One Druid, Many Worlds

The most popular talent according to TalentChic is the preferred L80 raiding build for Feral Cats in Wrath:

0/55/16

What do you do with it? Check out our very own OneDruid Feral Cat Resource Page with links to pre-Naxx gear guides, raid guides, consumables and more.

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I blame EQ1.

You see, when EQ1 was created, there was no concept of “the raid.” Some players in beta wanted to kill a dragon. The devs felt it should be a monumental event and threw in just two when the game went live: Vox and Nagafen. People wanted more so raid content was specifically designed for every expansion and became the hallmark gameplay for this early MMOG.

Fun and phat lootz for all, right? Well, not if you lived outside the East Coast of America. Early EQ1 raid content wasn’t instanced (that concept hadn’t made its way to MMOs yet.) All raid content was ‘contested’. If another guild on your server beat you to it, your evening entertainment was limited to begging for a spot in the UGuk froglok assassin camp. If you were serious about raiding, you had to be able to log on by 6pm EST to get to it before the other raiding guilds on your server. This forced West Coast raiders into East Coast raid guilds which meant you had to either be a student or self-employed to be on at 3pm PST every day.

This situation got worse when the Planes of Power EQ1 expansion introduced killing certain raid targets a requirement to access big, badder and better-loot-dropping mobs (and I’m not talking about cloth caps here.) This is when it got ugly. Once the best raid guild on the server killed the Bottleneck Raid Target (BRT) and received access to better zones, they would make sure said BRT’s stayed dead so no other guild could get access to the keyed zones (I’m looking at you, LoS.)

Then along came instancing. Every guild gets a shot! Huzzah! And hurrah! And all that. Now important raid targets were available whenever a guild could get its members to stop farming for their alts.

So, gentle reader, tell me this: with the majority of raid targets no longer contested, why are there are so few Late Night PST Raiding Guilds in EQ2?

The majority of raid guild available to us are either EST (see problem above) or Asian/Australian (raids start at 1am…). Why aren’t all of us day-job-working, small-children-raising, divorce-averse West Coast players forming our own raiding guilds and farming our way to glory and phat lootz? Why are we still scraping together dicey pick up raids or agreeing to spend time with the in-laws in exchange for permission to raid midday on the weekends?

The answer is: We should be forming these guilds ourselves. It’s upon us now to change our own mindset and realize we have the tools to create an online experience that fits our life. Our passion for online gaming can now co-exist with our desire to balance the other activities in our life. We just have to choose to embrace it.

And pray the kids don’t wake up when the raid target is pulled.