20 Man Mythic: Success or Failure?

[Lilija]

If there's 13 dps in your Mythic team doing 100k dps, and 1 guy is doing 40k, will you notice it? Of course not, because it averages out to be 95.7k dps. If 5 dps in a 10-man raid are doing 100k and 1 guy is doing 40k, then that brings down the average to 90k dps. See my point?

Yes, you will notice if someone is underperforming on progression. It might be less relevant on farm but on progression you can't have people underperforming. My guild actually had people underperforming in Mythic raids and it has slowed our progressiong a lot. The reason for that is that bigger raids were always tuned more for dps requirement and this still stands for 20man.

Did you actually progress Mythic or Heroic 25man before WoD? Cause you pull things out of your butt like a person who did not ever see how it's done in bigger raids.

[kamuimac]

The thing is that most likely the group who prefers bigger format and the group that prefers smaller format are the minority. Everyone else will chose to raid the size that is easier (in general aspect). T

and by "everyone" else you mean the whoping 10 % of community which is ...also a minority -_-

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, so? Your guild wanted to do 20 man content and couldn't get 20 people for it. It's a problem of players, not of the new difficulty. Your guild wasn't capable of doing it, so it didn't get to do it.
.

techincally its not so much a problem of players as they can just quit and move to other games - its more of problems of devs who will have it harder and harder with each year to explain to maangers why they wont just cut mythic from game if its bringing them looses and if catering to tiny miority costs them milions of subs. lfr could prolong the agony of hard mode raiding but eventually they will have to cut that cancer from game.

[Bullettime]

If there's 13 dps in your Mythic team doing 100k dps, and 1 guy is doing 40k, will you notice it? Of course not, because it averages out to be 95.7k dps. If 5 dps in a 10-man raid are doing 100k and 1 guy is doing 40k, then that brings down the average to 90k dps. See my point?

I'm sorry if you disagree that larger raid sizes increase the wiggle room for "bads" and carries. Its simple math that YOUR performance matters MORE in a smaller group than it does in a larger one.

You're talking about "blah blah blah if raid sizes were tuned properly"... well guess what? They're not. Find some random guild that has killed Mythic Archi in the past month, and I 99% guarantee you'll see a handful of players destroying the damage meters, right alongside a handful a carries.

The game cannot support large raid teams anymore. Plain and simple.

Actually the game can. It's just dependent on Blizzard trying to fix the server issues that they allowed to snowball out of control for too long. Mythic was a pretty huge success on the servers that could support it and brought a large return of unity in the raiding communities.

The problem is that the difficulty unification caused a significant amount of backlash on the lower population servers who found themselves quickly becoming ghost towns as more and more began to flee to the high-full pop servers to have much better recruitment and economies.

If would Blizzard would address this problem, such as with additional server mergers like they began with then inexplicably stopped, things would look a lot better. I understand why they haven't necessarily done much with it RECENLTY because of Legion undoubtedly bringing some players back to the game which would mean a reanalysis of who needs to get merged and with who. But I don't see why they didn't continue to do them about the time of BRF opening when the cracks began to show badly and I really think it's something they'll have to do soon into Legion's launch once the newness wears off.

So again, I really think the game can. They need to level the playing field by addressing the servers as all inaction is going to do is further push more and more people into flooding servers like Stormrage which isn't a pleasant experience for the existing residents either. Legion is already going to be a nightmare for those people as their queue times hit extreme levels.

[Deleted]

techincally its not so much a problem of players as they can just quit and move to other games - its more of problems of devs who will have it harder and harder with each year to explain to maangers why they wont just cut mythic from game if its bringing them looses and if catering to tiny miority costs them milions of subs. lfr could prolong the agony of hard mode raiding but eventually they will have to cut that cancer from game.

completely different point from what was discussed.
Yes if subs keep dropping maybe mythic will get cut, because it gets not enough players. But at that point, the game has FAR more serious problems then mythic raiding.

[Bullettime]

completely different point from what was discussed.
Yes if subs keep dropping maybe mythic will get cut, because it gets not enough players. But at that point, the game has FAR more serious problems then mythic raiding.

Especially when Blizzard has stated that creating mythic doesn't take that much time at all. LFR's open accessibility allows them to justify creating these grand scope raids to begin with and then they just spend a small amount of time adding a new mechanic or two and occasionally an encounter for the mythic audience. If mythic difficulty gets cut then it means raiding as a whole, in its current state, is on the chopping block.

