Raiding in Cataclysm: too easy, right?

If you frequent any kind of WoW forum (especially MMO-Champion), you’re probably used to seeing posts where somebody states that their guild is stuck on a particular boss and asks for help. Invariably, many responders in these types of threads belittle the original poster for having trouble with “an easy boss” – regardless of which boss is actually being talked about. From there, these types of threads typically devolve into a mix of epeen-stroking (“lol my guild one shot that boss”), elitist ranting (“noobs like you are why everything gets nerfed”), and Blizzard bashing (“my guild killed that boss 3 months ago, and now we have nothing to do because Blizzard won’t release any new/harder stuff”). Reading through threads like these, you’d certainly get the impression that for the majority, Cataclysm raiding is a breeze. Faced with such claims, you may be tempted to question your own guild’s progress. I was curious where the “average” raiding guild stands, progression-wise, nearly four months into Cataclysm, so I went searching for answers.

Luckily, I didn’t have to search long. Guildox.com has a useful page that summarizes how many guilds have defeated each current Cataclysm boss encounter. I couldn’t find anything on the Guildox site that stated the exact number of guilds that they’re tracking, so I improvised and looked for a newly-added guild that only had credit for one kill (presumably, their worldwide ranking would be very near the bottom of Guildox’s list). The guild I found was ranked 53,997 worldwide, so I’ll assume that there are about 54,000 guilds in the Guildox database. If you assume that the guilds being tracked by Guildox are basically representative of the overall WoW raiding community (and I see no reason why this wouldn’t be true), then their progress page lets you draw some interesting conclusions about the difficulty of Cataclysm raiding.

Less than half of the raiding guilds in the world have killed any of the current Cataclysm end bosses (Al’Akir in the Throne of Winds, Cho’gall in the Bastion of Twilight, or Nefarian in Blackwing Descent).

Only about a quarter of raiding guilds worldwide have completed all normal mode encounters. Presumably, the guilds that have are now working on heroic modes.

Halfus Wyrmbreaker’s heroic mode isn’t much more difficult than Nefarian’s normal mode, judging from the Guildox stats. So let’s assume that the guilds that have completed all normal mode encounters will also defeat heroic Halfus pretty quickly. However, less than 15% of worldwide raiding guilds have downed a second heroic boss.

The numbers drop off quite rapidly after that. Only about 1% of raiding guilds have killed any of the three end bosses on heroic mode. Less than one half of one percent have completed all of the current heroic encounters. So about 1 in every 260 raiding guilds can legitimately say that they’re “done” with the current content. To put that in perspective, the server that I play on (which is about average in size) has less than 100 total raiding guilds on it.

Based on the numbers, I think it is safe to say that the current Cataclysm raiding content is quite challenging. The majority of raiding guilds are still working on normal mode encounters, with quite of bit of difficult heroic content ahead of them after that. So next time you see a forum thread where some elitist is bashing all of the “noob guilds” that aren’t at least halfway through heroic modes, you don’t have to wonder if that is actually the norm.  If your guild is currently sitting at 9/12 normal modes completed, then you’re above average, according to the worldwide Guildox numbers.