How realistic is casual raiding?

[cd288]

Originally Posted by tadkins [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm honestly not super confident. If I started to level a character now, invest the months it takes to get to 50+ (with all the failure and struggle associated with that journey, and I don't have any cleric friends), and somehow get into a guild (another beast entirely, and not guaranteed based on experience), that it would be months of hard work before maybe possibly having a chance at earning a piece of loot. It just feels too damn late at this point. While I've been over here struggling for the last couple years, there are tons in this game that have been steadily consolidating their DKP in their respective raiding guilds.

It's always been a goal of mine to earn something that you can't just buy in the EC tunnel, but it doesn't seem realistic at this point. Everything I've managed to earn has been bought through porting money...and after this weekend that's all I seem to be destined to be, an uber driver. I'd still love to fight a dragon one day but all I get to do is port the cool kids to the real adventures.

I'm just feeling so depressed, broken and lonely at this point.

I mean this really depends on the guild. First, if you're not trying to join like the top guild on the server you can usually join pre-raiding level.

It's also entirely dependent on the guild's DKP rules and policies. For example, you could have a guild that requires full DKP (or a large portion of DKP) bids for certain tiers of items. That inevitably causes people to burn through large amounts of their DKP and now they're under you. It also depends on when a guild awards DKP and how much they award...each guild will have different policies on what encounters allow you to earn DKP, they will also all have the ability to earn DKP through leveling guild bots, tracking spawns, etc.

It's also going to depend on the rules for spending DKP on alts. I.e., if you're on an encounter with Character A, can you spend your DKP on a drop that your Character B could use? Many guilds will have rules around this rather than letting it be a total free for all where someone with massive amounts of DKP can outbid your main on everything just to gear like their 8th alt. So it reduces competition for certain drops somewhat.

Many encounters end up not being DKP at all for a lot of the drops. For example, at this stage in Velious many planar gear drops will end up being /random (granted, maybe some guilds don't do this but I think a lot do). So you don't even need to worry about DKP there.

A lot of the time guilds will also run things like Halls of Testing and Kael on a /random loot basis (I know Kittens does a /random HoT once a week and sometimes a DKP one that week also). So you can get Skyshrine and Thurg armor on your toons without needing to sink a ton of time into gaining DKP.

Overall point being, don't assume that it's just "I'm behind and will need a million hours to catch up and get enough DKP to get loot". Sure, if you're going for the absolute top tier loot and things like very rare epic quest drops then yeah you'll need a lot of time spent accruing DKP. But you can get some sweet stuff without a ton of DKP (or DKP at all) in many raiding guilds.