There are 4 levels of difficulty in WoW raiding. At the time I started raiding, they were called Looking for Raid (LFR), Flexible (Flex), Normal, Heroic, in order of increasing difficulty. Each raid often had about ten bosses, and the goal in no matter which difficulty was to ‘kill’ them all and gather the loot that they would drop, which usually was gear that allowed you to be stronger, to eventually enter higher difficulties of raiding. The first time you kill a boss on any given difficulty, each week, you are able to loot it. Since the ability to loot bosses in raids resets each week, I would learn in the future that each week is called a ‘reset’. For those of us in Asia, the actual moment of the reset happens Tuesday night, so each new ‘reset’ started on Wednesday. Eventually, I even stopped thinking of a week as a ‘week’, I instead scheduled my time around ‘resets’, as in, “my dentist appointment is on day 1 of the next reset”. In layman terms, my hypothetical dentist appointment would’ve been on Wednesday. Incidentally, ‘hypothetical’ here is a literal term: I didn’t go to a dentist a single time during my gaming career. Ever notice that when you get drawn into a passion or a career, the things that treat you best are the ones most easily neglected? My teeth have always been good to me, so I was as likely to schedule a dentist appointment as I was to schedule a flight to the moon. My muscles, however, have always been high maintenance, so every month or so I’d remind myself to schedule workout times, and sometimes I’d even follow through.

Anyway, LFR allows the raid to be done incrementally in different sections, or ‘wings’. It doesn’t require any voice communication between its members, it works by allowing anyone who is interested enter a queue, and when enough people join the queue, from anywhere around the world, a raid of 25 people is formed, and lasts until the wing, or about three of the bosses, are killed. Flex was the next difficulty: it allowed you to form a group by yourself, with people of your own choosing, ranging from 10 to 30 people. It often included perhaps one extra mechanic for each boss, the bosses would have more health, and the raiders would die more easily.

Normal difficulty is viewed as the first true raid difficulty. It required an exact number of people: either 10 or 25. It would possibly have yet another mechanic to deal with per boss, and again the bosses would be harder to kill and the raid would more easily die. Because of the increased difficulty and the exact number of people required, you have less leeway to bring in someone who is weak. Whereas in LFR you’ll eventually still kill the bosses no matter whom you’re thrown together with, and in flex for every weak player you add to your group you can also add 2 strong ones… on normal  you have a limited number of spots available, and if the ratio of weak players (or ones with weak gear) to strong ones is too high, you may end up spending hours trying to kill just one boss and still not succeed. Normal difficulty is usually done with the same group members every week, and is viewed as the first true raid difficulty because these group members are generally part of a guild, and successfully killing all the bosses requires more than just being present and knowing some mechanics. First, specific times each week when the members all log in to do the raid needs to be worked out, then decisions need to be made about which people to bring in for each boss, voice communication is necessary to make real time decisions and callouts, and lastly, since your group is regular, each group can decide how they want to apportion the loot from the boss, so gear can be distributed in ways that help the group do better each subsequent week.

Heroic difficulty is normal on crack. There is always at least one extra mechanic per boss that can make the entire fight feel different. The health of the boss and the damage done to raids are scaled in such a way where if even one person messes up the boss may no longer be killable. ‘Wipes’ are a common thing: once you know the boss isn’t killable you can start over by having everyone die. This usually takes time and each wipe is a moment of frustration. All the issues that are part of normal raiding are enhanced here, and managing a group of raiders for this can be a full time job. Being able to kill all about 10 of the bosses can take months of raiding even for the strongest WoW guilds, with 20 hours of raiding a week. Only a very small percent of the WoW community is capable of doing heroic raids. It is managing a guild to do raiding at this very highest level that catapults this WoW to something that is beyond just gaming. It is the reason why a game can require someone to combine the characteristics of a governor, a professional sports player, a manager, and a researcher. It is why I think a game can be viewed as a career and given the same amount of respect any challenging career commands.

