Raiding: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I sort of fell into raiding. I leveled relatively quickly on a new server because I liked the world and the character but most of the people with toons at my level intended to raid with them. My first end-game guild raided Lower and Upper Blackrock Spire in a fairly organized fashion, with a sign-up add-on (Gemsomething), but all communication was handled in chat; we had no web site or vent server. We moved up to Zul Gurub, and the guild collapsed.

I took a break, became a casual gamer for a month, then joined a guild that was farming Onyxia and Molten Core. We were trying to progress in Blackwing Lair when The Burning Crusade expansion came out. My current guild has cleared Mount Hyjal and is working on Illidan in the Black Temple.

The Good

One of my favorite things about raiding is that it's challenging and I can get better at it, and more easily than I can improve at PvP. Right now, as a destrolock (0/21/40), I'm working on staying alive, keeping my curses up, and getting in as many Shadow Bolts as I can. Doing two of the three is easy enough... In order to become a better warlock, I had to go read up on my class first at the Blizzard Warlock Forums and then at Warlock's Den, and learned a whole lot of tricks my trainers didn't teach me.

I also enjoy the storyline aspect of WoW, and raiding is an important part of that. I finished leveling (to 60, back when that was end-game) in Silithus, and I had quests I'd never finish until I went to raid instances. I've turned in Hakkar's heart and Onyxia's head with a lot of help from my friends, and it was well worth it!



The social and team aspects of raiding are great. You need someone to celebrate victory with! I've driven out of state to two guild parties to meet my fellow raiders.

The Bad

Raiding is a commitment! It can be a little too social; some evenings I just want to wander around Outland on my own little projects and unwind. I really enjoyed leveling when The Burning Crusade hit because I could do it at my own pace. Fortunately, my guild only raids four nights a week and I'm not required to be there for all of them.



The other part of the commitment is bringing consumables and keeping enough gold on hand for repairs. I'm with a progression guild that does very little farming, so we wipe a lot and spend more on repairs than we get off mobs/bosses. I've got to get new gear gemmed and enchanted as best I can. Since I'm destro for raiding, I usually spend 100 gold on the weekends to spec SL/SL and to spec back. So, it's a time commitment. Daily quests and my herbalism alt really help make this part painless and give me an excuse to be antisocial sometimes.

The Ugly

The hard part about raiding for me is the strain it puts on the guild. Most of the time, WoW is really a lot of fun (it is a game, after all), but every guild break-up I've seen has been over raiding, even when the guild in question doesn't raid. In my experience, it's rarely about the epic items, especially now that great purples are available from crafting and badges. Good players enjoy a challenge. There's all kinds of “bad” players, meaning inappropriate for certain raiding guilds. People without the time/energy/interest to learn to play really effectively or to bring consumables can be a problem, but so can highly effective players who are competitive to the point of being nasty. I've just had to get used to the idea that guilds don't last forever, and that sometimes, one just has to move on.

Overall

Obviously, the pros outweigh the cons for me because I raid three or four nights a week and have for a long time. There's lots of alternatives in endgame WoW, including PvP and role-play, and lots of different kinds of raiding, about five tiers worth in The Burning Crusade, and ten- and twenty-five-toon versions of every raid instance in Wrath of the Lich King. I'm definitely looking forward to some new and different wipes!