Over 2000 guilds stuck at 3/10 mythic, was tuning 7 bosses to 54 traits a mistake?

[Marrilaife]

The ppl mythic is target at is the massive amount of players that stomp heroic and that find it super boring and need something else to challenge them, this group is not this mass of high skilled players with too much time in their hands that clear content in 1 week, there is a wide spectrum of skill and time investment here and only 1 arbitrarily defined mythic difficulty that right now is frustrating mid tiers guild and tiring elite ones, it is serving absolutely no purpose.

Most people who hop into the thread with "hurr durr it's mythic you're supposed to give it all otherwise mythic isn't for you" miss the point.

The point is "mythic raiding guilds" encompasses everyone from world top 10 to guilds ranked ~3000, and there's nothing in common between those guilds. Even when you compare a ~300 ranked guild is completely different from world top.

Heroic these days trips over within a reset, tops 2, even for these lowest of the low "mythic guilds" that are atm stuck at 3/10. If we tell all these people "mythic isn't for you, get out", they'll have content for 1-2 weeks after the patch, then unsub because nothing to do. Mythic chrono requires more than anything in hc, it was the same in the so called easy EN, mythic Nyth required more than anything in hc.

You can see how widely hc is pugged.

The problem is wow devs have to lob together "super hardcore skilled & farming day n' night people" together with "somewhat skilled semi-casual people" in one bag of mythic difficulty because they're together combined such a minority already. Majority of people in the community atm are either unskilled, or don't give a damn, don't want to be in guilds and commit, don't care to put effort or improve, and for all these people we have various levels of puggable content that doesn't demand from you to farm your ass off.

I used to raid through open raid at some point with people who had regular weekly event for normal (it was HM & BRF back then), you could obviously see that these people don't care about learning their class or perform well, but they were having fun, so yeah, things like normal has a reason to exist.

Problem with mythic is though you either tune it around world top 100 and let 2000 or something other guilds who want to try mythic bang their head against the wall somewhere, or you tune it more middle-of-the-pack and you get accused that it's too easy, faceroll, undertuned and world firsts cleared it in couple of days.

I don't think we need 5th difficulty really to differentiate the "really hardcore" from "ones from whom heroic was just a tad bit too easy", we're already in the territory of bloat and we're having weekly threads "which raid difficulty would you remove".

[Deleted]

Mythic should be really hard, let the top guilds smash their heads against a wall and have their fun. Hell you can make it harder and make the first boss like star augur.

The issue I have is heroic being too easy in comparison. I'm in a heroic guild with some skilled players, we want the challenge of pushing ourselves but we like the freedom of being able to skip raids if things come up in real life which having flex allows. I know some people are going to say "you're just a casual, mythic is for the hardcore", so sure, have a stupidly hard setting where you need to have great group composition to clear it. But give the rest of us a decent challenge as well.

It would solve a lot of problems, a lot of these guilds hitting a wall at 3/10 mythic could instead be working through a more difficult heroic with clearing heroic being a legitimate goal that you can actually feel proud of and be your personal endgame. Then the people who really want to commit can have an even more difficult time and even more prestige if they want it.

EDIT: Looks like Marrilaife above me said a lot of the same points while I was typing this.....

[Yunaqt]

The place isn't tuned so tight you need BIS legendaries on all your DPS and an obscene ilvl, the first 7 are all relatively straight forward.
First 3 are a loot pinyata to help with gearing to progress
Krosus is the target dummy - generally one every tier, with 1400 guilds past him doesn't seem overly hard.
Spellblade and Botanist are not super intensive dps check they're more so mechanics orientated bosses and after beating these bosses Tich usually falls over pretty quickly, most guilds within a week from boss 6 dying.
Only after then you get to the 3 that are more challenging but become slightly easier with gear having 7 bosses funneling M loot at the raid, I guess with a timer on a nerf when the first part of 7.2 releases and people can access new traits.

