A raiding guide, from a newbie, for newbies – Your first raid

Finally! You’ve geared up, perfected your talent spec and addons, and know all about the boss encounters you’ll be facing. You’re now ready to do your first raid!

For the purposes of this guide your first raid will be Naxxramas, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s currently the only raid at the cap with more than one boss. Second, VoA is ridiculously easy regardless of gear or spec, and OS10 with no drakes isn’t particularly difficult beyond dodging flame waves.

Regardless of whether you are PUGing it, or going with your guild, make sure you are fully prepared.

Before you enter the raid: Bring your consumables (and repair)!

Before you enter the raid, there’s a few things you’ll need to make sure you have.

Repair

Whether your gear is at 10% or 90% durability, get it repaired before you go in. The last thing anyone needs is for someone to have to go repair after they died a couple of times, because they didn’t do so beforehand!

Food

A 20 stack of food – preferably made with the 400 skill cooking recipes. If you know your stats, as you should do at this point, you should know what foods you’ll want. For example, physical DPS should be using Attack Power, Strength, Agility or Crit Rating foods, as appropriate to your spec and stats. Hunters and Demonology Warlocks should also bring pet food in the form of Spiced Mammoth Treats or Kibler’s Bits. Warlocks talented into Dark Pact that are using their minion as a mana battery  may also want to consider Sporeling Snacks.

Don’t forget to bring standard food and drink too – if there are a few res spells going around, the healers probably don’t have time to heal your lazy backside – eat!

Potions

There are three types of concoctions in WoW; Potions, which are limited to one per battle (typical examples are Health and Mana potions), Elixirs (Which come in two flavours – Battle and Guardian – one of each can be active at a time) and Flasks (Count as both a Battle and Guardian Elixir, but lasts two hours and persists through death.) You’re going to want to bring a few of each.

Bring an ample supply of Runic Healing and Runic Mana (as appropriate to your class) potions – as a Hunter with Aspect of the Viper, I find myself chugging more Health potions than Mana, but your mileage may vary.

You’ll want to bring either or both of the following; 20 stack each of one Battle Elixir and one Guardian Elixir/3-5 Flasks. Again, you should know what you are looking for here. Some of the best, but by no means all of the Elixirs will be prefixed by Mighty. Flasks are harder to categorise, so I’ll just link the three I think are the most important – Endless Rage for Physical DPS, Frost Wyrm for casters, and Stoneblood for Tanks. The Flask of Pure Mojo may also be handy for certain classes.

The reason it’s a good idea to bring both Elixirs and Flasks is that, even on your first run, you may not actually die a whole lot – in which case, Elixirs provide both the best overall benefit, as well as being a whole lot cheaper than flasks. On the other hand, if you do find yourself dying a lot – which is likely, even if you know what you are doing – a Flask will be the best choice as it lasts through death and will end up cheaper after multiple wipes.

Ammunition

This is most important for Hunters, but Warrior tanks should usually have a stack or two of ammo to hand. Hunters, make sure your quivers are full. I try, though I often forget to switch (No one is perfect, ok?), to use the vendor quality level 75 ammo for trash, and use the much better quality, Engineer made ammunition for bosses.

Warlocks should also make sure to have an ample supply of their own form of “ammunition” in the form of Soul Shards. You’ll probably be able to grab a few whilst you clear trash, but be sure you have a large amount before you go in. Also, if you haven’t already, go kick Blizzard in the shins for not really taking steps to improve the shard situation.

Bandages

Hopefully you were keeping on top of your first aid whilst you leveled, and should bring a stack or two of Heavy Frostweave Bandages to the raid with you. If you haven’t, it’s not a huge issue, but I do recommend you go and work on your First Aid skill, just to be prepared.

Consumable Summary

You’ll need a 20 stack of food, another 20 stack of pet food if your class requires, normal food and drink for out of combat healing, either 20/20 Battle/Guardian Elixir or 3-5 Flasks, an ample supply of Healing/Mana Potions, and enough Ammunition to cover the raid, plus bandages if you are capable of using them. Unfortunately, this is going to run you quite a bit of gold – such is the price of raiding. A large portion of this can be covered if you pick up Cooking – everyone can take it, and it’s actually not that hard to level from scratch, with a bit of patience.

Before you begin the raid: prepare yourself.

Before the raid starts, you’ll want to do a few common sense things. Go to the toilet, get yourself a drink, and make yourself comfortable at the computer. You shouldn’t be going throughout the whole raid without a rest, but you should be able to clear a wing in one sitting.

Make sure you are fully awake, and try and relax. Since this is your first Naxx run, you’ll probably be more than a little intimidated. Don’t worry about it – you’re well prepared by now, you can handle it.

