The Problem In The Mists

The man in this video speaks well. I was there.

Years ago, the real motivation in the game was to become one of the stronger players in the game. All you needed were 9-24 like-minded players to take the lengthy journey. When I would take breaks from questing or dungeon crawling I'd inspect the stronger players and the stuff they'd worked so long and hard to get. To be like them and become well known among the playerbase was quite the thought.

I wanted to be like the max level guys that took the time to help out rookies like myself on my beginning journey to the endgame.

These were the days where planning ahead wasn't something you wanted to do, especially if you were in it solely for the loot. Guilds would spend a couple nights or even weeks on one boss until it died. Developing a guild strategy was extremely important. It required patience, but at the same time it was fun. In guild chat on off-nights or raid nights we'd be busy discussing boss strategies we could use or the gearing we would need, the kind of number crunching that's usually done on some website out there.

The end result of such demanding conditions in raid were players that were exceptionally sharp. Before then, you didn't need an achievement to prove that you killed a boss. If you had the gear you definitely had what it took to get your guild through it. And it showed. When I used to do pick-up groups for dungeons I'd occasionally get a player from one of the higher-end guilds on our server, and they kicked ass. It was pretty admirable. Sometimes I'd ask about where their guild was in progression and other things, stories about raiding, silly wipes, whatever.

Hardcore Raiding

You know, before this day and age of raiding, where we now have three modes of difficulty to choose from, with inflating item levels every so often, we raided four hours a night for 3-4 nights a week. It really wasn't bad, considering the fact that raid dungeons weren't designed to be breezed through in a day back then. Karazhan could have been done in two hours with a decently geared Tier 5 raid chain pulling and whatnot.

I've done it once.

Anyway, raiding meant more than just "killing so and so for the phat lewts" back in the day, it was the THRILL of the kill! Man, nothing felt better than getting past that tense moment when a boss had 20% or less health and your healers were nearly out of mana while your tanks used every cooldown available to them (Shield Wall was a 30-60 minute cooldown depending on talent spec). DPS used their finishers (Yes, I was the one spamming Hammer of Wrath every six seconds).

Your heart pounds. The boss' health meter slowly depletes. Until it hits 1%.
When everything feels like it just slowed down. It's a horrible feeling. At that point the raid either succeeds or wipes hard, and then it's back to square one. You definitely don't get that sense of accomplishment anymore, unless you're one of those perfectionists that likes to do something over but at a higher difficulty.

Yes, I'm talking about you, HEROIC modes. I don't like them much, because most guilds won't attempt them after doing a full clear of a "Normal" difficulty instance. Some might, but they've become so accustomed to the simplicity of an easier encounter and don't have much of an idea on what to do when the odds really stack up against them. When I raided Ulduar with my 25-man guild it was a solid two months of progression.  We had a solid raid leader and a "decent" team, we managed to kill Yogg-Saron by mid-August but our raid leader bailed on the guild shortly thereafter, because of numerous complaints from guild members.

So much for hoping to start hard modes.

And now for some perspective on the roles in a normal raid- I've done all but heal in a 25-man setting, but my role was always a damage dealer. As a tank, however, you are tasked with keeping the boss off of anyone else but you and the off-tanks. This means positioning a boss a certain way, or rounding up additional enemies that may randomly join in on the fight. Bosses that cleaved, you faced them away from melee damage dealers and tanked them against a wall, dragon bosses always had to be tanked a certain way so that their tails didn't bother the melee and that the melee didn't get hit by their flame breaths or cleaves. Off-tanks had the duty of picking up those pesky adds, sometimes they'd hit nearly as hard as the boss themselves or sometimes even more.

Healers were tasked with keeping the raid alive obviously. Back in Burning Crusade the classes were used their advantages. Paladins were great single target healers, Priests were excellent group healers; single target healers with a Discipline/Holy hybrid build or just straight Discipline, Shamans were exceptional group healers while Druids made excellent single target inactive healers, meaning, they healed with spells that would heal over time and weren't cast repeatedly, so they benefit a bit better from the five-second rule that once existed for mana regeneration: Prior to Wrath of the Lich King mana users were restricted in their mana regeneration for five seconds after casting any spell. After five seconds their mana regeneration would go to their normal rates. However, there were spells and talents that allowed a percentage of out-of-combat regen in combat. Sometimes equipment pieces would have it as a flat-out stat (i.e; Restores X mana per 5 sec.) For shamans, that would prove to be a VERY important stat to find on gear as they progressed deeper into Burning Crusade.

Damage dealers. A dime a dozen, as they say. They made up the bulk of a raid, usually about 13-15 out of 25, or half a 10-man raid. Their job was to kill stuff, usually without dying. More higher-end guilds would actually dedicate one of the damage dealers as a "Main Assist" who which the rest of the damage dealers would follow on cue. This allowed for organized kills on targets, especially in groups where the monsters have pretty high health... Which was what most of the raid environment was. In a boss fight, the damage dealers were responsible for not hitting enrage timers on bosses or killing a boss fast enough so that the soft enrage mechanic does not wipe the raid. They are there to finish off the boss before the healers run out of mana to keep the tanks alive and are supposed to do whatever they can to remain alive. As the saying goes, "A dead DPS is no DPS." And that's a very bad thing.