[araine]

Not to mention the first 2 bosses are pratically give me's as long as you are a guild that has cleared decent amounts of mythic content in the past. The third one can almost be put in the same boat. After that admittingly the difficulty ramps up a bit more. But I seriously doubt all these guilds are wiping only because their DPS/HPS is a little low.

But it is always nice to have an excuse for failing to soak the crap on krosus

[Fynzie]

Dont have time to do daily caches, m+ or off-day raids. Got 44 traits so far, stuck on 3/10 mythic NH.

Yes, yes, i'm bad and dont deserve to progress etc etc...

Funny because i'm not at home before 19:30 and my alt is at 52 points with 5 mythic+ done since the opening of Legion. I may be able to do 4 emissary a week at best and run the big AP quests during week-end

[Deleted]

In my guild we had a couple fire mages we had to bench on krosus because they didn't have a viable frost/arcane spec (no leg, low artifact level), one of those quit the game shortly after that (tired of legion grinding).

It doesn't surprise me that your guild makes those sorts of decisions.

So because they're on the lower end of dps this patch (but still perfectly viable) you bench them. I feel sorry for their choice in guild and with your erroneous and frankly, embarrassing sentiment being enormously prevalent this expansion it riddles me not that they decided to quit, only why they remained so long. It's likely they felt that the spec they found fun was entirely broken and unplayable and thus all the work they had completed over the last few months purposeless.

It also wouldn't surprise me if you turned out to be the GL.

[clevin]

personally, i doubt blizz would balance any boss around 54 traits as that would be beyond stupid, the problem is underperforming classes, even if you're highly skilled some classes just cant punch out the numbers unless they have bis legendaries AND 54 traits, a class like fire mage is a perfect example of this as that is currently one of the worst classes for ST dps atm.

Ahem...

https://twitter.com/WatcherDev/statu...56538650066945

[DakonBlackblade]

I know it's hard to comprehend but not everyone who clears heroic can clear mythic or make significant progress in mythic. Or former normal and heroic. Has never been that way and doesn't need to be that way as again you might as well just leave it at current heroic difficulty.

Im not talking about ppl that take 3 months to clear heroic, most of the guilds on 3-7/10 actualy killed Guldan on the first or second week of NH, if mythic is not for them, and it is definetly not for the world first ppl, it is for almost nobody and you cna't even justify this existing. The ppl that take 1-2 weeks on heroic are the ones that need something to do, the ones that take months on heroic are heroic raiders. The ppl getting the shaft currently are exactly the ppl that should be progressing on mythic.

It seens its hard for you to comprehend that the only reason to have a higher difficulty is for ppl to do it, if you make it exclusive to top 100 (actualy well tuned for the 30-100 guilds, cause the very top ones are finding this incredibly tiring) guilds nobody will bother and then mythic dies. Where do you think the top 100 guilds players come from ? Cause, on that lv, every month ppl burn out and stop playing, hell every week even. Without the mid-tier guilds the whole system just crumbles, and right now mid-tier guilds are hitting walls left and right and disbanding. My server has lost at least half of its raiding guilds since ToV (ToV contributed more than NH admitedly).

For all the complaints ppl had about EN, it got ppl raiding, it got ppl excited, it kept ppl progressing and engaged on the game. Its wierd the only ones who realy complain about EN being cleared in 10 hours are the ones who did not clear it in 10 hours. The bar should be set somewhere in the middle of NH/ToV and EN, Blizz seens to be very bad at middle grounds, they swing the pendulum too far every time they change something.

[clevin]

What is actually meant by "tuned for 54 traits"? How can you tune for traits, when they only make up a small part of the damage output? A whole raid with only 35 traits will kill every boss eventually, once they gathered enough gear.

post 35 traits are .5% per point. So if you're at, say, 44 traits, you're 5% lower than you will be at 54. In the past, most raiders will mock you unmercifully if you tell them that they shouldn't worry about 5%. They'll point out all the lower % wipes that could have been kills, etc.

Sure, many people can always clean up how they play, etc but the point is that all of that being the same the extra 10 traits are STILL 5%. Tell me, do you shard gear if it only gives you 3% more DPS? No? Well then...

