They will tell you it can’t be done.  They will tell you that if you don’t raid at least 3 times a week, you’ll never see any success.

They tried and failed?
They tried and died.

They will say that you can’t learn the advanced encounters, that you’ll hold the group back.  They will tell you "show up 80% of the time, or don’t show up at all."

Lies, all lies.  And I am here to prove it.

One of the questions I often get asked is this:  "PTD, how do you do it?  How do you raid part-time like you do?"  Well, today I’ll try to give you some insight as to how I accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, and give some recommendations on how you can do it yourself.  Without further adieu, here are my five keys to casual raiding.

Key #1:  FOCUS!

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

The first key is simple.  To be a successful casual raider, you MUST have one character that is geared to the hilt, and raid-ready above and beyond any other character.  The more hard-core out there can afford to gear multiple characters for raiding, but for casuals like us, we need to focus.  In time, you can slowly gear another toon, but do NOT do it at the expense of your main. 

The problem with this key is that as a casual player you probably have a LOT of alts.  I know I have every slot filled with characters level 8 to 63, and I’m sure I’m not alone.  They key, though, is that my Druid is in very good shape.  I didn’t even attempt to start 25 man raiding until I was fully equipped in epics, with proper gemming and enchants. 

If you are going to try to raid only one night a week like I do, that one character better be good, very good.  Don’t get too wrapped up in gearing alts.  Make a decision on a main and stick to it.

Key #2:  Be Overly Prepared

Shield Practice.
Gurney, we had practice this morning. I’m not in the mood. 
Not in the mood? Mood’s a thing for cattle and loveplay, not fighting!

Similar to Key #1, you can’t afford to mess around in terms of knowledge, either.  You aren’t going to have the same number of attempts to learn about the various boss encounters, so be as ready as you can be.  To counter that, do your homework.  Read a few different strategy guides for the bosses you expect to see.  Watch at least one video, but if you can view a few different ones from different perspectives.  Admittedly, there is no replacement for actual in-game experience - but you need to get as close as you can. 

Also, make a point of being that guy that’s always early for raid night.  Make sure your gear is repaired, and make sure you are fully equipped with pots, oils, food, elixirs - everything.  Don’t be the guy that asks for a summons 2 minutes after the raid was supposed to start, or who asks if anyone has any healing pots.  Be there and be ready.  Be an example, and you’ll have a better chance of being invited back in the future.

One other thing regarding preparation is this:  don’t be afraid to ask questions.  If you show you’re actually interested in getting things right, the raid leaders will notice.

Key #3:  Be Honest About Your Availability

As the new Duke, I hereby invite you to ask me for whatever you wish. You may request anything of me, anything at all.

This part is just as important as the others.  When you are looking at raiding, make sure you are honest with the raid leaders about your availability.  Be honest with yourself, too.  Don’t say you can make 2 nights a week when you can only REALLY commit to one.  Don’t say you can make a 5:30 raid time if that’s the time you walk in the door after work. 

The point is to make things as clear as possible, before you even get an invite to any raids.  Don’t write any checks with your mouth that your butt can’t cash.  Chances are, they may already be hesitant about you and your limited availability, so don’t say you can do something you can’t.  On the nights you CAN raid, be utterly reliable.  If you can make EVERY Wednesday night raid, make sure the raid leader knows that.

This can also be important if you have issues similar to mine.  My wife wants nothing to do with WoW, and I have an 18 month old and another baby on the way.  I am VERY clear with her with regards to the nights that I raid.  She knows and accepts that Saturday nights I will get on the game before 8 PM, and she’s ok with that. 

Key #4:  Be Open to Other Raiding Avenues

I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when my fear is gone I will turn and face fear’s path, and only I will remain.

You must be reliable if you are to raid casually, but you also might have to be flexible.  I know it’s frightening to think of, but there are in fact 25 man PUGs that happen all the time.  Don’t be afraid to give them a try if that’s your best way to see that content.  Perhaps in the course of PUG raiding you will find other people with similar schedules.  Maybe that can lead to a more established raiding group.  If you’re not raiding at all right now, it’s at least worth a try.

