What exactly are the arguments in favor of having 4 raid difficulties?

[Elim Garak]

All difficulties should be within the same raid.

First couple bosses - LFR diff
Next group of bosses - Normal
Next group of bosses - Heroic
Last group of bosses - Mythic

Loot should be distributed accordingly - LFR difficulty bosses should drop full LFR sets, Normal - full stes, heroic full sets, mythic - full sets

[Shakou]

Well who knows? Depends if Blizzard would have just sit on their asses or actually implemented a new form of gameplay that isn't gimmicky like pet battles and stuff

PVP brawls and m+ are both amazing concepts. I would have at least casually kept playing this game all along if they had been a thing before.

[Allenseiei]

I haven't heard any good ones so I was wondering if there even are any.

So lets study other options:

1º One dificulty models:
Creating entry level raids at the beginning of an expansion and increasing more and more the difficulty as they go through. Similar to Vanilla and TBC paradigms. Although both added logistics to the difficulty (40 man requirements, and specific gear or classes).

I believe many people that are against the current difficulty distributions often tend to favour this model, however, what problems does it have? Mostly related to patch cycles.
1. The beginning raids will be cleared the first days of the expansion, leaving nothing to do for the rest of the patch, for those who find this difficulty insufficient. Going back to "lack of content".
This could be saved, if we reintroduce the logistics part of the difficulty back. Logistics create a way to increase the time needed to clear content.Will people approve of going back to grinding prerequisites to do raids though?
2. The end raids will not be cleared by the vast mayority of players again. Like AQ40, Naxxramas, Black Temple/Hyjal and Sunwell, 70%-90% of the playerbase never stepped inside. This will create another content "draught" for those players.
3. How will the mythic + system be done then? If entry raids are easier than higher lvl dungeons, people will not run those dungeons. The opposite would happen after, if raids are too time consuming and difficult, they will not be run and mythic+ dungeons will substitute them.

2 Difficulty models:

The problem here resides in how do you balance the raid. Making the first bosses easier and the last bosses harder? I think this is the most popular way people would introduce this.
This has a somewhat shared problem with the method before. Beginning of the raid will be easy and cleared really fast, making the raid tier last much less, however the last bosses will become a brick wall for a lot of guilds, who will never clear them nor will they clear the raid. You are giving them a tease with the bearable difficulty and then you take it away. This will lead to a lot of crying, I am sure of it.

How about the Ulduar mode?
Well, to be honest, people who will do the hard modes, will always do the hardmodes. What's the difference from just making a harder overall difficulty? If you don't, you force people to stomp these bosses who don't have hardmodes, which makes it boring gameplay, to just reach those juicy bosses they want to kill. It's one of the reasons blizzard turned away form this difficulty.
It was well recieved when Ulduar came out because we only knew 1 difficulty, and we came from one of the most disappointing raids in history: Naxxramas 10/25 man. So suddenly being able to do these harder versions of the boss was amazing. Right now? Not so much...


So... Now we come down to, which difficulty would we remove? This is a very hard question because people feel represented in each one.

If you remove LFR, you remove most of the playerbase, which are people with no attachments, people who just want simple and quick success... With such a broad varity of players, this is not positive for the game.

Normal: Some, including myself, feel this is redudant to some extent. The new one that is, its basically LFR with more numbers. Yet, you can't remove it without tunning changes in heroic or LFR, since the gap would be too great.

Heroic: I think this difficulty is hard to remove, its a good middle ground between hardcore and casual, most people who want to feel an actual raid experience for the first time without having to commit to the efficiency requirements of mythic.

Mythic: Most people feel this difficulty is not needed, since they only look at statistical numbers that give no insight into why is important or not (since only 1% finish it). Yet this difficulty is incredibly important, since it gives a cieling with a decent height so that players can keep progressing to something. If you clip this, and just leave Heroic as the cieling, you will have a raid that can be cleared the 1º week of a patch, with a very low cieling, and WoW would start to depopulate heavily in the middle of the cycle of the patch, and then repopulate again the first month of the patch. Fluctuating a lot more in sub numbers. Its similar to profesional activities in other sectors. People watch those to feel inspired, to be entertained or simply to compare themselves to them. If you remove the profesional scene, and just leave the amateur teams that casually play, will people watch them, follow them or play the same sports as them? I think not.

[Deleted]

the difficulty of 5man instances that were relevant for like a month is hardly a good indicator of overall quality tho

one aspect of cata being better (5mans) isnt really a good indicator of the entire game

cata was the exp that started killing class diversity and complexity with the new streamlined talent trees that killed hybrid builds
it was also the start of the downfall of pvp

and it had the objectively worst raid tier in the entire game's history

It also had the best raid tier in History, Firelands (and you think DS is the worst.....TotC cough cough....T7 cough cough...)

