I sing my praises to Openraid and talk about my journey after the jump.
I signed up for Openraid in May of 2012. Dragon Soul had been out for 6 months, and with Pandaria a few months away, I had time to clear a bunch of old achievements I had never gotten around to doing. A lot of these involved leveling alts I had been neglecting, profession I had never looked at, and lots of archaeology. I was also still in school, so we were out for the summer, and I had a ton of free time on my hands, so I had all summer to complete these goals.
The first run I ever ran on Openraid was a Serpentshire Cavern run. I just wanted to get the achievement, but I didn't have the dps to solo Lady Vashjir, so I gathered a whole group of 4 people to go clear the instance. Openraid had just gotten a vent at this point (if I remember correctly), but we opted to just have party chat because it was an easy enough of a run. And sure enough, after 30 minutes we had cleared the instance, and I had a cool sword to transmog and the achievement for beating Vashjir.
Xyriin was someone who I saw was farming an old instance called Ulduar for the elusive Head of Mimiron. Pictured below, it's easily one of the most sought after mounts in the game. With a 1% drop off of the final boss, it is often not seen. People will most certainly be jealous of you riding this around. Mix this in with the instance of Ulduar, widely considered by many to be the best instance in the whole game(Future post idea!), and you had people flocking to the instance to be in Xyriin's group. I wasn't terribly close with Xyriin, but I got to know the people around him over the weeks I did Ulduar with him, and he had some of the best rules for his runs, many of which I would adopt when I started running my own raids.
(Mimiron's head aka The Mount of My Dreams)
Ralecia was another person I managed to stumble into for a run, and I like the way he ran, so I managed to talk with him after raid, and he had a goal to get as many people the meta achievement for BoT/BWD/TOFW (the opening tier for Cataclysm) as possible, including myself. I stayed through and helped get many people the mount, and catching up with Ralecia was one of my favorite moments of the weekend.
Sadly, the release of Pandaria in September of 2012 killed a lot of the runs I had been attending. The new content often puts a lull to Openraid events in general, but this expansion killed a lot of the runs I had been doing, and I took a break from Openraid to focus on the new content (battle pets, new raids, archaeology).
Fast forward to May 20th 2013, I'm sitting in front of my computer after another tough semester at Tech, and I'm remembering the fun I had on Openraid the prior summer. Now that I'm not taking summer classes (I've graduated by this point), I have a lot more free time, and I decided that I'm going to start a raid group to take on Ulduar every week and eventually get that Head, and finish the legendary mace that you can only get after many runs of Ulduar. I make a post to Openraid under the title "Kabas' Ulduar 25 Achievements". My goal was to help people get their Ironbound Proto-drake, which you got for completing all the base achievements in Ulduar. I never thought any would come to the events, because I had tried to run these with my guild all the time, to no avail. However, I logged on to Openraid that Sunday to see that 18 people had signed up. I was ecstatic! We ran the instance to great success, and so I made another one the next week, and people came again! I kept making them, and people kept coming to get achievements.People starting showing up for multiple runs, such as Shuerlia, Enigmata, Zurilia, Fernao, Hugeudders, and Knave. I call these people "The Entry-Level Bagelers", as they helped me get the runs going and helped get everyone coming to the runs. Before I knew it, thanks to help of my raiders, I had more than 25 people signing up. Since 25 was the maximum number of people I could have in my group, I often had a full group by Wednesday. This was mind-shattering to me. I had never believed that I could have had a run do this well. So, I continued to run Ulduar Sunday after Sunday. This continued with mostly successful runs (minus one run we didn't finish because I had 8 people show with only 2 at max level) for the next 8 months. People began to cycle in and out, and to honor the holidays, I took a two-week break. Little did I know how much would change in terms of my roster.
To kick off the new year, I started a new run through the heart of my favorite Cataclysm raid, the Firelands. I wanted to get the fiery mounts that Ragnaros dropped (pictured below), and get the legendary staff I had never gotten around to getting. I also felt like it was time to expand to a new run in addition to Ulduar, and again the response was overwhelming, with a mostly full raid on the first night. What was sad is that a lot of the people I had been doing Ulduar with were no longer running with me. Things had happened over the weeks we weren't running, and now they weren't able to make it to the runs. However, I still had energetic people who made my runs pleasurable, and they started coming back and running. I call these people "The Bagel Squad", as they're the ones who helped kick everything off. Knave had issues and was missing for the beginning antics of The Bagel Squad, but joined later. Among the ranks were Lucidor, Tenshi, Qipanjin, Neall, Shuerlia, with later additions being Beckhardt (Becky!), Grimskull, Nosajdivad (JD), among several others.
For half of a year, we successfully did Firelands and Ulduar. On June 15th 2014, I decided to open up my first World Boss Run, where we journeyed all over Pandaria and killed all of the bosses that were not inside of raid instances. These are special as we can have up to 40 people in a group, versus 25 for a raid (Sha of Happiness is not actually a raid boss, though I wish it was).
No real dramatic roster changes happened. A lot of the Bagel Squad signed up for these runs, and now I had 3 raids successfully running, all on a Saturday afternoon, back to back.
Soon after I started doing World Boss runs, a patch came out, and now people could do the Siege of Orgrimmar group with people from different servers. This was great news for Openraid, as now people could organize groups at any level. And while we were sitting around waiting for a World Boss, Knave suggested that I started my own Siege of Orgrimmar group. I was hesitant at first, but the Bagel Squad thought it was a great idea, so I did it. And we managed to get a lot done (check out more on that group on my blog post here). I added some new members to The Bagel Squad, namely Cwise, Jellexie, Skychaser and several others. And we were able to kill many raid bosses that most of us would not have been able to do, which was the goal of the runs. I'm ecstatic that we were able to do what we did.
Now that Warlords of Draenor is out, a lot of the old instances we used to run are no longer group necessary, and times have changed. I've always had a stance of having fun Sunday runs where everyone can come and relax and have a good time, and I want to keep doing that through many expansions. But I can't do it by myself. And I thank Openraid for allowing me to do that and "Achieve the Impossible"
If you play World of Warcraft, I highly recommend you visit Openraid. It is a wonderfully run website, and they have runs for just about anything you want to do. And if they don't have it, then it is super easy to set up your own runs, and you can become a raid leader like me. I cannot recommend them enough.
Have a great Tuesday!
-David
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