Story from a retired Hardcore Raider. (Hate it or Love it)

[sicness]

Exactly my feelings, i've grown kinda tired after years of raiding, but i just cant quit because i know i will be making 24 people sad each raiding night.

No offense, but no guild depends on one person so much unless you're a main tank and have clearly better gear than other tanks. Especially in 25 mans there's no reason to think that your guild can't replace you. I'm not saying you're bad and it doesn't matter, but a raiding guild who wants to raid will find a replacement. So this is more of a cop out to keep playing.

[Beazzles]

WARNING:wall of text incoming
I am an ex hardcore raider as well.
I killed every single boss minus KT in classic. Once TBC hit, my guild got a little bit more serious about raiding. The attitude from the players came off as a kind of "step up, or step out". We killed just about every boss in the first two tiers of raiding without any hitches. We were never a top 25 in the world guild, but we were always at least top 50. But that was always based solely on sketchy rankings based off the instance the gear people were wearing came from.

We killed Illidan quite early on and many raiders became bored while waiting for the next REAL tier of content to come out(lolZA). People got sick of farming warglaives for people that would only end up quitting anyways. This presented us with a real challenge when sunwell was dropped. Not many of us were enthused with sunwell. The encounters really were not that fun but just called for RNG and really strict tuning. We progressed easily at the same pace we had held through every other tier of content. Until M'uru. What a nightmare. MY guild had ONE resto shaman. That made this boss nearly impossible in phase 2 too burn him before everyone just fell over from raid damage. We eventually downed this boss after ~200 attempts. We pretty much steamrolled KJ in comparison. We had pretty decent luck with the bow. We had every hunter(3) with one as well as a rogue and a warrior.

Then WotLK hit. It felt exactly the same as when TBC had been dropped. The guild filtered through the people that were no longer "adequate" until we basically had a group of people that would play pretty much 8 hours a day minimum, 6-7 days a week. Naxx was an absolute joke and OS3D didn't stay up for very long. Once Ulduar hit, we had downed all of the keepers hard modes except for Hodir, and then the encounter became impossible for a couple weeks. We struggled to do the encounter, until they finally brought it back into line. We ended up getting one of the US early GoTUR25 achievements. We ended up finishing Ulduar with Celestial Defender and Death's Demise. And then they dropped the ToC instances on us.
These instances had the attempts system as you all know as well as 4 separate lockouts. Due to the attempt system, we were forced into doing alt raids that were just as serious if not more than the main raids. All of this raiding every single week made people burnout very quickly. We ended up losing Grand Crusader to a guild that transferred to our server. That was our first server first that we had not accomplished. Some people never came back for the next tier, some people emo quit. This is when I decided it was my time to quit as well.

ICC had the same grindy feel to it as TotGC due to the attempts, thus requiring more alt raids. This is where I drew the line.

I ended up taking a Vacation to maui only a month after quitting the game. This was my first real vacation in over 6 years! I deleted the game remotely off my desktop while I was there, it felt so great.

I ended up coming back the the game a week or two after cata launched and I have been solely pvping and it has been a very enjoyable experience in moderation.

[Asmin]

mmm you really sound like ya saw the true HC raiding atm raiding really HC atm....5 days a week 5h thou enjoying it still ^^ done its for 4 years now ^^

[Tantric]

I approve of this message.

[Slure]

I'm in Pals for Life (yes, the Leeroy one). We raid about 9-10 hours at most in a week and require very little of people other than they show up knowing how to play their class, have enough consumables for the raid and spec'd/geared properly. We don't go crazy trying to spend excess hours in raids trying to beat anybody. We do it because we enjoy it and usually we end up, sooner or later, pretty decent at it.

We will never be contending for World/US or even server firsts (now that Deus Vox is dead, maybe!). But we're fine with that. We're 2/12 Hard modes (all 25 man) so we aren't amazing but we aren't terrible...especially for the time we put in. Most of our player base has been in for years and a lot of the guys who made the guild are still playing. I've been with Pals for over four years now and I still sometimes feel like the new guy. There have been multiple drunken get togethers and Vegas excursions and even though it's not universally true there is very little in the way of politics or drama. Our attrition rate is almost stupid low compared to most guilds that have non-stop turnovers and people quitting.

Long story short, raid with people you like and who don't try to cause drama and try to kill themselves or screw other people (sometimes literally) for purples. Make efficient use of your time, know your class and what to do but have fun. Don't burn yourself out. Scheduling raids for more than 3 nights a week is unhealthy as far as I am concerned. Some people may want to raid more than 3 nights a week and let them do that, just in a 10 man or somewhere else. Burn-out by playing too much, especially if it's forced/scheduled raids, will kill the joy for anybody.

When did dv break up? Moved from laughing skull at end of wrath they were still going strong.

[redd]

A lot of the posts in here are some really over the top hyperbole anyways. 'Always have to be hardcore all the time, always stressful, blah blah blah.' Except when you're doing farm bosses(even amidst a content push there is still farm content), or after your content push is over and you can streamline your schedule and enjoy your success waiting for the next tier. Even in the heroics now, Halfus post nerf feels about as hard as normal mode Halfus did, and we killed Atramedes with 2 deaths on 10man(indicating that it's not an 'omg end of the world if I fuck up one GCD' moment of high stress stroke inducing raiding). If raiding really feels to some of you like the OP's post quitting is definitely for the best, cause all of the high end raiders I know of can cite far more moments of fun and enjoyment than they can life ruining hardship and depression.

[GrieverXIII]

10 man raiding and PvP ftw.

I'm raiding with friends, half our raid group if not more is Gladiator and we rarely ever have ''ego'' problems and such, we raid 5-6 hours a week and we are already on Nefarian, one-shotting everything else in normal mode every week, besides al'akir since we haven't cared to try him already :/.

Yes normal mode are a joke, but all i care about at this point is to see content, more power to you if you feel like banging your head on a brick wall 20hours+ a week, only for differently colored geared, i have mine from PvP.

But i've raided Hardcore in WolTK, and i can def recognise some situations i've lived, pointless to say now i'm out of this business and probably not coming back. I find playing high end arenas (duelist+ ratings) much more fun than heroic raiding.