Hybrid builds were always a joke and cata was the exp that increased the gap betwen average and good players

Pvp downfall started in TBC whit the arena clownfiesta

[Teri]

It also had the best raid tier in History, Firelands (and you think DS is the worst.....TotC cough cough....T7 cough cough...)

TotC was crap because it started the "run this place 4 times" thing.

Somehow blizz felt similarly at the end of Wotlk/Cata pre-patch and limited raids to only 1 boss kill per week (2 with LFR since Dragonsoul), and that lasted until Flex raid and later Mythic raid system was introduced.

I dunno why they went back to 3 boss kill a week (5.4), and now 4 boss kill a week (6.0+) (including LFR)

I didn't play from early 5.2 till 7.0 Legion so this shift was a big change for me as I didn't experience SOO or WoD in terms of raid systems.

[Deleted]

TotC was crap because it started the "run this place 4 times" thing.

Somehow blizz felt similarly at the end of Wotlk/Cata pre-patch and limited raids to only 1 boss kill per week (2 with LFR since Dragonsoul), and that lasted until Flex raid and later Mythic raid system was introduced.

I dunno why they went back to 3 boss kill a week (5.4), and now 4 boss kill a week (6.0+) (including LFR)

I didn't play from early 5.2 till 7.0 Legion so this shift was a big change for me as I didn't experience SOO or WoD in terms of raid systems.

Was crap the raid itself not the many difficoulties, but i can understand that having to raid that shit twice at week, like most of the guild, could give serious health problem XD

[Deleted]

Yeah, you might like what he said. But realistically when did he get his Curve? Can he participate in this conversation? Was he world first Ragnaros?

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Like LFR and Normal/Heroic/Mythic/Flex?

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http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post47492221

Are we pulling the "first clear" "2k2 arena" argument here? Because regardless of my level of commitment to end game, facts are facts. Most people are not hardcore into raiding at all, most people don't give a shit about raiding aside from increasing their ilvl for the sake of it.

Also adding LFR/Flex is not adding new gameplay because when I say new I say new style of content, so multiples difficulties is still raiding. I'm sorry you have been brainwashed with the Blizzard model of MMORPGS where raids are the alpha and omega of all things but MMOs can and should implement much more than raids and dungeons. If you want to play a dungeon crawler where you smack your head against a wall 500 times, there are games better fit for that. An MMORPG that fails to create an ecosystem, thats fails to give life to their world, that restricts players to combat/combat/combat/gear content is a failed product. This game and its clones are bad MMORPGs, they are nothing more than massive online dungeon crawlers, a world of diablo for example

[potatojenkins]

This actually makes quite a lot of sense, and I think that your idea of normal scaling down to even smaller groups would be a welcome change as far as the community is concerned. But why do we need both a "pug friendly" mode and a mode that is also a pug but you queue for it and it's awful because it's also pretty laggy a lot of the time and half the group is afk, not because they're bads but because they're assholes that no you cannot kick them for being afk and they're safe so long as they don't cause wipes and such or talk to the group.

Not sure about that last part though, raiding has always been the main focus of this game. I think if anything it had a more relaxed and casual feel in WOTLK, and I think they were on the right track with it in MOP, then they decided to do this whole mythic thing. And well cool, but I don't really even know 20 people who I would want to play this game with who are also able to play at the same time.

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No I am not wrong I made no comment there about how many people do normal, but actually everyone who does heroic and mythic regularly farms normal for quite a bit of time right now for titanforges and ap and badluck protection. At any rate I am correct and what I said is that there are very few people who only do LFR. Notice I said ONLY LFR.

Your idea of reality is a bit skewed. Here, here's some stats from MoP, where participation numbers, if I remember correctly, was at the very least about the same as it is now.

Can't post links, so uhm, remove the spaces and add periods where appropriate: www mmo-champion com/content/3984-armory-stats-siege-of-orgrimmar-progression-blue-tweets-dlc-439[/url]

Look at the drop off from LFR to normal. ALMOST cut in half. Beyond that, the cut is even more severe.

Unless I'm entirely misunderstanding what you're saying: Very few people go beyond LFR.

then how do you explain raiding being lucrative for 7 years beforehand?
if anything LFR harmed the raiding scene more than it helped it

and to use your totally oblivious and borderline moronic turn of phrase: "this is a wel known fact"

Raiding was never lucrative. The sad reality is that WoW had MASSIVE subscriber turnover. Around the launch of Cata, they said they had, IIRC, something like over 40 million people who were former subscribers who aren't playing.

