RL obligations vs. raiding time

[Khornn]

Hello everyone,

I would like to know how do you guys manage to balance real life obligations and your raiding times. I'm specially interested in those raiders who have/had full time job and now raid at the top 10 guild level.

1. Do you switch to part time, or quit the job ?
1. a) If you switch to part time, how do you pay your bills with reduced income?
1. b) If you quit the job how do you pay rent/mortgage, with endorsements?

2. Is your employer so flexible that he gives you days off ?
2. a) What do you tell to your employer when you ask for few days off ?
2. b) Do you spend all of your vacation days to free up raiding time, and is that alone enough ?
2. c) Do you take sick days if you your employer is not flexible enough ?

3. Feel free to tell me how do you manage your other real life obligations too.

I'm at the point where I have enough raiding experience, and I'm skilled enough, to make the jump to higher echelon of WoW raiding, but I have to keep a steady income to maintain my life style and pay for my house hold, so I'm stuck as I've not found an answer that would let me go all the way with WoW.

[meth]

The general answer that has been given in regards to the time issue of high-end raiders is, that they have to use much less time on the long run than the average raider. When the new content is out they have to push and will use a lot of time to be the first in the world. That is the point where sick days / vacations / skip school & university would come into play.

After the content is beaten, which happens quite fast usually, their raiding schedule is 2-3 evenings a week since they can beat a much higher load of content in a given time-frame than others who are still stuck on boss XYZ.

So as long as you have a regular daytime job and no family obligations I'd say it is quite possible to maintain your real-life in terms of job & income and be a full-time hardcore endgame raider. How you balance your freetime between WoW and friends / sports / other interests is then up to you of course. But the reduced raiding times once the content is beaten should give enough free time for other leisure activities.

[zYN]

Niroth pretty much nailed it.

The biggest rush is just as content gets released and when a new expansion comes out. Depending on what comes out, it might be half a week or a week that we expect people to be there at very early times. There might be some additional early raids scheduled, but that happens only if people want to or can fix a day off.

Most of the people who are also working just spend a handful of vacation days on it. I've done it myself a few times, I still don't regret it. Majority of our members are still in school though and that's pretty much no problem to skip out on for small periods.

After we've initially cleared something out, the raids are back to one or two days a week - as long as we succeed in the re-clear. At that point by latest, everything will start at a normal time again (roughly 19:00).


What it basically all comes down to is how you use the time you spend raiding. Significant factor in it is the level of skill a guild has. The lower it is, the longer everything takes (and the less time you spend on progressing). I'm not interested on raiding for ages or doing things half-assed while in a raid.

[cevius]

Hi,

1. I have been working full time job for the past 6 years, so no change there.

2. a)Employer is pretty forthcoming when I want to balance my work hours (overtime).

2. b)Policy is to use all the summer/winter vacation at the same time. So no, I can't use my vacation when ever we have a raid.

2. c)Never had to use sick days other than when I'm sick for real.


Balancing work and raiding has been quite easy for me so far. I think the mean reason is that I have pretty normal work hours and the raids are usually are between 19:00 and ~24:00. At the moment clearing hallion+icc25 with our mains and alts takes 2 night per week, so that leaves a lot of free time.

[Khornn]

What about encounters like Lich King HC, that took several weeks to kill, how much did you raid during that time and how did you manage your work hours during that period ?

[zYN]

We raided only at evenings at that point anyway. Cleared rest of ICC on the first week of Heroic mode being open, then just got stuck on LK. I think it was roughly 4-5 nights per week. At some points people didn't even try to play properly and we just essentially flushed the attempts down the toilet as quick as possible. Forgetting shadow traps exist 10 times in a row? Yeah.

It was pretty easy going after the first week. Definitely didn't raid even close to as much as dozens of other guilds outside the top-10.

[Fireslave]

Not a top 10 but top 150 if i can sorta throw in my 2 cents as to say.

Most guilds only raid in the evenings with exception to the first day of content available eg you could see guilds spending about 12hours to butn down 8-9/12 ICC 25 HC on day 1 of ICC 25 HM's. Now though since most guilds have content on farm, ICC and Halion combines take on average 3hours, maybe 4 which totals not really even a full raid night. Most people dont have too much of an issue meeting these commitments since

a) School/college students rarely have more than an hours work given on one day in for the consecutive day.
b) While at work, a night a week you dont really notice. While progressing if you complete work AT work, you dont tend to bring too much home, and few guilds raid more than 4/5 times a week for 25man.

Hope this helped even though im not top 10, I believe its still pretty accurate.