7/10 Mythic Nighthold in less than a day...

[Lilija]

The race still makes sense imo. It's simply shorter. And I don't think anything can be done about it. If you have a bunch of people dedicated to clear content asap they will be doing it faster and faster. In fact the same thing happens in sports. Top athletes achieve things us normal people won't even dream about.

So I think the race is still kinda interesting seeing how the top is racing each other. And the rest of us can have fun with the content at our own paste. And it is that big group of normies that content should be tuned for.

[brunnor]

This conversation has been had a million times. How do you fix it?

Heroic and Mythic share a lock out for 3 weeks at the start of a tier and mythic is released week one. That solves a lot of problems while not being too much of an issue for the average person.

[Ehuehuecopter]

I like how everytime that the 0.5% of players do a WF, the rest of the 99.5% of players, still stuck on Gul'dan normal or hc, are like "easy raid, what a delusion" kek

[edw]

Well you state that you are not complaining but you are ...
The real question is not why others managed to get 7/10 Mythic... but why have't you...
Your are judging difficulty based on a really small % of players that actually make progression for a living probably.
So ... before panicking that 00.1% of the players managed to clear mythic in 1 week ... think what is your progression and then panic.

[Lilija]

Remove ability to split raid, problem solved.

And break tons of others things in the process? No, thx.

[Deleted]

Blizzard put every effort into making the race exciting for top players

Is it now time to accept that chasing the dragon of difficulty fetishists has flunked, and that Mythic is really just an unnecessary exercise in vanity?

These sentences speak a lot about your view of mythic that's just not true. Mythic is not designed for the race of the top guilds. Mythic is a difficulty achievable by anyone who wants to put some effort into the game and progress at their own pace.

[RHDS]

And break tons of others things in the process? No, thx.

Updated my post with how exactly it could be fixed.

Remove ability to split raid, problem solved.

One way is to use the PvP template system that works only in Mythic raids (maybe at all times, maybe only for few weeks, maybe until the raid is cleared), everyone is downscaled to what Blizzard wants eliminating benefit from overgearing, but good itemization still gives ~8-10% impact on your performance, like currently in PvP.

[Deleted]

I don't get why people care who clears a raid dungeon first. People who are invested in this sort of shit need to find something better to do with their time. Go volunteer or something.

Well it's a fairly competitive race. What's the point of sports with your argument, why care which team wins the Superbowl or who wins Wimbledon? Where's the difference between a top tier raiding guild and a hockey team, other than the millions of dollars they earn a year. They're still bringing some form of entertainment to players, something to talk about with peers and something that brings excitement to their lives. It's just as real as any other competitive platform.

On topic though. The game is harder than it's ever been, with more punishing mechanics than ever before. The difference is there's players in these guilds who have been playing / raiding in World of Warcraft for over a decade. If Blizzard catered the fights to the top .1% of players, which these guys are, the game would literally be near impossible for the other 99.9% of the playerbase. If these .1% of players can beat the raid bosses while being undergeared it most likely means the majority of the mythic raiding players can achieve a kill with on par gear they have farmed over the weeks.

It's easy to look at players who literally live and breath this game killing these bosses and think to ourselves "wow, this content is being cleared so quickly, this never happened in TK or SWP!". You need to remember the game was fresh back then, players weren't as good and didn't have the coordination they do nowadays. In any game that's released you will have a small percentage of players beating it 100 times faster than the majority, you can't realistically cater games to these players while making them accessible to others.

- - - Updated - - -

One way is to use the PvP template system that works only in Mythic raids (maybe at all times, maybe only for few weeks, maybe until the raid is cleared), everyone is downscaled to what Blizzard wants eliminating benefit from overgearing, but good itemization still gives ~8-10% impact on your performance, like currently in PvP.

That would give the top guilds even more of a lead. The only reason most guilds end up downing half of the bosses are down to the fact they have farmed HC/Mythic bosses for 3-4 weeks. You need to remember the guilds downing 7/10 Mythic only have 2 resets of HC difficulty under their belts, they're undergeared af. Look Archimonde in WoD for example, the top guilds downed him with no legendary rings, which are a HUGE increase to the raids performance, months later their was still guilds in full Mythic gear + rings struggling.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Quickly blizzard, up the difficulty of raiding for 100% of the playerbase, because theres 60 nerds out there that play wow 72hrs straight when a new raid is released...you're an idiot.

