How did you first get into raiding?

[Louis CK]

Just thinking back a bit to my first raiding experience, thought I'd share and would like to hear some of your stories of how you "got started" in raiding, or what was it that turned you on to raiding?

My story:

I first started playing back in college, this was my first MMO and my cousin and uncle played so I decided to start up. I leveled a priest to around 56 in Vanilla, and by that time I had burnt myself out. I had no idea about stats or how the game worked in general, so I spent long hours of frustration dying as a priest.

I stopped playing for a bit and came back right as BC released. Having had such a bad experience on my priest, I decided to go with something I figured would be easier: a warlock.

I joined a guild called the Brotherhood of Blood and the leveling experience was MUCH easier because during my time away I had read up on the game a bit more, found out how stats worked with classes, etc. So, hitting 70 for the first time was less of an exhausting experience. Soon after, I got into my first raid, Kara.

I remember getting in and doing the first few bosses with a pug, and all I could think was, "Warlocks are kind of boring. I never need food, I never need mana, etc." Granted, stupid reasons to find a class boring, but I was new!

So, after one time in Kara on my warlock, I decided to start over again and rolled a tank. It was a bit of a slow process leveling a prot warrior, but very exciting at the same time. After hitting 70, I would spend a lot of time tanking dungeons, meeting people, etc.

One night I was tanking H BOT and a couple others with this warlock and a priest, they were related. I had not yet done any raids on my tank at this point, but a couple days later, I got a whisper from the warlock asking if I wanted to raid. I told them I hadn't had a lot of experience with raiding, but that I would love to. Thinking they would invite me to their guild, I soon found out that they didn't have a guild, and that they were going to be pugging it.

So, we started pugging Kara every week. After the same people continued coming every week, we moved on to 25mans. From there, the group became more and more solid and the warlock ended up making a guild for everyone. From there we ended up going through most of BT and a bit into Sunwell before Wrath came out. Beyond that, we ended up branching off and I got into a bit more serious raiding, and the rest is history.

So basically, I got into raiding through a pug...

What's your story?

[Aphrel]

got into raiding in the beginning of vanilla because it felt it was the goal of the game and i wanted them purples to pwn in hillsbrad pvp with
at first we did some 20man raiding in scholo/strat, that was in the early beginning when everybody was still clueless as to wtf to do. But welearend and progressed throu ubrs and eventually we mereged with a guild to get enough lvl 60ppl to start mc raiding. I remember my first epic from raids, robes of volatile power i think it was called and i felt like a fkn king wearing it! Been raiding ever since in various hardcore guilds. Raiding is the sole reason i play wow now, and i still like it. Just wish they whould make more hard bosses per teir and release content faster

[Ciddy]

I started playing in Classic, one year before BC. By level 40, I met some guy in Tanaris who ran around with me and quested with me some, and he invited me to his guild. They were a small guild that didn't have numbers to raid properly. Then we merged with another guild, which merged with yet another guild. Still not enough numbers to get any raids off the ground, but we were doing all-guild 5-man stuff (and even UBRS runs on our really good days). By the time BC came around, we were big enough to at least attempt Karazhan. Worked on it for a while but struggled with things like raid attendance, the fact that we were a stepping stone guild, etc. Never got past Curator. Then we merged with yet ANOTHER guild and started really taking off.

The other guild was slightly bigger than we were, so they were used to clearing Karazhan on a weekly basis, but the ones of us who came over just thought it was amazing. We eventually got our two 10-man groups geared up enough to combine them, recruit a few more people, and start doing 25s. I stayed with that guild and raided regularly with them for a long time. Unfortunately, BC was our peak. Things started going downhill really hard in Wrath, and even worse through Cataclysm.

In Wrath, we decided to do some "guild direction" changes that didn't work out. Up to that point, we were a group of friends who managed to get things done and have fun. The change was basically a "we're going to start kicking people who don't do X amount of DPS, even if they've been raiding with us since day one" sort of thing, and that started a downward spiral. We managed to hang on until the end of Cataclysm. But we were losing core raiders left and right because people got sick of Dragon Soul. By then, a dead server, poor raid attendance, and a server transfer/faction change that didn't help finally made us decide to go our separate ways.

I've been mostly taking a break from WoW since then. I played MoP enough to get my main to 90 and dick around a bit, get some reps to exalted, get some epics in LFR, and so on, but I haven't done anything serious in that entire expansion. Nothing against MoP, because I liked what I saw, but the whole thing with my guild left a bad taste in my mouth.

