So if you're literate in the World of Warcraft, you can skip a lot of this. So in the World of Warcraft, there are multiple expansions, each expansion getting more and more powerful, both in terms of the monsters fighting, and the characters we play as. With each expansion, there are multiple tiers of raids within each expansion. These raids have giant bosses, and groups of people get together and use their abilities and coordination together to beat them. Once they beat the bosses, they get pieces of gear that makes their character more powerful, in turn allowing them to fight harder and harder bosses. Well, this cycle continues until the players beat all of the bosses. So then, in order for the players to be happy, the developers release a new raid, with harder bosses, and more powerful gear. So now the group of players has a new goal to strive for, and they go after the new bosses, and the cycle continues again. Eventually, after a few raids, the developers decide to release a new expansion, which means a giant power increase for everything across the board. Usually the new expansion brings along a new theme, so the bosses have new thematics and new story to play along with. If you ever have the time to sit down and invest in reading about Warcraft lore, it's really exciting, and neat stuff. But typically, designing the new expansion takes a lot more effort than just designing a new raid, because the developers have to make sure that they're putting in enough content to warrant people putting down money to buy it, as the expansions cost money to buy, while the new raids are just developed over time, and don't cost extra. So typically in an expansion, the raids will be placed 2-3 months apart from each other, and then there's a big break before the release of the new expansion ranging from 8 months to a year, giving players time to clear all of the content in the expansion, and then the new expansion releases. So think of it like this, a expansion releases with raids, players beat Raid A. 2 months later, developers release Raid B, players stop doing Raid A and go get Raid B. They can go back to Raid A, but the gear they have from Raid B makes Raid A really easy to do. This repeats until the developers want to release a new expansion, and then theres a break for players to make sure they clear Raids A, B, C, etc, before new content comes out.
So groups of players will typically form a guild, or a set group of players who frequently raid together. This guild has a economy and a bank where the players pool their resources for the good of the guild, and players in guilds can chat and plan their next raid together. I am a part of a great guild that I've been a part of for three and a half years. We're like a band of brothers (and sisters), and we always love taking bosses on. Here's a picture of us together at Pax East this year (I'm in the back of the middle!):
However we had reached the end point of our runs for the current expansion a lot earlier than we had expected. The mixture of real-life events, people moving, and the fact that we weren't able to get past a certain boss lead us to stop raiding a lot sooner than we were expecting. I had missed raiding with them, and it felt lonely to log on and not see too many people on. Don't worry, they're all really excited to come back for the new expansion, and then we can continue killing bosses together.
However, there is a great online site. It is called Openraid. You can visit them here. (At some point, I'm going to do a dedicated post to these people, they seriously amazing and changed the way I play this game.) The way it works is you say "Hey everyone, I'm going to be running this raid at this time, and I need people to come help me kill it." So people will sign up and say, sure I can come heal this fight, or hey i can tank this fight, and if you get enough people to go do the instance, then at the specified time, you go out and clear the raid and get loots. The great thing is you can do this with any player in World of Warcraft without actually having to find them first, so you play with people that you would never see otherwise. So I've been doing raids like this for quite a while, but most of these are raids from old expansions, so the power level needed to clear the instances was much lower than what we were bringing to the raid, so we would constantly clear it with no problems. I would run several of these runs every Sunday, and we would clear them quickly. I've been doing these for the greater part of a year and a half, and over that year, I've developed quite a few friendships with people that have been coming to my runs for a while. And one day, one of them suggested that I start a group for the most powerful raid at the time, the Siege of Orgrimmar.
The Siege of Orgrimmar (SoO) is the latest raid in the World of Warcraft, and it is the first instance to have 4 difficulties in it, which is a big deal. The first two difficulties are very easy in terms of difficulty, and can be done in random groups. Called Looking For Raid, or LFR, and Flex, short for Flexible, these runs could be done quite easily with any group of people, and it allowed them to learn how each fight worked, and learn how to execute the fights without being punished for failure. However, once the fights are learned, the group could navigate into Normal and Heroic mode. These modes restricted your group to either 10 or 25 people, and the fights were more punishing in difficulty. Leading and participating in these runs often leads to lots of deaths, brushing it off, learning from what went wrong, and executing the fight until the boss dies. This requires a lot more precision and patience than any run I had lead before, so I was hesitant when I posted my First SoO run on Openraid. I went in with the idea that I wanted to take a core group of people who would never see the Normal or Heroic version of the encounter and give them the chance to experience that before the expansion ended. Also, the final boss, Garrosh Hellscream, dropped weapons that we would be able to use when the next expansion came out, as the weapons would level up along with us, unlike all the other gear we had gathered. So, it was important to me to get as many people these weapons as I could, and I wanted to have a journey with people who would be enjoyable to play. I had no hope that my group would fill out, but I posted the run anyway.