[Deleted]

I don't see the problems tbh. If you compare the amount of tries these top guilds take before killing current bosses for the first time with prior expansion bosses I don't think much has changed. Current bosses take probably a lot more preparation time / LUA skills but other than that... played time is probably just the same or more in Legion.

[Deleted]

2 Simple changes:
1) Internal testing, no PTR.
2) They fucked up on AP/Titanforging/Legendaries. Usually the top guilds cleared old Heroic/Mythic at an ilvl that is generally quite a bit lower than what normal players do Mythic at. However, Serenity has an average ilvl of 901.51 and the 1000th guild worldwide has 892.04 with people still being quite far from having 54 traits. The current system has made it so that the overall gear level of the top guilds right now is probably still higher than it will be for your average Mythic raiding guild in several weeks.

[Sencha]

Mythic race would last a longer if the fights weren't tested on the PTR and all the info about the fights wasn't out way before they are actually available.

^ This.

PTR should be removed. Blizzard should run sims on their side and not show everything to the players before they go live.

[Lilija]

Updated my post with how exactly it could be fixed.

Still, as I've said, it will break even more things. This issue really doesn't need fixing.

[Segus1992]

I was ready to jump on this post, but I completely agree with you.

I think Blizzard needs to tune their game around what they want their demographic to do. If that means that world first guilds finish the tier in 17 hours, then so be it. They will see the folly of their ways and quit the game, or drop down to what Blizzard deems as "reasonable".

As long as a wider audience can enjoy the content and it's still fun for the majority of players it's okay.

I guess at the same time they could go ham and make "legendary mode" or something, where they can have all these ridiculous tuning and where the WF races can take place, even though it doesn't drop any gear that's better than mythic. They could've made a "legendary" EN that was tuned around 54 traits (back when people were entering mythic EN with 25 or so) with crazy unforgiving mechanics or something. But they have to set the expectations off the start so that guilds that just want to play the game (ie. every guild past the top 20 or so) aren't completely demoralized when it doesn't really happen for them.

Look at it from Blizzard's perspective. Imagine if the entirety of the true top guilds (Method and Serenity) quit - it'd cause a lot of other people to quit as well, something I'm sure already happened when Paragon did.

[rda]

Is the race really even worth it any more?

In that it is a non-event, completely uninteresting to everyone outside of maybe a few thousand people? Sure, it is.

You know why it exists?

Because of the buyers. If your name is up there in the list of competitors, you get credibility and that brings you buyers. If it wasn't for the buyers, we'd have no race - sure, some would perhaps still try to keep tabs on who's first and who's second, but nobody would seriously compete, and so the first place would be just "meh, you spent a couple of nights trying to prove something? gz, I guess... plenty of people are better than you but whatever".

It's been the case for like 5 years already. Modern WoW, fake and disgusting.

[Nayami]

I think it's a good thing that the game isn't tuned around players relentlessly farming Mythic+, switching characters to trade loot for quicker acquisition of 4 sets and powerful trinkets, and whatever else these players do to be as prepared as they could possibly be for clearing the new Mythic raid as fast as possible.

They are competing in a race, and they are in it to win, that's it, it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to go all no-life mode just to raid on Mythic.

[Deleted]

I can honestly say; I don't care.

I like raiding mythic just like any other semi-casual player does; but i've never cared how the top of the crop finds it.
I'm pretty certain i'll be busy clearing mythic for a decent amount of time; meaning i'll get my money's worth out of the subscription.

[Deleted]

What people don't get is that nobody actually care anymore about these so called PVE races. So if some guilds want to race for content completion and be done in one or two lockout and then have next to nothing to do till the next raid release, it is their right, but nothing can or should be done about it aside than by releasing more relevant bosses per raid patches.

[Pua]

For those that read no further than the subject line, congratulations - you've managed to make yourself look utterly stupid by trying to insult me, but completely (and hilariously) missing the point.

Go, you!

As long as a wider audience can enjoy the content and it's still fun for the majority of players it's okay.

Absolutely. And with Normal through Heroic, that's exactly what we get; a relatively consistent curve of difficulty that serves the overwhelming majority of those who do organised raiding.

But with seven pages and counting, I'm going to have to abridge beyond the first post...

