Why do you raid? To experience the content? To throw yourself at difficult content? To see the bosses, the fights, the lore behind them?
“See the content” is brought up repeatedly by nearly every group I’ve ever spoken to. Bloggers, readers, commenters, guildmates, they all want to “see the content.” What does that mean? What do you mean when you say “I want to see the content”?
I’ll tell you what I mean, because this is my blog and I can say what I want. STRAWBERRY MARSHMALLOW KITTENS.
Raiding, to me, is a puzzle. A strategical and tactical scenario that needs to be planned for, prepared for, and then executed with as much precision as one can muster. What the story is, what the bosses happened to be named, are completely irrelevant.
Last expansion, Magister’s Terrace featured Kael’thas as the final boss so that far more players would be able to see this major lore figure. This is something I can appreciate; there is a great deal of story and lore in this game that many people get quite attached to. I mean, there are die-hard Kael’thas fans out there who were, at best, “disappointed” with TBC.
To me, lore and raiding are mutually exclusive. I don’t raid to see great characters, I have no desire to fight Arthas on the grounds of “hey look it’s Arthas!” I have no interest in fighting Yogg-Saron just because “he’s the old god of death omg!” When I wipe to hardmode Northrend Beasts, I’m not thinking “Gormok is killing us all, this is awesome”; rather, I’m thinking “We’re wiping to a hardmode fight at the pinnacle of current raiding, this is awesome.”
Let’s go back to Kael’thas. He’s a major lore figure, blah blah quest lines character this that and the other thing.
If Kael’thas had instead been a featureless blue cube named “Final Boss” and had abilities called “Phase One Ability” and “Phase Two Ability”, the fight would have been exactly the same to me.
This isn’t to say the lore means nothing to me. I loved the whole Wrath Gate/Undercity thing just as much as everyone else. I appreciate a good story, a good quest chain, just like any normal person does.
But when I raid, it’s not about that. It’s about strategy. It’s about positioning.
When the faction champs fight comes up, I’m not thinking about the evolution of the alliance and horde, the friction between King Wrynn and Garrosh. I’m thinking about how we’re going to handle the resto druid, who we should have the rogue lock down, where to put out our initial crowd control and so forth.
The Battle for the Undercity would have been significantly different if the whole thing was simply summed up in some quest text. The whole idea of “show the player” rather than simply telling them about it is a fantastic one, but when I sign up to raid, I’m signing up for some raiding, not story time with Yoggy.
This isn’t intended as criticism, this is imply how I raid. Flame Leviathan isn’t the big ol’ guardian of the entrance of Ulduar, he’s That Vehicle Fight. Ignis isn’t the forger of an unstoppable army of iron, he’s That Boss With The Interrupts Where I Get To Use Fire Ward A Lot.
I’m the exact opposite … I’ve had a major beef with this expansion because this is Wrath of the effing Lich King and we’re obsessed with old gods and vrykul and things that are only tangentially related to the big bad up there in Icecrown. I can understand raiding the way you do, but I just don’t do it. It’s more fun for me when I can curse Thorim out for “double-crossing me” after all my help in Storm Peaks, that rat.
I am on a roleplaying server, though; maybe that’s got to do with it. ^^
I also think of Ignis as the Fire Ward boss. But I have to explain him as the Crotch Pot boss since our lesser-blessed raid members do not have Fire Ward.
I want lore to get me to the combat, but when I’m there and killing stuff, I want it to be about precision and mechanics.
Blue squares would be boring though. And I like spiffy names for abilities. But half the time I end up saying, “that frost thing he does” or calling all bad stuff on the ground “fire” because no one knows what I’m talking about otherwise.
STRAWBERRY MARSHMALLOW KITTENS indeed good sir. You need to slow down your blogs, I cant read them all and your making me and my once every two weeks or so blogging look lazy.
On the topic which I briefly reviewed. I enjoy raiding for the challenge of course, the fun of figuring shit out and beating it. There is also something to be said of the graphics and the general shtick of the fight. Archavon is easy and boring as fuck, Flame Leviathan was also easy but the mechanics and scenery really made it awesome.
I agree to an extent – raiding is more about solving an interesting and engaging puzzle than roleplaying.
Having said that though, I’m looking forward to the Arthas fight, and not just because he’ll be the last boss in WotLK. I’ll be very disappointed if he’s a complete pushover, but not because I enjoy challenging content. There’s clearly a separation between raid bosses that are just space-fillers – like FL or NRB – and raid bosses that tie in heavily to the lore – like Arthas.
I mean, ultimately we’re all playing a Warcraft game. Certain characters play a pivotal role in defining the universe we inhabit: Illidan, Kil’Jaeden, Arthas, and I have a hard time believing that there’s ANYONE who raids regularly and doesn’t get even a little bit excited about fighting those guys just because of who they are.
The “seeing content” is two fold for me. Experiencing and solving the puzzle, as you say, as well as seeing the boss. Either from a lore aspect or “this is what everyone else was talking about” scenario.
