Raids

A raid group holds more than 5 and up to 40 characters, split into as many as 8 parties of 5. The word raid mostly means the raid instances: PvE areas built for teamwork and meant to be the hardest and most rewarding content in the game.

Raids are end-game content for characters at the level cap. Bosses ask for good gear and skill in damage, survival and healing, and most of them need special tactics, so even a well-geared group usually has to practise a fight before it wins. Raiding guilds often use voice chat and boss-warning addons to help.

Inside a raid group you get no credit for normal quest objectives (only raid quests count), and experience from monsters is reduced, so big groups cannot be used to rush content made for 5 players.

Every raid from Warlords of Draenor onward has four difficulties, and each one drops its own quality of loot. The three lower ones scale to the group, from 10 to 25 players; Mythic is the only one with a fixed size.

For Mythic, lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas once suggested about 2–3 tanks, 4–6 healers and around 13 damage dealers. See class roles for what each role does.

Raids use a lockout: bosses you defeat stay dead for you until the instance resets, usually once a week.

The Raid Finder sits in the Dungeons & Raids tab of the Group Finder. It arrived in patch 4.3.0 with Dragon Soul and has been part of every raid since. Who may queue depends on character level, average item level and, for later wings, the achievement of the wing before.

• Loot is personal: on your first kill of a boss each week the game may give you an item for your current specialization; players who get nothing receive a bag of gold.
• There is no lockout in the usual sense: you can kill the same bosses again, but only the first kill each week can give loot.
• Each wipe on a boss gives the Determination buff: +5% health, damage and healing received, stacking up to 10 times until the boss dies.
• If you leave while your group is fighting a boss and they kill it, you get no loot but still count as having defeated it until the weekly reset.

A party leader turns the group into a raid from the Social panel or by right-clicking their own portrait and choosing Convert Group to Raid. It needs at least 2 people. After that, new invites join the raid, up to 40 players.

The leader can drag players between the 8 groups and promote assistants, who may invite and remove players and send raid warnings that appear in the middle of everyone's screen. More on parties and raid groups: parties and the Group Finder.

Shortened list: the raids of the last four expansions, grouped by the land they belong to.