Raiding

A raid is a fixed run of bosses you work through as a group, on one of four difficulties. Unlike a dungeon key, the lockout is weekly and per boss: once you have killed a boss on a difficulty, that boss owes you nothing more until reset.

That single rule shapes everything. Raid gearing is not something you grind — it is a finite amount of loot per week, and the question is only which difficulty you take it on.

This season's main raid is The Venomous Abyss, 8 bosses. Each kill is about 15 minutes with a group that knows the fight, and roughly a 20% chance of an item landing on you personally. A full clear on a middle difficulty runs about 3 hours the first time and considerably less once it is familiar.

Every difficulty drops the same items at a different item level, and each one is a full step up in what the group has to do. The jump from one row to the next is the single largest gearing decision available to you.

Note what the track column does: a difficulty does not just drop higher numbers, it drops gear with more upgrade room left in it. That is why stepping up a difficulty is usually worth more than it looks on the item level alone.

The raid row unlocks at 2, 4 and 6 boss kills in a week, and what it pays depends on both the difficulty you killed on and how deep into the raid the boss sits.

Which means the kills that fill your first slot are worth choosing rather than taking in order. Late bosses on a lower difficulty can out-pay opening bosses on a higher one — and the opening bosses are usually the ones a pick-up group will actually finish, so this is a real choice rather than a theoretical one.

Looking For Raid is the exception: you queue for it, alone, and the only gate is an item level requirement the game enforces. Nobody is choosing you.

Every difficulty above it needs a group, and there the gate is other players. These are the item levels a pick-up group will usually invite at:

If you are short of the bar, the fastest route past it is rarely another raid night. It is solo content and low keys, which have no invite bar at all and pay the currency that closes the gap.

The planner treats every boss as a finite, per-difficulty opportunity rather than something repeatable, and prices it by the item level it would actually add to your character — discounted by the chance that anything drops for you at all.

It also knows what a raid night costs. A 3-hour clear has to beat 3 hours of anything else, and on a character that is already ahead of a difficulty's loot it frequently does not.