I Am Heroic - and You Can Too!

I've always felt like I couldn't call myself either hardcore or casual. While I leaned over toward the hardcore side of the fence, I've only ever been in guilds that raided two to three nights a week. I never really felt it was fair to call myself hardcore when other guilds were putting 4-5 nights a week - back in Vanilla sometimes more than 40 hours - into their progression efforts. 

Even so, from Vanilla up until a few tiers into WotLK, the two guilds I had been in were consistently well within the top five guilds on the server progression-wise, even with only raiding about 10-15 hours a week. Since then, the guild I was in had become worse and eventually disbanded, and with my real life getting more serious, I accepted my fate to be in the bottom rung of progression raiders - no hope of competing in the progression race and high possibility of not even clearing content before it was outdated. If I thought I had felt casual before, now I really felt it.


Right now, my guild is still only 11/14H after a year of Siege of Orgrimmar, 52nd "best" guild on my realm, and with 6.0 coming into the picture soon, it's clear to me I have little hope of earning [Cutting Edge: Garrosh Hellscream]. WoWProgress shows that 5.29% of players have defeated Heroic Garrosh, while 14.9% are 11/14H like my guild. 

Update: we finally killed Siegecrafter Blackfuse! Hooray!

There was an article explaining that WoWProgress only pulls its statistics from active raiding players - players without any raiding accomplishments are not counted in their statistics.

"This is our definition of Population:

Population - amount of unique players that meet any of the two conditions:
- has a level 90 character that killed something in Tier 16 Normal
- has a level 90 character in a guild that killed something in Tier 16 Normal

So basically we count all high level members of guilds that killed at least one boss in Tier 16 content."

This means that only 5.29% of raiders have defeated Heroic Garrosh. Compared to the total player base, an incredibly small amount of people who play World of Warcraft have cleared Siege of Orgrimmar on heroic.

It makes me consider, if I'm within the top 15% of the player base with the same PvE oriented raiding goals as me, I guess I would be hardcore?

that's the difference, right?

I've jokingly called my guilds "casual hardcore," but I feel that may be more accurate than I intended. Rather than being opposites, I feel the two adjectives describe different things and can coexist. My guilds have always raided very few hours per week compared to other guilds, yet we have always been very organized, serious, and progression minded. We exhibit all of the same personality traits as hardcore raiding guilds, but our rules differ.

Instead of demanding a 95-100% attendance for 25+ hours of raiding a week and suspending people who don't show up enough, we understand that people have other things to attend to in their lives and only ask for raiders to spend 6-7 hours a week raiding.

not pictured: heroic progression raiding requirement

Over the last few months, I've gotten to know a lot of players who aren't working on progression raiding, or even raiding at all. I usually had considered non-raiders to be uninterested in raiding, or else wouldn't they be doing it? However, I think I've noticed more that PvE oriented non-raiders do want to raid, ideally high end content, but they feel they are unable to - either they don't want to leave their social family guild, they simply don't have the time, or they don't think they have what it takes. Some people still think that progression raiding requires signing your life away.

People tend to translate "hardcore" as a commitment of raiding in place of real life responsibilities, rather than how far you are able to progress and what you achieve. I've actually had people tell me they don't think they could be in a serious, progression minded raiding guild because they couldn't raid more than 2-3 times per week. Obviously that struck me as pretty funny since I've been doing just that for 9 years.

This isn't a thinly veiled recruitment post, but my guild is looking to boost its roster for 20-man Mythic raiding in Warlords. My guild isn't the only one, though - especially nowadays, there are plenty of 'casual hardcore' guilds out there. If you've always wanted to be a high end raider, you totally can be! 

 As it is with the start to any new expansion, everyone will be on an even playing field and joining a guild will be the easiest it will ever be for the rest of the expansion. Raids won't open until two weeks after release, giving you plenty of time to level up in preparation. If you've always wanted to join a progression raiding guild but didn't know that you totally could, I say it's about time to go for it.