I was so surprised when I got back to my computer the next day and saw that I had tons of people who were willing to come and try to take on SoO. So, on the first day, we were able to go in, and within an hour, we had defeated our first boss! Since my raid only happened for two hours, we were only able to get one more boss, but everyone was so thankful for being allowed to come along, and it made me feel really good. A lot of my raiders who had come in other runs were playing roles they weren't used to, so it was interesting to see them doing stuff I wasn't used to seeing them doing. SO I made another one, and another one, and as we killed more bosses, I had a solid group going. We weren't the best group, but it was just us focusing together and killing bosses, like the Dark Shamans:
As we got closer and closer to our goal, a deadline made itself obvious. October 14th was the release of the next patch. As the next patch was released, a lot of the cool things we wanted to accomplish would be changing. The weapons we wanted to get would still be there, but the achievement saying that we were ahead of the curve by beating it before the patch would be leaving. THe format of the raid would also be changing, so compositions would be different. We wanted to do that, so we pushed on, and we killed more bosses. We went from 7 bosses out of 14, then we would kill one, and one more, the date for the pre-patch looming ever closer. Suddenly it was October 13th, and we only had 10 of 14 done. As much as I would love to tell you that we killed Garrosh Hellscream before the new patch, we were unable to. We were really close, but in the end we only got 11 bosses down before the new patch.
However, with the patch came new changes and new energy. As stated before the composition of the raids changed around. The LFR difficulty stayed the same, but Flex was replaced with Normal, and Normal became Heroic. Normal and Heroic allowed for anywhere from 10-30 people to be in the group, and the boss would increase health and power based on how many people were in the group. It was a really cool addition to the game, as it allowed groups to stray from only having 10 or 25 people, and leaving people out if groups weren't able to reach 25 people. However, they made a new difficulty, Mythic difficulty. This difficulty was essentially the old Heroic mode, but it required the group to have 20 people, and there was no tuning to be had. I'm including a new picture in here to explain it in a better way than I currently am.
So, as a group, we made it our goal to get through at least half of Mythic SoO before the expansion hit. As such we tried to bring in a lot of people to help us finish the Heroic version of the instance (the old Normal, i know its confusing). But the numbers proved to be difficult, as we had people coming with who weren't on the same page, so I reduced the run from 18 people to 12, so we could keep the core and still have the ability to do the fights with ease. And two weeks later, we were able to defeat Garrosh Hellscream, and we all took a picture in front of his throne to commemorate our victory in Heroic mode.
Now that we had finished Heroic, we had to assemble 8 more people and venture into the hardest difficulty. The new patch made things a tad easier because the numbers were tweaked for the new expansion (I'll go into this in more detail in another blog post), and with our new additions, and even with all of the new mechanics the fights had to try and slow us down, we were able to kill 5 bosses in our first two Mythic runs, stepping over the accomplishments I had been able to accomplish with my guild. Right now, we're struggling on the sixth boss, a giant mechanical scorpion who shoots lazers and saw blades, but I'm confident we can get it down.
I am so proud of the group that I started. It was a group effort to do what we had done. To start with many members who had no experience what so ever in Heroic raiding, much less normal raiding, it was thrilling to take these people and teach them. I had one of them whisper me after a raid "It means so much that now I'm the one telling people the correct ways to do the fights. I enjoy knowing what's happening in the fights now." And that's how I know that what I'm doing was right, because of the people I was able to help experience a side of my favorite game they would have never seen otherwise. And with two raids before the expansion releases, hopefully we can beat Mythic Garrosh. If we don't, that's fine. I still have the memories of my SoO run, and all of the bosses we were able to beat together.
So that's the story of my SoO group. And if you read all of that, thank you so much. You deserve to listen to what I've been listening to this week. It's a crazy bassy tune, and I'm loving it. Have a great Thursday, everyone
-David
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