I did AQ40 over the weekend, which I never had the pleasure of seeing back in the day. Although there wasn’t a whole lot learned on the fight mechanics, it was still a blast.
I’ve always found that “raiding for lore” requires too much of a suspension of disbelief.
I HAVE RID THE WORLD OF THE EVIL THAT IS YOGG-SARON!!
(Tuesday)
Wait, what? He’s back?
I mean, I get where you have to have that game mechanic to keep people playing and paying, but it’s just a tiny bit over my limit for ‘lore immersion’. Not that I can’t go back and re-do the Battle for Undercity on another toon, and it will be exactly the same, but there is more a feeling of reading a good book again rather than seeing the same commercial over and over, which is how weekly boss encounters tend to feel, lore wise.
(Story Time with Yoggy. Tee hee.)
I’m the same. I raid for strategy, difficulty, challenge, whatever. Once I’ve been able to get it to a “farm” status, I get bored. I’ll look at lore, etc. at another time.
If I thought of it that way, everything would be “The boss where I fill up green bars”.
Pfft!
…that said, I can’t explain to you exactly how I see it.
I guess I raid to make smark ass remarks in /raid, spam silly /rws, and put bunny ears on the GM. The lore is neat, but it’s only interesting the first time.
…hi, my name is Amber and I play to be social!
If I’ve ever said “I raid to see content”, it’s as Darthregis put it: a mix of what you said. Lore, seeing new fights, seeing the pretty halls that I got excited about months ago, and testing out our abilities as a group on what people would consider “hard” content for us.
My guild still hasn’t finished Malygos, though I pugged it ages ago and got my title. I’d like to raid him again just so I’m not the only guy in my guild with that silly title, plus it’s kind of an interesting fight.
My guild also hasn’t gotten past Auriaya in Ulduar 10. We’ve attempted Hodir, but every time so far we’ve gotten to that Cat Lady, someone says “Oh, it’s 1 am. We’ve been doing great but now we’re going to start messing up.” So we usually just stop there for the week and then go run naxx on saturday?
I want to see all of Ulduar partially from a completionist’s point of view. It’s there, I started it, and I feel the need to finish it. At the same time, I’d like to see my guild succeed at something. It’s irritating to me that we have a group of perfectly good players that have nothing to show for it because we can’t seem to finish a raid.
*Sigh* Well at least we downed Onyxia.
I agree with you Euri…when I log in, I want raid: I want a challenge. I couldn’t tell you the story line of the game, or remember names of figureheads etc. But if you ask me about raid logistics of a certain fight, I can definitely entertain that conversation.
What I thoroughly dislike, are players too worried about “what will drop.” When a player is more concerned with a purple, rather than focusing on the problem at hand, that’s really annoying.
Oh– and players not in raid, constantly asking “what dropped? Link it!”
/disable gchat
Semantics aside, players wanting to “see” the fight helps me distinguish who is actually up for the challenge =)
I agree. Spend 30 seconds going “Oh, cool. That’s that guy/gal from that thing I remember.” and then play the game. It is a game after all.
This is why I love the Heroic/HM vs normal versions of the game. I raid with 9 other people – because I don’t want to deal with the hassles (again) of a 25 man guild. I don’t want to be punished by reaching the end of Wrath and still not having seen the end game (like I did in Vanilla and BC).
Now – once we’ve zerged it in regular – oh yes, we fight the hard modes.
We’ve killed Algalon, have our rusted protos, and are only short no lights and a flawless ToGC(10) run to round out our raid achievements. Those are the fights we crave and love – those are the ones where we salivate and go over endless logs to find that missing 2%.
Or finding new ways to do old bosses – like single tanks, single healers – or…..boomkin tanks. Trust me – you haven’t lived until you see a critchicken flying across the room on Thaddius.
Give everyone a reasonable shot at seeing the end. I’m ok with things like legendaries and top gear going to those who do the hardest of the hard content, but nothing is as disheartening as rolling into a new xpac knowing that you won’t see Illidan die until you’re 80….
“If Kael’thas had instead been a featureless blue cube named “Final Boss” and had abilities called “Phase One Ability” and “Phase Two Ability”, the fight would have been exactly the same to me.”
That’s me. Although I do greatly appreciate how the bosses look. Their names are merely frames of reference so I know what fight I’m talking about. I don’t care who they are according to lore, I just want to see them go down and have loot pop out.
Solving the tactical puzzle is great fun. The story bit isn’t even the frosting, it’s the smoke from the blown out candles on the cake.
I loved the stories of how the dwarves, gnomes and humans came to be, but when it actually comes to raiding I don’t care one whit who the guys we’re killing are.
On the other hand, one of my officers is deeply aware of lore, and she is constantly pointing out tidbits like what Ignis uses to stoke his fire. I don’t even know if that info actually exists, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it came blurting out one day.
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