Mythic Raiding: what does it take?

[Clutch]

1. Skill(This is fairly obvious but the bosses are tuned around players pulling close to the maximum their characters can produce, obviously gear starts to make up for any lack of skill but even greatly geared people are required to know a fairly advanced form of their class/spec to even be allowed to raid at the mythic difficulty level)
2. Time (Obviously the hours you spend in the raid, as well as the time investment required to prepare your character for said raid outside of raid times)
3. Patience(If you're not in a top 100 guild, you're raiding with folks with different learning curves, some of your players will catch on to strategy/mechanics quickly some won't, at the end of the day you need both of those players so patience is required by everyone on your raid team)
4. Dedication(as said many many times you need 20 dedicated folks to put forth the effort of everything listed above and to keep at it for long periods of time)

[Deleted]

As a mythic raider leader i can say that all it really boils down to is:
1. Preparation, either in form of reading up on enounters, watching video guides or both.
2. Putting what you learned from that into effect.
3. Avoid taking uneccssary.
4. Keeping a cool head.
5. Communicate with your team, knowing when to talk and when to keep quiet. If you're not leading and havn't been assigned to communicate something throughout the fight, dont.
6. Patience. Accept that shit takes time, there's going to be wipes, sometimes a lot.
7. after every raid, hanging out just talking about the fight can solve sooooooooooooooooo many problems and it's also a great time to ask questions(if you're too afraid to do that during raid time)

Edit: a certain amount of skill as well obviously... Some people just arn't cut out for it no matter how hard they try it would seem.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Honestly, the only thing that prevents everyone from being a mythic raider is smarts since that comes into learning how to play your class, what to do... when, etc.

I agree that smarts are important, but the biggest obstacle for a lot of us is time. Even IF I didn't have a job, there are still other hobbies and things to do in life besides WoW. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy the game or I wouldn't be active in these forums. But the commitment necessary to be part of a mythic raid team? That's something I can't make right now.

[Egregious]

If you want to raid Mythic at a high-level; a lot.

If you just want to clear Mythic before the release of the next tier; time and dedication.

If you only aspire to kill some Mythic bosses before the release of the next tier; hardly anything at all.

[Deleted]

Right now top-end mythic raiding can be done with relatively little time investment, but I'm a little concerned that much more grinding will be required to keep your character's performance optimal in Legion. Legendaries are very important and have low drop rates. Artifact lower is a long, long grind with no weekly cap, and you'll want all the traits including the final 20 +0.5% damage/rank ones, possibly on 2-3 specs depending on your class and role. Nonraid content with no lockouts can drop mythic raid-quality gear, as confirmed in today's Q&A. There's essentially no upper limit to how much time you can sink into your character to improve your performance in raids.

[Jazzhands]

I think the biggest thing is being willing to take criticism and improve. I was part of a guild that was doing incredibly well at the start of WoD, we cleared heroic BRF and a few mythic HM bosses pretty fast, but when it came time to polish up and step into Mythic BRF, people fell apart when myself and a few other officers approached them about logs and such. They didn't want to spend time going over what was wrong, even though they didn't even have to read the logs themselves. The guild promptly fell apart when said people continually messed up in mythic, and it was clear they weren't going to improve. We couldn't find replacements due to having a crappy server population.

As long as you can improve, you can do anything.

[alturic]

I agree that smarts are important, but the biggest obstacle for a lot of us is time. Even IF I didn't have a job, there are still other hobbies and things to do in life besides WoW. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy the game or I wouldn't be active in these forums. But the commitment necessary to be part of a mythic raid team? That's something I can't make right now.

Well, that's a whole different "problem" though, no? Raiding mythic doesn't require hours and hours of time. I took the question as one of "why can't everyone kill a mythic boss", in relation to "what's needed".

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Well, that's a whole different "problem" though, no? Raiding mythic doesn't require hours and hours of time. I took the question as one of "why can't everyone kill a mythic boss", in relation to "what's needed".

Fair enough. The time issue is just what came to mind for me. It's not so much the total number of hours as it is being able/willing to commit to the raid schedule. Especially as tank. Especially when I'm a distance runner who travels to events at least one weekend a month.

[trm90]

I think the biggest thing is being willing to take criticism and improve. I was part of a guild that was doing incredibly well at the start of WoD, we cleared heroic BRF and a few mythic HM bosses pretty fast, but when it came time to polish up and step into Mythic BRF, people fell apart when myself and a few other officers approached them about logs and such. They didn't want to spend time going over what was wrong, even though they didn't even have to read the logs themselves. The guild promptly fell apart when said people continually messed up in mythic, and it was clear they weren't going to improve. We couldn't find replacements due to having a crappy server population.

