Did you know that the average player very rarely sets foot into a heroic raid, but that more resources are dedicated to the creation of raid content than any other content? There are 17 tiers of raids. Give or take, that’s one-hundred and seventy unique encounters that the majority of the player base never experiences.
In the last ten years, WoW has held a steady medium of seven million individual accounts, over five expansion packs, through five new races, two new classes and four new continents. But there are seventeen tiers of raids, averaging three per expansion pack.
An average of 68% of the population of World of Warcraft have completed the achievement to defeat each dungeon once. Out of WoW’s 7,400,000 players, 5,100,000 of them have [Pandaria Dungeon Hero].
2% of all players killed Heroic Garrosh Hellscream, the final boss of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, before Patch 6.0 nerfed the encounter. 2% compared to 68%… 148,000 out of 7.4 million.
That’s a big difference.
You’re reading this guide because you’d like to experience what World of Warcraft really has to offer—and I’m not talking about daily quests, rep grinds or pet battles. You want to raid—and you want to raid your way. That might mean casually clearing bosses on Normal, or defeating the last boss of the newest tier on Heroic… or it might mean two-hundred attempts on the Mythic secret boss that only raiders get to see. You want to raid.
You might not want to be in that 2%, but damn, you’d take it, right?
Even if it meant having to corpse run for the thousandth time at four o’clock in the morning because the last attempt looked really promising even though you wiped because the tank dozed off…
Because you want to raid.
There are steps that every new raider needs to take to get themselves ready for raiding. Follow this guide, improvise a little and you’ll be exactly where you need to be—neck-deep in a twenty man raid, topping meters and watching how weird it is to be the person that everybody stops to inspect. You know, for once. And it’s not because you transmogged your axe into a shovel.