Buff heroic or make 10 man mythic

[fiestatastic]

They're already lost those players though and they aren't coming back in full force. This happened to my 10 man raiding guild in Highmaul (we were world #10 on some bosses in MoP, world #50 or better for probably everything else, and still had troubles with recruiting and eventually fell apart), 14-15 man raid group and everyone except 2 quit, but only 4-5 are coming back to give Legion a shot at all, so I don't think we'll have a repeat cycle of the giant exodus of players that left during Highmaul (millions) just because of recruiting for mythic frustration.

What would be really cool though is if they could implement Heroic+, in a similar fashion to how they are doing Mythic+ dungeons, dropping better gear for groups that complete the raids more efficiently, up to Mythic ilvl for incredibly good completion.

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Flex Mythic will never, ever work on a competitive level. Even if it's "gated" after a month, the encounters still need to be designed with the possibility of Flex which greatly devalues the strategic opportunities for raid mechanics. And even then, guilds would still feel compelled to bench players to attain whatever is perceived to be the easiest raid size for any given encounter since a vast majority of Mythic guilds are still progressing after a month.

The idea seems diplomatic in theory but in execution would be absolutely terrible. It solves nothing and brings about more issues than it addresses.

It's a fine line between competition though and losing millions of players, how much do 2-3 million players really care about competition after the first few months? More likely than not those millions of lost players are too far gone at this point though since they've been gone for 2 years now and are for the most part likely not going to be enticed back.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

...you're accusing me of not reading your post when I very clearly mentioned that competition still exists even after the WF guilds get kills. Your arbitrary definition of competitive isn't one-size-fits-all. Why would a guild competing at 20M continue to try progressing on 20M if suddenly 13M Flex Mythic was way easier? To boot, all of the encounters would still need to be designed with flexibility in mind, which, as I said, is a huge deterrent to encounter design. The only other way this could possibly work was if you gave the Flex Mythic version of the instance different gear, at which point you're proposing a fifth raid difficulty in a game which already has too many raid difficulties to begin with.

I'm not proposing anything I am entertaining a discussion that goes beyond my own selfish interest. Because their is another side to the coin in this op. You could buff heroic to make it a bit more challenging and at the sometime slightly more rewarding to give those people a bit more sense of progression, challenge, and reward. Not to mention more valuable individually to the next levels recruit pool. The reason most semi-serious raiding guilds (Thant aren't mythic) right now don't do mythic right now does revolve around skill. It does revolve around willingness. It revolves around getting the roster. Because you have a natural progression arc in the game. It goes from anyone with anyone can que LFR, then a group of people greater then 10 less than 30 can do pretty easy normal, then you got 10 to 30 can do very mild content in heroic, but once you get here you have a fixed size wall which requires 20. So you either ditch people you naturally progressed with to continue which is unfriendly, anti social, and leads to drama or the more likely situation of you having 1 to 10 to few people and no one is interested joining because "they just heroic". Then to make things worse most mythic guilds aren't insanely interested in those people either because the difference in damage, healing, and tanking is pretty insanely huge. So you end up with a real lack of options for a huge chunk of the raiding community that everyone, including mythic raiders, need to be doing well to have a better game.

Also this whole then mythic would have to be made with flex in mind is garbage. WoD maybe had 2 really nicely tuned fights mechanically with 20 in mind. The rest was the same old number scale increase with an extra ability maybe two when they are feeling funky in raid design. It wasn't some magical difference. Hell most the encounters are trumped while they are current by being able to "just burn pasted mechanics" in majority. Some magical raids they have created here for sure. Not to hate on them because some were really good. But I think this is something many people on even my mythic team and these forums wave around a whole lot but in reality really isn't that impressive. I mean what was blizzards excuse? So we have to bring every class? Well HFC I just stacked as many mages and rogues as I could. Before HFC I dragged in as many boomkins and hunters as I could. Some vision of bringing all the classes and balance. What fight even required a specific class anyway out side of blast fren in Blackrock.

Game is just better when more people are happy. When more people are given a sense of progression and reward. Everyone wins. Instead a small crowd has bought in allowing Blizzard to be lazy as fuck with design for everyone because it appeals to there ego. Pretty sad community but everyone knows that already.

