"T" is for "Teamwork" (aka, there is no "I" in "Team")

Ok, this post I am going to reflect on teamwork within a raid, instance, or any guild-related event. Tonight we made an attempt at the Construct wing again in 25-man Naxx, and we failed miserably- well, maybe not so miserably, but we could have done better. Why did we fail? there were a number of factors:

• DPS was low. a lot of our DPS were undergeared, and thus the damage output was not what it should have been (our main tank ranked #4 on the over-all damage meter)
• DPS was unbalanced. We had a high concentration of melee DPS and very little ranged DPS in the raid group. Because this is a high-energy fight, which requires a lot of kiting, an even balance of ranged and melee DPS is needed, and (if I'm not mistaken) we had only one -maybe two) ranged DPSers in the group.
• Inexperience. This was the first time that many of the people had done the fight in either normal or heroic mode, and thus some people didn't know where to look for the "poo-clouds" that he dropped, or where to run to drop it when injected. The idea is to run to the nearest point on the outer perimeter of the room to drop it, and a lot of the new people were running to the middle. This caused the cloud to affect a greater area.
• The ever famous Disconnect bug. During the fight and in each attempt, at least one key person disconnected, which caused a lot of problems.

Throughout the whole thing, which I like to view as more of a learning experience than a "failure", everyone worked as a team. One or two people were calling out those who were injected, so they could run out of combat until it dispelled, and the healing was paramount. The DPS, albeit imbalanced, was great, as those who were working to get the slimes down worked together to do so. All-in-all, we learned from each experience [what did we do wrong? how can we improve? etc.] Also, there were marked improvements each time. So yes, it was a learning experience. At least it was for most people.

One person in the raid, who plays mainly on another (PvP) realm tried to tell the raid leader how to do things, and kept verbally yelling in vent telling them that they were doing it all wrong. He tried to run things, and when things didn't go his way, he left the raid (and the guild) in a huff, "never to return". Even when confronted with his behavior, he still refused to accept the fact that he was wrong, and blamed everyone else for his actions. As one who has known this person for quite a long time, I was familiar with his tendency to try to control things, called him on it and tried to explain to him what happened, but he refused to listen. Needless to say, I realized that my attempts were futile, and gave up.

Anyway, the point of this whole post is that to succeed at anything, everyone in the party (or guild) has to work together as a whole, or be doomed to failure. If even one person doesn't work with the rest of the group, it could lead to failure. Would we have done better if said person had dedicated more time to paying attention to what was going on instead of telling the raid leader how to do things and providing a distraction to the rest of the group? Maybe. Nobody really knows, but it would have gone a lot smoother than it had.

As far as clearing Naxx goes, tonight was not our night. I do know, however, that it is but one obstacle we have to overcome. Did we fail? no. Did we give up? not by a long shot. We will continue to work at it until we clear that hurdle, and we WILL complete the entire raid- eventually. What is most important is the fact that we were a team and acted (for the most part) as such, and also that each one of us learned from it, and despite the fact that we didn't reach our goal, we had fun trying.