[Osmeric]

Especially when Blizzard has stated that creating mythic doesn't take that much time at all. LFR's open accessibility allows them to justify creating these grand scope raids to begin with and then they just spend a small amount of time adding a new mechanic or two and occasionally an encounter for the mythic audience. If mythic difficulty gets cut then it means raiding as a whole, in its current state, is on the chopping block.

The last sentence doesn't follow from the earlier ones. If Blizzard concludes the presence of mythic has indirect negative effects it could be chopped, even if the direct cost of adding it were still low.

[Lilija]

and by "everyone" else you mean the whoping 10 % of community which is ...also a minority -_-

I was discussion the raiding population.

[Trapped]

Yes, you will notice if someone is underperforming on progression. It might be less relevant on farm but on progression you can't have people underperforming. My guild actually had people underperforming in Mythic raids and it has slowed our progressiong a lot. The reason for that is that bigger raids were always tuned more for dps requirement and this still stands for 20man.

Did you actually progress Mythic or Heroic 25man before WoD? Cause you pull things out of your butt like a person who did not ever see how it's done in bigger raids.

So you don't agree that underperformers stand out more in smaller group sizes? You just admitted that you have underperformers in your guild, but you're still progressing. Assuming you're a good player, how does it feel when you down a boss that you put 100% effort into while some scrub (for lack of a better word) that did no research on the fight, using wrong abilities, not using best consumables, gets the same kill you did? And possibly gets a chance at loot as well? I know I'll probably get cop-out responses like "I don't care as long as the boss dies" which is utter BS.

And no, I'm a former 10-man raider that has always cleared all of the heroic (now Mythic) 10-man content. There's been plenty of times where a subpar player has left our guild for "greener pastures" (larger guilds) to end up getting carried. I love logs.

[Relapses]

So you don't agree that underperformers stand out more in smaller group sizes? You just admitted that you have underperformers in your guild, but you're still progressing. Assuming you're a good player, how does it feel when you down a boss that you put 100% effort into while some scrub (for lack of a better word) that did no research on the fight, using wrong abilities, not using best consumables, gets the same kill you did? And possibly gets a chance at loot as well? I know I'll probably get cop-out responses like "I don't care as long as the boss dies" which is utter BS.

And no, I'm a former 10-man raider that has always cleared all of the heroic (now Mythic) 10-man content. There's been plenty of times where a subpar player has left our guild for "greener pastures" (larger guilds) to end up getting carried. I love logs.

It's not that 10M is somehow harder. It's not that 25M was somehow easier. It's not even that 20M is somehow the "perfect compromise." It's that the game for the entirety of the time that Blizzard offered both 10 and 25M versions of the same instance, the encounters were less finely tuned (or tuned disproportionately) than they have been at the single raid size in WoD. Raid size is the last thing that matters when encounters are tuned properly.

Now, you can argue that 20M is "too large," but that's already been debated extensively and the inherent issue with smaller raids is that class representation means far less and encounters would have to be tuned to be inherently easier due to the lack of expectation of either raid buffs or specific raid comps which make encounters less cumbersome.

[Greenmagoo]

So are players having issue asking for the return of 10 and 25 man top difficulty or do they still want one size just smaller than 20 man? I saw at least one asking for Flex Mythic which would be quite the disaster with groups who cannot hold bench spots.

[Relapses]

So are players having issue asking for the return of 10 and 25 man top difficulty or do they still want one size just smaller than 20 man? I saw at least one asking for Flex Mythic which would be quite the disaster with groups who cannot hold bench spots.

Flex Mythic would likely be more toxic for the endgame raid scene than anything Blizzard has tried thus far. We'd just end up with guilds benching 2/3rds of their roster for progression kills to get whatever "magic number" makes encounters easiest.

The 10/25M dichotomy was attempted for two years but I don't think it ever lived up to the vision Blizzard had for endgame raiding and created innumerable tuning issues on top of effectively restricting the devs to design encounters for two separate demographics.

There's an argument to be made that 20M was the wrong size to settle on after providing players a logistically easier 10M raid option for two expansions. But it stands to reason in a game with as many classes/specs as WoW currently has, it was an intentional choice to ensure diverse representation.

The common magic number I see thrown about is dropping Mythic to 15M. I could see this potentially happening in the future if the game's playerbase shrinks considerably but from the dev interviews it does seem as if they're happy with the way things are at this point in time. As @Osmeric has mentioned, I think it's more likely that by the time the game reaches such a point we might simply see an end to Mythic raiding altogether. Time will tell.

