Dark Glare

Written by Mercus - mercus@darkglare.com .

During discussions that seemed to have sprouted around lately was the topic of time spent raiding and how people seem to decide for raiding guilds based on the raiding times in amounts of hours. As with most discussions, opinions were very varied so I was surprised to see certain viewpoints so I will try to share my views here.

One concept that was personally to me - very foreign seemed to be »Set In Stone« raiding which means we would raid for example 3 raids a week, each lasting 4 hours every week regardless of what happens. (12 hour raiding schedule per week). Why I'm surprised was mainly because I've yet never found myself in position where I could say raiding is something as mundane and set in stone as this would imply.

I've noticed that our raiding times vary from as little as 4 hours per week in the farm phases to up to 16-20 hours per week in progress time. At this very moment in time (9/12 HM in ICC25), farming those 9 hardmodes + doing Putricide, Lich King and Sindragosa on normal modes takes 6 hours in a week. We sometimes decide to spend 4 extra hours on trying a new hardmode but overall raiding at the moment doesn't take more than 8-10 hours a week.

This was different in Ulduar where we preety much raided 16 hours+ steady simply because people were avaliable and wanted to but we have plenty of people in the guild who raid 2-3 times a week regularly.

What I'm trying to say is that I personally believe that Time Spent Raiding is a ever changing variable based on your capability to design your schedule, your ability to use the knowledge gained effectivly and planning raids ahead.

Pushing raids with non optimal setup has proven to be the biggest time waster which burn people out and make them less prone to continue raiding. Because not only is potentially lack of skill the problem which will go against you while defeating the boss, the encounters are tighly tuned with buffs and setups in mind. This means that you are basically adding an extra difficulty variable in the encounter which isn't very helpful but sometimes you simply don't have a choice.

I've noticed personally that people tend to be quite alot more active and willing when rested well, and motivated – so sometimes it is a better choice to not raid than to push an impossible raid. Or when you are wiping on same encounter hour after hour, some breaks inbetween or even delaying it until next week might be a better solution. Decisions when and how are obviously up to you though.

The other major time wasters on raids seem to be both ineffective ways of handling trash, too much control (as in being too careful), invididual or group slacking (people going afk repeatedly or in cycles on trash and or not contributing that little effort required to the raid), slow wipe recovery time (on progress raids) and poor loot distribution. This three things alone make the main difference in how much time you effectivly raid – actually spend on bosses and either farm or attempt to progress rather than ... well waste time.

So the question is, how many hours per week do you actually raid? Try timing it once how much time in one specific raid is spent on particular things like clearing trash up to Plagueworks, or trash to Marrowgar, and so on and so forth. Then do the same for progress raids – how long does it take you for full group to run back, regroup, rebuff and stand ready for the next pull?

This works hand in hand with maintaining both raid focus, fun and in the end results. If this got you thinking – then realistically try to judge how well you fare in those particular problems compared to other guilds and if you believe it is a bigger problem for you than another guild – why is it so? How can you fix it?

In the next articles I will discuss two things – Differences between old-school and newborn raiders (Comparing Vanilla, TBC and WotLK born raiders) and a shorter article about Lockout Extensions and Multi-tier raiding (which will seem to be the hot old way of doing things come Cataclysm).