[Celarent]

The weekly "my 10-man guild died because we couldn't recruit more people for Mythic so we want 10-man Mythics" thread. Guys, just let it go.

Except this one has the fresh twist of, "Please, Blizzard, make content for the middle 30% of raiders inaccessible so Mythic-capable raiders who can't get along with each other for more than 5 weeks are half as likely to disband."

[Sierra85]

If alot of guilds broke up because of it, then surely those players who left the guild would be absorbed by a 20man guild that was also recruiting?

If you go into it with "10man only or i unsub", well u cant really be enjoying the game that much to begin with.

[Relapses]

@Yggdrasil,

Couple of things here. First, you're making the grossly inaccurate presumption that the only reason fixed Mythic is a good thing is because of class-specific interactions. And while they're a plus, they're hardly the only saving grace. Flex Mythic would require every single mechanic to scale from 10 to 30 which honestly, while not impossible, lends itself to less imaginative raid design. A fight like Gorefiend Mythic would never be able to be done in any capacity on Flex without making the fight an absolute joke for smaller raid groups and an absolute fucking nightmare for larger groups. It's not that the encounters aren't able to be flexed, it's that the Flex mechanic simply isn't the best solution from a design standpoint. You can argue that perhaps we need to let the developers make these kinds of concessions in favor of the "overall happiness of the playerbase," but Mythic raiders never accounted for a substantial portion of the game's subscribers to begin with so why force them to make that portion of the game more bland simply to increase accessibility?

Additionally, you've yet to really address this but even if Mythic was made Flex at some indeterminate point after the original raid is released, how do you differentiate a guild that's 20M strict and one which goes Flex? Even the best guilds occasionally have attendance issues, so should they feel incentive to swap to Flex if a few key players are on vacation while they're farming the instance? What about the possibility that a certain encounter is suddenly much easier at a smaller raid size when you have a large roster? Is it fair for a guild to feel pressure to bench 5-10 people just to get a progression kill? It just opens up the door for so many complications that I don't really think it's worth even considering.

But that's just my personal take on it. I know I'm asking a lot of hypotheticals and I'm not expecting you (or anybody) to be able to answer them, it's just from my pragmatic musings, the cons outweigh the potential benefits. I'm not defending Blizzard's choice to stay with 20M fixed because it's the "lazy" decision, I'm defending it because I think it's the more appropriate direction for endgame raiding.

[oblakoff]

Newsflash - 10mans are just glorified dungeons, remove them altogether from the game

[Acidbaron]

20 man is fine, we need more then one expansion for people to adjust to it. The problem was too many adjustments each expansion for a guild to build their raid team around. Reason why things in wrath were better as TBC mostly did the ground work.

Also 20 man mythic is not for the majority of the player base and tailoring around it does not make anyone happy besides those that feel entitled to everything by just being present.

[Deleted]

I really miss 10m raiding, but 10m Mythic is - and always will be the wrong choice.
20m for mythic is the correct size, even though it really, really sucks guild-wise.

If anything, they should probably remove the Heroic difficulty completely.

[Ebalina]

Every time new expansion is coming the basement dweller 10man raiders come and say X Y Z needs to happen.

How about you already god damn assimilate or go away.
Ever since the 10man in WOTLK people have been trying to push this agenda that playing with family and friends is fun and they also should experience the highest difficulty in the game.

We tried it for 2 expansions and it didn't work.
It made more harm then good.

So please just GTFO already and leave the people that actually wanna play the game to play the game.

[Deleted]

No I said their guilds fell apart because they had nothing to do after clearing heroic within 2 months and not being able to maintain a 20 man roster to progress in mythic. The raid content (heroic) needs to be buffed to last longer or this will just happen again in Legion.

Well you will be fine wilt Legion then, can clear Normal/Heroic and you will have your Mythic + to keep alot of people busy.

[Deleted]

No.
/10chars

[Aleks0410]

Well you will be fine wilt Legion then, can clear Normal/Heroic and you will have your Mythic + to keep alot of people busy.

Isn't Mythic + lower ilvl than Heroic raiding gear? Might be wrong on this..

[Deleted]

Isn't Mythic + lower ilvl than Heroic raiding gear? Might be wrong on this..

