I read a post on a bluetracker last week (and forgot to bookmark it – again) in which the poster asked “do you need a guild now that we have the dungeon finder tool?”.
Thinking about that leads me to consider the changing role of the guild in WoW. Since the initial release, guilds have changed from being the only path to high-level gear to a primarily social organization that provides access only to the highest tier of gear and the latest content.
While the response to patch 3.3 has been overwhelmingly positive, it has pushed a major change in the social dynamic of WoW. For those who are not driven by the pure challenge of raiding the latest content, the argument for joining a guild as a way of gearing up no longer has as much weight.
Let’s look at what your guild could do for you with regards to loot from release until today.
Vanilla WoW
If you weren’t in a raiding guild, your loot capped out at Dungeon Set 1 (commonly called “Tier 0″), and later on Dungeon Set 2 (Tier “0.5″). The later parts of the quest chain to upgrade your gear from dungeon set 1 and dungeon set 2 were quite challenging and can arguably be called the first “hard mode” in the game, but once you’d finished it, that was the limit of your progression.
The only raids available were 40 people, and in the early raids like Molten Core and Zul’Gurub the number of warm bodies was more important than individual performance. As you progressed further, the level of technical skill required increased, as did the rewards. Still, the raid size requirements meant that you didn’t necessarily join a guild for social reasons. On any given realm there were a limited number of guild capable of fielding a team into the later raids.
Several encounters (Twin Emperors in AQ40 and the original Four Horseman come to mind) were known as “guild killers” because a few weeks of wipes against them could break the tenuous bonds that held some guilds together.
If you wanted PvE loot, you joined a 40 man raid guild. There was no incentive to go back and run the old 5 man content on your main.
Importantly: if you ruined your reputation in a large guild, your weren’t likely to get into another top-tier guild that easily. There just wasn’t as much choice as there is today. This pressure helped keep some of the drama in-line compared to the nerdrage explosions we see today.




