can do is call out timers and things that happen in melee. Make someone out at range responsible for calling out any range movement that isn't on a timer.

[kilj]

I raid lead as a rogue, its not hard. I dont need to be tunnel visioning to do good dps and keep a good perspective of whats going on around me.

[Tsuna]

When I raid lead on Com rogue my dps suffers significantly when I'm focused on making calls, of course the reverse is also true. When I'm on holy paladin I tend to have much more control and comprehension of my surroundings but my command wavers during crisis levels of raid damage or when people make life ending mistakes. On my Prot Warrior I suffered the least loss in mechanical skill while leading but am often limited by being forced to stare at a boss' legs rather than the position of my fellow raiders, often relying on the eyes of others to make sense of mistakes and adjust our strategy. As an ele shaman my dps instantly turns to rubbish when I'm leading so I had to scrap that plan

Really, it's all a matter of picking your poison, I can't lead for shit and play a caster dps at the same time but find that as a healer I'm pretty flexible. Tanks often have the least demanding priority/rotations of skills and are more free to react to the boss timers. After that it's a matter of micro managing things that require it, I often leave the timers involving raid damage modifiers and position changes to a ranged dps, gimmicks like kicking turtles and tracing lines to someone else, and interrupt calls to our tanks.

[Nairobi]

I've RL'd as a tank, but ended up recently giving up a lot of the "calling" responsibility to our Ele shaman. Ranged position + easy/basic rotation = great awareness of the raid and field.

Tanks are great too, since they usually are familiar with the encounter, phases/swaps, etc, but thier field of view is limited.
Melee has a limited field of view, and are often on "tunnel duty" so this is a less than ideal choice.
Healers CAN call well, but I find that most are a bit more focused on raid frames than boss mods/timers, plus that job is stressful enough.

[SurrealNight]

DPS is the ideal choice of a raid leader IMO and ranged is even better since they are free to move anywhere needed in most fights but not required.

I know as a tank you couldn't pay me to RL have to many of my own unique concerns and being excluded from many mechanics makes it hard to relate. I never have no never will see the pink dino on Horridon =P

[Deleted]

Would agree with what has already been posted; as a tank I could not RL, so passed on to the other members of our guild.

We had a healer lead the 10 man group and a tank lead 25 man BUT the ranged dps call the abilities that were not around the boss.

It always seemed to help when a ranged was calling everything but we always let the tanks call the tank swap and for healer cd's. So I guess we had a RL but each person helped them out as and when.

[saucywench]

We actually had 3 ppl responsible for rl roles in our 25man - 1 for heals 1 for dps 1 for tanks - sounds complicated but it was effective, during fights the 3 leads called out commands/feedback to groups

[Deleted]

From past experience, tanks usually make the best raid leaders - it's their primary job to look at what abilities are incoming (so DBM/Bigwigs watching) and to use cooldowns for those incoming attacks. They're usually the best to call for taunt switches as Blizz can't seem to make many encounters require more than one tank without using the obvious "taunt on X stacks" mechanic.

Having said that, encounters are getting much more complex these days than they have in the past, where it's not all about calling out what DBM is already telling you on the screen. In these cases I've always found ranged DPS to be the best raid leaders - sure their numbers may suffer on the charts, but they're having to look out for where everyone is instead of tunneling their rPPM procs, but at least they have the scope to see the entire area, instead of a boss's crotch and a bunch of bars on their screen.

[Blackmist]

Ranged have a better view. Our RL is a tank, but it's the ranged that are vocal about important events (that aren't simply timers).

[Axelond]

My last guild the RL was range dps(with a tank officer), The guild before that I had a Tank GM as well, The guild I am in now has a tank GM. For top guilds Paragon has a Tank RL and Blood legion have a tank RL and same with Method. I have no idea why but Tank=Leader seems very popular in WoW.

[Orion Antares]

DPS is the ideal choice of a raid leader IMO and ranged is even better since they are free to move anywhere needed in most fights but not required.

I know as a tank you couldn't pay me to RL have to many of my own unique concerns and being excluded from many mechanics makes it hard to relate. I never have no never will see the pink dino on Horridon =P

Heh, you should have progressed it in a 10 man raid then. You'd've seen the pink dino while also trying to keep Horridon from turning you into mush at the end.

[Deleted]

It calls for tanks to do it, but truth be told, I don't like to do it as tank. Tanks live in a paralell world in most encounters: half of the mechanics we face don't affect the rest of the raid, half the mechanics that affect the raid don't affect us. It's harder to see and understand problems with something you don't have to actually deal with, not even see sometimes. Ranged DPS has always been the better suited roll for raid leading.

[Vilvaldi]

We use multiple roles for 'leadership' in our 10 man raids. Myself (tank). handles ready-checks, countdowns for pre-potting and the actual pull and boss positioning. After that we have 2 very knowledgeable and vocal ranged (healer and a dps) handle call outs for add switches, movement etc. Seems to work pretty well. As stated by numerous people above it is sometimes difficult for tanks/melee to see everything going on so it helps to have an extra set of eyes speaking as well.

[clevin]

Um... ranged have 'a better view'?? Melee/tanks... ZOOM OUT. You don't have to stare at boss crotch all the time.

I've not RL as melee since TBC, but I don't think it's so much field of view but what you're paying attention to. If you can notice everything, adds, etc then your role doesn't matter. If you have a hard time noting that Dangerous Add spawned and needs to be kited (or whatever) or your rotation is too involved to make it easy to note tose things, call them out and do your job well, then don't RL as that role.

[Krisshaman]

I think it kinda comes down to class for each person. Certain classes just have a flow to them that can be pretty much predicted, others are more about having to focus on random procs/timers. I've raid led as elemental, restosham, enh sham, prot warrior, and BrM, each of them have varying degrees of buttons to pay attention to and timers/procs to activate. @OP, if you get fully into the swing of dpsing in melee off of memory, it becomes alot easier to raid lead because u dont have to pay attention that much to yourself and can focus on other things, just have to beware stutter step bosses who move .0001yards out of melee attack range.

[SurrealNight]

Heh, you should have progressed it in a 10 man raid then. You'd've seen the pink dino while also trying to keep Horridon from turning you into mush at the end.

haha I didn't know 10m tanks ended up getting targeted no wonder that fight was such a PITA for that raid size. I will end this tier being blissfully ignorant of that mechanic.

[marklar]

How many of you have raid leaders who play melee dps? Tanks? Healers? Ranged? Any general opinions on what role is best for a raid leader, and how much it actually matters, are welcome. I'm just interested in the thoughts of the community here as I am trying to decide what I'm going to play in 5.4.

it's irrelevant. i started raid leading on my warrior tank; the next expansion i switched my main spec to dps (still warrior) and it was pretty much the same. this expansion, i'm playing my resto shaman as my main and still raid leading.

the only possible difference is while healing i sometimes can't spare the time it takes to push the talk button, but that's rare.

my opinion is to change roles often (i.e. once per xpac) so the game stays fresh.