One interesting aspect of running a blog is being able to see how people find this site. Most of the time people are directed here from a similar website; a fansite, a Google search, or another blog. Once in a while however you get linked by something completely random, as is the case today.

For starters, it’s a French message board, so uh… welcome French readers! Also, the other link in the topic leads to a very interesting post about dual boxing (well actually, 47 boxing).That post talks about a guy and his gf raiding, the two of them controlling an entire raid. And THAT brings me to today’s topic, the problem with raiding.

At first I was shocked to read that two people could control 40 characters in WoW and have any measure of success. The more I think about it however, the more I can see how it would work, especially if you are raiding something like Molten Core. Molten Core is, for the most part, a tank and spank raid zone. Once you learn (or read) each bosses one or two unique abilities, the rest is just healing/dps/tanking. Luci is all about the pull, Mag is just the tank doing his fear dance, Geh is pull/fire dance, etc. It’s easy to see how a few good macros revolving around /target could make controlling 20 characters in a raid possible. All the healers just need to /target lowest health or the tank, the dps /targets the tank once you have agro, and the tank gets in position and does his thing.

When my guild in WoW was running AQ40/Nax, we would take one day, usually Friday because it was the slowest day, to speed run MC for kicks. Regardless of who was on, we would form a ragtag raid and clear all of MC in about 2-3 hours, depending on exactly how much we all goofed off. The rogues would always want to tank, all our tanks wore dps gear (or fashionable dresses, depending on the player…), generally a few priests would be near the top of the dps meter, etc. It was a shit-show, yet we still got it done in the same time it use to take us to down Luci. Yes, full high level epics make up a lot in terms of perfect raid makeup or flawless execution. When one rogue is able to pump out the same dps as an entire group did a few months ago, clearly you have a lot of room for error when running a tier 1 instance.

However gear is only one factor. The other was that, regardless of who we had in the raid, everyone had seen MC enough times to have it memorized. We did not need to stop before each boss and assign roles, designate tanking locations, go over the strategy. Everyone just did their thing, knew what to do, and did it quickly. And when you break it down to that, everyone’s role is very basic. Basic enough to break down into a few key strokes, and hence, 20 box a raid. An MC raid anyway. I would love to see a video of someone boxing in an encounter like Nefarion, especially phase 1. Even in BWL, how many of those bosses could you see being boxed?

That really brings up my main point, that the overall challenge of raiding is organizing the group and getting everyone working as one. At the same time, assuming you know what you are doing, everyone’s job is fairly limited in each raid encounter. What two people playing 20 characters give up in key strokes, they make up for in coordination. This brings out the general flaw with raiding, that in order to make them more accessible (lol goes the casual), the difficulty of each players job must be brought down, in some cases to the point of one or two clicks. Remove the challenge of raid makeup, attendance, and loot drama, and 20 boxing starts looking like the thing to do… maybe.