A few months ago, I wrote an article on ways to turn bad players into good players. Today I’m going to expand on the mentoring advice that I laid out in the hopes of showing some practical ways you can help even a completely new player improve their game very quickly.
Advice vs Mentoring
First, let’s be clear on what mentoring is. It’s not just throwing someone a few URLs to your favorite class specific blogs or sites and expecting the person to perform better next week. In order to perform the job of a mentor well, you need to analyze their current performance, identify the problems, help them find workarounds, then measure the improvement. It’s a coaching role. A football coach doesn’t just show up at the start of practice and tell the team “just kick the ball better this time” before walking away.
This means that mentoring is a non-trivial thing for a member of your guild to do. If this is not something that someone has already agreed to do (say by becoming a class leader), then make sure they understand what they’re getting into. This may be a good place to offer loot system bonuses, commensurate with the amount of time invested. If someone’s going to spend even two hours per week talking with and measuring the performance of another member – time that they can’t be doing dailies or random heroics – then shouldn’t they be rewarded in the same manner as you reward people for time spent raiding?
What you want to avoid is having someone say “sure, I’ll help _blank_ get his DPS up”, only to have them get frustrated and quit (or be short with the person they’re helping) once they realize the scope of the task. I’ve been playing for nearly four and a half years, most of that as a healer. I’m now pretty close to the top of my game, but to transfer what I know today to someone who is new to WoW and/or new to healing is going to take several weeks of coaching, as well as some heavy hands-on with user interfaces and explaining the nuances of experience.
To Match Class or Not
Let’s say that you’re a small guild, or one which is light on a few classes. You’ve recruited a resto shaman but their performance isn’t where it needs to be for the content you’re on. The only other shaman in your guild is enhancement and is very good at DPS, but only heals in a pinch for 5-man runs, never in raids. Pairing the two shaman may seem to be the obvious choice, but I would argue that any raid-capable healing class would be a better mentor.
In 5-mans, there’s no other healer to compare yourself against, and you rarely have to heal continuously for more than a few minutes. Overhealing doesn’t matter, there are no healing targets to stick to, and the mix of spells you use isn’t that important. Any sufficiently geared shaman with a resto spec can chain heal spam their way to victory. When you get into a raid environment, everything changes. You have to pay attention to more people, you can’t afford to overheal too much, and you have to know when to not heal a raid member because another healer is assigned to take care of them. If you don’t heal raids, you won’t have this type of discipline.
For everything related to healing, I’d rather pair up the resto shaman with a priest, druid or even a paladin (who, for all their history vs shaman are probably the least like them in healing style). When it comes to things that are shaman specific (such as totem synergy), you can either rely on web site resources, or pitch those questions over to the enhancement shaman.
Know the strengths of your potential mentors and match them up based upon the value they can provide, not just the color of their raid frame. This is itself an argument against class leads and more towards role leads – a technique I’ve found to be more effective in the guilds I’ve been a member of (more) Website Resources...
