Not liking raiding doesn’t have to come from a negative place. It’s slow paced, large group content with a massive time commitment. If it’s not a big time commitment, you’re probably playing below your weight class so-to-speak.
Of course. I am not saying everyone has to like raiding. I’m just warning people that the GD has a very inaccurate impression of “toxicity” in the raiding scene. Many people have let a handful of bad experiences, sometimes of their own doing, completely determine how they think about raiders/raiding.
There are perfectly valid reasons to not like raiding.
1> It takes too long. When it was “fresh and new”, it was more fun than say practicing my instrument. Years later, I regret not practicing my instrument more and now that I do, I don’t miss raiding at all.
2> I enjoy LEARNING the boss and OVERCOMING the challenge. No one does that anymore. You’re talking WEEKS before a new raid goes live, and the GMOTD will be something like “new raid coming, make sure to study the vids and strats online and be ready!”
No one even TRIES anymore! Just go see what Method did and implement that. Sorry, but I don’t find that fun.
At least TRY for 3-4 pulls! lol I have chrs in 3-4 different raiding guilds and ALL of the Guild messages for new raids are the same. Study online, learn the strats, be ready to do… what others did. LAME
3> Run dungeons, gear up for Heroic. Run Heroic, gear up for Raid. Complete Raid!!! Now get ready to for new Raid. Replace gear in new Raid. Complete Raid! Now get ready for new Raid. Replace gear in new Raid. Complete Raid! Now get ready for next expac.
That was fun for 2 expacs. I half-expected SOMETHING in that dynamic to change and when it didn’t, I checked out. “OMFG Lich King was so amazing!!111” LK was when I realized Blizzard was content to never evolve their game/ raiding, so I quit raiding.
I still like the IDEA. But the overall dynamic is, in 2020, a complete waste of time.
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why i want to: i largely play wow for the storylines, and most storylines wrap up in raids/dungeons. i main a disc priest, and… it’s a lot more fun to play with others as a healer.
why i dont: there’s never any true sense of how long a raid will take, and i hesitate to commit to something without knowing how long it will take. i also am new to the game, and have no desire to get yelled at, and i’m not in a guild (yet) so i don’t have people i know who i can raid with.
Raided hardcore from BC to the start of Cata, had illidan on farm, killed the lich king, all that good stuff. Cata came out and all the classes got shuffled around, before i even got into the first raid i had 3 geared tanks because no one knew what would be better and i lucked out and got benched, and benched and then benched again, because i wouldnt swap to a 4th tank. Needless to say that the min-maxing and the gogogo communitys killed my care factors for the end game and now bearly interact with like 90% of the games playerbase.
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precisely my experience. i play solo now am very happy pugging M+ keys and ignoring the raid gogogogogogo mentality. what happened to blizzard’s promised “bring the player not the class”?
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I do not raid because I am disabled in multiple ways, Have the attention span of a gerbil, and had major anxiety after a dungeon run of rage fire in burning crusade where I was yelled at for pulling with warlock. Never again.
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I dont raid because the community is too strict on people nowadays. No one is allowed to learn a fight or encounter without getting booted. Also gear score is a constant factor. Lastly this game is slowly turned into pay 2 win with corruption boe IE(gushing wounds) and I dont enjoy the economy in constant shambles because everyone just buys gold left and right now.
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If you watch read the dungeon guide and watch a quick video (so you can see what each mechanic looks like in addition to reading what it does) on the fight beforehand, you’ll be totally okay. At worst, you die to something once and then you have it down-pat for the next runs. Most groups have that level of tolerance within them, unless it’s something REALLY bad (i.e. you make the group wipe) - but there’s not many of those mechanics in Ny’alotha, and the one that comes to mind - Xanash’s “soccer” (void ritual) - so many people mess it up that you won’t stand out while practicing.
Can’t argue with that. People are really choosey about who they take in (attempted) one-shot runs. Learning runs that take all iLevels do form pretty often though (or you could make one!) and you’ll able to get an acceptable iLevel with just quests, titan residuum, and lower (under 8) keystone… enough to get your foot in the door for some groups, at least.
This is only really applicable to high-end (mythic progression) PvE and high-rating PvP at the moment… and now that the hall of fame (first 100 guilds) is complete for Mythic Ny’alotha, it doesn’t really even matter for PvE anymore. I’ve never seen a single person in my heroic runs with a gushing wound item. I got a BoE drop once, but the attitude of myself and everyone in the group was “yeah, sell that to some PvP-focused player for big money” despite it being an upgrade.
Group content. Being apart of a larger whole and rolling for those purples.
Good way to burn a couple hours a week.
Spread sheet toxicity.
You must have these talents, you must have these traits, you must conform to the mold the raider leader desires according to empty Sims and websites, or else you don’t even sniff Mythic or even Heroic Raids.
Numbers upon numbers. All hail the mighty calculator; where the RPG dies and the MOBA takes hold.
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It’s an interesting question really, and difficult for me to answer without coming across as an elitist or the response sounding like elitism. I’ll give it a go though.
I raided this expac through BoD and EP, and while I enjoyed it sometimes, most of the time we were carrying folks who were just plain out bad. I only did heroic raiding, and that’s probably part of the reason. I’m simply not willing to tolerate folks who won’t put in a modicum of effort at improving anymore (and actually improve).