[Mamut]

They tuned NH for most of the people to require farming first bosses before stepping into harder one. Is this really bad thing? WF guilds compete which each other so they need 54 traits, rest of the world does not. They will just finish later. If they would tune NH lower then people would complain its too easy like EN.

[Deleted]

Ahem...

https://twitter.com/WatcherDev/statu...56538650066945

Lets take a look at Star Augur. He was killed prenerfed with 902 to 903 ilvls and 54 traits. This is the absolute minimum to kill him (at elitist gameplay of course). This means at this point you can withdraw traits with gear levels. If you jump from 902.5 to 905.5 you can drop your trait level from 54 to 51 to bring the same performance.

Guldan for example is first killed at 904.9 ilvl at 54 traits. With 910 ilvl you can drop your traits below 50.

So, if you are an elitist, there is no need for max traits to clear the whole dungeon, because any boss can be outgeared (sooner or later). In 5 or 6 weeks even guilds with only 3 or 4 bosses in NH mythic will have equiped ilvls above 907/908 due to the wf/tf system. If they have around 50 traits at this time, they have enough "numbers on paper" to clear the whole raid at mythic.

But besides all the circumstances which makes it easier for slackers to find an argument for their slacking - its still an L2P issue in the most cases.

[cFortyfive]

if you make it exclusive to top 100

It isn't. The end. Those people you are talking about are currently progressing and eventually start failing when 6 bosses are over. Perfectly fine mythic doesn't need to be cleared by everyone and especially not by everyone within the first 2 months.

[clevin]

Lets take a look at Star Augur. He was killed prenerfed with 902 to 903 ilvls and 54 traits. This is the absolute minimum to kill him (at elitist gameplay of course). This means at this point you can withdraw traits with gear levels. If you jump from 902.5 to 905.5 you can drop your trait level from 54 to 51 to bring the same performance.

Guldan for example is first killed at 904.9 ilvl at 54 traits. With 910 ilvl you can drop your traits below 50.

So, if you are an elitist, there is no need for max traits to clear the whole dungeon, because any boss can be outgeared (sooner or later). In 5 or 6 weeks even guilds with only 3 or 4 bosses in NH mythic will have equiped ilvls above 907/908 due to the wf/tf system. If they have around 50 traits at this time, they have enough "numbers on paper" to clear the whole raid at mythic.

Sure - when you overgear an encounter compared to what it's assumed you'll have, you can drop power elsewhere. No kidding. This is increasingly the case as people farm other bosses and get more gear into the raid.

But the person I was quoting was disputing the 54 trait tuning and I pasted that link in to show that the design intent was that you would have 54 traits early on, when you hadn't farmed the first handful of bosses.

- - - Updated - - -

They tuned NH for most of the people to require farming first bosses before stepping into harder one. Is this really bad thing? WF guilds compete which each other so they need 54 traits, rest of the world does not. They will just finish later. If they would tune NH lower then people would complain its too easy like EN.

The real issue is whether the jump from the 3rd boss to the next set is so steep that people simply burn out and stop. It's one thing to farm, say, the first 5-6 bosses in a raid. People tend to feel they have a decent shot at gear and that they've accomplished something there. Being blocked too early, though, leads to frustration as the raid gets few drops (since it's only 2-3 bosses) so they aren't getting the power increase that they need to get past Trilliax. I think of this has Horridon syndrome - on 10 man, that boss was inordinately tough and yet you only had one boss before it so you couldn't really increase much in power between resets. This is somewhat mitigated by M+ now, but only somewhat.

[DisposableHero]

Why don't we stop scapegoating 54 traits for a moment and realize that they tuned the bosses for a hardcore raiding level of:

Post 35 traits
BiS Legendaries
BiS Trait Relics
Titanforged Everything
BiS Trinkets
Tier Set Bonuses
Sockets
Class/Spec Stacking

And the people who haven't played to 54 traits and a 900+ item level and BiS legendaries and 4 piece tier set and BiS trinkets and high item level relics with the right traits, and a half dozen sockets, and bullshit unique dungeon traits like small set bonuses or 10% auto-attack damage, on their main spec, their offspec, and a few FoTM specs from other classes are now paying the price, because the gear check boss had to be tuned to make life challenging for the one tenth of one percent of players who did all those things.