Also be sure to ask around and see if there are guilds out there that are open to outside members to fill their raids.  Use the official boards to look for guilds that may be doing that.  Believe me, there are MANY guilds out there that can’t quite fill a 25 man, and they’d love to have a reliable fill-in.  Maybe you can find a group that suits your playtime, and since you are so utterly prepared (See Key #1 and #2), your success will net you future invites. 

Key #5:  Perform

I’m dead to everyone unless I become what I may be.

Above all else, this is the true key.  Beyond preparation, reliability, and flexibility lie skill and performance.  If you have any dreams of being able to raid on YOUR schedule, you had darn well better perform when you get the chance.  You’re like the rookie that gets one shot during a pre-season game to show your stuff.  Make sure you show it.  You can’t afford to make big mistakes or even little ones, you have to show that you have the goods from the first pull.

Don’t randomly go afk.

Don’t ignore the orders of the raid leader.

Don’t break sheeps, AOE in a bad place, pull aggro, or let someone die.

Basically, don’t do anything stupid.  Be as close to perfect as you can be.  If you show that you can handle the job, you’ll get the job.  I am normally way down the healing totem pole in terms of gear.  My +heal, MP5 and everything else are usually bringing up the rear, or close to it.  I still routinely lead the meters in terms of overall healing.  I think one of the reasons for this is that I get so focused about the one night I raid a week.  I make a point to get everything right, because in some way I have to.  If we fail repeatedly because of me, I would feel like I let a lot of people down.  So I make a point not to do that.  I mean business when I’m raiding, and the raid leader(s) know that.  My skill and overall performance trump my gear.

There you have it.  If you’re looking to raid casually, that’s my advice.  Focus on one character, be prepared, be honest, be open, and, most important of all, perform.  If you follow my advice, I don’t know how any raid leader could turn you down, regardless of how seldom you can raid.  The point of all of this is to assure you that it CAN be done.  I raid one night a week for four hours.  That’s it.  I’ve seen 5 bosses in SSC, 4 in Mount Hyjal, and 4 in the Black Temple.  So don’t listen to "them" when they say it can’t be done.  They’re just jealous is all.  Thanks for reading!

It’s hard to believe, I know.  Your friendly neighborhood tree, all Bear-Butted out, tanking Moroes.  So hard to believe, in fact, that it could only be true. 

Anyhow, here is how it happened.  I didn’t have anything going on last night, and I had a good 3-4 hours to kill in game, so I joined the Kara LFG channel.  That usually ends bad, I know, but I need badges for the Gavel of Naaru Blessings and most of the guild was otherwise indisposed. 

I got an invite fairly quickly, as my note advertised me as a Resto Druid with 1923 Healing.  Should be sufficient for Kara.  ;)  I did a quick lookup on WoW Heroes of the person who had invited me, and I really liked what I saw.  A strong tank goes a long way.

So we’re trying to fill, trying to fill.  We have tanks, we have healers, we need DPS.  Though I had a hunter I could have brought, I really wanted badges with the Druid, so I stuck to my guns.  After about 20 minutes the RL asked if I would be willing to respec and DPS.  Why not? 

Next thing I know, I’m the OT for the night.  The other warrior in the group turned out to be pure fury, and he didn’t even have a shield if he wanted to OT.  The MT was VERY strong, so I figured what the hey.  I tanked.  Here are pics to prove it:

I felt a little bad for the healers, as I don’t have the most HPs around.  That’s one area I’d have to really improve in my Bear gear.  I have the defense and other stats, but the health is lacking.

Still, we got the job done.  I also got to tank all kinds of other good stuff, along with Romulo.  The MT did most of the heavy lifting, thankfully.