[Notdev]

My first guild raid was with a very casual guild. They were basically one of those mass invite/leveling guilds that actually ended up having lots of raid worthy players for Naxx. We cleared a couple wings on 25 man for the loot (pretty crazy back then, a casual leveling-first guild able to clear 25 man raid bosses, even though they were piss easy) but main focus was on 10 man. Naxx was so incredibly easy, our super casual guild that had people doing sub 2k dps was able to clear it in 2 weeks. I played with them for a couple months.

They weren't able to make any headway in on 25 man though due to inconsistent attendance, and the group just wasn't good enough to do 10 man malygos. I joined one of the organized raiding guilds, though they were still on the casual side of things. They demanded things like attendance, gems, enchants, optimal play, actually held you accountable for mistakes/low numbers, etc. They were working on 3D Sarth at the time, had Naxx and Malygos on farm. (At the time, I had no idea that the raids were considered easy, so I thought the guild was amazing) 3D Sarth was my first tough progression kill. Ulduar rolled around and the guild didn't even manage to clear normal 25 man before ToC. Thankfully I was included in a 10 man that was able to get their 10 man drakes and put in some Algalon attempts, otherwise I probably would have left to a more hardcore guild earlier (actually had an offer from the top guild on the server, but it was a pretty crappy server, they were world 900 ish at the time). Stuck around for a few more months. We cleared normal ToC, but no one would seem to show up for H ToC progression, so once again most of our progression had to be done in 10 man. Wasn't enough for me this time around though, and I sent in an app and shortly after was accepted to a top 70 US guild (ended WoTLK top 25).

I've gone back and forth from hardcore to casual raiding since then, but I'll probably never go back to being in a hardcore 16+ hour/week guild. Currently doing 6 hours/week with friends I've made in WoW and enjoying it. (on the cusp of 10/14H)

[Tziva]

In classic, my spouse played a healer and got invited to Zul Gurub by a mutal friend who desperately needed them for his raid. I was insanely jealous, but I played a DPS which they had too many of, so I used to go help pre-clear trash prior to start time in hopes a spot opened up. Once I was finally offered a spot, I never stopped raiding.

[Bluesftw]

got summoned ;>

[Darsithis]

Saw a guild asking for a sub for ICC, a tank. I'd never done a raid before but I finally got the courage up to respond. They invited me and I guess I did really well because they told me I was the best pug tank they'd had and invited me as a tank for their 10 man raid. We raided Ulduar, ICC, and Ruby Sanctum before the guild fell apart in Cataclysm and I transferred to a 25 man.

[ACES]

When I started playing I knew I wanted to collect mounts. When I saw that some mounts were only obtainable through raiding I knew I would have to be a raider. Though now I hate doing raids with mounts because if it drops and I don't win it I get really depressed. Man the time I saw Astral Cloud Serpent I offered the guy $400 for it and he turned it down I couldn't play WoW for a few days after that. Just talking about it now gives me a knot in the pit of my stomach. I guess now the main reason I raid is for titles since that's something I know I can be guaranteed to get and I concentrate on raid mounts when the raids are soloable.

[Slaughty8]

One day I decided to finally do raids, the only reason for me was to see how Blizzard dealed with ICC raid. I preapared my gear and joined a guild which was doing ICC 25 mans. Amazing experience I didn't failed, did everything well, aww, missing Lord Marrowgar.
I did not join for mounts/gear/etc, I just joined to see ICC and fight against Arthas, but the fight was a huge disappointment

[Rivellana]

Kind of the same as you did, OP.

I joined a guild back in BC that had a lot of members and eventually some of them decided it would be fun to get a Karazhan group together so we did. Spent some time wiping at first (even on the trash horses before Attumen) as we got used to raiding and sometimes had to pug people but eventually we made it through there and went on to ZA.

Some of us left to form our own guild and by the time WotLK came out we had enough to start doing 25 man Naxx. I never did do the 25 mans in BC but I kind of started small and slowly progressed upwards.

[Deleted]

I started playing in BC after finally being bugged enough by friends to try it. Guy who got me into it was best mates with someone in what was, at the time, rank 2-3 guild on the server we were on so we got social invites just to hang around. I geared up pretty quick and got asked to sub a few times when they were short on farm content during MH, BT and Sunwell. I kept subbing in when Wotlk launched and ended up as one of the top DPS and we became r1 on the server with Sarth+3 and Maly. That got me pretty hooked on raiding.

