Mythic EN/ToV mistuned, yet people still praise Mythic 20?

[styil]

The general concensus is that Mythic raid balance thus far has been a complete failure, with Mythic EN being grossly undertuned and Mythic ToV being overtuned. Mythic raid balance has arguably gotten worse since the the switch to a fixed raid size of 20.

Yet despite these tuning woes, these very people are still in support of a fixed raid size of 20. Why? If these raids are anything to go by, it proves that major balance issues would still plague Mythic raiding despite having a fixed raid size. Which was the major argument for switching to 20 in the first place. It proves that raid size was not the major contributor to raid imbalance.

I think that the Mythic raid size should be made more flexible to allow more players to access the Mythic content. They can start with two raid sizes, 16 (2/3-4/10-11) and 20 (2/4-5/13-14), and go from there with 12 following shortly after (2/2-3/7-8). Sure, they may not be perfectly balanced, but as seen so far, things will still be imbalanced no matter if the raid size is fixed or more flexible. At least this way more people will get to enjoy the content. Accessibility > balance (which is impossible to achieve anyway).

[Teri]

Flexible top level content will never work for the sense of achievement, it will lead to endless arguments and eventually lead to finding a cheese size/raid setup anyway.

[styil]

Flexible top level content will never work for the sense of achievement, it will lead to endless arguments and eventually lead to finding a cheese size/raid setup anyway.

We already have endless arguments about the tuning of Mythic EN/ToV despite it having a fixed raid size of 20, so nothing would really change there.

[Teri]

Yet would we have to list "world 1st 16 man" "world 1st 17 man" "world first 18 man" etc instead?

[Bullettime]

One of the main selling points of Mythic being a fixed 20 is for easier tuning, more unique encounters, class gimmicks, etc and this is just another tier where it feels like a failure. They've yet to hit or design around any of their goals for the push to the fixed size.

[Xjev]

Mythic raids are not supposed to be accessible. 16 or 20 will not matter much for those who are prepared to do that sort of hard content.

[Waltzinblack]

The only failure is that Emerald Nightmare was too easy, except for maybe Cenarius.

And why would making mythic scale be better? It would just ruin the tuning further.

[Pane34]

Content shouldn't be balanced around world first achievements, that doesn't make any sense and doesn't matter to the majority of players. We want to raid the hardest content without being pigeonholed into 20 man rosters, especially on low pop realms that need merged.

[styil]

Yet would we have to list "world 1st 16 man" "world 1st 17 man" "world first 18 man" etc instead?

Those 50 or so guilds can continue having those debates while the thousands of other guilds happily access Mythic raiding content with the increased flexibility in raid sizes.

Mythic raids are not supposed to be accessible. 16 or 20 will not matter much for those who are prepared to do that sort of hard content.

Accesibility =/= easier content. Accessibility = easier to begin doing the hard content.

[Xjev]

Content shouldn't be balanced around world first achievements, that doesn't make any sense and doesn't matter to the majority of players. We want to raid the hardest content without being pigeonholed into 20 man rosters, especially on low pop realms that need merged.

Well the content already exists in flex size Normal/Heroic formats or LFR. Mythic is for the very few who want to do suuuuper hard shit.

[Pane34]

Lot's of people want to do super hard shit, so we do it in 20 mans. But 10 is a better size for low pop servers. Why Blizz hasn't merged more servers is beyond me. My server has a 2 mythic raiding guilds per faction.

[Teri]

Lot's of people want to do super hard shit, so we do it in 20 mans. But 10 is a better size for low pop servers. Why Blizz hasn't merged more servers is beyond me. My server has a 2 mythic raiding guilds per faction.

So yes that's a direct answer, servers are the problem, not the raid size.

[Pane34]

I agree servers are the main problem, but I would be happy with either solution as it would show a rare moment of clarity.

[Dylemma]

They "overtuned" ToV on purpose. I don't think it's overtuned, overtuned means basically not doable. It's hard, it's doable. Just hard, and not going to take you a few attempts to kill a boss unlike EN. They undertuned EN and they made sure ToV was a challenge. Odyn on Mythic is a pain in the ass but it's a damn hard fight, one of the hardest fights in awhile. They also wanted to make sure it's relevant and hard since it's only 3 bosses and the last content until 7.1.5.

