What is “Hardcasual?”
Ask any raider where "hardcore" ends and "casual" begins and you'll get a different answer. The two words have meant very different things to different people over the years.
Does raiding every night make you hardcore, even if every boss you kill is on Normal?
And if you only raid two nights a week for three hours, are you casual, even when that group is 2/8 Heroic in Dragon Soul?
Is 25-man somehow more hardcore than 10-man? And if you never read the Elitist Jerks forums, can you still call yourself hardcore?
We all carry our own definitions of the two words, me included, and by my own definitions I don't really fit either one.
To me, "hardcore" means the very top: guilds racing for world firsts that are among the first hundred in the world to kill the last heroic boss of a tier.
A quick back-of-the-envelope estimate puts that at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 characters, a tiny group. Raiders in those guilds put in huge hours, pick apart every log and min-max everything they can for an edge. They tend to have excellent raid awareness and very tight organization.
By that definition, which I'm not claiming is the correct one, hundreds of thousands of raiders aren't hardcore. That doesn't automatically make the rest of us casual, though.
"Casual" doesn't mean what it once did either. Raid Finder has let millions of players see content that only thousands saw before, even if most of those fights are arguably easier than plenty of heroic encounters in Cataclysm.
These days I count as "casual" everyone from players who only queue for LFR to raid teams in the bottom two thirds of progression. GuildOx listed over 53,000 groups with a Normal Morchok kill, and 35,000 of them had also beaten Madness of Deathwing on Normal. It isn't a perfect rule, but by my standards, if you aren't working on Heroic content yet, you're a casual raider.
Again, this is only how I see it, and I'm not trying to settle the debate forever. I sort raiders by boss progression compared to the rest of the raiding world. Hours played, meters and time spent theorycrafting aren't part of my scale, and neither are plenty of other things.
Between the bottom 66% and the top 0.1% sits a huge, varied crowd of raiders who keep trying to get better. Some raid a little, some raid a lot. There are theorycrafters and achievement hunters, parents and students, altaholics and people who couldn't tell you what taunt actually does.
In my world, these are the Hardcasuals.
My armory currently shows 1/8 Heroic Dragon Soul, just over my own "casual" line and still pushing. What it doesn't show is that we killed Heroic Morchok before the 5% nerf (raid nerfs are a story for another Friday). Our 10-man has been worn down by real life, people losing interest and a certain galaxy far, far away, with a new excuse almost every week (yet another story for another Friday!)
I raid on my main two nights a week for three hours, plus one night of Dragon Soul on my resto shaman alt.
So where does that leave me? More serious than a casual raider, I think. I do my homework and keep working on my DPS, my awareness and my focus on whatever we're progressing. I want to get further than I am, but I don't believe I'm owed every heroic boss by the end of the expansion. I take raiding seriously, and I take my real life and my job even more seriously. I've led raids for about a year, though I'm on a break from leading right now, which is a topic for another day.
That's me. Hardcasual.
Each week this column looked at raiding in WoW, sometimes through my own group's progress and sometimes through raiding as a whole.