I’ve been with­out a kin for over 6 months now and while it does get bor­ing talk­ing to myself in chat, I have to say I’ve sur­vived pretty well with­out one. I’ve filled my hours work­ing on craft­ing and doing as many solo quests as I can. I do occa­sion­ally group with a friend or two for the 3-mans or to knock out lower level quests. But lately I’ve been miss­ing the raid­ing I used to do in my old kin and have been look­ing for a new one. What am I look­ing for in a kin? One that has fun and knows how to raid.

Herein lies the dilemma. I’m not a hard­core raider, but I do like hav­ing the bits of shiny for my toons. I don’t need to be the first to down the boss or have the instance on farm sta­tus, but a girl likes some swag, you know?

Then what are the options out there for the “casual raider”? Well, you can try to form a sta­tic group with peo­ple from dif­fer­ent kins, but you might run into some issues with fig­ur­ing out the loot rules as every­one will have a dif­fer­ent take on how to divide the loot.  Another option is to do PUGs, but hon­estly, when do PUGs turn out well for you? Almost never.

Seri­ously though, when look­ing for a group to raid with you can join a kin, but that doesn’t guar­an­tee that you’ll be able to raid with them right off the bat. Many kins these days require you sub­mit a raid­ing appli­ca­tion and then have a visual inspec­tion of your gear and stats. The prob­lem with this is that if you’re new to raid­ing (whether it is in gen­eral or on a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter) you might not have all your traits maxed out or have the best gear. With that in mind, it is a good idea to “shadow” a kin if you’re able to. By that I mean see if you can join them on a raid or just go quest­ing with them and get a feel for how they play and how the offi­cers treat their mem­bers. Also find out if there is a wait­ing list for raid­ing and if they have mul­ti­ple sta­tic groups that raid. Larger kins do raids at dif­fer­ent times to accom­mo­date alts, so there might be room for you on their sec­ondary raid group. Check out all your options and be well informed before jump­ing into a new kin. There’s noth­ing worse than being known as the per­son that is a ‘kin-hopper”.  Once you’ve run with the poten­tial new kin a few times you can bet­ter decide if you want to make it your home.

If  this doesn’t work out for you, there is one last option and it is my favourite.  Get two or three friends who will do quad box­ing! Put all your toons on auto attack and auto fol­low and hit those raids!  The only draw­backs to this idea are falling off cliffs when you drag that last toon around the cor­ner or hav­ing your toon run into the insta-death water.  But really, other than that it’s a fine idea. You have 4 times the chance at good loot, you get more coin and more XP. A win-win-win-win sit­u­a­tion for everyone.