There used to be a time when I was a competitive raider in World of Warcraft. I would spend all my waking hours chasing the best gear to prepare for the raids. I was in a top tier guild on my server and we would chase realm first kills of the raid bosses. Life happens, and since raiding takes up a lot of time I chose to drop it. Until now.
Teamwork makes the raid work
For those who don't know how a raid generally work in MMO's, they're basically bigger and harder dungeons that require more people to complete. A dungeon typically requires 5 people to complete. A raid generally requires 20+ people to complete. All of these people have to work together to take down the bosses by coordinating movements, completing individual tasks all while dealing damage to the boss and healing your team mates.
For me this is the peak gameplay of World of Warcraft. It was my favorite activity to do back then and I've been wanting to get back into it for years. The downside is that raiding generally requires a lot of time. There's a decent amount of work that goes into preparing your characters to be as strong as they possibly can before the raid. When you get to the raiding itself you'll usually need to set aside 2-3 hours 1-2 nights a week. This is all after you try and find a group of around 20-30 people to actually do the raid with.
First time tanking
When raiding previously I've always taken on the role of a damage dealer. This means my job has been to deal as much damage as possible to the boss while engaging with whatever mechanics I'm assigned or are thrown my way. This can generally be a bit boring as you end up not having a lot of responsibility in the raid. You're just a guy in the crowd.
For the War Within I decided to change it up by playing a tank. A tank has the job of making the bosses focus their attacks on you instead of the group while positioning the bosses where they're supposed to be. Preferably somewhere they won't destroy the group with their frontal attacks. Tanks, along with healers, generally have the most responsibility in the group and you'll always have all eyes on you. If you mess it up everyone will know. Because of this most people will choose to be a damage dealer.
This kind of responsibility makes me be more engaged in the raid and I don't end up being bored halfway through. It also means I get a bit of an autorative role in the group as tanks generally end up setting the pace of the group and controlling them through the dungeons.
To be continued...
For this first raid night we managed to take down 6 out of 8 bosses in normal mode. We basically steamrolled the bosses only wiping twice during the first six bosses. When we got to the 7th boss the difficulty spiked a bunch and we ended up wiping for the rest of the evening. We just had to call it at a point and will be going back in one of the coming days to try and finish up the last two bosses. It's quite normal to see a difficulty spike towards the end of the raid.
I'll be back with an update of this if we can take it down during our next attempt.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.