WotLK to MoP: A Trend Analysis of Raiding Difficulty.

[Glorious Leader]

I personally don't believe that players who don't gem, enchant or bother to learn to play their class at all should be clearing normal modes. Getting through the first quarter is pretty reasonable if there are better players willing to carry their chums, but any further and I reckon players should start to shape up a bit.

Christ you've got to be kidding me. Do you honestly think that's feedback the developers can take and use as action to develop content? Do you honestly think it's actionable feedback for ghostcrawler that he just has to find a way to drill it into all those entitled jackasses who left because raiding was to hard and the game wasn't fun that you better shape up raiding community! This isn't 2006 anymore. Lot's of games. Lot's of f2p stuff. Very little patience on the part players to swallow horse shit. They didn't swallow making gear catch up less generous or dungeons hard. Why do you think they would swallow hard raids or being told they suck and they aren't getting any further?Or being insulted by the title normal raids being applied to content they can't complete. I mean jesus apparently a large chunk (the majority of raiders) aren't even good enough for normals..

---------- Post added 2013-05-31 at 08:18 AM ----------

This is a game and moral judgement has no place in this discussion imo. Moral is something you apply to behavior in relation to other people, I don't get why you keep using those words as if they came out of my mouth. I don't judge people for how they play on a moral basis. I do judge them on their skills and the effort they put in, but being bad at a video game doesn't mean you're a bad human being - big difference dude.

But you are ascribing a certain behavior to them. And you are judging them based on the effort being put in (a function of their behavior in other words)? Okay what is that judgement? If they don't or can't put that much effort into a video game what judgement do you come to? You've made a moral distinction without even knowing it.

Finish this sentence. If they refuse to or decide they don't want to put that much effort into a video game they are ________

[Pua]

Really? I am not the sole player you say? You think their are more of yous than their are of mes? Or hell you think their are more of yous out there than then lfr heros? You think the minority of players who this content is actually suitable for actually represents some majority. Trust me you want to start talking about me me me then we lose every god damn heroic boss in the universe because the ONLY people with special entitlement mentalities are heroic raiders. When raids are piss easy guess who can do them? alot more people that's who and when their piss easy and so piss easy your mouth breathing inbred cousin can push one button to down them guess who gets to do them? EVERYBODY. The position you just described is not in your favor.

It's all me me me me me if you like this difficulty. If you think raids should be made easier than it's really not me me me me it's for us the living. Not all you zombies.

Come on, man, knock it off.

You've made your feelings known, you can tell I support them to an extent, so I'd politely ask that you try and avoid increasing the noise ratio in this thread by arguing with other posters.

Ghostcrawler himself is now looking at this thread, and I don't think cluttering it up with circular arguments are going to help anyone.

[l33t]

Anyways, he's the kind of person who won't ever get past Normal Horridon, unless someone boosts him. He's the type of player who wants to play a silly spec, regardless of the consequences for the rest of the raid, the sort of person who doesn't read up on his class(es), who doesn't care about his output. He stands in fire and is generally what I would consider a bad player.

I'm sorry, but this is pure nonsence. If people are forced to play FOTM spec just to be able to complete NORMAL mode, it really shows that something is very, very wrong in the very core of the game.

OT: In fact, everything is going as planned by Blizz. Raids become harder = less people participating. Less people participating = less recruting options. Less recruting options = more raids disbanding due to unability to find raiders. More raids disbanding = less raid bosses killed. Also, don't forget it's Summer, the Guild Crusher now

[Glorious Leader]

Come on, man, knock it off.

You've made your feelings known, you can tell I support them to an extent, so I'd politely ask that you try and avoid increasing the noise ratio in this thread by arguing with other posters.

Ghostcrawler himself is now looking at this thread, and I don't think cluttering it up with circular arguments are going to help anyone.

The "noise" comes from telling players to shape up or ship out. Guess what they'll chose to do. It's stops being circular once you realize that asking players to put in more effort than they are willing or even able to leads them to ship out instead.

You needn't worry about GC. While he may have read the thread on twitter (the op at any rate) i doubt he actually commits all this time to keep track with it. More than likely some cm comes and filters it out for him.

