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Deciphering the Art of Raiding in World of Warcraft

With every major content update, World of Warcraft introduces a new raid. Top guilds immediately begin the progress race in Mythic mode. Usually, these same pros clear it in a maximum of 2-3 weeks, while ordinary players take from 3 to 7 months to master a Mythic raid. So what’s the difference? In Dota 2 or CS:GO, everything is quite simple: professionals train every day, spending an incredible amount of time honing their reflexes and mechanical skills. Things are a little different in WoW. Today we will try to tell you what a raid is in World of Warcraft, and why players love this mode so much.

Raid

First, let’s look at what a raid in WoW is. Anyone who has ever played an MMORPG probably knows about raid dungeons. Usually, this is a location for a certain number of people with various bosses and valuable rewards. Moreover, most often in some grind games like Lineage 2, the bosses are just fat carcasses with incredible damage. And in WoW things were the same. However, since 2004, raiding has changed a lot, and the fat, hulking creatures have been replaced by smart villains with a wide range of options for killing your character. 

Nowadays, completing raids in World of Warcraft is not easy. Many players buy mythic 10 boost to receive cool prizes and quickly upgrade their accounts. Boosting companies provide services such as completing raids and dungeons, obtaining necessary items, leveling, and coaching so that players can enjoy the game.

A modern boss in WoW usually has between two and five different phases, each with different trump cards. If you stand up and just hit him in the face without following tactics, then in about ten seconds your corpse will most likely be hanging from his peak. Moreover, with the evolution of the bosses themselves, the approach to the format also changed. For example, in Classic, raids were generally limited to 40 people – in those days, along with the boss, you would also have to deal with lags. In the next Burning Crusade update, the number of people needed for the raid was reduced to 25, and in Wrath of the Lich King, they even provided an alternative in the form of an additional mode for 10 raiders and a division into Normal and Heroic. 

With the development of Blizzard’s technical capabilities in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, the company introduced a unique self-adjusting mode and an entire system that remained until the modern Shadowlands. Now any player can choose a raiding format to their liking and skill: flexible Raid Search System, Normal and Heroic, or Mythic limited to 20 people. In a flexible one, you can gather any number of people from 10 to 30, the game itself will count you and adjust the health and attack level of all living creatures in the dungeon. In Mythic mode, as before, you will have to select your squad in advance, but in the ideal number of 20 people, according to Blizzard. And the company did it for a reason. Balancing mechanics for a constantly changing group is simply impossible without various kinds of compromises, and because of this, the challenge can be lost. Imagine you are working on something very interesting, and in the end, the cunning people take advantage of ten people and simply ignore the ability. However, such a limitation promises additional difficulties for the players themselves, and we will look further into why.

How to collect static and not lose touch with reality

So, to master Mythic mode, we need a static – this is a permanent group for completing the raid. Finding a good teammate in any game is not an easy task, but here you need as many as 20 of them. Moreover, each player must be dressed correctly; in Dragonflight, each specialization has legendary items with unique abilities and covenants with mediums. Very often you can fall into the trap of high ilvl. When a person’s item level is high, the covenant is not the same, and the medium’s talents are chosen completely randomly. In such a situation, every raid leader is simply obliged to know the intricacies of each class in the game, and this is a ton of information. 

Of course, all this can be simplified by looking at the most popular ones on specialized sites like warcraftlogs.com. But you still won’t be able to recruit people without interviews. Yes, a raid in WoW is a job where the leader seems to hire players and then demands that all the rules be followed. And we will have a lot of them. As in any team, if you need to unite to achieve a common goal, you will have to maintain discipline: be on time, don’t chat when you shouldn’t, or don’t leave for tea without warning. The raid itself must have a certain number of tanks (2), healers (4-5), and Damage Dealers of various classes. For example, a demon hunter gives a bonus to magic damage, a monk to physical damage, and the Mage, Warrior, and Priest have specialized buffs for their main characteristics. Assembling a squad and at the same time getting all the advantages is one of the main responsibilities of a raid leader. And this is where all new guilds usually fall apart. Not everyone has so much time and resources for another job, and this is even comparable to a small business. That is why the easiest way to find an almost ready-made squad is in the general chat. 

Very often, in time-tested teams, some participants either burn out, because to play at an acceptable level, you need to spend a lot of time, or simply leave to start a family. This is where we join in. But this does not mean that the leaders of such teams do not do the above. Each departing member adds another layer of complexity to the search for a replacement, much like navigating real-life challenges.


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