It is initially, till you get to about the stage 9/10 mark. Still get your titanforge procs too etc. and i know alot will be spamming these the day raids open, I know as many as possible will be trying to get their hands on a decent Horn of Valor in their chest at the end.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

@Yggdrasil,

Couple of things here. First, you're making the grossly inaccurate presumption that the only reason fixed Mythic is a good thing is because of class-specific interactions. And while they're a plus, they're hardly the only saving grace. Flex Mythic would require every single mechanic to scale from 10 to 30 which honestly, while not impossible, lends itself to less imaginative raid design. A fight like Gorefiend Mythic would never be able to be done in any capacity on Flex without making the fight an absolute joke for smaller raid groups and an absolute fucking nightmare for larger groups. It's not that the encounters aren't able to be flexed, it's that the Flex mechanic simply isn't the best solution from a design standpoint. You can argue that perhaps we need to let the developers make these kinds of concessions in favor of the "overall happiness of the playerbase," but Mythic raiders never accounted for a substantial portion of the game's subscribers to begin with so why force them to make that portion of the game more bland simply to increase accessibility?

Additionally, you've yet to really address this but even if Mythic was made Flex at some indeterminate point after the original raid is released, how do you differentiate a guild that's 20M strict and one which goes Flex? Even the best guilds occasionally have attendance issues, so should they feel incentive to swap to Flex if a few key players are on vacation while they're farming the instance? What about the possibility that a certain encounter is suddenly much easier at a smaller raid size when you have a large roster? Is it fair for a guild to feel pressure to bench 5-10 people just to get a progression kill? It just opens up the door for so many complications that I don't really think it's worth even considering.

But that's just my personal take on it. I know I'm asking a lot of hypotheticals and I'm not expecting you (or anybody) to be able to answer them, it's just from my pragmatic musings, the cons outweigh the potential benefits. I'm not defending Blizzard's choice to stay with 20M fixed because it's the "lazy" decision, I'm defending it because I think it's the more appropriate direction for endgame raiding.

Actually in my last post I didn't even discuss changing mythic at all anymore but rather working on changing heroic. But I guess that slipped though the cracks to continue to pound away at your own personal interests.

[Rosencrantz]

Agreed. So many good guilds crumbled because 20 is just impossible to maintain. You can get a core of 10 easily, from real life friends even, and 5 other reliable, solid players, but there's always those 5 slots where you just need warm bodies. And unfortunately those fights where EVERYONE cannot afford to fail.

Truthfully, I used to support larger raid sizes......... until it was actually part of my responsibility to the guild t help maintain them. It's a fucking stressful nightmare.

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Every time new expansion is coming the basement dweller 10man raiders come and say X Y Z needs to happen.

How about you already god damn assimilate or go away.
Ever since the 10man in WOTLK people have been trying to push this agenda that playing with family and friends is fun and they also should experience the highest difficulty in the game.

We tried it for 2 expansions and it didn't work.
It made more harm then good.

So please just GTFO already and leave the people that actually wanna play the game to play the game.

Yeeeah cuz only scrubs cannot maintain the roster. That's why the best guilds have broken apart and scattered to the wind. /roll eyes.

[Echocho]

We should go back to the Cataclysm raid model with normal and hc imo but with one raid size (flex) but make sure that bringan more players will make the encounters easier so it won't just be 10m raiding.

[Vestig3]

Oh cmon already? cant we leave this topic in the graveyard?

[Osmeric]

Still don't understand why 20 man would kill casual guilds that only really did normal, but okay.

The presence of a higher difficulty mode that is beyond ones skill gap is the game sending the message "you suck".

It should not be surprising that when the game sends a player this message, it can hurt player retention.

[Xires]

Either of these needs to be done or it will just be a repeat of WoD again with raiding guilds falling apart en masse struggling to maintain a 20 man mythic roster and already having long cleared heroic and having nothing to do progression wise. And what a lot of people don't realize is that when this happened in WoD, it didn't just hurt mythic raiders, it hurt raiders, non raiders, everyone. Because guilds aren't just made up of raiders, and a lot of people didn't just leave their guilds and find new ones, a lot of people just ended up getting sick of joining guilds that broke up and left the game all together.