[Deleted]

I think this is where Blizzard really do have a lot to answer for, because this type of comment is symptomatic of the way the community is now (I'm not getting at you, by the way).

The community, for those of us who played WotLK, was much better during those days and particularly from a server standpoint. In Cataclysm, Blizzard pretty much hammered the raiding model that had worked and fostered communities to a point, and then chose to blame the community itself for those changes; alas, it's gone on ever since.

Why did they make such difficult five-man heroics?

"Many of our players didn't enjoy the easy five-mans in Wrath".

Why did they make the gear catch-up so generous?

"Many of our non-raiders don't want stuck to one toon".

Now these are paraphrases of course, but one argument is blaming the top end raiding community that provides a bit of realm gravitas, while the other argument blames the casual players that make servers thrive. Take a look back over the blue commentary from Cataclysm onward, and even into MoP, and you'll see what I'm talking about. At every turn, one group of players is blamed for inflicting woes on another and the result is that a community that used to essentially support itself ended up turning on itself.

And, no.

I personally don't believe that players who don't gem, enchant or bother to learn to play their class at all should be clearing normal modes. Getting through the first quarter is pretty reasonable if there are better players willing to carry their chums, but any further and I reckon players should start to shape up a bit.

I completely agree with you on this one. While I do see and understand the reason behind implementing LFR, I too think LFR was the actual start of the spiral we see now. Before LFR, your server reputation meant something. It was important to be in a guild and have friends - to make friends. Do well in a dungeon and someone might add you to friends list and invite you to a pug. Act like a kid, ninja or bad players would get blacklisted.

People would arrange GKP runs, alt runs between several guilds, pug runs were going every weekend non stop and everyone got to raid. I had a friend who started playing in Wrath and he was rather bad. But he got invited to my guild as a social and people helped him to the point where he could raid. That's how Wrath was and raiding was accessible in all forms and shapes. The flipside was that 25 guilds felt obligated to run both 10 and 25 man every week to get max VP or those emblems or w/e they were called and upgrades. I did that - on 2 characters, cause ofc you needed a viable alt.

[voxTree]

The "noise" comes from telling players to shape up or ship out. Guess what they'll chose to do. It's stops being circular once you realize that asking players to put in more effort than they are willing or even able to leads them to ship out instead.

I'm going to take a wild guess that players who bail when things get rough won't last long in the game anyway. That's the type of audience that fluctuates no matter what you do to cater to them.

Say normal modes were nerfed for this crowd. Then what? I guarantee you that a week or two later we'd see a million threads pop up calling for heroic mode nerfs because the content is "too hard". They'd just bail when heroic modes aren't nerfed. A line has to be drawn somewhere.

[Pua]

Christ you've got to be kidding me. Do you honestly think that's feedback the developers can take and use as action to develop content? Do you honestly think it's actionable feedback for ghostcrawler that he just has to find a way to drill it into all those entitled jackasses who left because raiding was to hard and the game wasn't fun that you better shape up raiding community! This isn't 2006 anymore. Lot's of games. Lot's of f2p stuff. Very little patience on the part players to swallow horse shit.

Actually, I do.

Gemming and enchanting, as well as learning a solid rotation, is something I don't think the game does particularly well. Firebert and I were discussing this in another thread, and it's basically the type of feedback that Blizzard can consider when it comes to designing the levelling part of the game and how statistics are presented.

I often talk about a friend of mine who levelled a hunter and was going for intellect gems. While you may laugh, it made perfect sense to him because he wanted his Arcane Shot to do more damage. To a longer term player it sounds like a daft conclusion, but to a newbie it looks reasonable. Another player I did a workshop with on Argent Dawn was trying to gem his hit rating to 100% and didn't really grasp the context of expertise at all.

Again, to someone not in the know, what makes more sense; wanting to hit 7.5% of the time or wanting to hit 100% of the time?

I know which I'd choose.

So, there are some things to take from this.

- Gem slots could be made red if you're putting in something that contradicts the item (spirit gem in agility mail, for example).
- Hit and expertise could be amalgamated with players aiming for 100% because it makes sense; the character sheet could show that.
- Gear without an enchantment could have a red border with a tooltip saying what's missing.
- The character sheet could border certain stats in red or green depending on what you want to stack or want to reforge out of.