If this was a spectator sport you may have a point. But it's not. What top guilds do isn't relevant to normal players.

Well, sure, but it IS a spectator sport in the realm of arena and I think Blizzard are going to want to turn its flagship product into something that's entertaining to watch, given that they're now heavily invested in the E-Sport scene. Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and Starcraft II are all big with this, and Overwatch was (at least in part) built for it.

So, you're touching on part of the question; could "the race" be changed to be more viewer-friendly?

Let's say for example that those wishing to compete in the world first race agreed to do so on a given day at a given time for a given period, and they all had to stream what they were doing via a Blizzard service. I'd probably tune in for some of that, and it would have other benefits such as increasing the pool of players able to compete.

There'd need to be some massaging, but that's not an insurmountable issue.

The core problem seems to be split runs trivializing gear hurdles and not giving enough time for the small skill discrepancies between top guilds to create real separation on all but the final bosses in an instance.

Mythic race would last a longer if the fights weren't tested on the PTR and all the info about the fights wasn't out way before they are actually available.

I think split runs and the PTR are probably necessary evils; players will do what it takes to get the edge, and the content will always need tested. Bosses like C'Thun lasted for so long because they were broken, not because they were necessarily the hardest (amongst other reasons, of course, mainly a very difference community).

the game is the same as it allways has been, bosses are the same dificulty and even harder
but the ssue is with titanforging there is no limit on gear, so world first raiders can have gear higher then mythic, before mythic comes out

and with M+ this allows for infinite farming and of corse infinite chances at titanforging...

the game has become so much faster. before you had 1 way to get gear, and could only do it once a week, not with 4 dificulties, titanforging, legendaries, etc, the game has become so much faster

I wholly support the divergence of options to get gear, and everyone should. It's an MMORPG after all, and not an arcade-shooter with one reward platform. But the problem you cite is a real one; those grinding the most Mythic+ may very well have an advantage over those who don't by virtue of gear itself, and the additional slog of Artifact Power.

I think top players have mastered the game since around late-BC to early-LK.

Errrr, yeah. I think I could probably go along with that. The problem is that it's led Blizzard to think that everyone was improving at the same rate, which isn't true because new players have no "skills" to develop; they're just new. What that did until flex became a thing was increase the entry ceiling to a point where new players simply couldn't raid.

I think that issue has been pretty well serviced at the bottom end, other than some frustrating tuning decisions in smaller groups.

Create a Mythic Raid realm. It would work similar to the Tournament Realm. You use a character template, have access to a variety of gear through vendors and the only thing active is the raid. Bosses drop no gear; there is no further character progression to be had. Tuning is made with the gear available in mind, as tight as possible.

I'm not sure about a "realm", as Mythic players are already scare enough; let alone competitive ones. We also have to ensure that players who aren't competitive can still build themselves into the toughest content eventually, and I'm not sure a realm does that very elegantly.

I am, however, persuaded by your argument that a level playing field is the way to go.

If you tune a raid so that the top 10 guilds need a month to kill the last boss (and 2 weeks to get 5/10) the rest of the world will never kill them (on the highest difficulty). Do you want THAT kind of raiding?

Nobody is asking for that. In fact, if you follow my commentary around here, you'll find that I'm of the opposite mindset.

It's not so much an increased mastery, as much as its a "flaw" in the design of this xpac. Because of mythic+, legendaries, and ap, blizzard can't realistically tune fights to be challenging outside of the last few fights in the instance and even then... they get nerfed relatively fast.

If player A has 54 traits and 2 BiS legendaries, there's going to be a massive power gap between that player and player B who's at 40 traits and got crappy legendaries. Blizzard can't tune the raid to be challenging for player A without making it neigh impossible for player B. Which means they HAVE to tune the majority of the raid around a raids worth of player B's, which makes it a joke for a raid full of player A's.

I think tuning is harder than its ever been, purely by virtue of the huge variance in gear levels. A guild ready to kill heroic Helya, but not quite over the hump, could be averagely worse geared than a guild that's been farming the tier so far on Normal.

Perhaps this is part of the problem (I think you're right) - that tuning the raid for Player B is the only option, but Player A is what you find in the top guilds.

