Raiding Pre vs. Post Burning Crusade

Let me just start out to say I am honored to start blogging under the title of The Daily Quest as well as give some background on myself. I have played WoW for closing in on three years now mainly on my human paladin. I have always been into raiding and used to be much more hardcore than I am currently (raiding every night of the week).

I helped start a guild called Dysfunctional on Shadowmoon early this year and was one of the more prominent officers. Coming from my previous experience I thought this was going to be a lot easier than it had been in the past. You know, I fell for the ploy that leading a 30-35 man guild was going to be easier than leading one that had 50 people in it. I was wrong, I did not count on the fact that the entire raiding attitude has changed.

I know that I was a hardcore wow junky back before the burning crusade. I would always be on farming mats, repair money, and back before AQ opened I was on a premade battle ground team to get people Grand Marshall since getting an Askhandi was a real great achievement. Those were the days, or so we tend to think about through the tinted lens of the past. Of course they were also a lot more demanding than now, being a paladin, getting gold for repair bills and consumables was a lot harder without dailies, increased gold drops, not a lot of rep drop items, etc. One thing I always enjoyed though was the professional attitude that seemed to surround our raids when we zoned in and got started. It was more like a job than a game when the raid started, you may bicker back and forth before the raid but when you zoned in you got to work and didn’t waste time. Now the extent of this varies somewhat from guild to guild obviously but if you were in a guild that had seen Naxx before the complete nerf of AQ40 you know the atmosphere.

Now lets pick back up with TBC raiding, we experienced a big change in the numbers, 40 down to 25. Kind of a weird number to switch to but lets not get side tracked. The switch brought about mixed reactions, quite frankly I wasn’t too angry since in a 40 man raid you always have your 15-20 really active, call out on vent, pull more than their weight people, and the rest, in my opinion, fill out the ranks. So I thought this was going to alleviate a lot of stress from leadership and get past a lot of the drama, I was wrong. I quickly found out that the business like atmosphere in raids has completely dissolved except for a few choice guilds on my server. The rest have adopted a friendship approach which works well for kara and gruul but not past that. The main things I have taken note to are; attendance, drama, and trials. The sad part is that these complaints have been wagered against people who have been in the raiding scene as much as I have and are grown adults.

Attendance, one of my big issues is that if we recruit you and you say you can make days X, X, X, and X, then you better be sure you are there. Today it has become a lot more prominent for people to decide to drop out on a raid night several hours before hand without saying anything until they log back on. I know that people have lives, and I have dropped out of a few (5 in the past year, I know, I’m a loser) and that real life stuff comes up. Just make sure you let us know as soon as you do, we can most likely replace you but when we told Johnny he can go watch a movie with his gf since we won’t need him on since you are coming, yeah, I’ll be pissed.

Drama, ok, I know if you have two or more people involved you will always have some drama. The drama that seems prevalent among today’s guilds is utter nonsense. Talking with long time friends they have the same problem on their servers as well, people not being able to shelve personal bias in order to accomplish a task. For example, we had a priest who refused to heal one of our tanks since she said he was rude to her. Needles to say I removed her from the guild when that happened; I couldn’t have someone rebel like that and keep them in with the good apples.

Trials, everyone that has played before TBC recalls when they first trial’d into a guild. For those who started one with a group of friends, my hat is off to you. Anyways, what I have noticed is the complete lack of seriousness put forth by them. Pre BC it was you showed up to all the raids for 3 weeks or more, no loot, and you were the low man on the totem pull. It is now the norm, at least the ones we got, who expected to get loot right away over members and would just not show up to 3-4 raids at a time. It was a joke that we were just temp’ing paladins for awhile since it took me over 17 trials to fill one slot and that guy ended up not working out.

I know that I probably come across as someone who believes one of the following, wow sucks, wow is ending, TBC ruined wow, raiding is too much work, I don’t raid, etc. Much to my surprise I still enjoy raiding, I am a PvE person, and I quite frankly suck at PvP. The only change I have made was I retired my paladin, and took up a shadow priest on another server in a non leadership position. So in a sense I did sort of give up, but I had to reevaluate my choices. I was playing around 9+ hours a day just sorting drama out and trying to progress a guild. All in all I get the feeling I am rapidly becoming a dieing breed, all of my friends who were similar in their position have kind of given up the hope of finding people who brought forth the same professionalism they used to.