Do you want to Raid?

Community General Discussion
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I have been playing wow for over 11 years, but I am relatively new to the Wow Forums. The first thing I have noticed is the huge split between raiders and non-raiders. Raiding seems to be looked at as a toxic wasteland of elitists when in reality it’s mostly a fun and welcoming community. Many non-raiders only get a taste of Raiding through Pugging. Pugging is by far the most toxic and least fun way of raiding. If Pugging was the only way to Raid, then I would agree, and I would have quit raiding years ago. I see many players make statements like “well how can I ever learn to raid if no one will invite me to their group or kicks me after my first mistake”. This goes back to why pugging is bad. In a pug people have no incentive to teach people they will never see again. Typically in pugs you have two types of people, either an inexperienced raider that wants to try out the new raid, or an experienced raider who just wants to farm some gear for their alts. The new raider wants to learn and see new content, the experienced raider has already spent hours learning these bosses and just wants to farm them like they do with their normal raid group. So naturally when you put these two different types of people together, you are going to get the toxic wasteland that is pug raiding. I have seen there are a lot of people on this forum that are interested in raiding but don’t know where to start or believe it is just toxic community that they want no part of. I would like to do my part and help those who actually want to get into raiding while avoiding the toxicity. But if you want to learn to raid, the first thing you need to join a raiding guild. Here is my guild for new aspiring raiders:

Raiding guilds have an incentive to teach you and make you better:

Raiding guilds are essential to new raiders. Unlike pugs, you raid with the same people week in and week out, there is an incentive for everyone to get better in the group. Guilds often have class officers or experiences raiders who actively go out of their way help members get better at their classes/role. As long as you are willing to listen to advice and learn, you can get a great satisfaction seeing your performance improve each week. Since you spend hours on end with the same people each week, there is also an incentive for everyone to get along and not rage out at a simple mistake. This helps build a community you can be apart of.

Find A Raiding Guild That Fits Your Play Style:

Not every guild is for everyone. There are a wide variety of guilds out there that are raiding, and if you are just starting out, signing up for a Mythic Guild is probably not the best way to go. Find a casual social guild that actively wants to help new raiders who join their ranks. Make no mistake, there are plenty of guilds who have no intention on teaching and only want experienced raiders to push hard content. But for everyone of those guilds, there are twice as many who would be more than happy to work with you. Look for a guild that knows you are an entry level raider and you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed while you start the learning process. You can find guilds on R/wowguilds or on Wowprogress that fit your schedule, playstyle, and personality (all three are important). I know there are toxic raid leaders and members of raiding guilds at all levels. There are a lot of people who play wow and not all of them get along well with others in group environments. But toxic individuals don’t tend to last very long before they are removed, or the raid team falls apart on them. If you join a guild that has toxic members who take away your enjoyment for the game (Important to distinguish between constructive criticism and toxicity) then you can just leave and find another home that makes you feel welcome. There are too many great guilds for you to put up with a bad one.

Raiding Guilds Provide a Community:

I know non-raiding guilds can provide great communities too, but because it normally takes 16-30 people to raid, most raiding guilds always have people on ready to do other group content like M+, IE, and even old Tmog runs. I have met some great friends in my raid groups over the years and there are several of us who still game together to this day, even if it is a different game than WoW. I still game with four different guildmates I met back in Wrath. When you are in the grind of doing LFD/G it can feel lonely and isolated playing with people who will say “hi” in chat at most. Being part of an active guild can make all aspects of the game more enjoyable.

How to get Better:

If you decide you want to get better and practice a bit on your own, it is important that you install addons like: Deadly Boss Mods, Details, and GTFO. These addons will help you get better by alerting you want to watch out for and you can track your DPS/HPS and see how you stack up against others. If you really are serious about improving and you have a boss kill or two recorded on warcraftlogs you can copy your kill page into wowanalyzer and get an idea on how you can improve. You can also learn a lot by going to warcraftlogs and look at the top performers of you class/spec and see how they set up their talents on each fight and how much dmg they are putting out with each spell (Example: Top Shadow Priests top dmg spell is Void Bolt. Next fight I am going to try and get more void bolts out). If you have specific questions about how to improve using logs, let me know and I will try to help.