If your class can provide a raid wide buff, then do so. Make sure you summon tables and healthstones as required and (here’s my hunter bias coming through) buff the Hunter’s pet if you are a Paladin – especially if the Hunter is BM specced. Pets count as Warriors, so if there’s one in your group, the Greater Blessing should also reach the pet.

Before a Boss Fight: Double check

So, you’re standing before a boss – now is the time to double check everything. Do you have all the buffs you should? Do you have the right gear on? (Ammo, additional Hit Rating gear?) Are you clear on what to do?

Hopefully, you’ll have read the strats and watched the videos, and you should have a good idea of what you are meant to be doing – but you aren’t a robot. There’s a lot of info to remember for various bosses, and if you are at all unsure about a certain boss, ask. All it may take is a few words to jog your memory with regards to that boss.

During the boss fight: Stay calm, stay alive.

Now you’ve engaged the boss, and it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. Keep an eye on your threat meter – make sure you aren’t overtaking the tank, or if you are the tank, make sure none of those pesky DPS are catching up to you. Stay aware of your surroundings – you’ll probably need to avoid various bits of nastiness. Watch your boss mod – is the Grand Widow coming up for a Frenzy? Get ready to Embrace her. Watch out for others – if you are a sturdy DPS, get that spawned add off the healer and the other squishies!

Hopefully you’ll make it through the fight – if you do die, try not to worry about it. It happens. If a mistake leads to a wipe, hopefully your group is made up of decent people who remember they were new once, too. Just make sure you remember what you did wrong, and take steps to avoid it again.

You cannot be perfect, especially not on your first run. Something will probably go wrong – it’s not the end of the world, and it can be pretty funny sometimes. I mean, look what I did on Thaddius and Heigan!

After the boss fight: gathering your phat lewts.

When the boss is dead, it’s time to divide up the loot. First, remember to grab your Emblem! Then, have a look at what else dropped. If there’s nothing for you, don’t get disheartened – you can’t get something every time. If there is, you may end up competing with a few people for it.

This is where things can turn nasty, depending on loot system, but you should accept whatever the outcome is gracefully. You simply can’t win ‘em all – and there’s fourteen other bosses in Naxx that could drop something else for you! If you did win it, congratulations on one of your first pieces of Raid gear! Make sure you enchant and socket it as appropriate when you get a chance.

Press on, brave adventurer!

Be prepared to spend a lot of time on one run in Naxx. Depending on how fast you are getting through the place, it could take a couple of nights for a full clear. Eventually, you’ll finish the place, and have your first full raid clear! Congratulations! You’ve come a long way from that level 10 scrub who had no idea what they were doing with their talent point, or where to go next!

I’ve beaten Naxxramas! … Now what?

Now, be prepared to do it all again. In order to progress, you’re going to need more gear. Hopefully, you’ll continue to enjoy raiding – the raid itself should be fun, and the gear should only be a way of advancing onto other raids, or as a symbol of your achievements. The day raiding becomes solely about the gear, and not the fun, you’re doing it wrong.

In conculusion…

As of the time of posting, this is basically where I am now – just cleared Naxx for the first time.  Since I clearly wasn’t a total failure, I thought, hey, why not share this with other new raiders? I hope you’ve all found this series to be helpful and enjoyable. I certainly had fun writing it, and I hope at least a few people out there see it and put it to good use.

Lengthy Thanks

This is not something I really figured I’d put in, but this guide has kind of exploded in popularity, and I’d like to thank people for that.

This little guide seems to have become pretty popular – mostly due to Dan O’Halloran at WoW Insider linking to these posts (Thanks! ). I’m hoping that got it out to people who could use it.

Aside from the obvious huge amount of hits from WoW Insider itself, I’ve been gathering numerous smaller hits from guild forums all over the place. One particular post that just made me smile was a brazillian guild forum – I babelfished it to get the gist of what it said, and it was awesome to know that even people who aren’t great at English have found this useful.

The WoW Twitterati, who urged me to go ahead with the idea, and some of whom corrected some stuff here and there, you guys get a huge thumbs up. Everyone who’s commented me about the guide, or who passed it on to their friends and guilds, thanks.

I hope everyone who’s read this has found it useful, and that at least some of you continue to come back to the blog in the future. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to top this, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the silly stories I tell.

What do you mean too sappy? ^.~; I’m a small blogger! I’m allowed to be excited people liked this!

I’m finally going to shut up now…

If there’s anything you wish to ask me about, or corrections/suggestions you wish to make, feel free to contact me via the details on the sidebar, or in the comments.

For now, good luck and happy raiding.

Faulsey’s Newbie Raiding Guide:

Part 1 : Gearing Up

Part 2 : Research – Talents, Strats and Addons

Part 3 : Your first raid

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