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All of this, and especially what heroic entailed were things that took me a long time to slowly discover, however. I just started with LFR and was already blown away by the fact that mechanics could exist. The first few times I entered, I had no idea what was going on. Though I had said that LFR is so easy you don’t have to do anything and you can still succeed, this doesn’t mean that wipes didn’t happen. If no one understood what mechanics there were, it was perfectly likely everyone would die and a wipe would happen. After each wipe on LFR though, the game would enhance your abilities by 5%, which would make each time you tried killing the boss progressively easier. With this boost, it usually wouldn’t take too long to finish killing the bosses. But wipes are always frustrating, so sometimes people would type out the mechanics in the raid chat windows. “Don’t stand in front of the dragon, you’ll die. When you see a beam of light, move into it. If you see purple swirlies on the ground, move out of them. When the dragon moves to the middle of the room, a bunch of small adds will spawn around the room and move towards the dragon, make sure you kill them, or we’ll wipe!” I was like, wow, everyone has to be aware of all of these things, all the time? All 25 of us? I was hooked. I soon learned all the LFR mechanics available at the time, and became that person who would explain things to everyone. In fact, since I had only just been one of those who had no idea what was going on, I felt that many would surely benefit being told what to do before we wiped. I started teaching everyone the mechanics before each fight happened. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was taking on a portion of the role of a raid leader already. In LFR. If you’re a WoW raider you’d know how silly and unnecessary it is to raid lead an LFR group, but some people are incurable teachers and raid leaders, and I couldn’t help doing what was, in truth, unnecessary raid leading. I also wasn’t veteran enough of a gamer to be able to act blasé and slightly contemptuous about this easy level of raiding (I got there in the end though, a few years later). At the time my amazement at how this game was more than finding christmas outfits, how it requires players to be aware of what’s going on and use some intelligence, was way past boiling point. I was bubbly with it, it spilled over in the form of my raid leading LFR, and in the form of my knowing I had to start doing the next level of raiding.

Flex raids are formed a different way from LFR. You don’t get to join one just because you queue up. Each raid is formed by one person, technically the raid leader, others could sign up, and that person chooses who can join. You could always start one up yourself, but if you were only an LFR raider like I was, one that had never done raiding in any other difficulty, it wasn’t likely you’d even know who to choose if anyone signed up for your group. I remember spending hours trying to join groups. I had no idea what made a person qualified to join a group, I didn’t know that the gear I had made me someone few raid leaders would consider allowing to join. I didn’t know my lack of experience in anything beyond LFR was also a major black mark. I didn’t know that anyone in game was able to find out the gear and experience of other players period. When I eventually became aware of this I was amazed. You mean you can just find all the information you want about any character online just by searching them on the Blizzard website?? If you look up one of my characters now, you’ll find she’s a level 110 mage, you can see each piece of gear that she has, and can find her raiding history (she’s 11/11 LFR for the raid named Antorus, the Burning Throne, which means she has experience killing all 11 of the bosses in that raid. In fact, if you hover over that, you’ll find she’s killed the first boss on that difficulty, called Garothi Worldbreaker, 4 times). I didn’t know any of this then. So I didn’t know why I would wait for hours before anyone would be willing to let me join their group to try flex raiding. When I did join, there were usually enough strong people that it didn’t matter that there was a weak one in me.

I was getting by, joining flex raids every once in awhile, and somehow muddling through. One time though, I joined a flex group and we kept wiping. The raid leader at the time was very nice, they sent me a ‘whisper’ (a private message), and told me I was nice and everything, and they were sorry, but they needed me to step out because the damage that I was doing was simply too low, and the boss wasn’t dying before it killed us. The leader needed to bring people who could hold their own, and though I was doing the mechanics correctly, as in moving to the right spots at the right time, I wasn’t strong enough to be deserve my spot in the group. It was the only time I’ve been  removed from a group for being a burden to it. Polite as the leader was, it felt pretty horrible. I’m not used to feeling like I’m a burden. I vowed then and there I would do what was necessary to make myself strong, so that I would not be a burden to any group I joined. I started researching how to play a mage in WoW, finding out that I’m only supposed to use the spell called Ice Lance after I see these specific icicle animations on my screen, that I’m supposed to use the super ability called Icy Veins as often as I can (which is once every 3 minutes), and a variety of other things. I had some idea of this stuff before, but really I used to use Ice Lance any random time, and I used to feel like Icy Veins can be used so rarely that I shouldn’t squander it, and probably only would use it once every 5 minutes. I studied, I got a little better, I went into more flex groups and did better, got more loot, and started getting invited to even more groups, where I was able to practice more and do even better. When you’re motivated and put in the effort, you cannot fail but to enter a virtuous cycle of getting better and feeling better.

One day, about 4 months after I went into my first LFR raid, I saw someone advertising for people to join a random group to do Normal. Groups that are not regular and look for random people in the way flex groups do are called ‘Pugs’, short for pick-up groups. It was rare for normal to be done in Pug form, instead of with a guild, and though I had done LFR and flex raiding, I had yet to join any guilds. Here was an opportunity for me to try normal without joining a guild! I whispered the advertiser to indicate my interest, and was allowed to join. By then, I had done enough practice in flex to make me more than capable for normal, though I had no idea of it at the time. So I joined and did well. In fact, I didn’t just perform adequately, I offered ideas as to how to deal with things and suggested tweaks to strategy. Among the other 9 people in that Pug, one of them was a raid leader for his guild, a guild that did heroic. Clueless about the world of guilds and high-end raiding though I was, he noticed me. He scouted me. He approached me after the normal Pug ended, and asked if I wanted to join his guild and raid heroic. Said he was impressed with how I offered intelligent ideas about how to overcome issues. It took me a couple days of anxious ‘can I really do this’ thinking, and many “are you sure I can do this?” questions to that raid leader before I said yes, and joined my first raiding guild. It was called Deus Invictus.

