Follow Up on Raiding Successfully: When You're NOT Raiding

As I said when I made the first post, raiding is a team sport.

As with anything competitive there is a logistical train that has to be maintained. Competitive raiders go through a lot of consumables, and many raid teams expect that the raider will supply their own consumables. This means that raiders will have to maintain the means to keep their stocks up, and that leads to what a raider does when he's not raiding.

If he's not working on an alternative character, then he's likely doing maintenance on that logistical train somehow. Either he's using his stable of characters (or, for games like Final Fantasy 14, alternative classes) to work that train in-house, or he's out farming up what he needs to buy those consumables.

If there is some form of metagame currency, such as Valor in World of Warcraft, that applies somehow to raiding then that too is expected to be regularly farmed and banked for use. Raiders often group up in smaller subgroups to handle that sort of thing, keeping up their good habits and practices between raid nights, and ensuring smooth farming of such things.

This sounds like a hassle, and done wrong it is. However, there are plenty of guides by people at YouTube or one of the various online sites (for WOW, that's WOWhead, Icy Veins, etc.; other MMORPGs will have their equivalents), so someone likely already figured out how to do this or that in a manner that is friendly to your free time so you can do what's expected of you and still have time to go out with your honey. The knowledge is out there to deflate the hassle, so take advantage of it and knock it out right quick. You'll be glad that you did, and so will your teammates.