[-Superman-]

I was new to the game in Jan 2007. I had rolled a Blood Elf Paladin. Had no idea really what I was doing until a guild invited me in, and the GM happened to be the RL, and ... ironically a belf pally. So, after they got me tuned and keyed, I started running as an OT and watching the combat logs and listening in Vent as the fights progressed. Did that til Cata.

[Phuongvi]

I started playing with people at the same work place than me.
Like 7 of us.
So everyday , at lunch it was warcraft and how many loots you had in the last kara run and the noob who got the healing mmace on Maiden.

It was the same duinG TBC, ICC , after that I started working at a new place, raiding was not the same.
People stop raiding during Cata and 10 mne group and the guild crumble at MoP

[Deleted]

levelled my hunter to 80 in wrath in patch 3.3 - gathered some gear from dungeons and got myself into a pug by lieing of raiding experience - hehe! we killed 1 boss in ulduar the flame keeper guy and I got a gun cant remember name - but I was so freaking excited and I craved for more! cata came out pretty soon and I swapped to a holy paladin. doing pvp I never saw myself being able to raid several days a week. My friend was in a guild that raided twice a week - Jane Doe. and I got myself into 2 or 3 of their raids killing magmaw and alakir, really enjoyed it but I never really got many bosses down. then in Firelands after the group had lost a few of their players they were 3/4 out of 7 and on lord ryolith! I had full pvp gear and not a piece pve, my friend managed to bribe me in and boy was it even better than previous raids. we killed it in a few attempts and I was top of the healing meters! ---> this ensured my spot now in the team hehe! getting to raid twice a week we cleared normal then DS came and we managed to defeat 8/8hc since then defeating HC bosses with 5 people, 1 being the original friend :3 we went through several guild merge fails realm changing and puggings, still together currently 8/14hc in SoO. cant wait to finish it

[RickJamesLich]

Some what similar story to OP.... I hit like lvl 54 and got burnt out... I took a break for like 4 months and came back, in that time there were A LOT of changes such as battle grounds so I had a TON to do. I had a lot of rested experience and just had to do a few black rock spire runs to hit max level. I read a guide on the different things you could do at 60... seemed like too much lol. I joined a few MC pug runs, I remember not knowing about the attunement and just telling people, yeah I got it lmao. Eventually I did get attuned and joined a guild, arguably the worst one on the server, the only boss we could down was lucifron but I didnt' mind because it was so different from the regular game, it was a lot of fun. I thought I'd see it all in 5 mans but raiding was FAR different. The idea of trash that could wipe your raid group even was cool... back then MC looked like it was an impossible place almost.

After like 6 weeks of wiping on Magmadar my guild disbanded but I immediately got an invite from one of the top guilds on the server, I was a priest and worked really hard on my gear, some of the people in the guild knew who I was and I didn't even know them back lol. I was all about mp/5 back then, and grounded out literally every possible piece of mp/5 gear you could from dungeons (no easy feat at the time). This group was on Nefarian in BWL... so I literally jumped from Lucifron to Nefarian.... not sure how many other people in WoW's history did that.

[Ecwfrk]

Started with raids of the Dragons and Plane of Fear in EQ. But I quit just after PoP got released to play Anarchy Online, which was great right up until about a week before it was released when it went completely off the rails. Got in the WoW Alpha in Nov 2003 (Human Push) through a friend from EQ and got hooked.
Went on to raid in Vanilla and did MC, BWL and AQ40 but with Naxx things got really volatile. We started with 25 people from EQ, but WoW raids needed 40. That's where the problems started. Some kind of drama would crop up and people would leave and finding people geared for Naxx was almost impossible. And gearing up someone new meant the whole guild would have to move backwards to bring them up to speed in gear and attunement before we could get back to where we'd already been. People got fed up and either found other active raid guilds, got casual or just quit.

Unlike when I played EQ (or UO), when I started playing WoW I had a full time job, a wife and a kid and just didn't have the time or desire to deal with in game drama. So I joined the "quit" camp and cancelled my account just before TBC was released and didn't come back until WotLK was announced (I couldn't pass up seeing the end of TFT's story).
But other than doing the a few Naxx 25 PuGs and a few of the raid weeklys, I didn't raid again until MoP and even then I've only done LFR raiding which doesn't really count.

