Question: When do you Call a Wipe?

Keeping the post really short today. Whether it’s in a 5 man, a 10 man, or a 25 man, I’m curious as to under what circumstances your raid leaders call a wipe.

Does it ever frustrate you when your raid leaders do?

Does it annoy you when they should and don’t?

For the raid leaders, does farm versus progression content impact the times you call wipes?

I’ve called snap wipes when we lose 2-3 people in the opening minute of a fight. I’ve called for a continual push even when we were down a half raid.

What’s your take?

18 thoughts on “Question: When do you Call a Wipe?”

  1. In my opinion it depends on the fight. On progression content we push till we all die just for the sake of better learning raid mechanics. If it’s a farm boss and a tank dies on a phase which only needs one tank (elemental monstosoty) we just push. If a tank or healer dies and we know we can’t down the fight without said person, on farm content, we just call a wipe, run in asap, and try again.

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  2. In my small casual guild with low progress and in various pugs I usually go by how much we need to learn the encounter. If we’re learning Atramedes for example, and two people die (in 10 man) right away we might continue so that everyone gets a hang of the fight. If two people dies on Maloriak (which is a fight we know well, and has an easy way to reset) we just reset it or wipe up (if bloodlust is popped) right away.

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  3. As a RL, it absolutely depends upon the type of encounter. Is it a survival fight (Pride Drakes) or a DPS race (Chim phase 2)? Survival fights I will usually let it go. Dps races, however, I will call an early wipe. The one exception is progression content. If it is a progression fight I almost always let it continue. The dead people are likely dead for a reason other than bad healers-giving them a chance to just sit and watch fight mechanics is invaluable.

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  4. Sometimes we let obvious wipes go so that folks can work on learning new mechanics. Usually though we call wipes early so that we can get back and get started and not waste time. There’s been a few times where something we though was an obvious wipe turned into a kill or into a fairly good attempt.

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  5. The circumstances under which I will call a wipe vary from fight-to-fight. Sometimes I keep things going extra long so people can see fight mechanics, but for the most part, if we lose 2/3 of the healers or 1 of the tanks with no battle rez, it’s almost always a wipe anyway.

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  6. As a RL, if its farm content, a wipe is called and we race back in. For progression content, for the reasons mentioned, I usually let it go a touch longer for learning purposes – more so for people on the ground than people still alive.

    Interestingly enough, I’ve been calling wipes a little less frequently nowadays, after some pretty impressive displays of talent from my team. For example, we were working on Nef10 as progression and my jump off the platform in the P2-P3 transition landed me in the lave, under the instance. Healer down and unable to be b-rezzed.

    I said, in a solemn tone “just practice P3 so we get the kiting down…” 95 seconds later, both tanks are still up, Nef is at 28%, and my OT gets all the adds to reset.

    Our first Nef kill was 9 manned for P3. Vent calls during that last minute or so were pretty hysterical and happened to be recorded, much to my chagrin. Anyway, since then, as well as a couple other minor miracles, we let fights go a little longer than we used to 😉

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  7. Calling wipes on progression content is a waste in my (sometimes silly) opinion. Our RL sometimes has a tendency to be annoyed at various player-mechanic fail and want to start from scratch. However, players cannot learn as much when we call wipes as when we push an encounter, even if it’s doomed to fail – if players are dead, they still can get a second-hand feel for more of the fight. During progression, players mess up more to being confused or unfamiliar about certain mechanics rather than being sloppy, which more time spent tends to fix.

    On farm content, I’m proud to say our guild has had some very clean kils lately(even on bosses we just got down for the first time the week prior). In a case where players mess up then, if you can still down the boss I’d say don’t bother calling a wipe. A lot of first kills are done by much less than 25/10 players.

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  8. It’s depends on the fight, who died, and the current progression. When you lose the only kite-capable class on a kiting encounter, it’s just silly to “push it” for mechanics when the mechanics are going to be totally skewed because you’re missing a vital role in the fight.

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  9. I had to call guild wipes for a long time, then moved guilds and had to respect when my new raid leaders were calling them. I had a hard time adapting to that, since I frequently only called a wipe if it was 100% clear we were done; that might mean only 3 people from a 10 man being up, or losing all the dps before phase 3 of Putricide.

    At any rate, I still frequently keep going if someone calls a wipe before I would have. I hate quitting, so being asked to do so is hard. Another minute isn’t going to break the raid, and who knows? If they misjudged it (which I have at times), then great! We’d never know if we all just stopped.

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  10. I served as healing leader once back in the day (talking BC).

    We were running for a first kill on Anetheron in MH and for some reason, the other healers weren’t pulling their worth. A rogue Infernal knocked out a bunch of dps and other healers and we were down to main tank, infernal tank, a warlock and me with the boss at 2%.

    Thanks to awesome advice from Wynthea, I donned my BT shadow resist gear and managed to keep a full mana pool most of the fight.

    RL called a wipe and I refused. With the four of us, we got the boss down in 3 more minutes.

    Rule of thumb: If any healer and DPS are up and the boss is so close to dropping, no harm in wasting a few more minutes going balls to the wall.

    If there’s a chance that you can still kill the boss with the people you have, keep going.

    Note: If I was a fail healer or if we had a fail OT or DPS, I would have gladly called it. We happened to have our best players still standing.

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  11. I think the main thing is that you ARE willing to call a wipe. There’s no hard-and-fast about when to call it, because we’ve all seen pulls where 3 people survive some catastrophe and still kill the boss, and pulls where everyone survives but it’s still a huge waste of time.

    But as long as there is some expectation and understanding that wipes will be called, that’s the main thing. That calling a wipe is just another raid instruction, designed to maximize success over time. Nothing personal, nothing dramatic, no raid leader screaming that everyone sucks so let’s start over, just a calm call to wipe it up so we can make the most of the next attempt.

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  12. Generally, if half the raid is dead, I call a wipe. If a tank dies and his mob ruins half the raid, I’ll probably call a wipe instead of a battle rez. If we lose a lot of people early due to a lag spike (which happened to us on Atramedes last night) we’ll call a wipe.

    I like the idea of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, but a lot of the time, it’s just easier to release, run and restart the encounter properly.

    On progression content, I do try to see how far we can go even when down 5-10 people, depending, though. I do like to encourage them to practice the mechanics of the fight even on what will almost certainly be a wipe. 🙂

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  13. Yeah basically the same as many..

    when we are learning a fight I want as many people to see as many of the bosses abilities as many times as possible so will continue until all are dead.

    When everyone knows the fights and we just had a tard moment that will either mean we will struggle to get the boss down I’ll call it.

    Upy

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  14. In the guild that I used to be in, we pretty much never called wipes and kept on going til everyone was dead. People generally knew when we were going down but it was never explicitly called.

    We wiped very very rarely on farm content so I can’t really say anything about that…

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