As long as you can improve, you can do anything.

I guess this is why it's so important to find a group of people you feel comfortable with. I wonder if people get anxious about criticism in fears they'll get benched or gkicked?

[Deleted]

Consistent commitment. A guild that stops raiding is a guild that dies more often than not. As such, to raid mythics you should more or less be willing to keep playing well past when the raid tier is fun

[Deleted]

To add something, don't underestimate people too much. Nobody is perfect but you are not god compared to them just because you noticed them doing mistakes. Just as nobody is perfect, the same way anybody might have something to offer that you don't, so prepare to learn from your teammates.

[Sevro au Barca]

Raiding effectively takes dedication, time efficiency during raid hours, and the large burden of knowledge that the raiding scene in MMOs typically requires. I think being a Mythic Raider now, in general, is much easier than it has been to be a Heroic raider in the past(when Heroic was the hardest difficulty).

[Deleted]

This is more for amusement or academic curiosity than for a working blueprint, but I was wondering about what some people feel are the key components to being able to defeat Mythic content. For example, if you had a group of raiders dedicated to the concept of beating mythic, even if it took a few months, is it feasible, or is it something where if, there is no reasonable success in a few weeks that it likely wouldn't happen?

How much of a weekly time commitment would a group need to complete mythic before the next raid tier for example?

I would especially like to hear from folks who had challenges on the way to completing Mythic raids and beat them, or if they couldn't, what felt like the major roadblocks to success?

Thanks for the feedback.

2 things:

1. an honest effort and focus (meaning players that want to be good and invest a little bit of brain power into getting good enough)
2. about 10 hours a week (~8 hours raiding, 2 hours for other stuff)

[Deleted]

In terms of time commitment, there are quite a few guilds who clear all content on mythic doing 2 nights a week. I'd say that's the minimum.

[Deleted]

In terms of time commitment, there are quite a few guilds who clear all content on mythic doing 2 nights a week. I'd say that's the minimum.

"Few" is very literal here since most of the guilds that do say they raid for 2 or 3 nights and have great progress often add more days during progression. Also, there are 3-day guilds that do alt runs on a 4th or a 5th day which doesn't make them really a 3 day guild. If someone is truly a 3 or 2-day guild and can beat the progress of others doing 4 or 5 days, it's very impressive because in this game time investment on PvE pays off and when I see a 3-day guild being around top 100, I bet they have players that can easily play near the world 1st if they had a little more time.

[Detritivores]

This is more for amusement or academic curiosity than for a working blueprint, but I was wondering about what some people feel are the key components to being able to defeat Mythic content. For example, if you had a group of raiders dedicated to the concept of beating mythic, even if it took a few months, is it feasible, or is it something where if, there is no reasonable success in a few weeks that it likely wouldn't happen?

How much of a weekly time commitment would a group need to complete mythic before the next raid tier for example?

I would especially like to hear from folks who had challenges on the way to completing Mythic raids and beat them, or if they couldn't, what felt like the major roadblocks to success?

Thanks for the feedback.

It comes down to time and skill. Even for a 2 night team, mythic completion at reasonable pace is possible, but rare. As far as weekly commitment 6 hours is plenty if everyone commits themselves to playing optimally and assuming a 6 month patch cycle. My teams challenges mostly center on us being on a backwater low pop realm. We're much more likely to teach an aspiring mythic raider how to play than we are to find an actual competent raider. This slows us down, resulting in half-completed mythic tiers and fully completely eternal xpac ending mythic tiers. But we have fun and enjoy playing with each other. Which is probably more important than progress at 2 nights per week.

- - - Updated - - -

"Few" is very literal here since most of the guilds that do say they raid for 2 or 3 nights and have great progress often add more days during progression. Also, there are 3-day guilds that do alt runs on a 4th or a 5th day which doesn't make them really a 3 day guild. If someone is truly a 3 or 2-day guild and can beat the progress of others doing 4 or 5 days, it's very impressive because in this game time investment on PvE pays off and when I see a 3-day guild being around top 100, I bet they have players that can easily play near the world 1st if they had a little more time.

This is my impression as well. Actual true 2 night guilds have a harder time. But many claim to be 2 night while having a 5 night progression schedule that most of them participate in. Pretty silly.

