Great guilds are more important than great raids

Not too long ago, Doone made his list of the top five raids in WoW. I tried to make my own little list, but I was hindered by a few things. First, while I've seen and finished all but one pre-Cataclysm raid, I'd done many of those during the next expansion and therefore with a different experience. Naxx at 70 is not the same as Naxx at 60, and of course neither are like new Naxx at 80.

Why wasn't I in those raids? Because I wasn't in guilds that were doing them. In Cataclysm I was almost never in a guild and consequently did almost no raiding. Ditto for Pandaria. LFR was raiding in visuals only.

If asked about the greatest raid ever, of all time, I will answer Karazhan. Why? Well it certainly was a great raid. The bosses were varied. Some were made-up for the raid, but many were straight out of the stories we'd hastily clicked past to get our quest reward or the games that made Warcraft a title that could sell millions of copies of a game in a completely different genre. Kara introduced many innovations such as tokens that reduced the tendency to get completely screwed by the RNG; a small, accessible raid; and polite ghosts.

Yet, why don't I say Ulduar? That was a place with a nifty story, varied bosses, and all manner of neat new tricks such as getting to punch a tank. It was perfectly tied into Storm Peaks and if there is one thing I love it is when instances are tied to their locations. The short reason is that I was in a different guild. I still enjoyed their company and stuck with them for a while after, but it wasn't the guild that I ran Kara with. I ran Kara with my guild, founded by my friends and me, filled with people of a similar mindset. Ulduar was someone else's guild that I was let into. Though in retrospect, when I took another shot at playing again in Cataclysm they were the ones I ran with, even giving up playing my paladin (it was on another server, this wasn't one of those "I quit my main to get into a raiding guild" stories). Just writing that was enough to make me start looking for them again. This is a dark road. :)

Anyway, there's the general trend: While Ulduar was on par with Karazhan, even a little difference in guild attachment can dramatically tip the scales. There is another issue though: I never finished Ulduar. We were stuck so close to the end, and I think slowly getting there and I would have gladly fought it out. Then someone set up a circus in Icecrown and we were off for some of the most forgettable bosses since Molten Core. My WoW experience was downhill from there, struggling through ICC, with Ulduar still bugging me, all because Blizzard yanked guilds away.

That brings me to my happiest time in Cataclysm. It wasn't a long time, but for a few brief moments I was back raiding with them again. I wasn't on my paladin. I don't think Dragon Soul was all that great of a raid. But I was with friends. About a week and a half ago I went looking for them, eventually going with the straightforward method of resubbing. Sadly, many of them are inactive now (not gquit), but a few are around and maybe more will come back. In the meantime, some low-key MoP is fun.

But about my top five raids...
Molten Core
Karazhan
Zul'Gurub
Gruul's Lair
Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (20-man)
These are in no particular order. Nor do I suffer from the delusion that these are the Top Five Raids. They are only mine and are almost entirely due to my situation at the time.

Molten Core was my first raid. I have fond memories of fighting Garr, a fight which required many warlocks, and during which I demonstrated my creativity, figuring out, in a time before many guides were around, a better way to banish. Perhaps it was a small thing, but it was fun. While it was an amateurish raid design, it was also perfectly integrated into Blackrock Mountain, a place filled with instances and raids, all connected in one way or another, making it a prime destination for players 50-60. That made it a fun, or frustrating, place on a PvP server.

Karazhan was a hard-earned victory, fought through with my own guild of friends. It was there that my paladin went from alt to main, a position that would only be lost because of The Great Betrayal. There was such variety, such strange things to find.

Zul'Gurub was strange place. There are multiple optional bosses. One boss was different depending on the week, and somewhat difficult to summon, needing an alchemist and some odd ingredients. Another boss was fished up. Where MC was dull, ZG was bizarre and outlandish. Players could loot voodoo piles for a chance at voodoo dolls, needed for trinkets, a rare thing in those days, but they'd be mind-controlled for a while. The 'correct' response was to CC them, but why not kill them instead? In an era of 40-man raids, ZG only needed 20. Its loot was an unusual mix of purples and oddly-powerful blues, seemingly scattered at random. Even that long ago Blizzard was doing strange things with its raiding.

Gruul's Lair consisted of one incredibly hard pull and a somewhat pushover final boss. The Council was based on a good pull: get the mobs where they needed to be, attacking the right people, and things could go fairly smoothly. Screw it up and it's a horrible mess of everyone dying. The final boss, Gruul, was a fight about spreading out: he'd slowly turn players to stone, then shatter them, hurting those nearby, so spreading out 25 people just right was sometimes difficult. I'd recently joined a new guild, merging our fading one with another that needed a boost. They reluctantly let me tank Gruul, but called for a lot of misdirects, because "paladins have trouble with aggro." I proceeded to double everyone else, at a time when aggro wasn't a matter of sneezing with righteous fury on. That was a source of endless amusement for me. Even beside that, those were still days when paladin tanking was still in doubt, it wasn't that long ago that paladins were mostly just exceptionally mana-efficient healbots. Of course we were recognized as good trash and five-man tanks, with our mechanics perfectly suited to holding aggro on unlimited enemies, but handling just one was apparently in doubt. And, of course, I always pulled with my goblin rocket launcher, because if you're going to make a tank, why not do it in style?

