My first Raid…about time!

So Tues­day (Feb. 10) was the first time I ever did a raid (a real raid) in World of War­craft. My friend Troy had me go with the guild to AQ20 (Anh Qiraj 20-player).

Wow…

Before I go into detail, I am going to give a lit­tle bit of a glos­sary, for those of you who read this that don’t know the game:

Tank -The per­son who grabs and holds the aggro of the ene­my in melee com­bat while oth­er play­ers do dam­age to the ene­my while the ene­my con­cen­trates on the tank. Tanks are almost always War­riors and in some very rare cas­es, Druids.

DPS -Dam­age Per Sec­ond. A few class­es have very high DPS, mean ing that basi­cal­ly, they deal great amounts of dam­age very quickly.

Heal­er — Some­one whose sole job is to just heal the tank (or the DPS peeps, depend­ing on how many heal­ers and who is assigned to who)

Aggro -The game has it’s own built-in “hate” sys­tem. Aggro can be short for “aggres­sive­ness” in a sense. For exam­ple, if you get too close to an ene­my, you can make it aggro to you and it will attack you. Fur­ther­more, if one play­er is attack­ing an ene­my and you out-dam­age them or heal them sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the ene­my will aggro to you.

Hero­ic Instance ‑This refers to an instance mode that can be set for instances in Out­land. If an instance is set to Hero­ic, every mon­ster in the instance is lev­el 70–72 elites, has a lot more health than nor­mal mode, hits a lot hard­er, and every boss drops a Badge of Jus­tice for each play­er in the par­ty. The last boss in also guar­an­teed to drop an epic qual­i­ty item.

First, I was real­ly ner­vous. I have nev­er done a raid before and I know that with larg­er raid instances you need a cer­tain dynam­ic AND that every­one needs to know their role and stick to it pret­ty close.

Sec­ond, I have recent­ly start­ed play­ing a Death Knight (since I could make a high­er lev­el on that realm, instead of start­ing from lev­el 1). But, he is a fight­er, so in my inex­pe­ri­ence, I was wor­ried about what his role would be. I thought most fight­ers (hack­ing away with a sword/ax) would be a Tank. Which scared me, because I am not ready for that. You need to be good to be a tank, and know what your doing to keep the aggro on you.

So when my friend told me I would be a DPS, I was relieved…But then I was wor­ried again, because I did­n’t know how a fight­er guy would DPS. I fig­ured only Mages, War­locks and spell­cast­ers could DPS. So I tried to read up on what I should do in the raid as a DPS, with­out any luck. So that just made me more nervous.

Then on top of that, I thought I had a tim­ing issue. The raid would start at 9pm. I would need to log off at 10pm for work…could we do a 20-man in one hour? But Troy insist­ed that I go for it, and when it came time I could log off, no wor­ried (lots of guilds frown of leav­ing a raid early.)

So I logged on at 6pm…did some quests to try and squeeze in one more lev­el (you need to be rough­ly a 60 to do AQ20) I got to lev­el 62.

Then I hopped on over to Silithus (where AQ20 is) around 8:30. Yeah, Troy did­n’t tell me that every­one would prob­a­bly arrive at 9‑ish…what can I say, I am punctual.

So, once every­one was there we went in.…or didn’t.…AQ20 does­n’t have a hero­ic ver­sion, so we could­n’t get through the por­tal until Troy made it a Nor­mal instance.

At this point, I was ready to go, although I still did­n’t know what exact­ly I would do, I fig­ured I would get instruction.…well, not so much.

We ran in, and the tank picked some­thing and went for it, so since the oth­er DPS all ran up to the mon­ster and start­ing attack­ing, I fig­ured I should too. So I did. Appar­ent­ly I did okay, because no one said anything.

So we went through the instance and quick­ly (and I mean quick­ly) took out crea­tures, mobs and boss­es. We were tak­ing groups out in about 10–20 sec­onds. Where as before, when you were with a group of lev­el 60s, it would have tak­en much more time. (I was the only 60, there was one 65? 75? every­one else was a 80. There was 7 of us total).

We got to the main boss and took him out pret­ty quick­ly. Once our raid leader remem­bered what we need­ed to do to defeat him. (It had been two years since he had been in there)

We then head­ed to the oth­er two small­er boss­es left and…well…Ayamiss the Hunter took us all out. I was able to help in inform­ing the raiders about how this boss behaves (She sac­ri­fices one of the raiders on her altar, and you have to kill a worm before it gets up to the alter to your raider, oth­er­wise they die and you have more bugs on your hands to deal with). But we got swarmed, died, came back and got revenge!

We then moved onto the final less­er boss, took him out, I logged off and went to work.

I had a lot of fun. The peeps from the guild were a hoot and I could­n’t stop laugh­ing at the com­ments they would make. It was very laid back and just what I need­ed for my first entry into a raid.