Raid Etiquette

I know, its been blogged about ad nausea. But I mean really, raid etiquette is a crucial part of raiding in my opinion. I know in the past and in other games, showing up and having reagents was about the extent of what you needed to be prepared to raid.

Well, guess what, son? Its not that way in WoW anymore. First lets bring out the check list of what you need to have when you raid around me.

1. Repair - Be fully repaired when you show up outside the raid instance. Nothing more disgusting than hearing, I need to repair two to four pulls into the instance. God, I think this is my biggest pet peeve among all things, just have your gear ready to work, its just like Real Life where you're tools of the trade need to be in working order.
2. Food - Bring your food to buff stats and do not just bring your DPS/Healing food if you're not a tank, bring Stamina food as well. Spicy Crawdads, baby! Bring em, eat em during any fight that your raid leader says,"Pop some Stamina food!" Make sure you bring enough for many many wipes. I personally always bring two full stacks of my Primary food, be I tanking, Healing or DPSing. If I'm in the latter category, I make sure to bring at least one stack of Stamina food.
3. Elixirs/Flask - This is your primary boost really when you look at consumables these days. Always make sure you bring your battle and guardian elixirs. One to two full stacks of each elixir, depending on how long your raids last. For raids in AC, one full stack of each elixir is enough. In the case of Flasks, these little beauties persist through death, so wipes will not remove your flask buff. Bring 2 of these. I know they can be expensive but for god's sake. Or you can do what I do, which is down 1 flask and once that wears off, use Elixirs. They tend to be more bang for your buck anyway.
4. Weapon Buffs - These tend to be oils or stones, depending on your class, but they are so worth the extra buff, you'll notice the difference. In the case of casters or pally tanks, one fresh oil can last a whole raid as each charge lasts 1 hour. The same goes for weapon stones as well. Now, when it comes to healers, do not be fooled into grabbing the Burning Crusade mana oil, NO! Only use the Brilliant Mana Oil as in my experience, the extra healing on that is worth more than the 2 points of Mp5 you see on the Superoir Mana Oil. For the DPS casters, I use Superior Wizard Oil over Brilliant Wizard Oil. I know, its a reverse of the healer role, but I tend to find myself not lacking in extra crit as often as Spell Damage. For the times I melee, Adamantine Sharpening and Weighted Stones are my lovely babies for when there isnt a Shaman with windfury around. But, seriously don't let a shaman in your group fool you from putting a Stone on your OH, it'll give crit and damage. So in review of weapon buffs, one fresh Oil with 5 charges is more than enough usually for a raid and as are 5 - 10 stones.

Now we're onto Two, having a sense of what to expect from your raid instance. Read a goddamn Strategy, there are numerous sites with strategies or strats for every boss encounter in the game. Bosskillers is my favorite for the multiple strategies posted, usually with maps, class role expectations and sometimes video, though you can go to youtube and find a video about any boss or mob in the game. But really, you shouldn't have to rely on your Raid Leader to feed you all the information you need to know about the boss and the mobs in the instance. Read a little, its good for you, it helps stimulate your brain, that blob of jelly in most folk's heads. Also, if you're read about the boss, DO NOT try and give your opinions on the boss at every frackin' second of the damn raid. I mean, if you were sitting in the same room as your Raid Leader, chances are, they'd prolly take a hammer to your head. If you're actually killed this boss before, whisper the raid leader that you have a suggestion, but if you've never done or experienced said boss or instance, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Three, this is a relatively new one. Ventrillo or Teamspeak, depending on what your raiding guilds uses for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Have one of the two installed, or both as I do. You never know when you met some folks in the game and they use the other (personally I have no preference, either has worked fine and dandy for me). You may have no idea the frustration of leading raids or doing groups with people who have no idea of what is going on (see 3) and not being able to communicate fast and efficiently via Vent. But what about the built-in voice chat Blizzard put in the game? Do not make me slap the taste out of your mouth! It sucks, it lags and its just horrible, good idea, bad delivery. So just get one of the two VoIPs I listed, it doesn't matter if you have a microphone or not, as long as you can listen. Its all good, but get a mic.

I suppose this covers raid etiquette in my mind.

Until I get more juice.

Starting off

I've done the blog thing before with various incarnations of the form; livejournal, myspace, etc. But I've always been a bit reluctant to blog in anything involving World of Warcraft. Not that I'm ashamed of my hobby, I've been playing MMORPGs since '97. Its been a long hard road with the genre, it started with Ultima Online and The Realm for me. But to tell the truth, I'm a MMO whore, I played everything and still to this damn day play those betas that appear on Fileplanet about new MMOs. T.T Pity me.

It was a breakneck experience for me, when I got into it. Online gaming was still an infant and FPS was the fancy of the day. As time has gone on, I've watched 2d go to 2d overview to 3d polygons to wireframes to whatever the hell is used now. I honestly barely can keep up with the latest innovations in making the games look cool, I'm just content to go beta test and play my joy of joys.

WoW though is a bit of a vice though, I mean I spent from '99 to '05 playing Everquest. Now that game had crack level addiction down, what else could explain thousands of people shelling out 20-30 bucks every 2 months, which was about the time between expansions. Looking back, it was beyond retarded. Looking at the progress SOE has made these days with EQ2 and updates that have content in them, taking a deep cue from Blizzard's smart marketing sense with WoW, quite interesting. I have this feeling though, that Blizzard is slacking in delivering their new content. They're allowing WoW to take a stagnant pace.

Now, when it comes to the MMORPGs, I look to two things. One is the raid content, I love to raid (My god, I drool with boyish wetness at great raid encounter. Nothing like a couple dozen of your fellow players cursing at fiendish game designers and tossing back their beverage of choice). Two, Player Versus Player combat. Woohoo, fighting another human without messing consequences. Gamers as much as we try are just highly competitive and AGGRESSIVE! PvP definitely weeds out those without the stomach for long hard fought battles of mindless grinding for hours upon hours, sounds like farming to me.

Now, I stay in EQ for the longest time because I got hooked into an extensive Storyline with Raid Encounters, not the PvP. I mean, yeah, PvP servers were kicking places of ABSOLUTE TERROR! I still have nightmares of fiendish gankfests from the Shadows of Luclin expansion. I mean really now, people talk about raid encounters in WoW like you're fighting gods. 25 man? 40? What about 70 man? Oh yeah, been there, done that in EQ and those were some fucked up encounters. My first raid encounter in EQ was a dragon, lil lvl 50 human monk of Freeport origins. Now some my know this dragon, Lord Nagafen.
Back in '99, Naggy was the beast and terror, awesomeness of loot and challenge to kill. It was epic and I was like, "This is nuts. We gotta fight that?!" Typing furiously in guild chat, no vent or ts in those days kids. We had to wait two resets to finally down him (for those going que? back in EQ's infancy, there were no instances, basically the raid boss would spawn after a server reset and people would scout to see if so and so was up, you got your raid together on that spot and went at it, if you wiped and were done, another guild would come in, it sucked but this was how it was until around late 2004 when they started instancing, but it was no where what it is today in EQ2 or WoW). Shenanigans!

I digress and do this often. I guess to just say, I am a raider at heart and always will be. I've never minded sitting for 5-8 hours in front of a PC banging my head on the desk, monitor, keyboard and back of my chair. The feeling of the well-oiled machine known as a raid pwnin' beasts from the beyond is my digital crack.

I guess I have joined the bandwagon of my guild known as Aetherial Circle on Drenden. We're apparently the most bloggiest blogging guild in WoW. If you listen to the hype.

Until I get some more juice.