In general I really love the raid finder system as it offers players another option for getting into the end game content.  It also offers you options for gearing up alts, or filling off nights from your raiding guild.  For many players without the easier raid finder version of a raid, they would never be able to see or complete the content.

While generally a great experience there is always someone out there looking to wreck other player’s fun.  Here are the 5 biggest and most disruptive raid finder disasters that I have seen since it was introduced.

#5 - Destroying runs / killing people for fun

This is probably the least common issue of the five listed here that I have encountered, but when it happens it is really obnoxious.  I have run into this at least a dozen times since the raid finder was introduced and it involves a player wilfully destroying a run just for their own malicious enjoyment.

They do they by starting encounters before all the players are there, ready, or resurrected.  They pull multiple packs of trash and pull them back to the group just so that they will wipe the raid group. 

They can usually do this sneakily the first time or two before anyone figures out who is doing it.  Then when players start to figure it out and discuss kicking them they get at least one or two more pulls in to wipe the groups again before they are able to be kicked.

It is behaviours like this that should lead to lifetime bans for harassment.  If this happened more often it would be higher up on my list, but since it is rare, it is listed as #5.

#4 - Not knowing the basics of the fights

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Every fight is explained right in the game!

When players sign up for a raid they obviously know which raid they are signing up for, it’s not that complicated.  Knowing where you are going, would not the intelligent thing to do, be to look up what happens in that raid, knowing that it is you and 24 other players counting on you to do your part?

Admittedly, in the past you had to leave the game to go and find information and having to alt-tab (or apple-tab) to a browser to look something up may have confused some of the un-edjumacated WoW players.  However, since Blizzard implemented the dungeon journal IN GAME, I can see no real logical excuse for not knowing at least the basics of every fight in an instance or raid.

Better yet, if you know that you are getting close to being ready to raid, why not check out the many youtube  videos out there or the many raid guides that we have here or that proliferate the net. With just a few minutes of reading or watching you can (and should) find out how to do any fight before ever entering a raid.

#3 - Players wilfully getting killed in an encounter and staying dead

You see this happen on many different fights that are long or boring fights that don’t need all the players.  Key examples are spine of Deathwing and madness of Deathwing. 

Players sit back and let themselves get killed so that they can either go and do something else or just skip the fight. Again, when confronted I have had many players be brazenly honest and say things like: I had to take out the garbage, walk the dog, etc, etc. Is it just me, or if you don’t have time to do a complete run then don’t sign up for one.  Better yet, if you do sign up and start a run, and something comes up and you have to do something else, then have the common courtesy to leave the group so a replacement can be found.

While most common on bosses I have seen people do this on trash mobs too to just skip it so they can do something else while others do the work, and just come back for the boss fights.

This should not be tolerated as it is essentially players treating the other players as if they were just an NPC in the game, purely there for their own benefit.

#2 - Players not playing the spec they queued for

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Shown is a very fast DPS queue at only 11 minutes, while logged on as a healer or tank it was listed at less than a minute.

For some reason, players just don’t seem to understand that they are supposed to play the spec that they get accepted into the group for.  I honestly don’t think that it is that complicated of a concept, but more times than I can count in raid finder groups, players end up playing something other than what there assigned role is.

This mainly happens with players queued as a tank or a healer and wanting to play dps instead, but I have seen it the other way around as well.  When confronted, I have had more than one, openly admit they queued as tank or healer to get in faster, but don’t want to play that spec, knowing full well that it takes a while to be able to kick them and that by the time they can be kicked, most players will forget or not bother.

This is just rude and ignorant and leads to many groups separating to find new groups so that they don’t have to put up with it.

#1 - Cheating the gear requirements to get into a Raid

This is one that really bugs me, and many other players as well.  It is likely the most common of all the disasters that take place in raid finder.  Most players go through a gearing process to make sure that they qualify for the raid finder tool and are able to contribute to the raid once they are in it.  However there are almost as many morons out there that cheat the system for person gain and ignore the fact that they are making the run exceedingly difficult and painful for the other 24 live players in the run.

They treat the raid finder as a given right and expect everyone else to suck it up and carry their slack backsides.

There are several ways that players cheat the system but the most common ways are with PVP gear and incorrect gear for their spec.   Since PVP gear is a higher item level than the raid finder gear and extremely easy to get, players grab some of the crafter item level 377 gear and a few pieces of battleground vendor gear and jump into a raid group.  Sure the gear qualifies them to get in, but it is next to useless for PVE since it gives up at least one stat on each piece for resilience which does nothing in PVE and takes away many item levels worth of usefulness.  In fact, in many cases a green item level 325 piece would be better in PVE than a blue 377 PVP piece.  However, these players don’t care, since it allows them in.

The second way players cheat the system is to grab any cheap piece of gear they can find that they can wear and carry it around even though it isn’t for their spec.  For example carrying around a epic healing piece even though you are a retribution Paladin and it would still count to your item level.  This is something that Blizzard should fix, but also something that players should not cheat with.

Players that do any of these or other things to cheat their way into raid finder groups are being ignorant, rude, disrespectful, and taken out to the back 40 and summarily shot (in my not so humble opinion).

The Messiah’s Last Words

I have had my say about the top 5 worst raid finder disasters; do they match up with yours?  Have you seen other horrible events in the raid finder?  Have your say in our comment system below.


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Byron has been playing and writing about World of Warcraft for the past ten years. He also plays pretty much ever other Blizzard game, currently focusing on Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, while still finding time to jump into Diablo III with his son.

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