Why I wrote this:

I have raided in wow for 11 years at all levels. From Cutting Edge to pugging on my own. I have been in “hardcore” guilds and have also been in casual guilds. I have been a guild raid leader and have sat the bench for others. I have experienced raiding in almost all of its forms and it is a part of the game that I am most passionate about. All my best WoW memories come from raiding and I have met long term friends in my different raid groups over the years. I will be unsubing next month for the first time. Instead of writing a long list of why I am leaving like many others. I thought I would try to leave on a more positive note and try to help some of the newer players. I want to help as many players as I can get past the fabled glass ceiling of the raid world. Raiders are fun and quick to have a good laugh. Don’t judge raiding by the toxic wasteland that you find in the group finder tool. Though I will be leaving soon, the new raid looks amazing and I hope any of you who want to raid get the chance.

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Didnot read all of it but I wont raid because I dont like to spend 1 hour on each boss… dont get me wrong I raided mythic nighthold and was my last mythic raid but I left because I work no time… so Mythic + is my love in this game I do some raiding but just when am free once a while thats it

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The root of all arguments over raiding difficulties

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I really need to hit this nail on the head. And I really need everyone to pay attention to me.

The communities of old are DEAD. Gone. Doneskies. There are more dodos than vibrant server communities.

I agree joining a raiding guild is a great way to meet new like-minded people. However, probably 99% of this game’s population has a bad guild experience.

Some people want to play the game without raiding or without pvp. We as a community (I’ve got jokes), should support separate playstyles because pushing for just one playstyle and leaving the rest to rot is bad for the game.

Raiding is not a “toxic wasteland of elitists”. The problem with raiding is that people have used it as an excuse to have a “toxic wasteland” of horrible opinions.

To all the people reading this post, play how you want, don’t grief other people, and have fun. That’s what most of us are here for.

Cheers.

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“Do you want to Raid?”

No…no I do not.

Been there, done that…not interested.

Thank you though!

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Same for me as well. It’s not that I don’t like raiding, it’s that I don’t have time for it. Sure there are plenty of nights I play for hours but I take breaks for things, sometimes for an hour even. Some nights I can’t play that long and I change things at the last minute. I need flexibility and raiding doesn’t give me that. M+ is the type of group content I can play for shorter periods and still feel challenged. And then of course all the other endgame content is stuff I can easily do on my own time as well.

If Blizz wants to get more people into raiding, they should separate up the encounters the way FFXIV does. That’s one thing they actually do well. So guilds could do just 1 boss at a time, instanced in it’s own zone. You wouldn’t be locked out of the other bosses, you could do it in any order as long as you completed the rest in order at least once in the past. That would allow guilds to form up for casuals with limited playtime to raid for shorter periods for those of us who are adults with busy lives.

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I haven’t done normal/heroic raiding since legion. I did one wing on uldir lfr and was like nope. I might do some normal/heroic for the upcoming raid though, it looks interesting so far.

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I raided back in vanilla/BC, and I had fun but… I’m done with that style of gaming. Nothing will ever get me to raid again, period. If they end up locking stuff I really want behind a raid (like Zandalari Trolls), I’ll leave the game. Just truth.

As for the “big picture” - raiding is a relic, M+ is the future. Games need to be faster, but can still be hard, just faster.

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Raiding with my guildies is the most fun I had in WoW and the reason I came back. But since you can now get nornal raid and heroic raid gear level without breaking a sweat (WF, World bosses, WF/TF) it gets harder and harder to get people to devote the time to raid wiping on new bosses to maybe get a piece of gear that a few world quests will give you anyways.

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If you’re spending 1 hour on a boss either,

A: The content is still new and everyone is still learning the fights

B: you’re in a terrible group.

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Just wanted to comment on this in particular because a lot of people seem to think of raiding guilds as elitist hives of toxicity but really they can be SUPER welcoming if you approach them with the right attitude.

We’ve had a guy on our team for a couple of months now and he’s basically been a fill-in and fringe player because he’s bad at mechanics, he’s bad at dps, and just in general he seemed slow to catch up to the rest of the group as we learned fights.

Most of the raid spent the first month hating this guy because he was actively making our jobs harder.

A few weeks ago we found out that he was basically brand new to the game, had joined our guild to play with his friends, and had never raided on any level before and was jumping right into Mythic.

All of a sudden it made sense … everything about how he was playing made perfect sense … and right after our team found out his situation people were talking over each other in discord to try to offer help to this guy.