Yeah, that’s right.  Thankfully the tank was very strong, and we did just fine with me as the OT.  We made it all the way to the Shade, but it was 3 am and myself and others were too tired to finish him off.  Oh well.  Still, I had a great time, and managed to snag a couple staves while I was there.  In the interests of summarizing, here is what I got:

• Staff of Infinite Mysteries
• Terestian’s Stranglestaff

Not bad at all!  I’ve been looking to pick of the staff of Illhoof for awhile, and the other staff looks like it might be the start of my Boomkin off-set.  It seems I’m headed towards true druidism, the ability to play any spec.  :)  That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

That was the scene last night.  Some of you have been to ZA, some of you haven’t.  If you haven’t, that’s what it looks like just before the pull of Zul’jin, the last boss in Zul’Aman. 

If you recall, I wrote about ZA a few months back.  If you don’t want to go back and read, basically what that post addressed is the difficulty of ZA in comparison to Karazhan.  When ZA was first announced, a lot of people thought it would be a case of linear progression, you finish Kara a few times, then move on to ZA.

They were wrong.  As it turns out, ZA is just flat-out too difficult for a Kara geared group.  I suppose I should pull back on that a little, as it is POSSIBLE with a Kara geared group, it would just be incredibly frustrating and filled with wipes. 

So what is it that makes ZA so tough in comparison to Kara?  Well, first the trash is a LOT tougher to deal with.  There are a couple parts in the instance where you have to run through a "gauntlet", and it can be very difficult to get through.  There are times you have to deal with wave after wave of mobs, and you can easily get overwhelmed.  In Kara, everything is quite easily controlled.  You position the raid in one spot that is safe, and the tank pulls back to you.  Easy cheesy.  It’s not that easy in ZA.  The one very nice thing about ZA trash is there is a lot less of it overall.

So what about the bosses?  The boss fights in ZA are on par with a lot of what I’ve seen in T5 content.  Some of them last almost as long, too.  Sure, the bear boss is easy enough to deal with, and once you learn a couple of tricks the Eagle boss is pretty straightforward as well.  But then you start getting into bosses like the Dragonhawk or Malacrass, and the whole game changes.  You need strength in your group all around for these fights, and a solid plan of action.  This is not your mother’s tank and spank Prince fight.

So, all that stuff aside, is ZA fun?  You’re darn skippy it is.  When I wrote the above linked article, I was just barely getting out of Kara myself.  ZA still seemed like a waste of time for me, as the times I went I died over and over and over again.  To trash.

Now, things are a little different.  I’ve seen a great deal of T5 and T6, I’ve geared up significantly, and now the challenges of ZA have paled somewhat.  I can pump out a lot more healing, and take at least one or two more hits before I go down.  PTD’s all growed up since he first set foot in ZA, and much of the group I was in was T5+ equipped as well.

Now when I look at the instance, I see the kind of challenge I get in T6 content for a 10 man group.  Kara is a snoozefest nowadays, which is why I do stuff like try to solo heal the place.  Besides the healthy challenge, there are some very nice drops I could use.

So how did we do last night?  Well, we got to Zul’jin, but didn’t take him down.  Myself and the other 2 healers were fairly new to the place, so overall we did well.  We only took two shots at ZJ since we were already past the raid time when we got to him.  That Eagle phase of his is nasty, I’ll say that much.

As far as the timer thing, we only managed the first.  We wiped on the trash leading to the Eagle boss as we didn’t have a Pally tank.  Our Pally healer had to try to deal with all the birdies, and he went down.  On the second attempt at that gauntlet the same pally healer died again, but towards the end and we made it through.  Then he had to release and run back, and he got lost on the way.  So no second timer for us. 

Oh well.  At least the first timer netted me the Life-step Belt.  And with that I said my final goodbyes to the Windhawk set.  The belt was the last piece I was still wearing.  Into the bank it goes, where if I ever decide to try out a Moonkin spec I will regem it for that.  I also managed to pick up that froggy pet.

Still, we did make our way all the way to Zul’jin, which is pretty good considering all the healers were basically new.  That Malacrass is one bad mutha.  If you haven’t seen the fight, just think of a Moroes fight on steroids. 