[stomination]

Flex Mythic would likely be more toxic for the endgame raid scene than anything Blizzard has tried thus far. We'd just end up with guilds benching 2/3rds of their roster for progression kills to get whatever "magic number" makes encounters easiest.

The 10/25M dichotomy was attempted for two years but I don't think it ever lived up to the vision Blizzard had for endgame raiding and created innumerable tuning issues on top of effectively restricting the devs to design encounters for two separate demographics.

There's an argument to be made that 20M was the wrong size to settle on after providing players a logistically easier 10M raid option for two expansions. But it stands to reason in a game with as many classes/specs as WoW currently has, it was an intentional choice to ensure diverse representation.

The common magic number I see thrown about is dropping Mythic to 15M. I could see this potentially happening in the future if the game's playerbase shrinks considerably but from the dev interviews it does seem as if they're happy with the way things are at this point in time. As @Osmeric has mentioned, I think it's more likely that by the time the game reaches such a point we might simply see an end to Mythic raiding altogether. Time will tell.

Your more likely to see mythics name get changed to something else and ppl will think its gone.

[Lilija]

So you don't agree that underperformers stand out more in smaller group sizes? You just admitted that you have underperformers in your guild, but you're still progressing. Assuming you're a good player, how does it feel when you down a boss that you put 100% effort into while some scrub (for lack of a better word) that did no research on the fight, using wrong abilities, not using best consumables, gets the same kill you did? And possibly gets a chance at loot as well? I know I'll probably get cop-out responses like "I don't care as long as the boss dies" which is utter BS.

And no, I'm a former 10-man raider that has always cleared all of the heroic (now Mythic) 10-man content. There's been plenty of times where a subpar player has left our guild for "greener pastures" (larger guilds) to end up getting carried. I love logs.

And you are talking out of your butt because you have no idea about how bigger raids work. What I have said is that having underperformer in a 25man Heroic or Mythic hurst as much as having underperformers in smaller raid size. People who have never progressed the hardest bigger raids have this strange idea that it's somehow easier to cover for people who aren't doing their job. Well, it's not. The encounters are tuned this way that everyone has to do their job. The reason boss eventually drops with underperforming players comes from the fact that other people will eventually outgear the fight. Also, as my guild has a really small rouster so this is why sometimes we had to take underperformers and trust me, bosses didn't drop. In fact, we still had issues farming Archimonde when most of our core already started making a break or couldn't come - having to take underperformers ment whole evening of wipes (we don't have mages to carry anyone thru the ecnounter.

The bottom line is that UNDERPERFORMERS in bigger raids HURT AS MUCH as they do in smaller raids.

[Greenmagoo]

Flex Mythic would likely be more toxic for the endgame raid scene than anything Blizzard has tried thus far. We'd just end up with guilds benching 2/3rds of their roster for progression kills to get whatever "magic number" makes encounters easiest.

The 10/25M dichotomy was attempted for two years but I don't think it ever lived up to the vision Blizzard had for endgame raiding and created innumerable tuning issues on top of effectively restricting the devs to design encounters for two separate demographics.

There's an argument to be made that 20M was the wrong size to settle on after providing players a logistically easier 10M raid option for two expansions. But it stands to reason in a game with as many classes/specs as WoW currently has, it was an intentional choice to ensure diverse representation.

The common magic number I see thrown about is dropping Mythic to 15M. I could see this potentially happening in the future if the game's playerbase shrinks considerably but from the dev interviews it does seem as if they're happy with the way things are at this point in time. As @Osmeric has mentioned, I think it's more likely that by the time the game reaches such a point we might simply see an end to Mythic raiding altogether. Time will tell.

Given that there is also a poster here who is complaining about normal mode balance is an example that Flex is still not there yet even on the lower levels. I have noticed many more serious progression guilds just cannot maintain benches like they was before.

The 10/25 man thing was filled with its complaints as well. On both sides there was players complaining over balance to the point of even blaming on the death of their guild.

If I recall correction the choice the devs said was 15 man or 20 man. A 10 man was just not an option with the move to a single difficulty. The reason for the choice of 20 man was due to the intent to make fights require certain classes and specs. This would have lead to more casual mythic raiders who do not run multiple farm groups and maintain a bench players to be forced to reroll or recruit for a single fight here and there. In WoD though the devs mostly just delivered with one fight set up as such. Looking back on it the devs should have just gone with 15 man.