Most top guilds are beyond prepared for the race; Serenity ran 2 heroic split runs to ensure they would have the best gear they could before launching into mythic. The raids aren't easier than previous expansions; it's just the players who are more innovative when it comes to gearing mains etc

IIRC (and I'm happy to be corrected), it was Cataclysm where the top guilds really "took it up a notch". I even read a post, though I won't say from which guild, that advocated their players using illegal drugs in order to be on top form.

This time, I think the added convolution of Titanforged, random gear levels and the efficiency of Mythic+ are compounding the issue.

I don't think Nighthold is intended to last that long hence why it's easy as Emerald Nightmare. We already have the next patch in the PTR that will come out in a few months.

Funnily enough, that actually worries me a little. I don't want another Mists where the pace of content release was fantastic, until they got to the Siege of Orgrimmar and ran out of content with a woeful expansion still only half complete.

All blizzard needs to do is to make a beyond standard mythic raid difficulty.

This isn't logical. What you're saying is that Blizzard should just keep creating an endless number of difficulties until they shave off everyone in a multitude of difficulties.

That's simply not a solution in any way, when there are already too many difficulties for the same content.

Indeed. The truly "average" guild will probably be stuck somewhere in early heroic and never get close to mythic.

Numerically, yeah - that's where the average raider tends to find themselves.

Anyway...

Most other posts are a substitute for the points brought up, other than the abusive posts that the trolls think are edgy and cool but are actually juvenile and pointless.

I personally think that coming down on things like split-runs is a strange choice that deals with the effect rather than the cause. If the "cause" is gear inflation (and many seem to think that it is), then surely that's where the effort needs to be spent? And while some argue that this only affects top players and thus nobody else should care, we know that such a view is demonstrably untrue. Gear inflation is having a significant impact throughout the entire glut of endgame, pricing players into or out of content they're arguably ready or not ready for while simultaneously increasing frustration through a triple-random (or worse) reward system.

Personally, I like the idea of a Mythic race that discounts gear altogether. The technology already exists to scale players down or up in instances, so we know it can be done. And if killing Mythic bosses is supposed to be about prestige and/or achievement, then surely the competitive players would like to see their achievements legitimised in ways they aren't currently. Such as:

1) They've got the best gear.
2) They've got the most time.

I also happen to like the E-Sport idea, where progression happens at a set time and players can watch it. I think the benefits of such a system wholly outweigh the drawbacks, and it means that Blizzard can control a raiding "season" at a suitable pace for everyone while increasing the number of players that can participate. If you make the instance have no power-related rewards and impossible to overgear? Well, then the tuning is perfect and only the right target audience would participate.

It might even make some people want to make the jump to organised raiding.

[Battlebeard]

... So what can be done?

The best guild in the race at the moment, <Serenity> EU, are at 7/10 in the Nighthold and we've not yet wrapped up the first day; my suspicion is that probably only Gul'dan will survive the reset, and even that might not happen given the pace at which bosses are falling over (and split-runs will be completed).

I'm not arguing the game is too easy.

I'm not saying the top guilds are doing too well.

I'm not even whinging about how quickly the best guilds in the world are clearing content I'll never look at.

What I'm suggesting is that, just maybe, the top players have mastered whatever PvE can throw at them and perhaps a review is needed.

So, here's the question:

Is the race really even worth it any more?

I won't lie, this is the least interested I've ever been in the race to world first, and I've been tracking it since mid-Wrath. Even the community seems generally disinterested, with MMO-C not having their usual WoW Progress page linked to the first post. The typical guilds are all there, with <Method> likely to be the first to round the place out, and I'll probably wake up tomorrow to see a guild or two moving up a couple more notches on the progression bed post.

What's next?

Blizzard put every effort into making the race exciting for top players, and they're wrapping up these instances in record times with nobody to seemingly care. Whether it's the fact that players are better than ever now, the access to PTR/beta, or random gear inflation and legendaries making bosses beatable before their intended time, "the race" seems to be dying a death before anyone even knew it was happening.

Is it now time to accept that chasing the dragon of difficulty fetishists has flunked, and that Mythic is really just an unnecessary exercise in vanity?

Or is there something else Blizzard can do to make their progression players excited?

Answers on a postcard.

The raid is defenitly not too easy. The top guilds are simply being more dedicated than ever, especially with the 54 traits on their weapons.

And Serenity is the current leading guild, not the best guild in the race :P