I can't understand people in mythic guilds defending this state of affairs. The problem isn't the tuning on the bosses. The problem is every single minute of your play time contributing meaningfully to the power of your character has two very very adverse affects on the player base:

1) Skilled players burn out faster because its less about skill and more about time spent.
2) The pool of mythic ready characters shrinks dramatically.

If you are a mythic raider this means that the people you raid with are more likely to quit, and your guild is less likely to find good replacements when they do. So while the bosses should be tuned to be hard for you, playing 40 hours a week shouldn't give you as much of an edge over someone who plays 12 hours a week as it does now.

[Marrilaife]

It seens its hard for you to comprehend that the only reason to have a higher difficulty is for ppl to do it, if you make it exclusive to top 100 (actualy well tuned for the 30-100 guilds, cause the very top ones are finding this incredibly tiring) guilds nobody will bother and then mythic dies. Where do you think the top 100 guilds players come from ? Cause, on that lv, every month ppl burn out and stop playing, hell every week even. Without the mid-tier guilds the whole system just crumbles, and right now mid-tier guilds are hitting walls left and right and disbanding. My server has lost at least half of its raiding guilds since ToV (ToV contributed more than NH admitedly).

Dunno which server or region are you on even, but my server had similar issue, and it's one of the high pop EU servers. Yes, guilds always disbanded, either when they hit a wall, or they hit end-of-expansion lull and people got bored.

To tell you an example, when in November I was looking for a guild, I found 4 recruiting my class & spec. After doing some research I decided to join the least problematic of them, let's put it this way. And my intuition was correct, the other 3 all disbanded in January & February. What saves my guild is what is also our poison. We play wow as we always played, raid log, don't force anyone to farm, if people wanna play alts or overwatch, we won't scrutinize them for it and tell them to farm m+ on their main instead. But that means we also hit a wall, some people were dissatisfied with what Blizzard did with their mainspec in 7.1.5 so decided to pick different spec or class for NH and that held our progress tremendously, because those people weren't nolifers who kept alts up to date (it's a semi-casual no split run guild after all) or grinded their asses off for all 3 specs "just in case".

We spent 1 week on Krosus and realized we're getting nowhere. We left it after that and progressed on another boss, finally killing it this week. Next week hopefully everyone is geared enough to kill Krosus, few weeks passed after all. I don't really blame Krosus as a boss, all I blame is Blizzard making respecs so damn hard AND also fiddling with the spec design mid-expac.

I mean it used to be absolutely fine in any other expansion "Krosus is single target boss, you should play frost here not fire", and in every other expansion 90% of the mythic raiders would be fine with that notion and were ready to swap boss per boss basis to the "best spec", I was in a similar type of guild in HFC and we had locks, mages and rogues switch spec except a few weirdos who were like "I play this spec and only this spec". It wasn't considered super hardcore to be able to play 2 or 3 dps specs within the same class. Now it is, because it requires double or triple the grind.

I mean I wouldn't mind if my guild had slightly better progress, however I didn't really have much of a choice, as I said all the other guilds I was considering back then, now disbanded, so I'm glad to be where I am now, even though my current progress is in a bit of underwhelming spot. I always told myself I'd trade slightly better progress away for slightly better guild stability because the second one is damn hard to come by. Not burning people out, not adding extra raid days or "optional raid days", not extending extra hours, not forcing to farm m+, all that is probably why my guild still stands while many others tried to nolife it, didn't break into server top 5, and called it quits.

Most guilds that achieved any decent progress on my server have 4+ raid days, half of them at least have split runs, many of them sit all day in m+, nowadays just selling boosts but only because they're done farming. No, definitely wouldn't enjoy that, every time I tried to farm m+ a bit more serious I was puking with the same dungeons over and again.

