Guild Wars 2

I see a lot of posts by people about the troubles they’ve had, or are having, in trying to learn how to raid. I know how you feel. I thought that I’d share how I got into raiding to maybe give some folks some ideas of where and how to start. I’m not saying this is ideal, but it’s how I did it.
I started raiding in March 2017. I had absolutely no experience. Like a lot of people in my guild, I did not want to deal with the “toxic raid community” that we’d heard about, but I figured if I wanted to learn to swim, I had to wade in with the sharks. First, I went on the GW2 forums under the raids and class sections to see what classes I should use that would more than likely not get me insta-booted. Ranger is my favorite class, I was already using a condi Ranger build, so I went with what I knew well. Doing this is where I first learned about the Quantify guild (http://qtfy.eu/). Remember this site. Bookmark it. If you want to raid, use the builds this guild recommends. They know their stuff.
I then spent the time in game to equip my Ranger with the ascended gear that QT recommended. I farmed the newer areas (bloodstone fen, lake doric, etc) to get the ascended trinkets, and since I already had ascended armor, I mystic forge’d it into vipers.
The QT site also has the rotations for getting the most damage from the various builds. I read and watched video for condi ranger, then practiced at the golem in the aerodome.
Once I felt that I had that down, I went onto the GW2 forums under LFG to look for training guilds. I found several postings that specifically said that they took players new to raids and were willing to teach. I left some posts and messages with the people posting. I made sure to let them know that I was new to raids, what type of toon I could bring, and what gear I had. And I didn’t lie about it.
I had several guilds tell me no in various ways (including 1 that said a condi ranger wasn’t very viable. This makes me laugh now). I finally hit on a guild that said they were not a training guild, but that was willing to teach, so long as I was willing to learn & show improvement. I talked with 1 of the guild leaders on discord about it and they decided to give me a shot.
That was back in March 2017. Right now I am still a part of that same raid guild, a member of a static team that raids twice a week. We can get 6-8 kills a week, and are constantly working on expanding that number. I currently have switched from condi ranger to healer druid for my group. At this time I have 82 LI and I’m almost done envoy armor I for legendary armor.
Getting into raiding can be done if you really want it, but you’re going to have to put in some effort. Plain and simple. In the 3 months I’ve been raiding, I have learned that the meta builds and roles exist for a reason. They’re the best chance a random group of 10 people have to succeed. We have people that use non-meta builds, myself included. But that’s on a team that raids on a set schedule every week with the same people (mostly). Anyway, my main point is this: raiding can definitely be done, but you’re gonna need to do some homework. Period. I happen to feel it’s worth it, because raiding has seriously tightened up my game.

First off, congratulations on joining the “toxic raid community” and good luck on getting those last few bosses down. Dare I also congratulate you to a new amount of acquaitances/friends you have thus gained from joining a guild and playing with others.

Yes, the forums do paint a horrible picture of how supposedly the raiding community is. Then again, back in vanilla GW2 one could have said the same thing about dungeons and the terrible berserker meta. Though everyone who actually did dungeons (and did not only forumwarrior about them) knew that it was not even half as kittenome made it out to be (unless you decided to join those – “zerker, exp, 80, speedclear, don’t suck” – groups in your full knights gear letting people know you were wearing knights).

The big difference being, you will soon be one of those who can sport a nice envoy armor (and eventually legendary) while others will remain complaining and demanding on the forums not getting 1 step closer to achieving their goal. I still remember completing the Envoy Armor I collection, it was awesome (was missing Xera as last step and boy did it take multiple tries to get her down back then). Also had 1 person in my casual raid group finish his step 1 yesterday and we all congratulated him on doing so, he was very happy too.

tl;dr: Congratulations, it’s nice to see people not listen to the forum doom and gloom and attempt to join raids with some common sense and realistic expectations.

It’s funny I haven’t started raiding yet, I’m almost there, getting a couple of classes min/maxed first as I am pretty close already.

I do t4 fractals and farm 40 if I have time to use up the 30 keys I buy daily, I run arcdps and generally in 40 if you are running some dagger ele build and the ps warrior is spiking higher than you, you’re getting politely kicked.

So I can understand why the raid community is supposedly “toxic” if you can’t use youtube to learn boss mechanics and metabattle/qtfy to get the right build then you’re going to be a dead weight and you’re going to get kicked from any group that knows what they are doing. It’s common sense really, am I right?

Congratulations and welcome! I hope your story inspires others to try out raiding too. It’s a lot of fun when you get into the right mindset.