Patch 5.4 - Flexible Raid Preview

Is the new difficulty also split up into four(?) wings or is it just the whole raid and you clear as much as possible?

I would really like wings like in raidfinder when I don't have 4-5hrs of time to go through the whole raid.

This is not the news we were looking for.

Great addition.
Although it doesn't directly affects me since i'm not raiding with a 25man guild, i'm pretty sure a lot of p;layers would find this very helpful.
Really exciting feature.

This is a brilliant idea - those who are saying its crap have never been a position where you must recruit enough players to do your 10 man, but not over recruit that you have to bench people each week. If you don't like it, don't use it.
I can hopefully get my social life back and not worry about the raid group/loot systems too much now.

Happy bunny now.

to stay competitive and mix max , at the start of a new tier well will have to do the content 3 times a week now.
I like this feature but I feel that's doing a lot of raiding on alts every week.

feeling they should give up on regular and make this the new regular content. and its not as finely tuned and challenging as current normal modes and just keep the fine tuned ballence raiding in heroic content.

Ill probly lose many people on this idea but maybe consider dropping 10 man heroic altogether and only 25 man heroics exsist. will let them have a super focus on 25 man heroic tuning and balance. and make it a more clear race for heroic progression.

Originally Posted by VanishO2

Ok, let's all ditch our friends, bye bye, because they asked you to do something. Like asking you to also help them in LFR (to avoid so much bad players making them stack determination istead of killing the boss 1st time), or now even in flex mode. "No guys, sry, i only raid once, don't want to go again" good job dude.

We all could say "dude, just find a better guild with less bad players, so you could finally down normal bosses". Wouldn't you tell me that you shouldn't ditch your friends just because they're bad enough to not kill the normal mode boss?

As Blizzard alread stated so many times, it's their job to be the ones imposing some limits, to avoid this kind of thing. Instead of having ppl arguing, fighting, etc. about that inside the guilds, they just put limits like valor caps, 10/25 lockouts, huge gap between LFR and Normal ilvl, etc.

Lower ilvl gear isn't cheesing, stop saying that, it's kinda of stupid since cheesing something means outgearing/outleveling it.

You're not out leveling something with lower ilvl. It's higher than heroic 5man gear and lower than Normal mode gear. It's fair game. Or you would be cheesing by entering T15 with T14 gear. See?

Grabbing valor gear would be cheesing. It's not normal mode drop.

See?

In a ideal world you don't need most of the things in the game. You don't need to do dailies, you don't need to do LFR, you don't need to do heroic 5man, you don't need to cap valor... (you don't need normal mode gear if your thing is just "LFRing" and "dailying" and sitting in your capital city since we're at what you don't need or need).

But... do we live in a ideal world? Guess not.

"because they ask you to do something"? It's your freaking life. Say "No". What kind of friend do you have? They should learn to respect your limitations.

It is cheesing, lower ilvl or no. It was intended you hit the bosses with gear from the previous raid. It has always been like that before LFR. LFR is just something extra they added for the causal crowd to do. You don't have to do it. It's not meant for you.

Maybe they should put LFR on the same lockout as normal and heroic. Some player can't seem to control themselves - totally Blizzard's fault here. Never mind that some players don't mind cheesing normal mode and don't QQ like bitches that they have to "work" for their cheese.

Finally the announcement of the unannounced feature!

I like that there is no queue. Any since it auto-scales it will be easy to find enough people.

Seems like a good way for them to "dip their toe" into the idea of them bringing an idea like this into normal raiding difficulties without the inevitable drama that would ensue from them plopping it into the current raid system and it causing chaos if it's not perfectly balanced from the off.

Good things:

More options for people gearing up, and a stepping stone into raiding for people new or returning.
Something for the people moaning about the loss of easier 10 man content on a separate lockout to do.
Great for more casual guilds struggling with normals, or struggling to fill raids, or having too many raiders for 10m and hating to bench people.
Interesting for the pug community - although I have a suspicion 10-15 people will be a million times more common than 23 for example.
As a lot of people will pug this, the loot system is sensible and abuse proof hopefully!