One other note is that I managed to crest 4 million in overall healing.  That’s a lot of HOTs, man!  I don’t know if I’ve hit 4 million before, but here’s a screeny to prove it. (My recount is in the lower right)

In all, it was a very fun night.  I like a good challenge, and ZA provided that, with some good rewards.  While I don’t see a Bear mount in my future, I can see myself running this quite a few more times before Wrath hits.  There are still some very nice items I’d like to see, and at my gear level it’s a little more fun than Kara.  If anything, I think I’ve perhaps proven my previous post to be true:  ZA is basically a 10-man for bored T5 and T6 raiding guilds.  I just wish Blizzard had told us that in the first place.

Oh, sorry…that’s supposed to be Shade of Akama.  Well, anyway, we hit BT again this Saturday, and started with this guy.  We waxed him like a level 25 in STV on a PvP server.  It was nasty.  Ok, maybe it wasn’t THAT bad, because it did in fact take two attempts.  Anyhow, this is how it went down.

We used three tanks.  One on each door to handle adds, and one Bear in the middle of the room to handle those other whatchamacallit guys.  My job was to roll HOTs on both the Druid tank and the Tank on one wall.  There is an easy place to stand where this wasn’t a problem. 

So we start the fight up, and the healing is surprisingly pretty easy, especially compared to the Supremus fight before that.  As it turns out, wires of communication got crossed in some way, and the tank on the other side wasn’t getting enough healing and he went down.  So the RL called a wipe and we all gathered by the Bear tank to corpse up. 

If you are ever in a wipe situation on that fight, it takes a LONG time.  The fight revolves around the real Akama trying to kill the Shade of Akama.  Akama is one bad mofo, as it took a good 2 minutes for all the mobs to beat him down after we were all dead.  I sent him a guild invite afterwards, but he turned me down.  I’d like to have him as a tank.

Anyhow, we figured out the whole in our strategy and rejiggered it a little.  It turned into one of those situations where I was surprised that things were going so well.  I kept listening to the reports from the DPSers on the progress against the channelers that hold the Shade in place.  (If you’ve seen the Leo fight in SSC, it’s basically like that.  The boss, in this case the Shade of Akama, is being banished or held by a group of casters.) 

Before I knew it, all the channelers were dead and the Shade was on his way to engage with Akama.  The whole point is that Akama is there to take down the Shade and restore some sense of balance to his people.  Or something. 

Once the Shade is free and engages Akama, everything is out the window.  No threat to worry about, and not a lot of damage to heal.  So I pulled out my trump card, my Ace in the hole, my golden ticket…mad Resto Druid DPESSSSSSS.  You’ve seen it before.  Here it is again.

Oh yeah, baby.  You see those numbers.  All Wrath, All the Time.  In this case, I was actually expected to contribute, as you have to get the Marshmallow down REALLY fast or he does something bad.  I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure it involves a massive wipe of the raid.  

With my 1k Wrath hits flowing, the Marshmallow met his end.  I must say, I’d rank him as probably the easiest boss I’ve seen since Attumen.  And it’s nice that he drops T6 loot.  I thought the Void Reaver was the loot Pinata, I’ve gotta nominate the Shade of Akama for that title.  Anyhow, once he goes down, there is a nifty little cut-scene wherein Akama does some magic HooHa and turns all the red mobs that were in his area green.  It certainly helped later when we were wiping on Gorefiend.

Here we are celebrating over his corpse.

There was loot, including a decent pair of cloth healing shoulders. I would have considered them, but there were a couple priests above me on the SK list. No biggie, real healers wear leather.

That was the fun part.

Correction, that was the end of the fun part.

After that we headed on to Teron Gorefiend.  Before we really get into this, let’s see some pretty pictures, shall we? 

Now, I was prepared.  I had heard many times that Gorefiend is the first real "idiot" check in BT.  The reason is that EVERY raider must be prepared to handle the whole weird constructs thing.  I won’t get into details, but basically you get a debuff that kills you in 1 minute or something.  When you die, you spawn as a banshee/ghost thing and are surrounded by these construct mobs.  You have to kill them with special abilities you only get when a ghost.  Nobody can kill these constructs EXCEPT ghosts. 

They, however, can certainly kill the other members of the raid.