I tried to actually follow the advice of a few fellow posters here back in WOD, namely I wanted to be semi-casual so tried to step down to heroic only, and literally the biggest reason those non-mythic guilds stay out of mythic is because they operate on a roster below 15 players and have no hopes to expand. You just come to a point you're done and have no more content, that was the point I decided to fuck it and go back to mythic.

I see way bigger differences between top 300 guild and mine that is 4/10m now, than between "heroic guild with no numbers to do mythic" and "3/10m" guild. The first case is difference of atmosphere, in the first guild majority is obsessed about performance, logs, ranks, min-maxing, farming m+ and whatnot, while mine is way more laid back. In the second case the only difference is "we don't have 20 people vs we have".

[Deleted]

The whole thing is quiet easy - blizzard outdid themselves. What once played as reward got in their way to tune content - their impression that gear can overpower any mechanic is the hardcore counter to titanforged, legendary & AP. During Dragon Soul they thought their debuff-system is not integrated enough within the game and they experimented on so much... with the "content dough" they mixed it and the abomination is what they are currently facing: What can they do against lucky players, what against unlucky players in terms of /played. WotlK and Cataclysm had a very predictable system but it was too much system for them so they tried and tried... till we got to now. I think they have to evaluate past systems against current and realize it wasn't so bad that worse players just needed more time, time made by systematical buffs/debuffs.

[Effinhunter]

The burnout is tied more to the legendary system than the AP system, but the latter is exacerbating things.

I have gotten 7 legendaries. None of them are BiS single target. I'm a stubborn person who doesn't give up on things quite so easily, but most players just want to have fun. Farming for legendaries and getting complete crap after months of a true "grind" of doing old raids, mythic+, lower difficulties, LFR, etc. every week is very frustrating and not very rewarding.

This has caused some people to create second characters of their main (same class) and try their luck with their first 2 legendaries. 2 BiS legendaries are worth their weight in gold, often contributing more than the contributions from 35->54 traits. For super competitive people, seeing other people get immediate BiS and beating them without even being optimal or fully invested in their characters of the same class is a pretty effective combination for burnout.

As for the 3/10M barrier? If you've read through even half of the pages in this thread, you can see testimonials from people in 3/10M guilds and why they're not actually progressing past it. Low interest, reclears of heroic (since gear can titanforge to 925) taking lots of time, and a more casual atmosphere. If you digest those facts, Blizzard has designed the instance to allow the majority of raiders to be able to experience Mythic raiding up to the first 3 bosses. This is one of the more generous gates that Blizzard has ever done for highest level raiding, and there are basically 2 real gates in NH. Post-trilliax is first for the major casual boundary. Star Augur is the major progression boundary, which as has been noted earlier was admitted by Blizzard to have been tuned around 54 traits because the top guilds would have that. The last three are currently tuned around your guild being maximized with reasonable legendaries, full traits, good gear and coordination. These last 3 are also what guilds are spending the most wipes on, which is to be expected.

I think Blizzard has done a really good job with progression path in NH. Allowing people to adjust their trajectory in boss 4-7 according to their comp, gear, confidence, etc. helps struggling guilds and helps keep things interesting. Reminds me of Ulduar's design quite a bit (in how you had options for bosses within a tier of difficulty).

[Measure]

2 months in an not even 25 guilds have killed mythic Gul'dan. This is going to end up being another Mythic Helya.

[Grimreaper]

Funny because i'm not at home before 19:30 and my alt is at 52 points with 5 mythic+ done since the opening of Legion. I may be able to do 4 emissary a week at best and run the big AP quests during week-end

Wich is more than i do.

Point being that the AP grind itself is another pointless gating mechanic. Yes yes, play more = get more. That idea is fine, but only to a point.

[Kikazz]

It requires an average of 615k~ dps over every raid member which isn't an easy task

Actually only requires 15 raid members to be doing 585k dps, as long as everyone is doing more than 585k you will get it, ofc this doesnt account for stupid shit like the demon hunters doing 900k+, allowing for a lax member or two.