Teacher says she’s just tired of tryin….

That’s one of my favorite Ralph Wiggum quotes. For today, rather than go into a boring diatribe on the Shade of Aran, I’d like to talk about my experiences with casual players and how I think they could fit in a raid structure.

Let’s start with my RP guild. I call it that for lack of a better term but they really aren’t into role playing, they are simply casual players who log in when they have time to kill – like every night. Most of the guild have 70 mains and at least one 70 alt – several of them are working toward their third and fourth 70. There are a variety of players among them, teenagers, college students, mothers, fathers from all walks of life, cops, professionals, students, retirees etc.

It’s an interesting mix and a fun one, but after a while I got bored with just leveling my alts. So I started raiding a bit, found I liked it, then found it was very time consuming and very expensive. So I got an idea, casual raiding? I've heard it can work if you're not into progression, if you like gear and seeing new sights but aren't worried about full clears. So I gave it some cogitation.

But taking the casual player and getting them to understand the needs of a raid isn’t so easy. I have a warrior friend who thought playing his warrior was the coolest thing – though he always said he found it really hard to level up.

I was amazed. I have a 51 fury warrior and I buzz through mobs my own level constantly. About the only breaks I ever take are to wrap a band-aid around my owies and drive on. Then I looked over his spec. UGH. He had points in all three talent trees, and nothing heavily invested in any of them. So I pulled a good DPS spec off the web and sent it to him, along with a list of gearing options for DPS warriors. A week later I checked him again and found he was protection – with all the wrong talents chosen. I mean, if a guy could pick every talent incorrectly – he did it. Instinctively I think. He said he wanted to try tanking and had read up on uncritability, but he was still getting mauled in 5-mans – non heroics. Gosh, I wonder why.

HE’s playing a mage now and says it’s so much easier to level, but he can’t do 5-mans, because he runs out of mana in the boss fights ….

I asked what his mp5 was, (mana regen per 5 secs) he hadn’t heard of it. I asked what his bonus spell dmg was at lvl 70 – it was 289, ‘why, isn’t that good?’

/sigh

Now to be fair, he’s tried. But he just doesn’t “get it.” He’s read some things, he’s tried gearing a little, but he has some blues and some just silly choices for gear, stats and spec and he can’t figure out why he’s not doing better. I’ve done what I can to help him, but I’m done trying

But I’ve gone from the idea of casual players in raid settings to harping on one gearing and talent choice. There are many like this guy, they aren’t theorycrafters and don’t get the game – but it’s really not that hard and you don’t have to get into the details of theorycrafting in order to start something like kara. You just need someone who knows raids, and the bosses to be the leader, someone who can help out to be the assist and someone who can follow the basics of loot rules to parcel out the good stuff. The leader simply needs to be someone who understands what each class does, and how to use the talents available.

I used to think leading a raid would be hard. And admittedly it can be difficult, but it doesn’t HAVE to be. It’s like so many other choices in life, it is what you make of it. Be a hard case and you’ll have to deal with resentment issues, be too lax and you’ll have a rowdy unruly bunch who wipe a bit more. Be of even keel and keep your mind in the middle and you might just get by.

I think if my self imposed breaks extend for any real length of time I’ll look forward to pulling together my own KZ raid, just to see if I can get a group of casual players to work out or not. I’ve tried this with the legacy raids, it’s not the same. There’s no incentive for them, no real reward. Maybe KZ is the place to test this out. I’ll let you know.