WoW Journal - 24-April-2005

I did my first raid in World of Warcraft. Well, not counting a chaotic low-level affair in EQ2, I did my first raid *ever*, as I never got to "raid-level" in other games. But frankly, if raiding is what level 60 characters do, I'd rather stick to my original plan and just start the next character, than to raid all day, once I reach level 60.

Our raid group of 10 people descended on Blackrock Depths. Not knowing much about raids, I had foolishly spent some time gathering quests for that dungeon before we started. Turns out that if you are in a raid group, you don't get any quest kill credits, and quest items don't drop. You do get to perform the same actions as you'd do for the quest, but they don't count, it's more like a rehearsal. That is a major disadvantage from my point of view, World of Warcraft is all about quests, and turning them off eliminates a major part of the fun.

The other problem is experience points. Okay, the level 60 characters don't care, but I'm still level 52 and would like to gain some xp. As far as I understood the way WoW calculates experience points, it works like this: Imagine some tough elite monster, which would give 1,000 xp if you soloed it (but it unfortunately too tough to kill solo). If you kill it in a group of five, you get one fifth of that, plus about 20% group bonus, for a total of 240 xp, which is still nice. If you kill it in a raid group of ten, you get one tenth of that, and all raid xp are halved, for a total of 50 xp.

In other words: I have Telo's InfoBar running, which counts the xp per hour I'm gaining. Soloing I easily make 10,000 xp per hour without even trying. In a typical five-man group in an instance I make more than that, plus getting quest xp at the end. But during this raid I only made about 6,000 xp per hour.

So the whole purpose of a raid is to gain items. And even that was a bit disappointing. I got some plate leggings which were slightly better than my previous ones. The problem is similar to that of xp, the loot is divided between ten people instead of five. And while there is no raid malus, that still ends you up with not very much.

After four hours of raid we had done the larger half of the dungeon, and had returned to the entrance, because we were missing a 12th key. So I politely bowed out of the raid and let another guild member take my place. Raids are not my cup of tea.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:39 AM Permanent Link