All of these things could make it into a new expansion that would make the transition to endgame simpler for new players - and none of it need be hard or time consuming. I also think the levelling curve needs looked at so that a spec starts to play like it does at endgame a bit earlier, but that's not common across all classes. Just for the record, I also think the entire endgame model needs an overhaul but that's a tale for another day.

[Glorious Leader]

I'm going to take a wild guess that players who bail when things get rough won't last long in the game anyway. That's the type of audience that fluctuates no matter what you do to cater to them.

Say normal modes were nerfed for this crowd. Then what? I guarantee you that a week or two later we'd see a million threads pop up calling for heroic mode nerfs because the content is "too hard". They'd just bail when heroic modes aren't nerfed. A line has to be drawn somewhere.

Yep. If that's what it calls for. To bad for you! I'm sorry Captain Picard blow up your damn ship!

[Deleted]

I'm sorry, but this is pure nonsence. If people are forced to play FOTM spec just to be able to complete NORMAL mode, it really shows that something is very, very wrong in the very core of the game.

I don't agree. In the interview GC and Hollinka just did with Legendary on Gamebreaker, they actually addressed this very issue. Saying that it's not possible to have 3 equally viable specs (talking pure classes here) and since the person I was talking about played a Hunter that day, what GC and Hollinka said applies exactly to him as well.

The thing is, that a Hunter can play MM on lots of bosses and get away with it just fine. But on Horridon with all the adds, you need AoE dps and lots of it. So it's not about FotM specs, it's about playing SV for this one boss in particular, I don't think that's too much to ask for. Cause the same applies to everyone else, spec for AoE or don't kill the boss.

[Glorious Leader]

Actually, I do.

Gemming and enchanting, as well as learning a solid rotation, is something I don't think the game does particularly well. Firebert and I were discussing this in another thread, and it's basically the type of feedback that Blizzard can consider when it comes to designing the levelling part of the game and how statistics are presented.

I often talk about a friend of mine who levelled a hunter and was going for intellect gems. While you may laugh, it made perfect sense to him because he wanted his Arcane Shot to do more damage. To a longer term player it sounds like a daft conclusion, but to a newbie it looks reasonable. Another player I did a workshop with on Argent Dawn was trying to gem his hit rating to 100% and didn't really grasp the context of expertise at all.

Again, to someone not in the know, what makes more sense; wanting to hit 7.5% of the time or wanting to hit 100% of the time?

I know which I'd choose.

So, there are some things to take from this.

- Gem slots could be made red if you're putting in something that contradicts the item (spirit gem in agility mail, for example).
- Hit and expertise could be amalgamated with players aiming for 100% because it makes sense; the character sheet could show that.
- Gear without an enchantment could have a red border with a tooltip saying what's missing.
- The character sheet could border certain stats in red or green depending on what you want to stack or want to reforge out of.

All of these things could make it into a new expansion that would make the transition to endgame simpler for new players - and none of it need be hard or time consuming. I also think the levelling curve needs looked at so that a spec starts to play like it does at endgame a bit earlier, but that's not common across all classes. Just for the record, I also think the entire endgame model needs an overhaul but that's a tale for another day.

In principle yes I agree. Theirs a couple of other things the game fails to teach players. DPS or healing while moving is a particular thing that I think players struggle with and the game does very little to teach players how to handle that properly. The problem is a couple of things. People have a wide degree of tolerance for learning. Some will put up with alot and don't mind others not so much. Remember they aren't paying 15 bucks a month for a college degree in warcraft so any "learning" they do has to be fun (which really means rewarding). Another one people struggle with is interrupts. I'd love to see them give more carrots for proper interrupts. You silence something get a benefit for it. That's a good example of learning disguised as having fun I think. The other problem sort of relates to the first one, their are serious limits to the amount of improvement you will see from players just based on pure biology I guess. Peoples response times, working memories, and eye sight all vary so much that it can really have detrimental effects on their ability to raid and no amount of learning systems by the developers will be able to cope with the amount of complexity they are asking for and would be potentially asking for in the future if the trend continues.

