Poll Who here hates raiding?

But having 31 online still sucks, right?

First week of raiding this expansion we ran 2 30 man raids

The poll is too narrow.

I liked raiding, i don't like what it, or the whole MMO genre has become.

Gears no longer unique, rare or enjoyable that is acquired from a Raid. Raiding encourages you to make friends in order to burn those bridges later so you can progress.. A lot of raids exist "just because" and have no point to them other than something to do. Farming a raid boss is about as epic as collecting bear asses. The first time you kill a raid boss is exciting, then, as the weeks go by, it just gets to be mechanical. Another brick in the wall.

I dont pretend to know how I can make raiding better, but this current iteration just cant be it...

Really they could make raiding better by making the gear better than everything else again. Raiding is pointless when you can run mythic+ easy ass dungeons for better gear.

I really want to like it, but I just can't seem to make it happen. During vanilla when I was in highschool I did the whole hardcore raiding 40 man server top guild thing - it kinda sucked having to deal with guild drama and server politics, but I was gaming 4pm - 2am every weeknight anyway, because highschool, and it was the only way to access the new content, so I took the good with the bad.

More or less every expansion since then (excluding BC and MOP), I've gone through the exact same cycle, which is - start up again with the new expansion, go balls to the wall for 4 - 6 weeks levelling, gearing up, etc. Wait for the raid content to come out. Raid for one or two weeks, realize I hate the way raiding forces me to play with total strangers and turns the game into an obligation instead of a hobby, quit, come back a year later and cruise through all the content in LFR/pugs, then wait for the next expansion.

It's become steadily worse since they started fucking with different difficulty modes, since now you clear each raid on normal/heroic in the first week or two, and have nothing to look forward to in terms of new content, just months of doing the same shit over and over with higher numbers and maybe some more difficult mechanics, all so you can jerk off over the number on your character screen being higher than the number on other people's character screen.

The first thing that kept me going in vanilla was the drive to see new content - now I don't need to put with 39 or 24 or however many other random fuckwits to do that, so why bother? The second, honestly, was getting decked out in gear which I could use to kick ass in PvP, and with the current way they do loot and the abortion of a PvP system they've implemented, that's no longer a factor.

It's a shame, because Legion was otherwise an awesome expansion. I thought maybe this time, finally, I'd be able to get into it. But nope. I've realized that raiding just doesn't do it for me. And it bums me out, because at the end of the day, I love WoW and the Warcraft setting, but the obsession they have with making raiding the core of the endgame really limits the potential for what it could be, or could have been.

Someone please create a successful DAoC-style faction PvP game. I could play that shit till the end of time if somebody just got the formula right, but both WAR and GW2 dropped the ball hard.

I think the biggest thing that fucked raiding was gear resets every expansion. In EQ, during PoP, people were still doing Luclin raids, Sleepers Tomb etc, and there was top end must have gear outside of just whatever the top tier raid was. Also, raids not being instanced, and random spawning bosses, really made getting a boss spawn more rewarding.

I enjoy raiding when the numbers are more flexible. Scaling technology is great. But Mythic-20 and before it Heroic-25 and before that, 40 Man raids are literal aids. Not even getting into EverQuest during Luclin where clearing VT was an 8+ hour affair (and you had to do it right when you could, so other people did not down the mobs) or PoP and 72 man raids - talk about feeling like a cog.

qwertyqweqwertwqert said:

I hated that thing the most. I spent many entire weekends raiding Plane of Fear and Hate, and then Kunark comes along and makes everything so obsolete. Then you are supposed to do it all over again and then Velious comes along and makes it all obsolete again...

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Its a lot worse though in WoW. At least in EQ there were still uber items in previous expansions. WoW has none.

Games used to have clickie effect items, even if they were irrelevant to combat and mere racial illusions or something it made them more desired than a randomly dropped mount/pet that goes into a collection and is never used again.

Of course all of WoW's items were nerfed or had 30 minute cooldowns. Dicks.

Reading through the points being made here and I think I just had an epiphany.

Classic MMOs were Capitolistic. Modern MMOs are Socialistic. I don't know why this never occurred to me until just now but goddamn if that doesn't sum up our situation.

In the EQ era, everyone started with nothing, you earned every single thing you owned, you worked together because one hand washes the other, and tight knit communities were formed. Economy thrived with droppable items, you could buy low sell high, competition for those non-instanced drops kept inflation low. We were all self made men.

Now look where we are. Starting with free gear, getting hand outs from every quest, no-drop "colored" gear that can be neither gifted nor sold, epics for everyone, no reputation, no sense of server "nationalism," no communities, and no point in working hard.

We need to Make MMORPG Great Again boys.

I don't mind raiding but I don't want to schedule playtime and couldn't possibly make any kind of raid schedule so I haven't raided in years.
Luckily I have enough friends with flexible hours who can somewhat reliably log in a few times a week when I happen to be available so we can run some mythic+/karazhan together.

I think the whole concept of an endgame that can be equated to an economy is the problem. The whole "farm gear so you can do the content on a higher difficulty to farm gear to do the content on a higher difficulty to farm gear..." treadmill is just not that fun on a fundamental level.

They bury it under ego pandering and achievements and randomized gambling style mechanics so the game provides a regular dopamine hit, but at the end of the day, once you've seen all of the content a few times, raids just becomes elaborate slot machines. And while watching someone sit at a slot machine for hours on end might not be the single most depressing thing in the world, it's definitely in the top 10.

What we need is an MMO that provides a better motivation for engaging with the endgame than boasting rights and bigger numbers on your character screen.

Stave said:

Its a lot worse though in WoW. At least in EQ there were still uber items in previous expansions. WoW has none.

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Admittedly I've given up after several minutes, but I couldn't even find a picture of a Guise of the Deceiver that doesn't require ROG/BRD. Saw a high elf wizard zone into Castle Mistmoore and immediately turn into a dark elf. I nagged that dude about how he did that, where could I get one, etc until a couple months later I was max level and in his guild.

The Primal Velium War Lance I got, after the keeper was released (by another guild), is the only item I really had that could be considered uber from a previous expansion. Being able to go Dark Elf as a paladin, years later, was pretty BA too though.

Amutlet of Necropotence for life.