Possible Problems:

You will probably have to pug it, unless your guild has the time to go through (12) extra bosses each week. (and you can sign up in the time they choose).
Personally I'm not sure how I feel about trying to shoehorn into my schedule - finding a pug (or more if not completed with 1 group), killing another (12) bosses a week until I have the upgrades I need.
The scaling may end up with people mathing out an optimum group size, and sticking with that anyway. (although if it's pretty easy it probably won't matter that much).

All in all I'm interested to see how it turns out, although the time aspect of it will be a small burden for me personally.

What I wonder is how the difficulty scaling is going to work given that some fights are NOT just a numbers change:

Spawn rate of adds - Will it have different timers for 10-12-14-16 etc?
Adds in a fight - Will they scale for 10-12-14-16 etc?

Or is it going to be a fixed number ala 10 man, but with bigger numbers?

Great feature but would rather they axe 10 and 25 altogether and go with this scaling for normal and heroic modes. Like minimum of 8 or something and capped at 25.

Completely unnecessary and further adding to the out-of-control item level inflation.

Who is this for exactly lol? Most people are 10man these days anyway, and there are plenty of guilds with friends and family members raiding. I play in a more casual guild because we wanted to take friends and family over progress so we are on normal 10man but we have a blast, a really fun time. I don't see who this is for. The only people I can see it's for is for people that finish LFR but then can't raid normals because they are just that terrible, so they just go on to raid something slightly harder than LFR. If people cannot make the jump from LFR to normal, the honest problem solver is to make LFR slightly harder to ensure people understand the tactics. Not very hard because of course it's still the same raid, but to remove the big jmp for some people.

To go to flexi raid, you need 10 people. Presumably in raidfinder gear since the raid is slightly above raidfinder. Are you telling me 10 people couldn't just go kill 1-2 bosses in normal modes and feel good about themselves? All I see this doing is people will choose the path of less effort and once again it will be harder to recruit the mentality for 10+25man. You already killed 25mans pretty much and now it seems they are after 10man.

Originally Posted by Kanariya

Completely unnecessary and further adding to the out-of-control item level inflation.

I agree to an extent but honestly the jump from 502 raid finder to 522 normal is pretty huge. It wouldnt be hard to stick in a 512 or something in between.

It's a good fit for more casual type normal mode guilds, but unless they make it share the lockout with LFR people are going to burn out trying to run all 3 lockouts every week.

bravo blizzard

always thinking beyond the player (for now)

Originally Posted by Narshe

I agree to an extent but honestly the jump from 502 raid finder to 522 normal is pretty huge. It wouldnt be hard to stick in a 512 or something in between.

That's probably what they'll do. The ilevels are spaced out enough now that it shouldn't be hard for them to fit it in.

Originally Posted by Therec

Yeah, luckily this doesn't affect heroic raiding at all. If getting more people to raid means that the dev teams will focus more on awesome raid content then I'm all for it.

Actually, this could be a boon for heroic raids. My realm seems to have quit a few guilds breaking into early heroics, but losing people along the way and being unable to find recruits for months at a time. My own guild progressed both our heroic kills with a pug as our 10th person. Having a lower difficulty level may allow more newbies to gain the skills they need to be worthwhile recruits for traditional raid teams suffering roster churn.

What I also wonder is, this is going to make less people want to do LFR (Because they can raid something a little more challenging, in pugs, with as many people as they want and the gear is better).

My point is, LFR queues are directly influenced by the amount of people queueing for them. Isn't this going to have a massive impact on queue times and potentially cause a snowball effect (LFR queues are too long --> I won't queue for LFR any more --> LFR queues increase further) and potentially even kill LFR eventually? What will Blizzard do if their baby gets sidelined?

Originally Posted by Volendrung

Well... I guess Ghostcrawler was right when he said he didn't know why everyone was going to get hyped... and was worried that it would be a letdown. This is getting a bit out of hand, no?

LFR -> "Flex" -> Normal -> Normal Thunderforged -> Heroic -> Heroic Thunderforged -> ???

What's next? When can we expect the difficulty that is slightly more heroic than normal but not as hard as heroic? We have to cater to the semi-pros after all.

Maybe they should just add a slider that scales difficulty and item level....

Now we have to do the same raid 3 times per week ... pathetic idea.