It is possible that the four raid difficulties will get trimmed back down. That will still leave a top difficulty. During the first raid tier of WoD the overall organized raiding population was on par with SoO while at similar subscription numbers. Flex and the introduction of the lower difficulty has been a great success in boosting organized raiding numbers surpassing that of ICC. Lots of casual raiders are also moving to PuG raiding or even doing organized raiding for the first time with PuGs further proving that one does not need a guild and set schedule to do organized raiding.

Legion will hopefully show us a lot and hopefully in a good way.

[Trapped]

The bottom line is that UNDERPERFORMERS in bigger raids HURT AS MUCH as they do in smaller raids.

Meh, I just don't agree with this statement. Nothing more I can say if you don't agree that your performance matters more in the smaller group sizes than the bigger ones.

[Lilija]

Meh, I just don't agree with this statement. Nothing more I can say if you don't agree that your performance matters more in the smaller group sizes than the bigger ones.

Reality > what you agree with or not. Raiding isn't only about math. In fact math starts to matter less and less.

[KaPe]

Meh, I just don't agree with this statement. Nothing more I can say if you don't agree that your performance matters more in the smaller group sizes than the bigger ones.

It's entirely dependant on the difficulty. Yes, it's much easier to be carried in 25 man LFR than it would be in 10 man. When you only need a small group of people to be competent in order to defeat the encounter, large numbers tend to trivialize it. This goes double for flexible raiding, since Blizzard's initial tuning is rather awkward, unfairly punishing smaller groups until they finally fix it.

Mythic doesn't work like that. Static raid size means there are no sudden jumps in difficulty if you add/remove people. Mechanics generally require full attention from a group of people. This is where the distinction comes in. If you need 2 people to handle something in 10 man, it's much easier to coordinate them in case something goes wrong. If you need to assign backup, it's just one or two extra players involved.

In 25, this would be ~5 players, with 5 more in reserve. Much higher chance of something going wrong, more chaotic if you need to change something on the fly, requires good performance from larger number of people, more potential DCs/lags, more visual clutter. Also, things often did more damage (usually +10% or so), so potential mistakes were more punishing. In some cases this was a massive difference, making it easy to trivialize something in 10 man.

In addition to that, the tuning generally assumed more DPS per player in 25 man. On the one hand, this made sense, with larger raids having all available buffs, better synergies and not having half of raid being being tanks and healers. On the other... that last point meant 10 man was more susceptible to stacking. Dropping a single healer allowed for 20% more DPSers. Solo tanking increased DPS to the point where it was often superior to two tanking, while being only slightly harder. Sure, Vengeance doesn't exist anymore, but still.

And then there are the positioning mechanics, which can be a massive pain in larger groups. Trying to fit 20+ people into same space is much more difficult, leading to more potential deaths. And it's not just room, it's number of mechanics at the same time. Mythic's Archimonde lasers would be a joke with just five of them, requiring you to be hit by more than half in order to actually die.

'Course, none of that means that I find current Mythic to be a great success from the design perspective. I had the "pleasure" of enjoying two things I consider to be consequences of "we can bring every class into this raid". One of them was horribly annoying shield spam on Iron Maidens - better do it or your soaker gets instantly killed. I already did it during Infest days and I hated it back then. The other was mind control, wooo. Running around with a fat orc and trying to hit two elementals amidst that mess. Again, did it ages ago in Naxxramas.

(oh, and I also enjoyed having 0-1 hunters on Kromog... being unable to cast while moving turned easy encounter into massive pain in the... even Blizzard realized it was retarded, removing said skill from hunters in next patch)

[Thirstblood]

it sucks imo really suck orc-balls period. Alot guilds ain't really happy..

[Echocho]

I think raiding worked a lot better when they were easier mechanically but had more gear checks. It felt like it had more RP value when some of the progress were in the hands of the character and some in the player.

[Glorious Leader]

I think raiding worked a lot better when they were easier mechanically but had more gear checks. It felt like it had more RP value when some of the progress were in the hands of the character and some in the player.

Agreed. Simple can be difficult too it just has to be a bit less forgiving. Throwing everything at the player including the kitchen sink is bad design. Peoples working memory, reflexes, and eye sight all pose limitations for the complex raid. We used to have this older lady who was a bit slower on the response but was reliable as a raider and in cata around molten core we just couldn't take her anymore.