Speaking of very bad things, Crushing Blows were one of them. They were random damage spikes tanks had to contend with when Crushing Blows could be delivered by a monster that is roughly three levels higher than the player. This was usually boss-level monsters or simply any creature in a raid that was level 63 or 73. This mechanic was changed by the time the second expansion came about. Crushing Blows were hits that were basically half-criticals- or 150% of normal damage. Tanks had to gear in a way so that they could minimize the amount of time they remained vulnerable, by attaining a total combined defensive percentage of 102.6% roughly. This meant your dodge/parry/block combined with the standard miss percentage of 5% had to add up to 102%.

For warriors, this was nothing, as Shield Block provided a whopping 75% block chance for five seconds but only lasted 1-2 blocks depending on the talents. That explains how warriors were the "main" tanks back in original World of Warcraft. Paladins, while they could have been tanks, had a higher bar to clear as their Holy Shield only provided 30% block for 10 seconds and only lasted 8 blocks. In addition, any blocked hits would recoil to the attacker as Holy damage, which was pretty nifty and also the primary method of Paladin threat gain back then, as Paladin were better reactive tanks with a niche in multi-target tanking.

If only things were like that again, huh?

The Dread Citadel

Naxxramas. Originally released as the final raid instance of Vanilla World of Warcraft, it was the hardest thing players could hope to tackle at level 60. With fourteen bosses in five massive wings, it would go on to be remembered by veteran players as an excellent and highly rewarding experience.

An interesting note about this dungeon, most of the items acquired here were actually enough to wander into Karazhan with, surpassing even most of the rare items from dungeons. Also, the Tier 3 sets were nine pieces instead of the usual eight- a ring was added to the mix!

Unfortunately, many players had not been able to experience the full wrath of Naxxramas, and many guilds had not even completed it, as there were six months to do so before the release of Burning Crusade. Six months wasn't enough time for raiding guilds back in the day, as raid bosses took much longer than a few weeks to develop and perfect strategies on. This also led to a retcon of the raid, as it would later reappear in Wrath of the Lich King as the introductory raid with a new story.

In Wow's third expansion, the entirety of Naxxraamas was re-tuned for both 10-man and 25-man groups, a lot of trash mobs were removed, replaced, or rearranged for smoother traversing. Bosses still retained MOST of their original abilities with relatively minor tweaks, such as damage outputs and mechanic changes to account for a smaller raid group. The original Naxxramas was tuned for 40 people.

Over The Years [Part Two]

So yeah, by Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard gave players the choice of going for 10-man or 25-man versions of every raid introduced in that expansion. In a nutshell, it worked, as the 25-man raid versions gave higher item level loot than the 10-man, but it also caused some problems. For instance, epic level gear began at item level 200, but by the time the expansion was at its end, the highest item level was pushing 277-284. That was a BIG jump at the time, but it did not have to be that way.

Another issue was the introduction of hard modes, harder versions of raid bosses that could be triggered by a raid for even better loot, a couple item levels higher than the usual. For 10-man raids, hard mode loot was equal in power to the stuff you'd find in a normal 25-man raid. Ulduar, for example, gave iL213 loot in 10 man, while hard mode bosses would give iL226. That was also the same level of gear you would receive in the normal 25-man version. Hard modes in 25-man would yield iL239 gear. Quite the jump. The next raid tier would go from 232 > 245 > 258.

It also didn't help that there were lots more players were running around in such gear too. It was pretty hard to distinguish the good players from the bad ones. Sadly enough, this was the new face of World of Warcraft.

As time went on, the player base would being to alienate itself from each other- The better players would still continue to interact with one another, totally avoiding things such as the new "Looking-For-Group" system for their daily badge rewards. The rest of the players relied on these random group runs to earn badges to buy their gear and hope to get in a pick-up raid for even extra rewards. The game quickly became boring. Not many guilds were able to do hard modes, since they'd become too cozy with the simplicity of normal raids, especially on the server where I played. This led to a few burnouts.

Nobody had to work anymore to get a few purples. All you had to do was run the easy heroics countless times to get the badges required. All you needed was a bit of time really. But oh well.

When Cataclysm rolled around Blizzard attempted to scale the difficulty back to where it once was at the start of the Burning Crusade but the damage was already done, people weren't too happy leaving their comfort zone and the ones who had greatly enjoyed their time in Wrath of the Lich King all started to break off from the game, as well as some veteran players who grew tired of everything else.

But oh well, life goes on.

Over The Years... [Part One]

World of Warcraft was a growing game up until after the release of its current expansion set, Cataclysm. Although the numbers began to slowly bleed off at the end of the Lich King expansion, Cataclysm was the final nail in the coffin for many.

At the very start, World of Warcraft was a very immerse experience. There were lands unexplored and dungeons to pillage. Players had to work together to conquer most of this content, as solo play was mainly discouraged. As a result, server communities were quite close. It meant your reputation.

