WoW: Gaining the Raiders Instinct

This guide starts out with a basic assumption that your know what a Raid is, and have participated in a few already.  Having done so you are probably now hooked and want to understand how to do better when participating in a raid. You may be looking to start progression raiding or just doing more PUG or casual raids.  You have seen other players that feel right at home in a raid though and you still don’t, but want to.

You want to start gaining that raider’s instinct and really participate.  If you’re the tank, this means you want to not make mistakes and wipe the group.  As a healer you probably want to put out big healing numbers (assuming you’re not a Disc Priest) and still have mana left at the end of each fight.  As a DPS you want to put out competitive numbers and not pull threat, or know which fights your damage should be low and what you should be focusing on. 

All these things come down to a certain something that makes a raider a raider.  Sure the odd casual player will get these things too, but not always and really it’s not required all the time. When you are a casual player you are generally either soloing or participating in small groups.  When soloing, the only person you can hurt is yourself.  When in small groups most content is a bit more forgiving, and even if you do wipe a group it is only 4 other players.  In a raid, your mistakes can cost 24 other players their time and gold.  This makes it much more important that everyone knows what they are doing and responsible and to do it well.

How do you defeat difficult bosses like Professor Putricide?

So, what do you do to learn that certain something and gain the raider’s edge?  It comes down to several simple things really.  Start doing these simple things and you too will start progressing as a raider.

Character Basics

The first two things that you need to learn to get the raiding instinct really have nothing to do with raiding.  What they do have to do with is absolute core basics of the game.  The first is to master your character, their rotation, understand their stats and benefits completely and to constantly looking for the best info on your class. While this really should apply to everyone that plays the game, it applies doubly or triply so to a raider, since you have so many other relying on you to be your best.  If you don’t know if haste, crit, or hit is a better improvement for you at your current gear level, you shouldn’t be raiding until you take the time to learn the differences between them.

The second basic element is to understand what each and every other class is best at and how they do it.  This includes understanding the basics about their gear, stats, abilities, and cooldowns.  Again, it is best for everyone to know this anyway, but as a raider you are expected to.  This is especially important so that you know who can buff with what, who can remove which debuffs, and more.

Game Basics

Next up are some in game basics: learning the camera and the mouse.  By the time you have gotten to level 80 you have surely scrolled the camera around and looked at your character from different angles. If you haven’t, start practicing.  If you have, start practicing some more anyway.  In a raid, situational awareness is key.  You need to see and understand what is going on around you at all times.  Get used to moving while looking around you not with just the camera default view.  Get used to doing your thing (tanking, healing, dpsing) while looking around.

Something you can do to help build these skills is to jump in a Battleground.  Yes, you heard me correctly, jump into PvP to learn a skill for PvE. The thing here is that a BG is mass chaos and carnage.  Players are running everywhere and doing anything.  If you can learn to watch and follow what is going on in a battleground then following the action in a scripted fight (no matter how crazy it is) will feel like child’s play.

When you see that a boss has a frontal cone attack for example, you need to start watching how the tank moves the boss and stay out of the front.  When there is fire, you need to learn how or when it is spawned and get away from it or out if it as quickly as possible. There are many things you can see visually when you watch and learn, take these things in and adapt from them.

Two things that help with this are setting a further camera distance than the default.  While most players have figured out the zoom setting, many don’t know that you can set it to allow you to scroll out further with the command: /script SetCVar("cameraDistanceMax",30). The other thing that helps is to get used to seeing enemy health bars.  This is normally turned on and off with the V key, but if you have played with keyboard bindings it may be something else.  While seeing them all the time wrecks some of the visuals of the game, seeing them is easier at times than seeing new adds pop up.  They stand out sharply against the background, so get used to turning them on in any fight that may have adds.

