EDIT: Holy moly, this got WAY more engagement than I expected. Apologies if I’m not keeping track of everyone’s responses; there’s a huge amount to read through right now, but I appreciate folks’ responses very much nevertheless!
There are plenty of folks who play this game who aren’t interested in raiding whatsoever. There are plenty among those folks who probably use the forums as well. While I personally don’t really agree with that decision, that’s ultimately your decision to make and I support it every step of the way regardless. This thread isn’t exactly directed towards you guys, though.
So for the purposes of this thread, this is a question directed towards the people who do want to raid, but for some given reason cannot or do not.
What interests you about raiding? Why do you want to raid? And, of course, why don’t you currently raid despite your interest in raiding? Feel free to share here!
There are going to be a lot of replies assuming the thread is active of people that frequent these boards talking about how incredibly toxic raiding is. I just want to preface this discussion by saying that isn’t true and the overwhelming majority of experiences raiding are positive. There is a lot of anti-raid sentiment on these boards from people who frankly never really raided. If the overall experience wasn’t positive, the raid groups wouldn’t exist. For every 1 bad experience (which is unavoidable in all areas of the game), there are hundreds of hours of good ones.
The experience
Completing the story
Viewing the settings ( I think Temple of Ahn’Qiraj is one of the most beautiful places in the World)
Unique challenges
Earning reputation
Mats (ie soul essence from Karazhan)
Questing
Because I like to have fun and being a part of a group that expects me to be a certain race/class/spec, have certain armour/weapony, have a certain score, have studied the raid in advance, be able to do all the mechanics off the hop, do a certain amount of damage, focus on the fights and ignore the story/setting, rushes me thru the whole thing, does not sound like fun to me.
I play solo so I still enjoy the raid instances, it’s just not the same thing. It’s too bad. I remember the night/morning my son and his guild made it thru Karazhan for the first time, it was a celebration!
Because I’ve personally found any current content that isn’t raiding to be downright unbearable. I’ve always been interested in some level of min-maxing even when I wasn’t doing more difficult content, but if that endgame wasn’t there why would I bother doing so?
My reasoning was the anxiety. I was so afraid to group up with other players because the first time I did, I got shouted at (a level 15 dungeon). I was very confused and ran out of the dungeon and never did group content again until MoP.
It took MASSIVE amounts of courage for me to press the Queue button for LFR for the first time, you don’t even know.
I have never faced toxicity from raiding guilds. Just dungeons.
Now I’m a Mythic raider, very loud and happy in my guild, but it took a long time to get here.
I’m not willing to deal with bs from the overly toxic raiding community of this game and I have no friends that play wow since all of them moved to other games, so I end up just not raiding at all.
i planned on starting to raid this expand but the games boring to me right now, i normally take really long breaks when i play mmos for a while, but bfa didn’t really give me the fun i wanted, so now im in a weird limbo, just trying to have some fun, but just hating it like 30 minutes later
now im just logging in to do first time dungeons for alts for heritage and rep stuff, and leaving the other raiding stuff for shadowlands
I have plenty of other stuff to do and it’s not the highest priority right now. But part of it is because, when I raided back in Pandaria, it seemed like it was just a whole bunch of people casting spells on a giant mob, which took forever to defeat. And then from time to time everyone would be told to run this way or that way at a certain point.
Another reason is because people were never on the same page, or even stayed long enough to see the whole thing through; getting into pointless arguments, throwing out blame, insulting each other; etc.
It didn’t seem that fun and took a long time to assemble to a group, and it was basically just run through the raid as quickly as possible to get items. I didn’t enjoy this aspect of running through dungeons as quickly as possible to kill the boss then quit in Diablo 2 either – and was a big reason I quit. Maybe joining a guild would work better for that kind of stuff, but it’s not something I’ve done before. I always prefered to solo even within a group.
I might still get into it once some of this other stuff is taken care of.