I agree with most of your suggestions but would go further. Get rid of hit and expertise. Boring stats anyway. Look in the end normal raids are just gonna have to be made easier. You can't get around it. I'm sorry. The developers do need to do a better job of teaching players but the response being given by some people in the thread isn't about the game teaching people it's about brutal harsh justice. Blood and claw. Rise to the top.

[Deleted]

Christ you've got to be kidding me. Do you honestly think that's feedback the developers can take and use as action to develop content? Do you honestly think it's actionable feedback for ghostcrawler that he just has to find a way to drill it into all those entitled jackasses who left because raiding was to hard and the game wasn't fun that you better shape up raiding community! This isn't 2006 anymore. Lot's of games. Lot's of f2p stuff. Very little patience on the part players to swallow horse shit. They didn't swallow making gear catch up less generous or dungeons hard. Why do you think they would swallow hard raids or being told they suck and they aren't getting any further?Or being insulted by the title normal raids being applied to content they can't complete. I mean jesus apparently a large chunk (the majority of raiders) aren't even good enough for normals..

---------- Post added 2013-05-31 at 08:18 AM ----------



But you are ascribing a certain behavior to them. And you are judging them based on the effort being put in (a function of their behavior in other words)? Okay what is that judgement? If they don't or can't put that much effort into a video game what judgement do you come to? You've made a moral distinction without even knowing it.

Finish this sentence. If they refuse to or decide they don't want to put that much effort into a video game they are ________

They are bad at the game and won't be able to kill Normal Horridon - that still doesn't make them bad as persons and I never once said that.

[Glorious Leader]

They are bad at the game and won't be able to kill Normal Horridon - that still doesn't make them bad as persons and I never once said that.

Why are they bad at the game? Are they innately genetically bad at it? What adjective would you use to describe the behaviour of these "bad" players who don't put in the effort? I mean calling them "bad" is in and of itself is certainly a subjective judgement but the root of it is a moral judgement about the player.

For the record some are just innately bad at the game. That can't be helped I don't think but I bet you don't accept that in it's entirety either.

[l33t]

I don't agree. In the interview GC and Hollinka just did with Legendary on Gamebreaker, they actually addressed this very issue. Saying that it's not possible to have 3 equally viable specs (talking pure classes here) and since the person I was talking about played a Hunter that day, what GC and Hollinka said applies exactly to him as well.
The thing is, that a Hunter can play MM on lots of bosses and get away with it just fine. But on Horridon with all the adds, you need AoE dps and lots of it. So it's not about FotM specs, it's about playing SV for this one boss in particular, I don't think that's too much to ask for. Cause the same applies to everyone else, spec for AoE or don't kill the boss.

And that is just what I was meant to say. The damage done with double spec available. You know, it is a way of a lazy game dev, just say people to spec in that particular spec that is doing most of the damage of all three specs available. The problem is that not everyone wants to play named specs for their own reasons. I, personally, can't stand BM huntards and disc priests. In my opinion, normal modes should not be tied to extreme min-maxing. And normal modes of ToT are forgiving enough to let people play with whatever spec they like (for example, normal modes of HoF weren't, in fact, they were almost uncompletable without disc pre-nerf. That is what I call crappy game design), while that people are clever enough to deal with bosses mechanics.

[Deleted]

And that is just what I was meant to say. The damage done with double spec available. You know, it is a way of a lazy game dev, just say people to spec in that particular spec that is doing most of the damage of all three specs available. The problem is that not everyone wants to play named specs for their own reasons. I, personally, can't stand BM huntards and disc priests. In my opinion, normal modes should not be tied to extreme min-maxing. And normal modes of ToT are forgiving enough to let people play with whatever spec they like (for example, normal modes of HoF weren't, in fact, they were almost uncompletable without disc pre-nerf. That is what I call crappy game design), while that people are clever enough to deal with bosses mechanics.

There's a huge difference bewteen min/maxing and playing a certain spec on a certain fight. I agree that Disc Priests are way too important and were in T14 as well. But in the example I gave, I was talking about one fight, where he had to play SV.

