What is a trash run?

[:1]Sorry silly question, but what is a 'trash' run? I see it advertised in trade chat and don't know what it is.

Are videos the best way to learn what to do on raids etc?

And how do you get geared for them as people always want you appropriately geared to ilevel 359 or something and know the fight tactics.

How do you learn?|||Quote:








Sorry silly question, but what is a 'trash' run? I see it advertised in trade chat and don't know what it is.




A trash run is a run of the trash in a raid without killing any bosses. (Which usually means killing the trash up to the first boss.) After the trash is dead, the instance is reset and the trash is run again. The two primary reasons to do these runs are for BoE epics and rep. (Rep doesn't apply to current raids, but it did apply in places like ICC.)

Trash runs have looser standards than a real run, since you only have to deal with the trash, not the bosses. (Depending on the difficulty of trash, there may be some raid stacking involved, often to maximize CC options for more difficult trash.)


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Are videos the best way to learn what to do on raids etc?




I always found that studying a combination of videos and written strategies worked best. Videos help you actually get a real look at fight movement and such, but written guides are better for explaining the details of boss mechanics and abilities. Of course, nothing beats plain old experience. I'd do the research before hand, but once I'd actually done the fight myself (especially if it wasn't a successful run) I'd go through those strats again. It's a lot easier to remember all the details when you've actually done the fight, and a lot of stuff will make more sense.


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And how do you get geared for them as people always want you appropriately geared to ilevel 359 or something and know the fight tactics.




Rep gear, BoE epics, and Valor Point epics are the main non-raid sources of raid level gear. (For weapons, the arena weapons can be an acceptable choice for many characters. This is because most of the weapon's budget is taken up by it's DPS (or Spellpower for caster weapons) which makes the lost stats to resilience a lot less of an issue than it is for other pieces of gear.)



Unfortunately, pugs have a very annoying habit of asking for an unreasonably high ilvl. (In order to have ilevel 359, you would pretty much have to have run some current content raids already, since the above mentioned gear sources won't cover all slots.) You just have to wait for that pug that has slightly more reasonable gear expectations.

That having been said, the current content really isn't designed to be pugged. A more practical answer if you want to start raiding is to find a start up raiding guild. The best place to learn how to raid is in a group with others learning how to raid. (In that case, the emphasis is more on learning raid mechanics than purple loot or progression races.)

When 4.2 hits, the Cataclysm introductory raid content will be much more puggable since it will be easy to overgear it, and so you can wait until then. This didn't work very well in Wrath since the easy puggability of current content made it easier to just move to the most recent raiding tier. However, with Cataclysm's (slightly) harder raiding. I suspect that the previous tier of content will still be run fairly frequently.|||Ty very much for the thorough explanations,

I was doing fine until..."raid stacking involved, often to maximize CC options"??

So are trash runs a good way for getting a feel of how raids work or are you still expected to know everything?

The only time I've ever been in any sort of group was a BG a very long time ago when it was merely a free for all with no co-operation.|||Going in blank will result in people dying. Even though Raid Trash is far less challenging than the bosses, it's still lethal enough that faffing about without paying attention will get you killed.

In BoT, some of the Trash pulls are quite big, with healer mobs, so there needs to be some CC and focus fire.|||So reading Aerath reply on a another thread, its best to start/learn with normal instances then their heroic versions before then finally move onto raids?|||Pretty much. A lot of the basic mechanic concepts get introduced in 5 mans. Then it just becomes about learning how they work together in more complicated boss fights in raids. Most things can be broken down into pretty basic elements, and your specific role plays a role in how you interpret them. (Things like "don't stand in stuff that hurts" or "interrupt the spell that will kill us all" are a few of those basics.)