I put in quite a bit of effort during EP to improve myself, doing keys, analyzing logs, always coming prepared and on time, and being able to play multiple specs at the drop of a hat (or multiple characters) at similar levels. Other people couldn’t be assed to show up on time or with consumables. I really despise when people waste my time and the time of many other people like that. On top of that I was maintaining a leadership position as a healer, and some consumables like cauldrons.
Because of the aforementioned reasons, I’ve just remained guildless or not bothered since. I moved around a bit, and didn’t find what I was looking for elsewhere so I’m back on Area 52. Now that the expansion is essentially over with, I’ve not felt a whole lot of push to go back into raiding. I wouldn’t mind it, but it’s not at the top of my list.
The other factor for me is just the nature of the content. It’s scheduled content, and usually requires multiple nights at 2-3 hours each during progression. That was a difficult thing for me to manage on a set schedule from a time standpoint. My work/personal life has started to let up a bit though, and nowadays I could pretty easily swing it I think.
I stopped raiding when they decided to turn fun raiding into an annoying overly long tedious slog through an event full of annoying mechanics.
This is just an issue with who the top end is being designed for. Currently, it’s setup for the Methods, Limits, Pieces, etc of the world whereas the majority of the customer base is either unable/unwilling to invest the time. Then we have the other portion of the high end who does, but with great difficulty or at a significantly slower pace.
It’s even bled into dungeon content. See Shrine as an example. It’s a dungeon that once you start passing into higher key levels requires a fair bit of coordination on interrupts moreso than you’d see elsewhere. Both it and Siege feel a full tier ahead of the other dungeons. Certain affixes make them absolutely miserable in uncoordinated groups to a far greater degree than I would argue you see elsewhere. Compare that to Legion, where there were some hard dungeons, but they were either nerfed or were still better than those two I think. That is simply my opinion on them and I’m sure others feel differently.
Compare this to something like Wrath, where dungeon mechanics were far far easier (too easy, but that’s a different issue) and where raid bosses on heroic had less mechanics than current heroic level bosses in most cases. I feel like raiding was far more accessible back then, and I don’t recall having less fun at it, but rather more. I was also able to bring people I couldn’t currently and still complete the content.
So… the release of Wrath, roughly? There were mechanics before that, but Wrath was about the time they started getting consistently fancy (emphasis on consistently - it happened before then but not as often) with the unique boss mechanics. As for the time commitment - well, that’s pretty much always been a thing (aside from the isolated intentionally short raids, like Tol Barad)
It’s interesting to hear this point of view; I know a lot of people who loathe the opposite side of this - hating bosses that don’t have as many mechanics but instead are all about pumping DPS.
Honestly coming back to the game a few weeks ago has been eyeopening.
I wanted to do a few test runs of Nyalotha before my guild got it’s raid team formed and even with 459 gear and AOTC in everything from MOP to G’huun along with some mythic raiding here or there, I’m having a hard time finding pug groups for normal.
Thankfully my guild is gonna start running Nyalotha this week so I don’t have to dip my toes into the pubbing cesspool.
I just don’t want to get involved with a guild again. I used to be part of a raiding guild in WoTLK and then another in Cata. I grew close to the people, but then there’s always someone who gets power hungry, or gets slighted by something, and then drama happens, and it’s just really disheartening to spend so much time getting close to people only to see it fall apart
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I don’t want to be in a guild or have set raid times or anything like that. I’d like to clear raid content, but the cost/benefit isn’t right for me.
I recently came back to WOW after being gone since early Cata. Guild raided 10 man in BC and did a limited amount of 25 man with another guild that needed to fill a gap. Guild drama ensued, so a group of us server changed for Wrath and built a new guild there. We casually 10 man raided all the way through ICC, and again I found another standing 25 man team to raid with. That was way easier to do as a grad student when the time commitment was less of an issue.
Fast forward to 2020…due to work & personal commitments, committing to several hours a night, several days a week, for several weeks is not really feasible for me currently. Mythic+ dungeon experience seems to be a requirement for even normal raids (for my server, during my playtimes). And finding Mythic groups that don’t require previous Mythic+ experience is difficult (again, for my server, during my playtimes). As such, I’ve generally given up on raiding this expansion because of what for me and my playstyle are barriers to entry. Depending on where life takes me, maybe Shadowlands raiding is in the future…maybe not.
Alright, this is going to sound pretty silly.
I’ve played WoW since Vanilla, meaning at the time of Vanilla, I was 10 years old. I used to do dungeons and attempted raiding early BC, when I was 11-12, but I was often blamed for wiping. I don’t know if it was my lack of understanding of the game/mechanics that caused wipes, or if it was easy for the groups to blame the child who played a hunter, but it caused so much anxiety that I never went back.
In MoP, I joined scenarios again, and that helped ease me back into PvE content with strangers. Once I felt comfortable there, I did a lot of LFR in Draenor but was always too afraid to really venture past that. It took until Legion for me to be a Guild Master who ran casual raid groups in Antorus, and it felt… okay.
It felt good, actually, because everyone in my guild was casual like me. We were all friends. We never judged each other.
But to this day, I don’t really do PvE content without friends/guildies. I can’t PUG. I could probably never do Heroic+ raiding. It seems silly, but my childhood fear has sort of stuck with me.
It is kind advice but then a player isn’t experienceing the raid for the first time, first hand so the expereinced is effect is muted.