I dont raid in random group finder, always a wipe, doesn’t go anywhere most of the time, group leaves if 1 wipe. Mythic raid runs super toxic, kicks you out if 1 mistake even when you don’t know the fight and they don’t explain it and still pull the boss, Poor leadership but it is what it is. But for me, i do raids in guilds and voicechat is required but not a huge raid fan in BFA tho. Not that exciting and not very challenging.
I dislike the regular schedule aspect, I find the community to be odd, and I’ve just never really felt that spark that a lot of folks feel.
That’s not to say I look down on anyone who does or think it should be diminished. But it just ain’t for me. It sounds theoretically cool but in practice always feels…not.
Used to raid 2x a week. Aotc all of legion and first half of Bfa
Then I realized that every raid is the same thing. Sure, the bosses are different shapes and colors, but other than that its taunt swap now. Move out of that. Pass this debuff. Then gear resets and everything you just did means nothing.
Yes, that is exactly what I used, and turned out as you described. Running dungeons in the same manner is also similar. But prior to those tools I was unable (or too impatient) to assemble a group.
Really doesn’t give much of an incentive when it works out that way. I can just go out and do whatever I want and make progress in other ways without being held down by schedules.
I was running a rogue in BC/vanilla on a (different account).
I was running five healers and a hunter in WotLK.
Went to a hunter and three healers in Cata.
Two healers, a hunter and a warrior tank in Pandaland.
Then pretty much quit the game in WoD, played the end of Legion and only came back last week after quitting again for most of BfA.
So I have raided heavily in the past and it’s just not fun like it was. Part of that is I don’t have time, between school, work and a kid (the current quarantine situation not withstanding), to dedicate to hours of raiding in a week. Part of that is I don’t like most players who consider themselves raiders now. Part of that is I don’t enjoy the Mythic/Heroic/Normal/LFR setup that they have going.
Do I want to get back into it? Sure, but no guild that’s I’ve found is laidback/casual. Everyone is trying to push for mythics and trying to be a hardcore raider and there’s so much pressure it just ruins it for me personally. Plus, so many people that I used to play with have quit the game and no one is social like they were way back when. Now yes, part of it is my fault for being so inconsistent with playing, I realise that before anyone says anything.
I was part of one toxic raid group once, I left the guild right after and joined a much better one so it wasn’t really an issue since it’s easy to ignore idiots. But, the worst part of raiding is being benched and knowing you deserve it, so you end up not really feeling justified in leaving since if you got better they might give you a spot again but it also sucks knowing you suck.
Discord sucks. There’s one girl who won’t stop screaming and crying about bedbugs…in a raid. Plus, most of my friends moved on to other games like animal crossing or ESO. So…raiding isn’t my highest priority.
Heh, gonna preempt a lot of “who are you to disagree with my choice yada yada” responses, but I’ll answer your question:
I like the idea of raiding because of the camaraderie it supposedly inspires and the idea of so many people working together to achieve a common goal; there’s a sort of epic quality associated with that which I like.
That being said, I have no desire to ever, ever, ever have any facet of my life rotate even minutely around a game; it must always be peripheral, a pass time. In 15 years of WoW, I have never had to say, “Sorry guys, I have a raid that night, can’t make it.” The idea of that makes me shudder. This is probably because my brother was a legit WoW addict, to the point of losing his job and breaking literal walls out of raiding rage.
I don’t like spending literal hours upon hours in the same game activity. This is why I love M+. I can do several Ms one after the other, but even then, I have to stop and either go do something else IRL or even something else in-game. Raiding requires commitment which I’m not willing to give and don’t really care for.
I think I have 6/12 Heroic purely from pugs now, and that’s fine with me. I was in a super friendly group that 1 shot the first 3 and then 2 shot some more and even then, I just couldn’t be there much longer, despite having nothing else pressing to do.
I like raiding in short bursts for the experience, the loot of course, but don’t really care for the sheer amount of time it demands, even with flex raid groups and the newer lockout system.