Forced to Raid?

[Serilda]

I apologize for the necromancy. It was an accident. The thread came up in a Google search, and the date is close to the same as the current date, only it was last year. I didn't notice the year when I posted in it.

To reply to just your points alone then, unlike all of the people talking to the OP, I hate raids too. I like the showiness of them and some of the mechanics are very clever, but I hate the businesslike way everyone wants to run them. The 24-mans are the worst because I can run them a million times in DF, and clear them, without ever needing to fully understand anything that is going on so long as most of the other people do. It doesn't feel exciting, even though the dungeons themselves are gorgeous. Unfortunately, designing encounters which actually tax healers and force us to master our class seems to be beyond the team at the moment so instead they challenge players by turning the experience into an action RPG about dodging invisible mechanics and memorizing a bunch of routines which prevent us from actually using most of our abilities, which I don't find all that engaging as a playstyle. Still, it is what it is and hopefully the trend will eventually swing back to the playstyle I enjoy, which is more reactive and less scripted.

My solution has been to do as much learning as possible with my FC. There are six of us in total when everyone is present, but thankfully there's also a ton of content in this game so we can live with being behind everyone else. What we do is to do everything with the fewest people possible so that personal responsibility for figuring out mechanics is actually relevant. The old 24-man raids are completely different when run with three parties of two, and nobody cares if we wipe a bunch of time trying to figure things out. It's way less efficient - a clear in DF would take maybe 20 minutes, whereas we spent an entire evening working on figuring out Ozma back when we were level 70 - but it ditches all of the pressure of performing with a bunch of mostly-mute complete strangers and replaces it with high stakes fun. Some mechanics explicitly don't work properly if you don't have enough people or the right roles and we have to figure out solutions to those problems too (where possible). The Omega raid series is brilliant with friends. I'd never have bothered with it if I'd had to work through Party Finder but all of the surprises (we always go in blind) and fan service moments had us shouting with joy. And once I know the fight and properly understand it, I'm happy to join runs to help other people. But progression raiding is only really fun for me if I can do it with friends. I don't know if it's a thing elsewhere but on my server it's also perfectly acceptable to put up a Party Finder suggesting a relaxed learning run with your own rules if you need more people but just want to have fun.