“Casual raiding” is a bit of an oxymoron. Casual implies that you aren’t interested in progressing as fast as humanly possible through content, in favor of having more time for alts, random events in game, or life outside of the game. Raiding is the act of smashing through bosses for loot/gear/glory. Neither of these are a bad thing, but together, it can lead to interesting experiences.

I belong to a casual raiding guild. We raid 3 nights a week, 2-3 hours a night. That’s the official 25-man raids. Then there’s the Kara runs 2 nights a week, and the ZA learning team 2 nights a week. Neither of the 10-mans are run on the same nights, so there’s always some raid going on. Our guild calls this casual. Other guilds might see this differently. But if you ask those people that are part of the core raid team, those that make time in their schedules to be at as many raids as they can for whatever reason, if we’re not interested in progression, you’ll get laughed at. You can ask most of the rest of the guild if we’re not interested in progression and you’ll get laughed at. We want progression. We just have other things that make it so that we only raid for limited times.

And to be honest, that’s fine by me. Burnout is a big problem. People get tired or want to try other things, in-game and out. It’s not a failing to say “I need a break.” Personally, I’d rather someone takes a break and comes back ready to kick butt, than sulk in raids for weeks before blowing up and leaving everything in a huff, never to come back. But there’s also another problem, other than people getting burned out on raiding. The people that don’t pay attention.

Back when I briefly raided before The Burning Crusade came out, 40-man raids were a thing of awe: 40 people working together to bring down massive amounts of monsters and bosses. Controlled chaos was the order of the day for the “casual” raiders, while the “hardcore” raiders turned boss fights into amazingly choreographed destruction. Then the expansion came out and people found out that 25 people working together might have seemed easier in concept, but going from 40 to 25 proved that you needed to have 25 people that were all pulling their weight. The old raids allowed for the people that weren’t quite up to snuff in their jobs, those that weren’t really paying attention for any amount of time. The new raids, you needed to be ready to turn on a dime, change plans at a split second, and do your job to the best of your ability.

So I’m always amazed when I walk into a 25-man raid and people aren’t focused. They aren’t ready. They ask for summons to the raid, one minute before the first pull and they’re PvP flagged. I’ve seen people get to the raid zone, then turn around because they forgot food, drinks, pet food, ammo, poisons, potions, powders, bandages, etc. You name it, someone’s forgotten it. I’ve stood in raids, waiting to hear assignments for tanks and who’s getting misdirects, when people start joking around in voice chat while the raid leader is talking. I’ve seen hunters use Multi-shot over and over, even after they’ve been asked not to, breaking sheeps and shackles the whole time. I’ve seen healers go afk without actually telling anyone they were leaving to go have a smoke break. And then there’s always the people that try to move as close to the mobs as they can without aggroing them, that make one little misstep and wipe the raid that was busy buffing and healing still.

I’ve heard people ask for how a boss fight works, even after we’ve been there for 5 weeks. I’ve heard people beg for buffs for five minutes before the person assigned to give that buff gets around to giving it to anyone. I’ve even heard people, after one wipe, say “Oh, I need to go repair. I haven’t repaired for a few days and all my gear is busted.”

So please, save the people you raid or group with a few headaches and do the following:
1. If your class requires items to use certain spells or actually fight, bring them. Bring extras. Arrows/bullets, soul shards, arcane powers, symbols, candles - all things that I would have thought that people would know to bring, yet I’ve seen people show up without.

2. Food/drink. Don’t count on mage food or drinks. Always have some of your own. Also, learn to cook. Amazing what the higher level foods will do for you by giving you an extra buff. If you won’t cook, then look on the Auction House for those buff foods that are good for your class.

3. Hunters, bring pet food. if you don’t, you lower your pet’s damage, thus lowering what you as a hunter-pet team contribute to a raid. Worst case scenario, in mid-raid, your pet leaves you. (Also, check into those cooking items again, now that Blizzard’s added pet food that buffs.)

4. Potions, elixirs, flasks. At the VERY least, you should be bringing health and/or mana potions, depending on your class. But if you can get that one little edge to help down that last 1% on a boss that an appropriate pot/elixir/flask would give you, why wouldn’t you use it? Learn about potions and get them.

5. Bandages. “But that’s why we have healers!” If you’re not a tank, during a lot of boss fights, you’re going to be at best #2 on the healers’ lists. There are boss fights that certain classes need to stay up, but that giant 500 foot tall THING eyeing the raid and muttering “lunch” has one person holding it back from making a snack of you: the tank. Help the healers not use all their mana healing you when you could have slipped away to the side for two seconds and slapped a bandage on yourself. They’ll love you.

6. Repair. For the love of all that is holy, repair before you get to a raid. You might see you’re at 80% durability and think “that’s okay, this is going to be cake.” But there’s always something that can go wrong. Twenty minutes later, you could be looking at the ground for the 4th time and wondering where the nearest repair person is.

7. Show up on time. the simplest thing to do is sometimes the hardest. It’s one thing if you’re dealing with work or traffic keeping you late. It’s something else if you’re on an alt or wandering around doing something else 5 minutes before the first pull.

8. Don’t show up flagged on a PvE server. It’s just rude. It wrecks the group buffing, irritates your other raid members, and usually means you’re showing up at the last minute before raid, if not late.

9. Pay attention to the raid leader. Also if you have a class leader, pay attention to them. They might try a different strat that the one you’ve used 50 times before. Pay attention. If your class lead is saying “Don’t life tap!”, that means don’t. Just pay attention. And please don’t start up with the jokes while the raid leader is giving instructions. You look like an idiot and they get ticked.

10. Actually read up on instances/bosses before you go. There’s a wealth of information out there on every boss and instance in WoW. Going to a raid with no clue as to what is going on is excusable in one circumstance: you didn’t know you were going until you were randomly asked. And in that case, if you have multiple screens or computers, hurry and pull up something like WoWWiki and scan the instance and boss fights quickly. Sure, you might be with a group that’s learning it, but the more you initially know, the less the raid leader has to explain and the more killing the raid can get in.

Essentially, think and be respectful of everyone else there. The more things that are left undone, broken, ignored, the more frustrated everyone’s going to get and the less fun everyone has.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under raids.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.