5 too many and 15 too few, it's the amazing 10-man!

The week before today, also known as (aka) "last week" to you kids these days (yktd) I made some claims regarding raiding, such as suggesting that easymode raids would be nothing more than oversized dungeons and that oversized dungeons are stupid.

Well long story short, Upper Blackrock Spire, Karazhan, and Alterac Valley (before they ruined it).

UBRS
This was a good start to a flame war back in the day. Someone would say something about raiding and not being able to raid and then someone would say that UBRS was a raid and someone else would say that is stupid. It was a raid and it was not. It was true that to create a full UBRS group of 15 people, or 10 after they did some changes to a few of the high-level instances, you would need to use the "convert to raid" button and would then have raid bars and all that stuff. It was raid-sized-ish, in the sense that anything more than 5 players required a raid. It was still smaller than the smallest raid of 20 people for ZG (or AQ20 later on).

It was essentially an oversized dungeon with the occasional raid-like element, such as one person being able to ruin everything. The loot was mostly blues, with some extremely rare epics (if you saw one drop ever you were lucky). This was the standard for the high-level instances at the time. Fights weren't quite faceroll, but most of them weren't especially tough. Mistakes could get you killed, but patient clearing minimized the risks. Randomly placed quest chains would lead through the instances. They'd take an hour or two to complete, though depending on the level of PvP activity at the time, just as long to get inside.

I loved that place, despite it not properly fitting with my "no oversized dungeons" philosophy of the previous post.

In fact, maybe that's what made it so great. It was a 5-man that you could bring a crowd to. Bring your friends! Bring your enemies! Bring someone with the key otherwise we're going to have to hire someone and that's a bit of a pain! This was quite handy because it was like meeting three groups at once, a useful thing back when meeting people in groups was how you formed guilds.

UBRS was a strange sort of place. You'd go in and do some raid-like stuff such as struggle to find a competent hunter and a druid (not competent, just a druid) and people would find new and creative ways to wipe the group. Bosses could have some interesting mechanics, but nothing too major. It was somewhere between raiding and 5-mans, but clearly on the side of 5-mans.

Karazhan
This was the best raid ever. Hands down (unless we're doing OWS finger waving things in which case it is hands up, but seriously, stop doing that). Nothing comes close. Why? Why indeed.

You know what? I could go on all day, night, tomorrow, and probably keep going about everything that was great. But I'm not going to. That's right, I'm just going to say that Karazhan was awesome and was a 10-man raid, and then walk away.

Alterac Valley
This is one case where I think having more people was critical. It was the sheer number of people that made AV what it was. Well that and an unusually important PvE element in a BG which was gradually nerfed into oblivion, somehow taking the PvP with it, until it was reduced to a boss race and I went home to cry.

Alterac Valley was the oversized place. There were a lot of people and there were a lot of flags and graveyards. It was like Texas if Texas were colder and the immigrants shot back more often. I think in this analogy the Orcs are Texans and the Dwarves are immigrants, which reverses just about everything we'd usually expect, given the dwarvish love of guns and the orcs being illegal aliens.

In a sense, AV was an oversized AB. You'd run around and try to capture flags and then the other side would try to take them back. Then people would yell at you to fight at the flag and someone else would run around behind everyone else and capture it. So then we'd all fight on some other road. Then at the end the winner would fight a boss while a bunch of idiots tried to wipe them, much like raiding. Mechanically, AV was like a giant AB, but by making it so big, it made it different.

It's not the size that matters, it's what you're trying to do with it.
UBRS isn't an easymode raid, it is an oversized dungeon and does not pretend to be anything else. Similarly, back when several of the dungeons were 10-mans, they were oversized dungeons, not easymode raids. Part of this is that they were not easymode, at least not at the gear level of people who ran them.

In contrast, an easymode raid will not be an oversized dungeon. It will pretend to offer challenges, and then not. It will pretend to require coordination, and then not. It will put on all the appearances of a real raid, and then not be that.

Karazhan, while a small raid, was not easymode. It would kill you and kill you again and then make you play chess. Then kill you for losing at chess. It was small so you could round up people without too much difficulty, though certainly nothing compared to an automated tool that can bring in anyone and then just as easily get rid of them so you don't accidentally form any human connections. With the attunement changed, Karazhan was accessible without being trivial. If someone still won't run it, then the raid is not the problem.

Finally soloed Moroes

It took a few tries, but he died. It was pretty close and I ended up popping LoH for the last 10% or so. I might have been able to kill him without it, but I figured it was worth it, just to be safe. The adds were shadow priest, ret paladin, prot warrior, holy paladin. If not for the stun reduction in ret I probably would have died. Nerf HoJ, except on my paladin. :) Gear-wise, I feel like I'm right at the edge of what is practical, not relying on procs too much or needing to pop potions. The last time I attempted this my gear was about the same except for a worse neck and I had H VH legs instead of T7.

Keeping with the theme of the past two years, the watch did not drop. The two times I have seen it, it's been a much bigger upgrade for others.

Attumen was close due to a bad choice when resealing.

Maiden was a slow death that I didn't feel like I could do much to prevent. So much damage is holy, so my armor does nothing and BoS isn't giving much regen. This would probably be a lot easier as ret so I could actually hurt her and heal more with instant FoL.

Time for ZG...


Oh right, Happy New Year.