I had no thoughts of raid leading when I joined Dark Harvest. It was more important to me at the time to improve as a player. I still considered myself a noob, and in actuality I was: I didn’t really know what to expect. When I was in DI, I essentially entered in the middle of their progression, when they’d already done 9 bosses. With DH, I was going to experience progression from the very beginning: right from when the new raid becomes available for the whole world. The new raid was called Highmaul, and had 7 bosses.

By now, the four raid difficulties had been renamed and overhauled to be LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic, with both normal and heroic allowing for a ‘flexible’ situation of 10 to 30 players, and mythic only available for 20 players. This meant what used to be heroic guilds were now called mythic guilds, and instead of either going for a 10 or 25 player situation, all high end guilds needed to have 20 players. This was decently easy for a guild that was previously 25-player to adjust to, but was very difficult for many 10-player guilds to adjust to. I was only aware of the fact that it was hard to find another 10 good players, at the time. Later I also realized a big part of the difficulty was having the leadership transition from only needing to manage a bit over 10 people, to now needing to manage more than 20 people. 

When new raids open, they always follow a schedule. The first week they open (I call this week, ‘week 0’), only the normal and heroic difficulties are available. The second week mythic and parts of LFR open, I call this ‘week 1’. We can ignore the LFR part because if you’re in a mythic guild, LFR is used more as an afterthought, with the gear it drops usually too weak to be helpful in mythic progression. The reason why I call the second week, ‘week 1’, is because that’s when a world-wide race starts. All the mythic guilds in the world start their progression and race to see who finishes killing all the bosses first. There are websites that track each guild’s progression, and ranks the guilds from first to last place in the world. Those in the top world guilds are often professional streamers, or people who do not need to spend a lot of time working. A big part of being able to be the best guild in the world has to do with the skill and management of the teams, but also has a lot to do with whether everyone can put a lot of time in. Top world guilds often have players take time off work (if they work) for the first few weeks or month when new raids open. Then they do schedules of maybe 16-hour raid days, 7 days a week. Whenever you finish killing the last boss in the instance, the time of this killing is recorded, and your guild rank is set. Or at least, set until the next raid opens. There were more than ten thousand mythic guilds around the world. Which may seem like a lot, but since there are over 5 million players in WoW, that’s still maybe 0.5~1% of the entire WoW population. What rank each guild is is usually a matter of prestige in the game. If you belong to one of the best guilds in the world, you’re treated differently in the game. If I had been in one of those top guilds, I may not have been called a “stupid little F” that day years ago.

Dark Harvest was one of the thousands of mythic guilds. When I joined it I didn’t care what rank it was. I just wanted to raid at the highest difficulty level. After awhile, though, I realized that just because a guild was able to raid mythic difficulty, didn’t mean it would actually finish each raid before the new one came out. In the end, we were 2/7M Highmaul when the next raid came out, which means we were only able to learn and kill 2 out of the 7 bosses. To be fair, only a small percentage of mythic guilds regularly finish the content, less than 10% of all mythic guilds. That puts only 0.05~0.1% of the WoW population among those who regularly are able to finish the raids when they are ‘current’ (non-current raids are too easy to require a guild to do). When I realized that my guild would not be able to even see maybe half of the bosses of the mythic raids, I was pretty disappointed. As you become stronger, your expectations of what you should do rise as well. Just half a year ago when I was with DI, it didn’t matter if we only killed 2 of the bosses, any moment I was doing the highest level raiding was a moment of ecstasy for me. Now, the idea of only killing 2 bosses and not even seeing the 5 other ones meant that I wasn’t getting everything I wanted out of this game.