The reality is, is 1) Most people through the years didn't even hit the level cap until they made it stupid easy.
2) The ones that did, for a large majority of them their endgame was pretty much just running endless Battlegrounds and leveling alts until they got bored. (Yes, this means a lot of people didn't even do dungeons.)
3) Clearly, retention didn't matter, because they were replaced by just as many that kept playing. So, why would it matter? That stopped happening in Cata, and that was why LFR got made as a way to stem the bloodletting. (Rather than, IMHO, addressing the actual issues.. which they still haven't entirely done.)

(Personally, I think a huge problem with WoW is that they tried really hard to garner an audience that had no business playing MMORPGs to begin with, relative speaking, and never really understood how to deal with that... so they just didn't.)

[melodramocracy]

I haven't heard any good ones so I was wondering if there even are any.

There's 4 difficulties because Blizzard hates you.

[Seranthor]

PVP brawls and m+ are both amazing concepts. I would have at least casually kept playing this game all along if they had been a thing before.

So you aren't even playing? So you've become the whispering stalker in the shadows trying to ruin your ex's new relationship? how sad.

[Deleted]

So you aren't even playing? So you've become the whispering stalker in the shadows trying to ruin your ex's new relationship? how sad.

Of course he's not playing. There are 4 difficulties, man! How can he play when plebs are raiding as well? He won't be special anymore.

[netherflame]

Well the idea is to have something for every type of player...

If you removed LFR you would alienate most of your low-skill playerbase (and let's face it, this is most of the player-base)
If you removed normal then LFR players looking to better themselves would hit a brick wall when stepping into heroic.
If you removed heroic you would create a gigantic gap in difficulty between normal and mythic... much alike what Wildstar has.
If you removed mythic the game would become a joke and no semi-serious gamer would even touch it.

See there we go; you simply cannot remove a difficulty without getting rid of a serious chunk of your player-base.

Roll LFR and normal into one difficulty, people can either get better at the game or not raid. There you've solved the puzzle. Oh and cap titanforging.

[deadman1]

Most games have difficulty settings. There are lots of people who play video games, with all sorts of levels of skill and time investment.

Most games don't split the playerbase when someone chooses a difficulty though.

[cuafpr]

Normal seems to be the only purpose-less one.

LFR - Exactly like normal now, but lower numbers required (DPS/Healing/Tanking/etc), no one-shot mechanics and no severe raid dmg mechanics. Also no drastic changes from current normal like LFR now(e.g. Maiden missing on Fallen avatar)
Normal - Exactly like heroic now, no changes. The mode is extremely flexible, loot is flexible, you dont need to commit yourself to anything and still you can clear it.
Mythic - leave as is.

as a member of 2 raid teams one that clears HC content and one that struggles on normal (got their first KJ kill last week)... they are vastly different, and for different skill levels. Most people here likely cruse threw normal and HC, however some people that don't want pugs and want a guild run are not up to HC content skill wise, so thus you have normal.


Also what does it matter? No one cares about difficulty levels in single player games.

[Wolfbear]

There aren't really any good arguments for less difficulties. The difficulties you don't do, don't effect you.

[Swalload]

I haven't heard any good ones so I was wondering if there even are any.

Accessibility, appeal to as many players as possible.

[Deleted]

Accessibility, appeal to as many players as possible.

But see that's not a 'good' reason according to him fro whatever reasons. But don't worry. His brain naturally blocks out any post that disagrees with him.

[omeomorfismo]

because let everyone play their difficulty > satisfy the obsession of a bunch of heroic/mythic raider that feel "forced" to run all 4 difficulty

[bufferunderrun]

I haven't heard any good ones so I was wondering if there even are any.

i really hope that one day blizzard give us a slider for open world content difficulty so each player could set how hard mobs are for themselves and scale the reward with it thanks to personal loot.

The answer to the question is: because players range from casual grandpa to the pelè of keyboard the more the game allow scaling the better everyone has it's own cake and customers are happy blizzard earn money etc. etc.

[Lahis]

as a member of 2 raid teams one that clears HC content and one that struggles on normal (got their first KJ kill last week)... they are vastly different, and for different skill levels. Most people here likely cruse threw normal and HC, however some people that don't want pugs and want a guild run are not up to HC content skill wise, so thus you have normal.


Also what does it matter? No one cares about difficulty levels in single player games.

Yeah, the skill levels have such huge variance.

First week Heroic clear on ToS was a literal clusterfuck in terms of execution for us, but we still oneshotted most bosses. Only from Maiden onwards we needed to really start to pay attention to them. Sure Mythic NH gear helped immensly, as we already had the intented ilvl (915+) for ToS HC/Mythic.

Outside of mythic raiders, there are great number of guilds who take weeks, even months to progress through normal and heroic. It's good thing that the game has something to offer for them too.