Season two begins 1/22/19. With season two brings the brand new raid: Battle for Dazar'alor. With this new upcoming raid its time to start thinking about what you can bring to your raid beyond your role.If you're in a guild like I am, most likely you will have access to guild benefits. What are these guild benefits? You might be thinking of like faster mount speed or mobile banking. Nope. I'm talking about them bringing flask and food for the raid. If your guild brings that. Awesome, but that doesn't mean you don't have to help anymore. If you have a gathering profession like Herbalism or Skinning, go farm. Most guilds are going to have one or two people (most likely your officers) who will have level 3 Cooking or Alchemy. That means the things they make will have a chance to create more than of itself. That means if you create one flask you have a chance to get 3 or 4 flasks for the same amount of materials that it would cost you to create one. This means if you can donate as many materials as you can to the guild to allow these people to create flask and food the better. This is a win for both your guild and you. The guild can use the items you donate to create flasks for people and you don't have to worry about leveling up your profession to create these items. You also don't have to worry about farming a lot of materials to get these items. If you have a good guild who is willing to work together to get these benefits you will have a lot of people donating and you have a lot of materials to work with and you won't have to farm for hours on end, because your guild will be there for you in the end.
If you are not in a guild for a multitude of reasons if that is you don't have a reliable raid/work schedule or if you prefer to solo queue and pug groups, there are still ways to be useful (and some of these will apply to guilds). First thing is your class. What class are you playing right now? Each class and spec brings something unique and helpful to the raid. Are you a Hunter with a lust pet or a Shaman? Great! You bring heroism! Heroism is a lust that give your entire raid/party 30% haste for 40 seconds. This reduces the global cooldowns on all of their abilities and allows them to pump out more damage. Does your group not have a Shaman and or Hunter. No worries! If you have the leatherworking profession you can create Drums of the Maelstorm. This works almost just like a Hunter or Shaman lust but instead of giving the raid/party a 30% haste it only gives the team 25% haste, but that is still is a lot of haste! Other classes bring useful tools like lust also. If you are a Druid or a Death Knight you bring battle rez. This allows you to revive fallen teammates mid-combat. If you are a warrior you bring Battle Shout which increases the attack power of all teammates in raid/groups. If you are a ret paladin you bring a blessing you can put on a healer that allows them to generate some mana. If you are a monk you bring a 5% increase physical damage buff(This dosn't stack). Your class can bring a lot to the team without having to create flask or food.
Another useful thing you can do is create a Mystical Cauldron or feast for your team. I rarely see people do this anymore in pug groups, but if you can! You are helping everyone in the raid team progress and down bosses. If you can't create these items, just bringing your own food or flask can be benefical for everyone.
Other than the things listed above just know your class. Just knowing your class in and out allows you to heal more damage, deal more damage and mitigate more damage. Just not dying is the most useful thing in the raid.
Thanks for reading! These have been my tips on what you can do to be more useful within your raid then just performing your role! If you have any more tips, please feel free to write in the comments!
