Karazhan raid experience

I am so not going to bore you with a detailed description of how we killed this or that boss, what loot dropped, and what tactics we used. I leafed through many WoW blogs in the past, and found that all the descriptions of raids to one place strongly resemble each other, because everyone uses the same well-known and publicly available strategies, the bosses are always the same, and the loot drops only vary slightly. So I'm just going to say that my first Karazhan raid with my old guild was great fun, and I saw lots of encounters and events I had never seen before. We did Atumen, Moroes, the Maiden, the opera, and Nightbane. I got one epic, a healing trinket from Romeo, but we weren't all that lucky with the other epics and many of them ended up being needed by nobody. I'm not crazy enough to "need" on epic cloth items which are obviously designed for damage casters, and which would have ended with me having less +healing than in the blue items I'm currently wearing. Anyway, I don't raid just for the loot, and I always get badges of justice which I can turn in one day for whatever epic I need most.

In the comments of the last couple of days there were some questions regarding my Karazhan raid. One hardcore raider asked why casual players wanted to go raiding at all, if it was obviously so difficult to schedule. But when I see encounters like the opera, where the same location has a random chance of three different and nicely scripted events, or boss fights like Nightbane with its several phases, I can only wonder how anyone playing WoW would *not* want to see them. A hardcore raider killing Nightbane for the 15th time and cursing because the one piece of loot he wants is still not dropping might consider the evening to be hard work spent for nothing. But for somebody there for the first time the huge amount of work Blizzard developers put into these raid encounters is really obvious, and the difference with the boring mobs you can kill solo is striking. If the hardcore raider don't want casual players to raid, I propose that the devs make the solo and non-heroic group encounters as interesting as the raid encounters are now. And save the raiders some time by making raid dungeons simple linear corridors without decoration with X stacks of trash mobs in evenly spaced distances, followed by a boss with huge stats and powers, but no animations or scripted events. If the casual players value the lore and detailed embellishment of encounters so much more, why waste all that work on the hardcore raiders who only want the difficult fight and the loot?

I'll certainly sign up for more Karazhan raids. And if I get a bit more lucky with loot, I might be able to move on to other raid dungeons. But the fun is certainly in seeing the places, and in hanging out with friends to overcome the challenges. That my guild doesn't organize a Karazhan raid every night and I'm not expected to raid several times per week suits me just fine. It is obvious that there is a point somewhere where the same raid dungeons stops being fun, and starts becoming a boring treadmill you are only willing to do because of the promise of another fun place somewhere in the future. I frequently talked about how Karazhan is too hard for an entry level dungeon. But of course for the raiders the problem is more the gap in difficulty between one raid dungeon and the next, forcing them to run the same raid over and over. Hey, now I even understand why people loved the introduction of Zul'Aman!

Another reader asked how raiding Karazhan compares to playing Pirates of the Burning Sea. Well, Karazhan wins hands down. Not only because of the huge different in quality and polish between WoW and PotBS. But also because a Karazhan raid by definition is a group thing, a social experience. Pirates of the Burning Sea in its current pre-order state is an almost pure solo game. PvP isn't enabled yet, and there is only a single (but repeatable) group mission in the whole starting area. I enjoy the economy game, but the interaction with other players in the PotBS economy is indirect and anonymous via the auction house. You could theoretically set up a contract with another player, for example for him to provide you with a certain amount of raw materials every day at a fixed price. But PotBS doesn't have any tools to support that, you'd need to be online every day at the same time as the other player and meet in some port to manually transfer the goods. Games like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies with their player-run shops had much better opportunities to develop long-term business relationships between players. The PotBS economy might be player-run, but without the players actually getting to know each other in the process. I can tell you who the master smiths are on my WoW server, but I have no idea who the ships made I bought in PotBS.