My First Wow Raid

So my friend. Lets see, we'll call him Dan for the sake of his addiction. lol Asked me what I was doing last Saturday night? I told him that "I had to work during the day and that I was free that night." Dan said "why don't you come by my place and watch the raid that I will be in?" Mind you he has been trying to get me to download the "10 day trial" for about a year now. Always asking me to come and play it, constantly talking about it whenever gaming comes up between us. I have been curious about the game, I have seen him play it before at the earlier stages of his "Wow career", like level 5 or so. He is now a level 80, and working on 3 other character. He is also in a guild with a bunch of people online and loving it for the most part. He plays it to the max, so far to ignore texts from friends cause he is so in to the game. Point being, he does get his $12 a month out of it. With me being on 360 and Ps3, I just never seen the point to pat that much a month to play one game. I guess it is for the whole service and experience. They seem to patch the game up a lot and always have millions of people playing it at once. Dan claims that its endless and always stuff to do, I just don't know what to think. So back to our conversation, I was like "sure man I come see what this hype is all about."

Saturday night comes and i'm done work for the day, off to Dans house for the night. He text me earlier in the day and told me that the raid is scheduled for 9pm. For those who don't know what a raid is, it's basically I group of players up to 40 players get together and go through massive levels of huge mobs and boss fights. The advantage to this is you find rare items and get to loot a bunch of cool shit, and of course play crazy boss fights with tons of players. So I get to Dans house and he has his computer already running Wow,  he is on it running around the place in this main town. Storm Wind I believe. The place was packed with players everywhere, hanging out, talking, and planning missions. That was only in one main town, in a continent! This game is fucking huge! Tons of space and places to go and see just filled with tons of design. Graphically the game isn't close to anything of modern games, but its catered for really anyone to play. which is smart.

So were sitting there trying find out what is going on for tonights raid. He is pulling up chat bars, friend bars, guild bars, chatting and seeing who is online. At first glance, there is so much fucking stuff on the screen at once. You can see in my tilted picture at the top, all the little icons of moves, actions, spells, potions, and on and on..... I didn't even get it all in there! But it seems to me very overwhelming. I had to take in count his character is at this highest level cap too, so it will be a little to hop in and understand what every little button was for. I asked frequent questions about certain things, cause I knew once the raid kicked off he be in full battle mode and zoned in on whats going on. So we find out there all getting together at this certain Tower in the game world, and everyone is going to meet there now. So we head there by flying on some creature, and you actually have to sit there and watch him fly there. Different. So we get to the meeting spot and Dan tries to get a program were everyone can talk together to work (I try find out the name). He had it set up, but as the clutz that his is, he deleted some networking information to get in this chat room. 

So trying to figure this out,  I snapped that picture of everyone standing around at the meeting spot and beginning of the where the "raid dungeon" starts. Eventually he got it working, but it already kicked off people were on the move. The raid was 25 man(woman) made up of two guilds working together, and everyone is paired up into groups of 5's.  There are different stat boards that pop up on scree to tell you who caused the most percentage in damage and what not, that everyone seems to gets addicted to. Dan was yelling about how he was "DP" was "pulling"... which means he is started to more damage and climb up the leader board for the Party damage. They would fight a Mobs of tough level 80 goons that were little taller and could take quite the beating, you definitely need pure communication through the different characters and their classes. You would have people healing each other, characters casting spells, and there would be the Tanks that do close combat and can take and deliver the most damage. Dans Wow character is an Archer type character that stands back and launched magic arrows with a giant bow, he also could cast some magic but not as affected as other Mages. 

The video I posted showed on the first bigger enemies that came up I was like "holy shit, that guy is huge!" He wasn't even a boss, or anything out the ordinary I learned after I seen that enemy several times later in the raid. The First boss, was a giant skeleton that floated in the air with a huge axe. It was Massive. Everyone was just on the outside not attacking the boss, regenerating their health, magic, and what not. They all the were chatting, I could hear them cause Dan had it going through the speakers. Who was going to do what, and what the strategy was to defeat the boss. It was apparently pretty easy from what I seen them do it in, it was the first boss so people must have done this before. It did take maybe 10-15 mins to take down, but yeah some of those mobs of enemies took the same. The screen in combat is always filled with HP numbers coming up, how much damage was laid out! If 25 people are attacking, there is a lot of numbers on screen coming up. If you sit through one of these raids you knew that you were in for the long haul. Couple hours in I seen a couple more boss fights, and there were couple times the team would go down and have to go find your body again or wait for someone to raise you from the dead. That would take 15 mins to reorganize everybody back together and head back in.

Hours into this I realized, its not fun really to watch the game. There was times it would take 20 mins to take down one enemy. It wasn't boring but I seen it all really, and its something you have to play it yourself to enjoy the most. A single player experience would be best way to experience it, and your always online for playing with people and getting help with things. In the background of his place I could see his tv had the Premier League Football on, so if I got bored of watching that same fight I would glance at the tv. lol There was a lot of frustration near the middle of the raid it was like 3 hours in. Dan still couldn't find one piece of any item that he wanted or needed. If you find the piece you can roll the dice on it and who ever wins the roll gets to keep that item. There were car racing shows on the tv at this point, I was keeping my eye on some of that. The raid had a break for 15 mins, Dan could finally get a drink or go to the washroom. Same with everyone else that was playing. Once they all got back they planned for the next step. It seemed that it was all like a ladder that you get up, fight bosses get farther and farther. There were checkpoints after each big encounter, and thats where everyone would stop and wait and discuss strategies.

The final end of the raid was at a boss fight, everyone was getting wiped out. I stayed to see maybe 3 replays of the same part. The last one was definitely the closest, people were complaining about how other player weren't guarding there side. Enemies would spawn from right and left, you had to have people taking them out or it was over. Plus there was the main boss that the Tanks and Mages would be trying to suppress. people would either try to attack the boss and get defeated from either end or vice versa. It was like 1:30 am at this point and I was out of town, I was like Dan "Thanks for letting me come over and check this out, but I have to head out." Time flew by for the most part. I can see why he is caught up in this game and community, which that is what it is really. As for me I still have been thinking about playing it and getting into it, I just have so much other fun playing all my games on the consoles. It could be for me, but I just don't want to take away from all that. If they were to come out for one on the consoles, I would try it. Final Fantasy XI was the only mmo on 360 and that was $11 bucks a month. I couldn't do it,  when I already pay $60-70 a year for the Live service. Anyways, as for Dan. I will just keep telling him "My Pc won't be able to run Wow!" lol

I tried the upload the video of the Raid for 8+ hrs, it never worked. Wtf Blogger ?