And at this point there is nothing that keeps my more interested in raiding than gearing up and waiting for the one hard encounter that will keep my guild busy for weeks.

I am more of a casual player now, but I will NEVER forget the first time we took down Vael in BWL. We must have wiped on him 50+ times easily and there was NO GREATER feeling then when we finally took him out.

I agree with everything that you and the other commentors said completely. Problem is that a good chunk of people are loot whores and only want the loot. They dont care about lore or the feeling of accomphlishment, they are simply in it to get gear and expect it to be ezmode.

You have to learn how to wipe and not get upset about it. This isn’t suppose to be easy, there is a reason why it is called end game.

Very well written with good stuff in it, im linking on my blog. Let me know if you have any problems or issues with that.

You guys are a big part of what makes this game fun for me and keeps me motivated. Not just in my guild but everywhere. I sure couldn’t do the part of a raidlead. I think I’d loose my temper every second raid. I try to almost never criticize fellow raiders and just help motivate the healers and point out little things that could be done better.

I have never heard so much whining, pissing and moaning as when I told the raid that after ‘warming up’ on Plague Wing, we’d go do Military instead of Spider. Yes, spider is easier, yes we can do it in our sleep and yes, you are ‘guaranteed’ loot but… meh, we hadn’t cleared military yet! If it hadn’t been for another admin complaining I’d have even done Military first!

There’s also our first kill of Razuvious when I was told 5 healers was not enough… *ahem* When the choice is between stopping the raid 30 minutes early or at least giving new bosses a shot with a sub-optimal setup? It seems ludicrous to stop.

I have to admit, I was on the verge of really losing my temper. There have always been people of the attitude of “we need better gear before we can kill x” and I’m afraid I always read it as “we don’t have enough skill to take x boss down without out-gearing the encounter”.

Although ‘rushing’ for each first kill sometimes feels a bit hectic, I enjoy it more than farming the same thing over and over again at the start of each raid week.

If you are out there and you want to annoy me there is one simple way: Talk in raidchat about why we aren’t doing a boss that’s on farm status after some wipes on a new boss. That just drives me nuts. We all want our loot. We all need our badges. We’ve all been through nights of wiping that just wouldn’t end. But sorry guys, raiding, especially 25 man raiding is just no 5 man pug. You just don’t do 1-2 tries on a boss, shrug and let it be. And if you’re in a good guild I’m sure you know that even the last try of the night can bring the long awaited success.

Although I don’t mind the ‘easy’ segway into raiding that Naxx has given us, the only downside I see to the ease with which you can do it is that people are not used to wiping and start to get restless when you wipe more than a couple of times (as we did on our first patchwerk tries) and suddenly believe that it’s ‘impossible without better gear lets go farm x’. /growl I completely detest, as you say, this new attitude towards wipes.

/hug

A guild has to decide if they want to have progression at their ultimate goal or if fun and just playing together is more important.

My example for this is BC content after prequests for BT and MH went away. As I guild you could farm the first bosses in MH and BT for months and doing fine like that. Gear just kept flowing in and eventually you could slowly progress and kill boss after boss.

Or you could soon as you met a roadblock boss start working on this one, start with him in your raid ID and bring him down as fast as possible. Like that you can kill a boss weeks or even months before a guild that focused on farming both MH and BT. The price for this is that maybe some weeks you’ll have to fill in an additional raiding night to clear the farm content. And that there are going to be more wipes compared to just outgearing a boss.

Everyone is looking to progress, otherwise guild stagnation and possibly drama is sure to follow.

Our guild only really got into raiding with Burning Crusade, although we’d done ZG and about half of AQ20 in “classic” WoW. After clearing Kara our first tries on Gruul (well, High King Maulgar to be exact) were a bit of a disaster and rather than persevering on our next raid night we returned to Karazhan for further farming. We’d got several teams clearing Kara, with some of us thoroughly bored of the place, and had some of our more progress-oriented members leave for more advanced guilds before we went back for further attempts.

Once we got back into it we actually progressed quite far before the pre-WotLK blues set in, but that long stay in Kara both slowed us down considerably and lost us a few good raiders.