[Teri]

I agree servers are the main problem, but I would be happy with either solution as it would show a rare moment of clarity.

Blizzard openly admitted server imbalance is an issue in the blizzcon QA, they likely have the tech to connect more realms already so I dunno why they haven't said more yet.

Connecting realms should be easier then complete merges and free transfers as people will run into things like renaming their character.

[Thereaperszone]

Blizzard openly admitted server imbalance is an issue in the blizzcon QA, they likely have the tech to connect more realms already so I dunno why they haven't said more yet.

Connecting realms should be easier then complete merges and free transfers as people will run into things like renaming their character.

At this point they just need to make 1 mega server with clusters

[Tehterokkar]

Regarding fixed raid size, yes, absolutely it is the right way forward. OP mentions balance issues however has no idea that there are 2 "balance" issues that can exist in raiding. First one is raid group size, this is only obvious in Normal/Heroic since Mythic is always the same, and it eliminates the weird "How many debuffs should a raid size of 16 get instead of 23?" dilemma for Blizzard. Second balance issue is obviously number tuning, which can be very easily adjusted, however yes, doing so mid-tier is stupid other than fixing certain strats(*cough* Il'gynoth *cough*).

Now about the actual numbers tuning of EN vs ToV. Was EN undertuned? Yes, a few of the bosses could have used more health and more damage, especially Xavius, as the "only" strategy was to burn him before getting a 2nd Horror in P1, which made the fight a joke in terms of corruption management, obvious oversight by Blizzard. He should have spawned one at 95% and other at 75%, to make Corruption management a thing, but what we got was a target dummy with a few add waves in-between.

Moving on to ToV, on normal and heroic, yes it was a bit overtuned before the changes to Odyn(regarding the Hyrja/Hymdall health in p2), however Mythic was left untouched, and even had 1 minute less on Berserk timer of Guarm. About Mythic tuning, Odyn and Guarm were both fairly trivial, with Guarm requiring very high DPS on first kills(our guild did it with +10s to spare on berserk timer with no 35 traits in group).

And about Helya, she was not a DPS check, or well, kind of was, depending if you wanted to deal with the last breath that she did in p3(~30s off berserk). It mostly came down to a mistake being extremely punishing to the entire raid;
*People going to orb markers with mariner up and then being "caged in" with the Mariner casts = dead people.
*Dispelling tank at the moment of breath = Dead tank/breath in Africa.
*Missing a P3 breath Soak = 1m raid-wide heal absorb = people get MC'd for sure.
*People standing in the wrong position at the time of Orb spawns = Positioning for the rest of the fight is fucked/someone dies


TL;DR: EN N/H/M = Undertuned. ToV N/H = overtuned before a few nerfs. ToV M = fine.

[hulkgor]

Balance is out of whack due to legendaries.

Player power levels are completely across the table with the disparity between legendary strength.

They either tune around not having legendaries and we stomp it. Or they tune it around us having BIS legendary setups and we get stomped. See disparity between EN and ToV.

That being said, it will be impossible to have a balanced raid with this sort of systems in place (legendaries, rng in obtaining them, etc), so all we can hope for is decent encounters and that they overtune them and tweak them if needed, instead of giving us another Emerald Nightmare.

[Spotnick]

Not sure why people think EN was undertuned and TOV overtuned..it's a natural progression from Cenarius.. the anomaly was Xavius.

Remember, we're just mid-tier..

The only overtuned boss is heroic Helya.. that seems impossible to me to kill for a heroic only guild.

Helya seems to be the Gorefiend of this tier.. wall in the middle.

[Lartok]

We already have endless arguments about the tuning of Mythic EN/ToV despite it having a fixed raid size of 20, so nothing would really change there.

You completely missed the point of why it was changed to a fixed raid size, yes, the word 'balance' is involved but not in the context you're using.

Mythic wasn't made 20 man so they could create raids that everyone who wanted to could complete it at the perfect pace appropriate to their skill level. It was created because previously, making a boss/raid that was equally difficult for both 10 and 25 man raid sizes was practically impossible, so one side would always complain that the other had it easier. Therefore every raid is now the same size, 20, that's the balance it achieved.