I had basically skipped the normal raid difficulty, and from doing flex raids had leapfrogged to heroic raids. Much later, I realized that no matter how much potential I showed, that a heroic guild would recruit someone who hadn’t really raided normal at all and didn’t at least have the gear from normal meant that they were at a moment of desperate recruitment. I was lucky to be able to join them, and though they reassured me that I wouldn’t be in over my head, I really kind of was, but they needed people so badly at the moment it was worth having someone as weak as I was. Years later, I would be the one desperately recruiting for my guild, bringing in people I felt showed promise, but who I knew would be lucky to hold their own. When I joined, I could do enough damage that I wasn’t a burden to the group, but I was just starting the highest level of raiding, and the world of the type of gaming that can suck a person in was just opening up to me, there was so much I was learning, and so much I didn’t know.

Joining DI was my first real glimpse of one of the most important sides of WoW. I found that raiding guilds like this ‘progress’ through a raid on heroic difficulty. They raid a certain number of hours a week (9 for DI, 3 times a week 3 hours each time), and it’s perfectly likely they may spend each entire raiding session wiping on the same boss over and over again. Therefore, first week they raid they may successfully kill 2 bosses. The second week they’d kill the same 2 bosses again (for the loot), and maybe kill the 3rd and 4th boss. The third week they may rekill the first four bosses, and maybe kill the 5th. Perhaps by the fourth week, they will rekill the first 5 bosses, and work on learning how to kill the 6th one, but not succeed. This general way of finishing a raid is called ‘progression’. The progression DI was at when I joined them was 9/14H, which means they had killed the first 9 bosses on heroic out of 14 total. Before they could work on the 9th boss though, they had to rekill the first 9, and the 9th boss was not something they could rekill easily. So my real experience with team coordination and practicing learning a boss came in trying to rekill the 9th boss with them. We spent entire raid sessions trying and wiping and trying and wiping, on a boss they had previously already ‘learned’ and killed. It was so frustrating for them. It was so fun for me.

This was a whole new level of intellectual gameplay that I hadn’t experienced before. Not only were there new mechanics that I needed to learn how to react to, I also saw how everything was much more punishing, as in a small mistake anywhere would lead to a wipe. With the raiding I had done previously, just in general doing the mechanics correctly was usually enough. Now though, if you react just a second or two too late, it was over. And this applied to every single player in the group, which means that all 10 of us needed to perform with few, if any, mistakes. Then on top of not making mistakes with reacting to mechanics, we also needed to do a lot of damage and a lot of healing. With the easier raid difficulties, being ok was enough. With heroic, being ok meant being bad: being very good was average, and to really impress people you need to be among the top in the world. Without the kick in the gut I had with that flex run a short while ago, and the large amount of studying and practice I put in, I would have been awful. So not only was this challenging for me, I realized that when we would eventually be successful at killing the bosses, that it would mean that every single one of us needed to perform with barely a flaw, both individually and how we coordinated as a team. This was a far cry from just moving to a beam of light when I notice it, and an even farther cry from looking for pretty outfits for screenshots. This was no different from any professional sports team in what it required of the team members. Just without the sweating and cramps. Oh man I loved it. Wipes were exhilarating for me because they allowed me to practice and made me feel like the eventual success would be so much better. And oh man the rest of the DI team hated it. For them, they were stalled, unable to rekill something they had killed before, unable to continue progression. I may not have been a huge burden, but nor was I particularly an asset either. A couple months later, we had successfully killed 2 more bosses and were 11/14H, but though I was like a cat frolicking in catnip the whole time, the rest of the guild was not. To only progress on a couple bosses in a couple months, with weeks of regression sometimes (where you can’t even kill the bosses you had killed previously), was an frustrating hell for most. DI decided to take a break. They didn’t plan on raiding anymore for the rest of the time that raid was current. There would be a new raid in another several months, so they would consider restarting then.

My guild was taking a break, but I didn’t want to stop raiding, not when I was loving it so much. It didn’t enter my mind to find another heroic guild that wasn’t on break, so I went back to spending a lot of time doing flex raids, with my then experience and gear allowing me to join any group I wished. It was in one of these groups that I met Noci, a recruiter for another heroic guild. His guild was 10/14H, but they were struggling with attendance too. By then I wasn’t amazing, but I was definitely someone worth recruiting. Since DI had stopped raiding, I agreed to do heroic runs every week with Noci’s guild. Several months later, when it seemed likely that DI may not get back together again, and the new raid was soon to open, I agreed, and did my first raiding guild swap. Noci’s guild, my second raiding guild, was called Dark Harvest. It was at DH where I would eventually start raid leading high-end raids, and what put me on my path to creating my own guild.