I’ve been thinking a lot about raiding lately and wanted to share some of my thoughts about the state of raiding in WoW. I’ve been a guild leader or officer for pretty much all of Wow 1.0 – 3.1. I’ve never been the hardest of the hardcore; but I’ve managed to find a good balance between hardcore and casual. I consider myself as neither.

Leading a guild has changed drastically between each expansion. In Wow 1.0, guilds were substantially larger and there were less of them to go around. At that time, recruits were plenty. Many people were just making their first steps from a “friend guild” to a real raiding guild.

My guild started out as a friend guild, but grew into a raiding guild as we all hit 70 and got bored with the 5-man dungeon content. At that time, Zul’Gurub had first been released. So we worked our way as a 20-Man raiding guild until we had enough for a 40-Man to attempt Molten Core.

Back in those days, choosing who got tier items and choosing who gets the fire resist and who’s main tank meant a lot more than it does now. Resistance was key is a lot of places, where today it’s really just a joke. There was tons of resistance gear in the professions for BC, but it was all pretty much worthless filler junk. Did any of you really use the Aldor and Scryer resist gear? If you did, you were stupid; especially if you dropped epics for them. As a tank, I maybe jokingly tried the arcane resist gear when we were stuck on Curator, but I never used it again.

I miss the synergy involved in planning a raid and planning groups. You had to plan who goes into what group, and make sure groups had healers (we didn’t’ know about raid frames back then, healing across groups was totally taboo). Organize classes according to buffs, work out your 5 minute pally buffs. Organize your DKP. I wrote a super cool website application to manage our “home-brewed” DKP system. It was a very different experience from WotLK or even BC.

The work and game knowledge required to do a lot of that is gone from the game, but managing a guild still has its headaches. The guild is made up of two types of people. Those who are in it for the guild, and those who are in it for the loot. I’d imagine that a given guild would be about 50/50. When the raiding gets tough and the guild wipes, it makes the first type stronger; but it makes the second type start to question their loyalties or question their ties to the guild.

Fast forward to WotLK; Naxxramas has often been quoted as the best dungeon Blizzard has ever made. The first version was intense and immensely difficult. For Wrath, they diluted it and repacked it as the first entry-level raid dungeon. Like clipping off a viper’s fangs, Naxxramas was now a much easier instance to complete. I’d say that Heroic Naxxramas really wasn’t all that much more difficult than the Normal version.

I really think that this has hurt Wow, since it was such an easy dungeon, even PuG’s can succeed. It’s bred a raiding atmosphere where instead of a few big successful guilds and a large recruiting pool; everyone thinks they can be a competent raid leader. Many guilds that have seen success in Naxx, couldn’t have held their own in the original version or in Ahn’Qiraj. I think this is a worrying trend because the guilds that are actually progressing into Ulduar are stuck with a dwindling recruiting pool because a lot of people are content to be in these guilds that will probably not be able to succeed past Naxxramas.

Another situation is that your guild will encounter something that mine did. When we started to wipe in early Ulduar, some of these people who were tied more to the loot than the guild thought that they could do it better. They split off and convinced seven or eight people to join them. None of these split-off guilds have ever really been able to match our former raiding progression, yet they still think they can do it.

I question their motives. If their rationalization for leaving the guild and betraying us by pulling members away with them; I can’t believe they’re qualified to run an honorable guild.

I’m in it for my guild. I wouldn’t spend so much time organizing events and recruiting if I wasn’t in it for the right reasons. I feel bad that a little wipage causes members to rethink their membership. I kinda think that they either weren’t a part of or don’t remember Molten Core and Black Wing Lair, and that the current raid dungeons like Naxxramas have made people think that the guild can learn entire fights in one sitting. To those people, I say Grow Up! If you want the gear, if you want to raid, you need to pay your dues and learn the content.

Have you had similar guild situations like mine? I’d love to hear about them. Send me a comment at questions@deathknighttactics.com.