This latest guest post comes from the evil tyrant awesome guild leader and raid leader Alas.  She is helping me out with content for the blog because I’m le tired.  Writing epic verse is toooooo haaaard.

Hey everyone. It’s Alas here. I’ve been winning lately. Seriously #winning. I think I might have some sort of large cat blood running through my veins. I mean, look at how awesome life has been for me lately: no more Kooky, a new job, husband with a new job and a better commute, baking shenanigans that have resulted in decadent croissants, Brandon Sanderson talking to me like I’m a real person, and let’s not forget that whole awesome Gnome Clone thing people are talking about.

Since I am clearly living the awesome life and am so on top of things that my very presence is like totes magical, I told Zel that I’d kick a guest post her way. One that explained how to be awesome and raid lead with style.

Because that’s how I roll all the time! Awesomely and stylishly.

The first thing you need to do to raid lead with style is to make sure that you have the proper raid composition. I’m not talking about crap everyone knows here. I’m just saying, when you’re making sure you have the proper balance of tanks to healers to dps, also make sure that you’re bringing the following:

• Two whipping boys (4 if 25-man)
• One person with a disco ball
• An enchanter
• As many mages as possible

If you can’t find most of these things, then just bring the two whipping boys. That’s the most important part. You’ll learn why below.

Once you’re all in the instance and getting ready to rock, the first thing you’ll need to do to start the raid out on the right note is to give a little speech. You’ve watched movies, right? And whenever an army is about to go to war and they’re basically standing around in some field with bushes tickling their asses and looking like they want to let loose with some sort of bodily function or other, their leader always comes up with some brave and inspiring words about how totally awesome they all are and how they’re gonna go pwn faces.

Your raid needs to hear that, too! I always let my speeches come to me on the fly, because you obviously don’t want to use the same one every night or people will start to think you’re not sincere in your belief that they are capable of beating these raid bosses. And, you know, of course you’re not. But part of being a good leader is to pretend.

• Pretend you care how your troops are feeling.
• Pretend you actually remember their names.
• Pretend you don’t want to reach out and choke the life out of them yourself.
• Pretend you believe in them.

Anyhow, a typical speech from me usually goes something like this:

“Alright guys, tonight we’re facing down ______. It will be a challenge, but I know we can do it. We have great ______ tonight. And I’m convinced that ______ isn’t going to be a total fuck up like he was last time. so as long as ______ doesn’t _____ again, we should be fine. We can get this. I mean, sure, most of the other guilds out there have already killed _____ upwards of a dozen times and we’re lucky to even see the second phase, but you know, we have to work with what we have.

“If what we have continues to cock things up, we’ll be opening recruitment and getting rid of ____ and ____. So if you want to see those two stick around, then you better be prepared to keep carrying them. Or we better all pray for a miracle and hope their apparent strategy of facerolling the keyboard pays off for once.

“Is everyone ready? Great. FREEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOM!”

Assignments are super-importante. The mark of handling those with style is to over-pull the trash and while everyone is freaking out about how to deal with the third pack of trash that just took out the healers, you scream over their panic about how the tanks need to be TANKING ALL THE THINGS, and DPS, stop hugging the floor and DPS ALL THE THINGS.

Healers? Healers are always on their own.

Look. They think they’re so fucking special with their little channels and their special addons and the way they don’t even try to help kill anything, ever, except for some priests and even then, have you seen their results on the meters, what a joke I mean really amirite?

So you just tell those guys, hey, you think you’re all smart and special or whatever. So why don’t you figure it the eff out?

They’ll still whine at you about needing tiiiiiiime, but you can just say HEY. None of the dps or tanks needed a plan. I don’t see them dying.

Shuts them up every time.

Now your raid of awesome style should be well and truly launched. The last thing to keep in mind throughout the night is to maintain the style. There are two really effective ways to go about this, and I recommend you employ both. It helps to keep people on their toes.

The first method is the crotch punch. We use this in EtI all the time and it’s super useful when you have so many couples. The concept is simple: pit those husbands and wives against each other.

Say a tank fucks up (easy to imagine since it happens all the time). Just tell their significant other to crotch punch him for not using the cooldown when he was supposed to. A few times of that happening and that tank will be on the ball (heh) when it comes to using his cooldowns appropriately.

The second method is slightly less effective because there’s no physical pain involved. However, employed wisely, it can reach those raiders who don’t have anyone around to threaten them physically, so it has slightly better reach.

I speak, of course, of the verbal abuse.

They key here is to be inventive and keep things mixed up. Here’s a little chart I keep taped to a monitor so I can pick new combinations. Just take one from column A and match it with one from column B and you’ll have a wide range of slurs to hurl at your raiders.

Be awesome and stylish like me and everyone will love you. It works for me. I’m still winning!