[Zyky]

2 things, common sense and basic awareness.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

Raiding seemingly doesn't take much from the individual player in terms of "skill" but instead demands more and more to the mentality and lifestyle the higher up in the "competition" one goes.
There are a couple key pieces that has to be in place for one to become a successful raider, however they're not all required to the highest importance as there are many guilds with different schedules and levels of progression.
Here are my top priorities.
1. Attendance / Schedule / Real life
Attendance is what makes you reliable to your guild, if you can't make it for half the raids then that means the experience on encounters you get has to be learned by someone else when you're not there. Not only that but any gear rewards you get has to be gained again for someone that takes your seat when you're not available. Most of the time these attendance issues come from real life situations that doesn't allow you to be occupied for X hours, X days a week. Kids, Work, social life and/or other activities is what stops most people from raiding with a set team. There are many guilds out there who raids 1-2 nights a week, some weekends but also some that do mid weeks.
2. Mindset / Mentality
How someone approaches raiding mentally is something many people overlook but is by far the most important thing for a guild to consider, for example the biggest key to a successful guild is to have a group of equal minded people. This can be in the ways of thinking about loot, thinking about role assignments, thinking about humor (the social bit) and so on. If you have people that completely misfits in your group of people, bad eggs, you need to remove them- regardless of what they do in raids. These "bad eggs" are often people that refuse to follow tactics, play for themselves, argues about loot and so on. Keep in mind that just because someone does the things I mentioned doesn't make them bad eggs, it takes experience with people and leadership to handle these things. A skill that is hard to learn, which is why managing a guild is hard and many guilds fail to last very long.
3. Dedication
Dedication is two-sided.
One side is how much dedication YOU put inn, from reading guides on encounters and/or your class, how much extra work you put inn for your guild and co-raiders to make encounters in any way easier. If that means you're out grinding materials for foods or flasks or you having 5 alts with Inscription to offer your co-raiders crafted trinkets (and so on) then that's a great asset that is highly valued by any management/officer team. This sets you apart from the other raiders and you'll not go unnoticed!
The other side is how much dedication your guild demands of you and your co-raiders, a guild that is thriving socially might not strive to do better or faster progression because the social part of the guild is very good. However a guild that wants to push harder into the higher ranks may ask more of their raiders in many ways. Asking to do extra raid hours or even extra days of raiding during progression is one such demand but there are many others like requiring alts for split runs (a popular demand in recent raid tiers), having specific professions to feed the demand of crafted loot and so on. Some guilds will even force people to change their main spec or in some cases even change class, most high end guilds do this every tier and sometimes during a raid tier.
4. "Skill"
"Skill" in some shape or form obviously matters, however what's the "skill" with raiding in WoW these days? To me the answer is 3 things.
- Focus, being able to stay focused when progressing on something hard is priority. Focus can mean staying calm, or not getting frustrated and so on.
- Consistent, being able to do the same task over and over and (re)producing the same results over and over without fault. This is a key skill for good players.
- Flexibility, being able to quickly adapt to new strategies or situations as they come makes raiding a lot smoother. When you're progressing on something and you need to change something to see what changes (for better or worse) it's important that everyone follows the same tune as soon as possible, if it takes someone 15 wipes to learn a change then that's a big waste of time and causes frustration in your raids. In other words the faster people are to learn (and adapt) the better, this also somewhat relates to people playing different specs for different encounters. It basically translates to "expertise" in the game, the more experienced you are the easier time to adapting, in theory, you should have.
5. Leadership.
By far the most important part of your raid is the leadership, who decides the raid setup, who decides the tactics and so on. The leader of raids is the hardest role to master in any guild, you have the demands of maybe as many as 30 people under you who wants to play and be treated in many different ways. The raid leader may not do all the calls for when things are happening but he's the one that most of the time delegates those roles. The other part of the leadership are the officers. Officers come in many different roles, some do recruiting only, some handle strategies, some handle individual people, some handle loot etc.
The leadership of guilds is something one could write 60 pages on and still not fully grasp the full extent of the job(s). My GM has been the leader of this guild since the second week of Vanilla, 11 years, and even he has his ups and downs. It's a stressfull job that puts an enormous amount of pressure on your shoulders, so much that in many cases GMs or raid leaders will quit early on because of it.
My advice to you: if you find a good GM/raid leader, stick with them as long as you can- they're a rare breed.

[Gaidax]

Just need competent people really. You do not even need time, I am in two nights, 3 hours per night guild and we got 13/13M all right.

[Caliph]

Have the right add ons, move when you have to, mechanics come first, and realize you're there @Mythic level because of the people you're there with. For instance, back in ICC heroic Arthas the raid leads all of a sudden are lambasting the healers and some dps for "failing". Well the reason you're at heroic arthas in the first place is because of those same healers and dps you morons. it's the main reason i longer do any mythic raiding. not interested in scorning or being scorned.