[Sylreick]

I started in my time at college, with a couple classmates who were pretty big on the game and suggested I try. One was alliance and one was horde, so it had me flip-flopping a lot. I made both a human warrior and a blood elf paladin. Eventually, after a LOT of effort trying to quest/understand abilities and stats, I made it to 70 on both characters. I really liked the idea of tanking on a paladin, but it was a big struggle to get the stat weights and grind heroics, and the skills were so unintuitive. Eventually, my horde friend had quit so my blood elf stayed in limbo until another buddy told me he had been playing on a different server. But I had already given a lot of focus to my human warrior, which I really wanted to stick to arms on, but that was laughed out of pve groups left and right.

That's when I met this holy pally in a group when a tank ended up just dropping the group, he suggested I go to the AH grab some cheap tank greens or whatever I could find, respec and just tank it myself. I was familiar with the idea of tanking on my pally and gave it a shot. Ended up joining the guys guild and main tanking through all the 10man content while we kept trying to have 25 active people to progress (and losing them when they had no patience and joined pre-arranged 25m guilds). So my first raiding experience was Kara and ZA, which I didn't really mind until months later when we could not go on to the other raids and people started leaving the guild.

[Raic]

I started playing in Wrath, wasn't really too knowledgeable about the game. Think my first raid experience was pugging ToC on my warlock. Don't remember if we finished it, seems like a lot of ToC pugs failed back then, at least on the realm I was on.

After that, I leveled a Hunter to 80 and joined an ICC pug (this was near the end of wrath). They were pretty impressed with me and I got an offer to join the guild and raid with them. I don't really remember what happened, I think the guild ended up falling apart or something because I can't recall raiding all that much with them after that, either because I didn't or my memory is just bad. Then the change from mana to focus came out and I pretty much quit my Hunter.

Then Cata rolls around. I didn't raid much in the opening tier (T11) and my altoholism began and I started working on leveling all classes to 85. At some point I joined a level 25 casual guild that was thinking about raiding, made quite a few friends in that guild. Initially started raiding Firelands (10m) on my Shaman (I think) and at some point switched over to my Rogue. I performed much better on my Rogue and stuck with it for the rest of the tier (for however long the guild stayed together, attendance was always an issue). The guild stopped raiding shortly after DS came out. A few of my friends in the guild left and formed their own guild, I briefly tanked a few raids with my blood DK for them. Still testing out alts by that time I noticed a rather high-end guild looking for a Mage, so I applied and got in. This was a 25 man that was working on heroic DS and would regularly split into 2 10-man heroic groups when necessary. I suppose I did OK on my Mage, but after about a month or so I was fed up with Fire and its RNG-reliance and wanted to switch back to my rogue, because I felt I could perform better and I figured I might as well go for the legendaries. They approved the switch and I raided on my rogue for the rest of Cata, even got my shiny legendary daggers.

MoP releases and we begin raiding immediately in MSV (continuing on my Rogue). We progressed fairly slow compared to DS and the guild was never quite the same. From the release of MoP up until the point I left that guild, we were plagued with attendance problems. We basically beat everything on normal by the time ToT came out. ToT was our first return to heroic raiding since DS when we managed to kill the first boss on heroic late in the patch, it was still disappointing considering how long the patch was out. However, it did spark the interest in heroic progression again (the "hunger"). I was optimistic heading into patch 5.4, but nothing really changed. A couple weeks go by, I was fed up at that point, behind the scenes I started talking to a heroic-progression guild who posted on the recruitment forum looking for a Rogue. I took things really fast at that point, basically leaving my old guild "in the middle of the night" only leaving a short farewell note with my battletag in the email for one of my old guildies. A few people kept in touch, but I was never really close with anyone in that guild.

Joined my new guild (10m) as recruit, after a month or so I was promoted to raider and things took off from there. We're currently progressing on H Garrosh.

[Vyrd]

my first raid ever was alterac valley. seeing 80 players at once in the bg sure was a sight.
i then started gearing out before vanilla ended. i saw molten core a few times and did 10 man ubrs, scholo, etc.
in tbc i started with kara.
downhill from there.

[Feali]

I saw someone with Rivendare's Deathcharger and asked him where he got it from. He said Stratholme so I set out to get that mount because I really liked it. I ended up in a group for Stratholme and the Hunter bracers dropped. I won them and so my quest to get the full set started. After getting almost full T0,5 I was asked by my guild to join their Molten Core raid because they were missing 1 Hunter. So I joined and that's when I lost my life to the game. Never regretted it.