I like to raid. I enjoy getting together with a minimum of nine other nerds and combining our powers to form a mega nerd session and killing bosses, but unfortunately (this is just from my perspective since coming back to the game) it seems that every raid group expects me to have my neck at level 110, cloak at rank 30, whatever an “io score” is at a bazillion, have ALL mythic +15 dungeons completed in world record times, and to completely outgear the raid content before even stepping into it. It feels completely ridiculous. I never thought I would come back to the game and find raid groups that expect you to outgear the content you are looking to accomplish.
It just feels like the raiding scene has taken a nosedive and I find other ways to have fun in the game.
Even though tanks are highly sought for Mythic + it’s a lot harder to find a decent raiding guild to jump into as a tank. That position is usually filled and guilds want offspec tanks as backups. Kinda why I’ve sat my DK(other then doing my visions/cloak resistance weekly just in case shadowlands isn’t out till Christmas and I feel like playing her again) and switched to this Pally to heal. Ranged DPS and heals are always in demand!
Hopefully Shadowlands is alt friendly so I don’t wait till the end of an expansion when enough catch up mechanics exist to play alts. I like Blood tanking and Holy healing!
Edited to add that I agree with everyone talking about how bad average pug groups are too where they want overgeared players…especially when you can run mythic +7-10s for 450-465 gear. The barrier for entry to mythic + is so much lower for “heroic” difficulty content/rewards when it comes to the average pug.
I don’t believe half of the posts. Another quarter are lack of self improvement or lack of trying or lack of commitment. Last quarter are interesting perspectives.
I hate and enjoy reading these threads because I think most people type some BS for like farms or unrealistic views of the raiding community.
This is part of my problem with raids. Sorry but I’ll not run dozens of Mythic+ dgs just because the guilds are asking to have a specific corruption for a specific fight. Because of this I’m totally against these kind of “RNG systems” and I would like to have the old system back. Where we could only look to the ilvl and think “ok, this guy can handle it if he has some skill.” And then progress inside the raid to Heroic and so on.
I remember enjoying raiding in BC and Wrath. I tried getting back into it in Legion, but it didnt grab me like it did back then. Our raiding group in BC and Wrath was pretty chill, never required you to farm consumables. We still made it through Naxx, Ulduar, TCC, and most of ICC.
The group I ran Emerald Nightmare with in Legion were nice, but the whole “you must prepot” and flask thing, not sure why but it really bothered me. What are the chances we wipe ONLY because we didnt use consumables?
But it feels like today’s raids are created like a mechanic salad. The dungeons of today feel like the raids of the first couple expansions to me, just because it seems like there are more mechanics. Of course it could just be that I am over 10 years older now.
That’s pretty much the best way I can explain it. The majority of my friends are the same way. We are still holding out hope that Blizzard will add 10 man mythic raiding, even though it will never happen. The best thing that could ever happen to this game is going back to having one difficulty and hard modes were something you activated by doing something specific on each boss fight (Ulduar style).
Because my iO score wont get me into pugs.
(Im not going to build it up by doing useless content).
Also i dont like to commit to guild runs because again, i dont want to do useless content. Im in there for Wrathion, Raden, and Xanesh and im out. I dont like it being scheduled either.
I WANT to pug, but i essentially cant because of iO.
I still am generally able to squeeze out Heroic Wrathion by the end of the week, but thats about it.
Raiding lost most of its luster when they added in heroic (and later mythic difficulties). I don’t want to kill the same bosses over multiple tiers. Personally I think they should go back to how Ulduar is set up where most bosses have a hardmode option and a super boss like Algalon. It feels way more immersive that way and there is something for everyone.
Another factor is time and patience. With life outside WoW I don’t have a schedule I can reliably play on so if I want to raid I have to pug it. At the start of an expansion I’ll usually pug normal and heroic but usually only once as it can be a frustrating process. When the same player is messing up the mechanics over and over while you perform perfectly every time it gets very frustrating… if only it flexed from 1-30 players
God I wish there was downvote on this board. For this to be the first reply that people read is… :s:
Raiding is incredibly toxic a huge portion of the time.
A lot of people who are anti-raid here did raid a lot in the past, because it was the only form of progression available.
Raid groups had very little participation prior to being opened up widescale in LFR, and dropped harshly after the introduction of M+. A huge proportion of people who have raided and continue to raid do so because they felt/feel they have to, not because they want to.
For some reason, they had a happy medium in WotLK, where you could mythic raid with 10 people or with 25, allowing small groups to access difficult content as well as large groups, but abandoned it because of a gross addiction to perception of balance (while class balance is as it is now… :rolleyes:
It’s extremely rare to get a group of 20 people which is entirely cohesive as well as entertaining, and most groups that do function well run as a drill line; someone needs to bark out orders to be followed (generally) without question. It’s hours of butting into a brick wall being barked at, followed by seconds of elation, repeated ad infinitum as each new tier rolls out.