For all of the original World of Warcraft and much of the Burning Crusade expansion this was how the game went. As a player who started in late Vanilla ("vanilla" is another term for the original iteration of WoW), I enjoyed the end game of Burning Crusade, which wasn't too different from Vanilla's raid style, raids were cut down to 25 players, warriors were still the de-facto main tanks but druids and paladins now had a decent chance, raiding Retribution paladins weren't too common yet, priests were still the best healers but shadow was becoming increasingly prevalent, Horde and Alliance now both had Shamans and Paladins as these two classes were faction-specific in Vanilla, so and so.

Getting into the raids required going through some quests called "attunements", which were required for a spell to be cast on your character or an item he or she needed to possess to get past the green raid portals. In this case, in Vanilla, players had to trek through the Blackrock Depths and find the entrance to Molten Core in order to retrieve a rock sample. Blackwing Lair required a full run of the Upper Blackrock Spire in order to use the teleportation orb. In Burning Crusade players had to complete a lengthy quest chain including four dungeon runs to re-assemble the key to Karazhan, its entry-level raid. Moving on to Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep required slightly more demanding tasks, such as defeating the end bosses of the raid tier before it.

Sadly, Blizzard decided to remove the attunement quests altogether for all raid dungeons in order to let more guilds access this content. While I consider this a bad move, it allowed for more players to flood the raid content, both eager yet unprepared. Although players were now able to enter the hardest raid dungeons without stepping foot in the easier ones, their lack of experience and gear would quickly come to bite them back. This explains why not many guilds ventured past the first few bosses of Black Temple/Mount Hyjal or Sunwell Plateau, which was exceedingly difficult at the time...

Constructs In The Raid

Ah Teron Gorefiend.

The fourth boss in Black Temple (or fifth/sixth) depending on what order you kill the bosses in this area. Teron Gorefiend was among one of the first Death Knights according to Warcraft lore. There's an interesting quest chain where you inadvertently bring him back into the physical world at Shadowmoon Valley.

Anyway, Gorefiend is a DPS race boss with a very nasty twist. This boss wiped many raids back when it was new, mainly because players failed hard at the Shadow of Death "minigame".

Basically, what raids wanted to do was kill Gorefiend before his Doom Blossoms became too much for the healers to handle. The Doom Blossoms were strange purple clouds that floated in mid-air spamming Shadow Bolt Volleys at random raid members for absurd amounts of HP. 1500 Shadow damage might not sound like a lot, because at 70 it wasn't, BUT if you had a good number of them up, more players are taking damage and that's more stress on your healers. That's a Very Bad Thing. That and Gorefiend hit pretty hard, about 5-6,000 HP on an average geared main tank. Tanks at this level of the raid tier would roughly have about 19-22k HP raid buffed.

Now, the catch to this fight! While your raid's busy dispelling the various magic effects and pummeling Gorefiend, every 30 seconds he marks a random player for death! This ability was called Shadow of Death!  Players had 55 seconds to quickly finish whatever they were doing, run to the other side of the room from the raid, where they would drop dead, spawning four shadowy constructs that would slowly run towards the raid. Along with that, the now-dead player would also become a ghost. This was very important. As a ghost, you'd have 60 seconds to kill the four constructs you just spawned because they cannot be harmed by anything else but the abilities you now possessed. These abilities were Spirit Strike, Spirit Lance, Spirit Chains, Spirit Volley and Spirit Shield. These abilities were bound to the 1,3,4,5,7 keys respectively. To kill the constructs before they reached the raid, players had to use the four damaging abilities to their advantage. Spirit Volley would hit all the constructs for massive damage, Spirit Chains would damage and root them temporarily, Spirit Lance would slow the constructs and do a fair bit of damage. Balancing these abilities required fast fingers and fast target switching. Spirit Shield could be used to help out random raid members.

After 60 seconds, players would remain dead for the rest of the battle. So much for that. This fight is very similar to one of the Hyjal encounters in terms of this mechanic.

If you could kill Gorefiend before he finished your whole raid off, you'd walk away triumphant.

Reigning Triumphant

The joys of downing a raid boss for the first time.
The cheers that blew up the vent servers.
The many chat messages that flooded everything from Guild Chat to General Chat.

It may sound funny, but downing a new raid boss for the first time was a wave of excitement for many guilds. To some, it meant they were progressing as a whole. Raid-level bosses were not designed to be easy. They were designed to require tight guild coordination and teamwork. Without those, you were doomed to fail. Now, getting it right was the main obstacle to getting down that raid boss. That meant wiping for hours on end. Until everyone got it down right and pulled through for the last attempt.

Wiping wasn't a bad thing. It shouldn't be one either. Sure, it's frustrating, but the repair bills don't matter. Gold is plentiful in the World of Warcraft, even more than ever. Instead of giving it up or calling it quits next time, focus on what the raid is doing wrong, and do things to improve it. Check your positioning/raid balance. Check if you're properly itemized for the encounter. Make sure your tanks are properly equipped and are using their abilities accordingly. Make sure your healers are being efficient with their mana. If damage dealers constantly die to avoidable battle elements you may want to consider going one-on-one with  them to rectify the situation.

Please don't call an encounter hard or un-doable. If anything, consider your playstyle and improve on what needs improving.