Anyhow, it’s like a mini-game, you against them, and if you can’t take them down, they get into the raid and start tearing people apart. 

It’s bad.

Hell, someone even came up with a FLASH game so you can practice killing your constructs.  If you need out of game training, it must be tough. 

And it is.  Basically 2 people get this debuff every, I don’t know, 30 seconds or so.  They have to go die in a specific location that makes it easier for them to try to hold off their constructs.  In our 5 or 6 attempts, some people were able to do it, some weren’t.  I never got a real chance to try, as every time I got the debuff we were already pretty much stewed.

However, from a positive prospective we did notice we got him down to about 40% without successfully holding off a single wave of constructs!  By my math that means we only need to hold off 2 or maybe 3 waves to kill him and take his T6 tokens.  (Ooooohhh….T6 armor….can you hear me salivating?)

So, we didn’t get it done, but I think we can.  A lot of people got a look at the whole construct thing, and that should help us next time we go in.  I think there’s a good chance that the Wednesday night crew will start taking down the first 3 bosses, and then we’ll start every Saturday at Teron.  We’ll see.

So PTD’s adventures in the Black Temple continue.  So far, so good.  I’ve seen a lot of wipes, but I’ve also been there for 2 of our "first kills," Supremus and the Shade of Akama.  In two weeks time (since ’tis MH this week) hopefully I’ll have another one or two "first kills" under my belt.  Until next time!

My priest is now sitting about halfway through level 62.  I spent some time leveling his fishing, which is now up to 308.  I am now making a nice profit from fishing in the Outlands, and I’m glad I took the time.  I can now also make my own stinking golden fish sticks and won’t be raiding the GB or hitting the AH every week.  Yay!

Anywho, I’ve started to think about my priest’s future.  Luckily, I made him "later" in my WoW life, so have made some excellent decisions.  He is at 316 enchanting and 364 tailoring, and I’m sure I’ll have no problems finishing off tailoring before I hit 70.  Enchanting I won’t worry so much about, I’ll just level it while I can.  I’m quite happy that I chose tradeskills that worked well with the class.  Of course it helps that this pair works together well and really is a slam dunk for the class.  

The question is, what do I do with him when I hit 70?  Stay Shadow, and contribute as a support/DPS class in raids, or go the Holy route, and see healing from another perspective?

Obviously, I already have a healer, he is very experienced and has pretty decent gear.  I enjoy Druidic healing, and I’m not sure if I’d have the same love for Priestly healing, as it seems to be a whole different ball game.  I’d have to worry about things like down-ranking, when to use flash heal vs. greater heal, when to use Prayer of Healing and when to use Circle of Healing.  It appears as if Priestly healing is a little more complex.  With the druid, healing is largely a matter of watching timers and managing the GCD.  I’m quite adept at weaving in all my little tricks without sacrificing my Lifebloom stack on the tank(s).

Would I have as much fun as a healy Priest?  I’m not sure.

Also, I kind of made the Priest with Shadow in mind.  We don’t have many Shadow Priests that regularly make raids, and I’m sure, once geared, mine would be a welcome addition.  I also relish the idea of seeing raids from a different perspective, mainly concentrating on melting mobs faces, rather than being so focused on my Raid UI.  One thing that holds me BACK a little is that I know Shadow Priests don’t dish out the highest DPS numbers, but I also know it’s also helpful to have a mana battery around. 

Of course if I want to fight for a top spot on the DPS meters, I could start bringing my Hunter to raids.  (I do plan to do just that, I just have to find the right 25 man.  A Saturday night SSC or TK would be great, but it would be more difficult for me to make the times that those raids go.)

I do have the advantage of tailoring playing nicely with either spec.  I can make the PMC set if I go holy, and the FSW set if I stay shadow.  For right now I am PMC spec’d, as I can make that at any moonwell.  Spellfire was out due to the mob you have to fight, and Shadowcloth requires you to go to SMV, and I am still only 62.  I figure I’ll just stockpile PMC as I level, maybe selling it here and there, and make a decision when I get to 70. 

So, what should I do?