When I updated something on my about page the other day, it occurred to me that the series about my raiding history that I have linked on there and which I wrote in 2020 is actually missing a fifth installment about what happened after that point. There's no time like the present, so let's get on it now!
Everything I said in part four about how I realised that I mainly raid for social reasons and how that's why I still I raid in SWTOR is still true, but something else happened in the meantime: WoW Classic.
I started playing Classic at its launch in 2019, but I once again had no interest in raiding there initially. I just rolled up some Horde characters on the EU's biggest PvE server with a couple of friends from back in the day, hoping to revel in a bit of nostalgia. Unfortunately said friends all dropped out pretty quickly, which left me feeling somewhat lonely on a server that at the same time felt unpleasantly crowded to me personally.
I ended up re-rolling a night elf hunter on an RP server, where I was happier - while I still played by myself, the medium population and general vibes felt noticeably nicer to me. However, my interest started to falter again when I approached max level for the second time and started to run out of things I wanted to do - until I ended up joining an explicitly casual pug for Zul'Gurub one weekend, a raid I knew very little about at the time. It went so well that I returned the next week when the opportunity arose and won lots of loot.
Soon afterwards, a random paladin ended up chatting me up in Ironforge (which I still think was because of that raid gear) and I found myself invited to a raiding guild, where I quickly became swept up in the manic scramble to get someone the Scarab Lord title. I had an insane amount of fun taking part in the server's gate opening event, and my new guild just generally made me feel extremely engaged with the game again. Soon I started to join their raids as a social member and even though I was extremely reluctant at first, they eventually convinced me to become a proper progression raider as well. (It seems a bit strange in hindsight, but they really wanted more hunters at the time for some reason.)
I learned that I really loved 40-man raids and was very motivated to contribute as much to the good vibes as possible, even if what was required of everyone was very little. I spent several months primarily raiding AQ40, yet it felt like barely any time had passed when Naxxramas was released. I also geared up my paladin alt to serve as back-up healer for some bosses there that were more healing-intensive than others. Overall, Naxxramas was more challenging than expected for a bunch of casuals like us, and we ultimately ended up killing Kel'Thuzad only once, in the week before the Burning Crusade pre-patch, though in a way that ended up being a nice capstone to the experience. (I just felt bad for the people who had been on the bench that night and never got to take part in a kill.)
I was very excited to continue into the Burning Crusade, since that had been the golden height of my original WoW raiding, but boy, did I end up being disappointed on that front. The downsizing from 40-man to 25-man had wreaked havoc on many guilds when it happened the first time, and BC Classic was no different. As the roster was trimmed down, many more casual and less optimised members were no longer welcome, and others just drifted away on their own. Everyone who remained suddenly seemed a lot more hardcore and less interested in just hanging out, which left me feeling very frustrated.
We did clear tier four pretty quickly, but I was just not happy raiding anymore and stepped down. I took a break for a couple of months, but then ended up returning during tier five, when a lot of the initial excitement had worn off and people seemed to have chilled out a little.
Unfortunately then Blizzard decided to inject some drama from their end instead by axing the RP server we were on, which resulted in a huge emotional rollercoaster for me. I eventually rejoined my guild on its new regular PvE server home, but a couple of months later, early into tier six, the guild suffered a sudden death anyway. I continued playing for a few months, but once I found out that everyone would be forced to transition into Wrath of the Lich King (which I really did not want to replay), I lost all interest in that version of Classic.
However, after a few months away I felt the itch again and decided to start exploring the vanilla Classic era servers instead, which were considered very dead at the time. (I had paid to clone my entire stable of characters during the BC transition.)
I quickly found myself invited into a guild on Horde side, and almost immediately hopped right back into 40-man raiding there, again as a hunter. I ended up raiding with them for a little over a year and it was a lovely time, though I made a point after the emotional intensity of my BC Classic adventures to not get quite as emotionally entangled. Progress was really hard and slow at times, largely due to a lack of numbers, and I never actually got to fully clear Naxx with them (though they did go on to do so without me later). I still check in on their Discord every so often and am happy to see that the guild is still going strong years later.
The main reason I stepped down from raiding on era was simply a lack of time. When I first started raiding in Classic, it was the height of the pandemic and my employer had everyone working from home full time, which meant that I had a lot of extra free time from not having to commute to London. Even so, I was still working, so I'm honestly not sure in hindsight how I mustered the energy to raid almost every single day of the week (as I was still playing SWTOR as well).
My job kept us working from home longer than most, but by late 2023 I did have to return to the office at least twice a week, and those days coincided with my Classic era raiding days, which was one of the main reasons I stepped down.
That said, I still miss it sometimes, because those chill 40-man raid vibes are just something else. I know why many people hate the format, and I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the poor officers who have to organise it all, but as a mere participant it's a unique experience that I've loved more than once now. A friend in retail keeps asking me whether I want to come along to some raids with the guild he's in there, but the mere question always makes me recoil a little because while I've come to enjoy many parts of modern WoW too, raiding is still not one of them and I don't think it has anything to offer me on that front. Those impeccable Classic vibes though... the memories still make me sigh wistfully and just re-reading some of the posts I linked about the subject here hit me right in the feels. I just don't think that I have enough time for it now. Maybe one day if circumstances change again.
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