Interview: For the Horde

At this year’s gamescom in Cologne, Germany, fans of World of Warcraft had the opportunity to see some of Europe’s best raiding guilds challenge the Lich King live on stage. During the event we took the opportunity to sit down with members of the well-known German guild “For the Horde” and ask them about their experiences as top-notch raiders and their thoughts on the future of World of Warcraft.

Q: Your guild was among the first to storm Icecrown Citadel. How do you approach new bosses when you face raid dungeons for the first time? And, just out of curiosity – how much gold do you spend on repairing your gear when you’re working on a new raid?
A: The first thing we try when fighting a new boss is simply to stay alive as long as possible and gather as much information as we can. The next step is mastering the different boss abilities one by one – we do that and push our group performance to the limit until the encounter is beaten. Some of us also create small UI modifications to time boss abilities or to set raid icons. Repair costs for these encounters vary - engaging a new boss for the first time can be expensive. During our first week in Ulduar, for example, we spent about 80,000 gold from our guild bank on repairs.

Q: A new raid instance also means guilds racing to get the first boss kills. Tell us what the atmosphere in your guild is like at these times.
A: Such phases of progress are both fascinating and stressful to us, because for a short period of time we spend many hours a day tweaking our strategies. The competition between guilds around the world is important to us and we are very happy with any first kill we get, but we are happy for other guilds when they get major achievements too. When we succeed with something especially challenging, we can get very emotional – we’ve even had neighbours knocking on our doors to see what’s going on!

Q: What are you looking forward to in Cataclysm?
A: We are very happy about the new guild system which provides guilds with lots of useful features to help them with their raiding. We are curious to see how Blizzard is going to ensure that both 10-player and 25-player raids are going to be balanced in terms of difficulty and loot distribution. We also welcome Blizzard’s efforts to continue the approach of “bring the player not the class”, for example by better distributing different buffs among the classes.

Q: What are your most treasured memories of five years of raiding in World of Warcraft?
A: Many might expect us to bring up Ragnaros or other great first kills we accomplished in the past. But after all this time, we have come to realize that the most important thing is the fun of playing together and the relationships we’ve built up.