Links to highly rated threads from WoD about this issue:
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/18596067834
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/19288929186
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...roy-your-guild

I want this expansion to succeed, it's looking pretty good so far. But if Blizzard doesn't address this issue from the previous expansion I just don't see that happening, it led to a lot of people unsubbing in WoD. And now that they've returned it could just happen all over again. I see so many people recruiting for guilds on my server and I'm hopeful about the prospect, but at the same time I'm scared because of this issue.

No. The WHOLE POINT on making 1 mythic difficulty is so that they could properly tighten the fights and make them well tuned. Back when we had 2 difficulty's it was a cluster fuck of a boss being ridiculously easy on 1 raid size while hard as shit on another. No. They gave you a YEAR to recruit for 20 man mythics and if you couldn't do that then that is on YOU. You used to have to raid with 25 ONLY and if you couldn't then you didn't raid. Now you can raid with 10-30 and if you are a semi-hardcore raider+ then you WILL get 20 people and raid. You've now had 3 years to do it and if you can't by now then you DESERVE to not be bale to raid mythics. Suck it up and recruit or stick to heroics.

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Go to wowprogress.com and see how many guilds fell apart in the first 2 raid tiers of WoD compared to MoP. There used to be like 10-15 heroic raiding guilds on most servers, and now there are 1-3 mythic guilds on most servers. Obviously it differs depending on if the server is high pop or low pop, but I'm going off the server I play on which is a pretty middle ground medium server and that's what happened in WoD.

So what? The game was older and people MOVE ON. I've had people leave because of life rather then because of some "game format" you claim it is. LIFE happens and then you gotta quit raiding. Other people quit because they socially couldn't handle 20 people in a team (that is weird and sad but not due to the game).
Others just didn't like the x-pac period. Their are MANY reasons why raiding guilds fell apart and it isn't just because they were too lazy to get 20 people or couldn't find another guild. If someone wants to raid end-game bad enough and they have the skills- they can find a raiding guild no problem.

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No I said their guilds fell apart because they had nothing to do after clearing heroic within 2 months and not being able to maintain a 20 man roster to progress in mythic. The raid content (heroic) needs to be buffed to last longer or this will just happen again in Legion.

What a 30% buff? 20%? 10%? So it will be cleared in 3 months instead of 2? Heroic is just fine where it is at. Suck it up and realize that heroics is where you will always be...or find a mythic guild.

[Pruke]

I've raided since release and have cleared almost all content when it was current. I think there are many reasons why there is a decline and none of us work for Blizzard, we do not have factual data to base any real conclusion on why things have changed.

All anyone can do is post their opinion, please do not call anything you are posting a fact.

In my opinion, a solution would be to release more raid content. Simply put, you cannot have raids last as long as Blizzard has been making them last for and there not be issues, regardless of flex or mythic. No one wants to see the same bosses each week for longer than 4-5 months. That is usually the point where people are sick and tired of seeing the same raid zone over and over.

Perhaps they should consider making raids have 4-5 bosses, last 2-3 months and then release a new raid with 4-5 bosses that have the next ilvl in gear and a bit more challenging content.

For example:

Raid 1 - Opens 1 month after release - lasts 3 months) Normal - ilvl 800, Heroic ilvl 815, Mythic ilvl 830
Raid 2 - Opens 3 months after release - lasts 3 months) Normal - ilvl 815, Heroic ilvl 830, Mythic ilvl 845
Raid 3 - Opens 6 months after release - lasts 3 months) Normal - ilvl 830, Heroic ilvl 845, Mythic ilvl 860

Rinse and repeat, over and over, each new raid could have a modifier of say 10% increased difficulty over the previous raid tier for the same difficulty. For example: Normal Raid 1, Heroic Raid 1 and Mythic Raid 1 is the baseline floor in difficulty, Normal Raid 2, Heroic Raid 2 and Mythic Raid 2 are 10% stronger then each of the previous levels.

They could still keep warforged/titanforged as a mechanic through the entire raid cycle.

With each new raid, they could add a batch of quests - say 10 or so, that show the lore to the new raid zone, why the end boss is a big mean demon. That gives non-raids a batch of quests to do to help keep them in content and with each new raid zone/batch of quests give the quest rewards an ilvl boost as well.