By the next raid, Blackrock Foundry, I started working even harder to be an asset to my raid team. I figured if I did better, it would help them more and we would be able to kill more bosses, see more content. I started using a resource called combat logs. Apparently, each time you enter a raid, you can ‘log’ what is happening, creating a text file that records every single ability used by each person, as well as by the bosses. There are websites that parse these logs and create tables and graphs for people to use. These tables and graphs allow raiders to analyze what they did, what others are doing, and become stronger for their team. The website also ranks individual players, so one can find the strongest druid, warrior, mage, etc., for each individual boss, on each difficulty. I was playing a druid at the time, so I went to look for the top druid in the world, and basically went through which abilities they used starting from the beginning of the fight. They started with a Starsurge, then a Moonfire, then two Starfires, then another Starsurge, and so on. I found that when a bunch of little dogs spawned that needed to be killed quickly, they changed their target away from the boss to the dogs, and used Sunfire and Starfall. I went through every second of the fight and saw each of the casts they did. I figured out why they chose to do which cast at which time, to which target. And I did this with maybe the top 5 druids in the logs, for the specific fight we were doing. It was like school, but so much more fun. The sitting down and studying was there, but each time I figured something out was an epiphany, and allowed me to ‘level up’ in my understanding of how to play druid. In doing this, for that fight, I went from an weak druid, performing at maybe 30 percentile, to among the top 90 percentile in the world. For that fight, and for any fight I studied, I became an asset to my raid, someone who was necessary to the success of the raid group, someone who could help the raid group achieve more.

However, a raid team is 20 members, and just having a few strong members isn’t enough for it to do well. As time went on, I also started voicing my opinion more to the officers in the guild, mainly to Noci, the officer who had recruited me. I would complain about one of the tanks who was always dying: if a tank dies, we wipe. I would complain about one of the heals who was doing so little healing they were barely contributing to the group, and we couldn’t rely on her to keep us alive. I would complain about how we kept not replacing the weaker members. I would complain about how we weren’t recruiting enough stronger players. I complained a lot, and I know he in turn pressured our guild master a lot to be less tolerant of the weaker players, though those players were his good friends. My behavior during this time is my biggest cause for regret in WoW. It became one of the biggest reasons I could not forgive myself and put all the blame for any problems on myself when things didn’t go well in Syzygy. How could I blame others for complaining all the time and not lifting a finger to help me, when I did the same thing in Dark Harvest? I could have worked with that tank to help him improve. I could have worked with that healer to do the same thing. If I could make myself improve, I could also do the same thing for others and teach them what they needed to know (or motivate them to do the studying themselves). I could have helped recruit, to allow our leaders to have a stronger pool of people to choose from. I could have done so much to help my guild, but I thought that it was sufficient that I made myself strong. Hell, I even thought the work I put into making myself strong entitled me to constantly voice my dissatisfaction in others. So, I didn’t lift a finger to help fix all the other elements that made us struggle. Instead, I complained, pressuring an officer to pressure the guild master, adding stress to the leadership while stewing in frustration myself.

And we struggled. Much like DI struggled when I joined them before, only now I was one of the ones who was dissatisfied: we should be killing the bosses, we shouldn’t be regressing, we should perform better. Almost every strong member of the group was dissatisfied, and it’s likely none of us did anything more than complain and stew about the weak members dragging the team down. People became less motivated to have good attendance. My father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the time, and I was flying to his hospital to stay the week with him every other week, so I was also one of those with extremely low attendance. There were raid nights we would barely have enough people to do the raid. Though we weren’t the strongest mythic guild, the fact that it was a mythic guild didn’t change: you still need all 20 people to perform well, so having less than 20 people just made the raid undoable. Time went on, and by the time the next raid came out, we were only 3/10M: we had only killed 3 out of the 10 mythic bosses.

The next raid opened, it was called Hellfire Citadel, or HFC. I was already unhappy about the fact that our progression was slow enough that we couldn’t finish the content. Now, when HFC opened, any little thing was about to send me over the edge. That little thing was that we chose to spend our raid sessions doing normal during week 0, instead of doing heroic. This meant we were bound to progress slower, since we would start off by getting weaker gear, and it would take time to gradually build up the gear and experience that raiders had. So, I decided to start creating Pugs. After our first raid session in DH on normal difficulty, I created a group in the group finder window in WoW, a sort of forum that allows people to create groups or sign up for groups in game. With this group of people I didn’t know, on the first day of week 0 of HFC, we went into the raid on heroic difficulty, with me acting as raid leader.

We spent 4 hours on the first boss. Couldn’t kill it. After that I spent 4 hours online combing forums that discuss obstacles guilds had with killing bosses, talking to gamers, trying to figure out what we needed to do to kill it. The next day, I built another Pug, and we killed it on the first attempt. That was the moment I changed from a mythic raider to a true raid leader.