Let me go back to 10 man without being cordoned off at the faceroll that is heroic and I might be interested in going back to raiding… or not. Probably not, at this point.
For me, it comes down to there being two types of raiders.
Try hard spergs that freak out when something goes wrong.
And casuals who ignore all mechanics and come to the raid unprepared.
Just isn’t worth it for gear I’ll be DE’ing a few weeks. Rather push mythic keys with people I know aren’t bads.
I mean all three of your points are either untrue entitrely or are a fallacy. You have no idea why people raid and there are no numbers to indicate the things you say. Raids had low completion %s before LFR at the highest levels but that did not mean guilds were not raiding (and enjoying it). It means the end bosses were too hard. But earlier bosses were still heavily participated in and I can remember plenty of raids that my teams weren’t good enough to complete but were still fun to raid in. The oNly .0001% cOmPlEtED NaXX arguments are ridiculous.
There may be a large number of toxic occurances as a whole if you gather up every single bad experience and mark them down on a tally… but they make up an overwhelming MINORITY of the overall experience. The amount of tallies on the positive side would dominate the amount on the negative side.
People that do not wish to contribute to or buy into a team but still expect the rewards tend to have bad experiences in raid and then look to blame the group, but that is a toxic person. Not a toxic raid.
It’s annoying when people paint raiding with such a bad brush when they either have no idea what the majority of raiding guilds are like yet insist on labeling them as toxic or when they have little to no experience contributing to a team yet insist on describing what the team atmosphere is like in a negative fashion.
“It’s hours of butting into a brick wall being barked at, followed by seconds of elation, repeated ad infinitum as each new tier rolls out.”
This is just flat out wrong.
It’s a good thing that my post is first because it is coming from a point of view of someone who actually has proof of the experience to back up the point. Too often do people who insist on playing the game in solo tourist mode (which is fine to do) take it upon themselves to describe an entire scene because they don’t like raiding.
Go look at every single final boss kill PoV and let me know that those guys aren’t having fun and are only there because "they need to be"
There are communities in this game for people with anxiety. You will find that playing with others on a frequent basis helps relieve the anxiety.
If you need help ask me, I’ll hold your hand and help you find people you can feel comfortable with.
I too deal with crazy anxiety and some of the issues I deal with are easier among people I know as there is not the expectations, like you have with a group of strangers.
Anyway I feel this thread will reveal that many players are missing out when we could surely come together and prop each other up here.
I stopped raiding in Wod after finishing Hellfire Citadel. I still miss it but unless there are massive changes to the game (that I don’t think will happen) I won’t be going back. There are two reasons.
My last week raiding in HFC I finally finished my 4 piece set bonus and got a best in slot trinket. With those two pieces my damage went up by over 30%. Now granted, the last raid of an xpac many times does have some stupidly overpowered stuff in it, but I felt like that was over the top.
What I enjoyed about raiding was working to improve myself as a player. Doing things like practicing my rotation, improving my cooldown usage and timing. Working on my macros. Planning my movement phases better to eeek out every bit of damage that I could. None of that can hold a candle to what gear does these days. Unless you are a cutting edge mythic raider, you see much more improvement just getting more gear than you do anything else. This leads to my second issue.
I enjoy raiding. I hate playing the game (in a particular way) 20 hours a week to prepare to raid. It used to be that you got pre raid BIS gear and you were done. You were ready to raid. From that point on, you could just raid (maybe do a bit of farming for consumables depending on your guild). The rest of the time you could play what and when you liked. Now every xpac has a system of continuous grind that you feel compelled to do to “keep up”. These systems usually give some very powerful reward and force you to play in a particular way to get that reward. Because of their power level, they pretty much become required content for a raider. I have zero interest in this and wouldn’t consider coming back to raiding unless this changed.
I like raiding a bit. It’s not that it takes too much time, it’s that to commit to a time regularly is not a possibility at this stage of my life. Pugging often takes too much time and can be unreliable. When I’ve exhausted gearing opportunities aside from mythic raiding is usually when I work on alts. Unless it’s BFA where I think it’ll be fun to play alts until I realize just how many chores the content I want to do is locked behind.
Your arguments are just “the majority of raids are good because… I say so!”
You have no idea what the “majority” of raid experiences are like; you have your own experiences, and that’s it. You claim that the shrieks from the world first mythic raiders are proof that the average casual player won’t have a generally toxic experience, or that I was somehow wrong to say that the 100 pulls before that one weren’t mind-numbingly repetitive and peppered with a raid leader issuing instructions. Those very videos describe exactly the few seconds of elation that I mentioned in the quote that you replied to.
From a pure data perspective, what you say isn’t correct.
the answer is simple, time, anxiety, and I don’t want to deal overly toxic raiders.
would I like to? yeah maybe if I had friends that played this. but otherwise no.
I’m interested but have just recently gotten back into the game after a year and a half long break or so, and everyone I knew moved on to other games. So I’m currently guildless and focused mostly on grinding gold till I find a good fit