Next up on the gaming basics is learning how to mouse move and to key bind abilities.  These two things will do more for your game than almost anything else.  Not many players can move with WASD while activating abilities as well as players that mouse move.  While it is possible, it is much more difficult.  In an MMO where you have so many different abilities that you need to activate at any given time it really helps to have your fingers free to activate them.  Also very few ability clicking players can put out the DPS or reactive healing that a key bound player can.  Moving the mouse back and forth to the buttons just slows you down too much. Many players that came from FPS games are so used to WASD moving that it just stuck (myself included), however in a FPS game you have far fewer additional buttons to contend with.  Learning to mouse move and free up your fingers for those abilities usually improves your game substantially.

Raid Knowledge

Getting the instinct of a raider comes mainly from the few items in this section, and most of it is learnt.  You really need to learn to do research and plan ahead when looking at a raid.  If you know that you are raiding a new instance on Tuesday, that means you have the weekend and Monday to find out all you can about it.  A good raider should never go in unprepared.  Every single raider in a raid should know and understand the basic mechanics of each and every boss in a raid.  That means that even on a first ever attempt on a boss (unless it is on a PTR server) that any single raider should be able to explain the whole fight to a player that got a last minute invite, anyone should be able to lead the raid.

While the mechanics may change from the last PTR client to the release, many of the core mechanics in a fight will remain unchanged.  Learn what they were and adjust as required.  This includes things like raid buffs that are granted by doing things, and dealing with raid debuffs and mechanics.

The next thing while learning to get that raiding instinct is to unlearn something.  To be the best raider possible you really need to unlearn self importance.  You are not the key to the raid, the group as a whole is.  This means that you can not be a gearscore / DPS / HPS focused player.  After all gearscore is only based on item level, DPS changes based on the situation as does healing. What’s best for the group is what’s best, period.  That is a big shift for many players.

Don’t get me wrong here, doing the best you possibly can and being competitive as all hell is still ultra important.  If you are DPS for example, you should be trying to be #1, just realize that sometimes you best serve the raid by being put on interrupt duty or misdirect duty or kiting duty.  Your DPS will not always be at the top, period. 

Part of preparing for the raid as well is knowing and understanding the best drops in the raid for you.  Having a gear list of items that drop for your class and spec and how much of an upgrade they are really helps out.  If you know that a drop is a 70 DPS upgrade for you, and someone else knows it is a 100 DPS upgrade for them, then it comes back to what is best for the raid.  Even though you want to upgrade, maybe you should willingly pass occasionally so that you keep everyone strong.

Once you gain an instict for raiding then even hard bosses like Arthas will seem simple

Lastly, while in raid you need to keep an eye out for things not going correctly and to keep an open mind when your mistakes are pointed out.  Even if you are following the known strategy for a fight, it is possible it is wrong or just won’t work for your group.  It may also be correct but someone is doing something incorrectly.  Even if you are not a raid leader, to have that instinct means seeing something happening and pointing it out, or even ideally figuring out how to best correct it. Also sometimes someone else will see something you did wrong.  Be open to listening to them describe the issue and try to correct it.  We are not all perfect, we learn from our mistakes, don’t be afraid to make them or admit to them.  Learn from them and move on.

Raider’s Instinct

As you have learned from the above almost everything about gaining the raider’s instinct can be summed up in the end by three simple words: Learning, Knowledge, and Selflessness.

To be a great raider you need to spend a lot of time learning. You learn about your class, the game, other classes, raids, mechanics and strategies. You take that learned information and turn it into knowledge that you can use and share.  Knowledge can be used to adapt to different similar situations or to provide minor corrections.  Lastly selflessness in not always having to be the top DPS, or not dealing with adds or mechanics, or not always taking loot that would be better for someone else.

Learn how to manage those simple sounding items and you will surely be on your way to having the raider’s instinct. One thing to keep in mind is instinct is intuitive; you can not just learn it over night, and you may never get it.  First you need to spend a lot of time learning and practicing.  When everything in this article comes to you without thinking, when you don’t flinch to give away gear, when you just know where to stand, when you are always seeing something new and adjusting automatically, only then will you really have the raider’s instinct.