Over the last few weeks he’s gotten noticeably better at everything because people are helping him now but more importantly he recognized he needed it and let us know.

I guess the TL;DR is … ask for help if you need it, tell people you’re new, stop trying to fade into the background and just hope that you don’t screw up or that no one notices that you did.

If you do that stuff then you’re going to see a lot more help than you probably expect and you’re going to run into a lot less toxicity.

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This is not based on personal experience. It based my two kids who used to play. From what I have over years. I am really surprised anyone ever joins a guild. I know, not all guilds and have to find the right one. My sons are extremely picky. They like to be invited in chat to see how people react and stuff. Then a month in a guild they say all ugly comes out. it reasons why we tend to family and real-life friend raid. I sure hope there are good ones. In the 10 years off and on, I have been playing. I have not found any. I figure one day. It just that diamond likes to play hide and seek.

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I’d like to, but just don’t have an interest in scheduling playtime anymore, so I don’t. If you look for a guild that fits your needs it can be a great experience. Find some fun people who raid at times that work for you, and it can still be a ton of fun.

Some of the best nights I ever spent playing the game was raiding.

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Yes I want to raid. All my best memories come from raiding, since I started 10+ years ago. No matter the expansions flaws, nothing takes away the memories you create and bonds you form while raiding. It brings everyone together to overcome challenges. That is why I raid and will never stop until they stop making this game :heart:

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Well the simple reason for this is because the PUG raiding community is a toxic wasteland of elitists, if you’re with a guild you’re fine, that’s the end of the story imo.

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And that’s the problem. If you’re new to raiding, you’re going to be bad, at least at first. You’re probably going to end up in a guild full of other screw ups just like you. The raid leader will probably be bad at understanding mechanics and explaining them to people. There’s only so far you can go, because a good guild won’t accept an unproven player like you. They get their new, experienced recruits from guilds that have gone away. Or they just poach them.

Meanwhile, your guild is struggling for months to do what real raiding guilds with experienced mythic raiders completed the first night.

Eventually your guild will reach the point where they can go no further. Perhaps they’ve done the first boss or two on heroic a few times. People start to leave, some because they have improved to the point where they are beginning to see what screw-ups their guildies are and realize they can do better as far as progression goes, but they’ll have to leave the friends they made in the process.

But if you do that, were you really their friend?

But it’s clear to everyone that they’re not making progress. And even with the improved gear, losing their best team members guarantees they can go no further.

So even if you’re not very good yourself and have nowhere to go, you’ll get tired of this in the end. So change guilds and hope history doesn’t repeat itself, or go play some other part of the game become your only option in the end.

And then they come to the forums and read how heroic raiding is too easy, and they should be doing mythic on a few hours of login time a week, by raiders deliberately forgetting to mention the decade or more of experience they have that made them good, and the people who helped them along the way.

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The sad thing is a lot of players don’t realize this and they think because they frequently encounter toxic players in pugs that joining a guild would just be like playing with 20 of those people and that’s the furthest from the truth.

Or you’re doing progression raiding. That might be a foreign concept for people whose idea of progression is waiting for all of the high-end raiders to need gear on their alts and then joining those groups and getting carried through the raid via a series of one-shots.

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I think that one of the biggest problems as far as the divide between guild raiders and PuGs/non-raiders goes, is that raiding guilds don’t tend to be the ones reaching out. More often than not, the new recruit is the one who has to initiate contact and get involved, and many new players simply don’t know how to go about doing that. Therefore, there are a whole lot of these players in endless PuG limbo that would otherwise have guilds to try out with that fit their needs, and I definitely agree that that is one of the worst places to be when it comes to raiding. The irony of it is that these guilds need new blood in order to survive, they just don’t go looking for it often enough, at least in my opinion.

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And this is exactly what I love about raiding. If everything was faceroll easy like WFs, islands and WQs then I’d find no excitement in the game. It’s wiping for hours on end that makes downing something worthwhile to me. I’ve always felt that nothing worthwhile comes easy

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Raid?

  • I did that 12years ago, when I was a kid with a lot of free-time.

  • Can’t show up in times due life/kids, & I don’t feel like wiping on a boss 100 times. just to get some kind of gear that will get replaced anyway next patch.

I’d rather log in everyday and get the most out of my 1-2 hrs a day getting the best thing I could. Thank you blizzard for (Mythic+).

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