Forcing players to play one spec - that's absurd. Ofc people should be allowed to chose. Take Hunters again. Atm Raidbots has BM as the lowest of the 3 specs. SV is top and MM is a bit above BM. But if you want to PvP, then BM is the way to go - or the way most Hunters go. So should everyone playing a Hunter be forced to play one spec, just because we shouldn't have options to pick between anymore?

Edit: I totally agree with Disc Priests and Paladins here in MoP - not okay.

[Lei]

And that is just what I was meant to say. The damage done with double spec available. You know, it is a way of a lazy game dev, just say people to spec in that particular spec that is doing most of the damage of all three specs available.

And now we are on the way to three-spec option, where you can't say that your second spec is for pvp anymore. Anything happens, you COULD play on a second PvE spec for the sake of the encounter. This is good for the extreme people, but not for people who really like a spec.
Also, I already hate the talent respec options. I better liked when you specced to one way, and it was good enough to play whatever you want. Now, you can change talents, but "can" usually means "must", or minimum "better to" at Blizz.

[roahn the warlock]

Yeah, if anything LFR is to blame.. I LOVED the ICC style.. and my guild disbanded in heart of fear. See they lumped raiders into two categories Hardcore and casual... yeah, what about us inbetween?

[Deleted]

Why are they bad at the game? Are they innately genetically bad at it? What adjective would you use to describe the behaviour of these "bad" players who don't put in the effort? I mean calling them "bad" is in and of itself is certainly a subjective judgement but the root of it is a moral judgement about the player.

For the record some are just innately bad at the game. That can't be helped I don't think but I bet you don't accept that in it's entirety either.

Unless you have some sort of disorder or a handicap, I believe that close to everyone could learn to play a class to the point where they could do Normal mode. Then there's going to be the group of people who just won't ever learn or are innately bad as you say. I do accept that, cause that's like everything else in life, you are good at some things and bad at others. But there's different reasons to this; I'm good at what I do (my job), because I took an education and I have a natural flair for it. I'm bad at French, but that's because I was lazy in school and didn't care much about my French grade.

Now back to WoW - There's nothing wrong with being bad/lazy/have a disorder or a handicap or w/e the reason is, but just like everything else in life, loot and achievements don't come free. Some people like Paragon, Method and Blood Legion will get World First and (most) others won't. Some will kill Heroic bosses and some won't. But if you want a piece of the cake, you have to put in some effort.

Do I think Blizz should think about how they present new players to the game, how they feed these new players information and point them in the right direction? Probably yes, but keep in mind that back in Vanilla people had to do it the hard way - learning by doing. There were no fancy UI's, no advanced add-ons, heck I remember the first version on Quest Helper lol.

[Glorious Leader]

Unless you have some sort of disorder or a handicap, I believe that close to everyone could learn to play a class to the point where they could do Normal mode. Then there's going to be the group of people who just won't ever learn or are innately bad as you say. I do accept that, cause that's like everything else in life, you are good at some things and bad at others. But there's different reasons to this; I'm good at what I do (my job), because I took an education and I have a natural flair for it. I'm bad at French, but that's because I was lazy in school and didn't care much about my French grade.

Now back to WoW - There's nothing wrong with being bad/lazy/have a disorder or a handicap or w/e the reason is, but just like everything else in life, loot and achievements don't come free. Some people like Paragon, Method and Blood Legion will get World First and (most) others won't. Some will kill Heroic bosses and some won't. But if you want a piece of the cake, you have to put in some effort.

Do I think Blizz should think about how they present new players to the game, how they feed these new players information and point them in the right direction? Probably yes, but keep in mind that back in Vanilla people had to do it the hard way - learning by doing. There were no fancy UI's, no advanced add-ons, heck I remember the first version on Quest Helper lol.

Actually no their were mods in vanilla. We used CTRA and Decursive although it was probably less necessary back then then it is now. Boses were also piss easy in vanilla. Baron Geddon was a joke then he's a joke now.

Again I'm sorry you are attempting to apply some moral world view into a video game. This is a video game it's not like the real world in any sense. Blizzard could tmmrw make every raid boss a single player solo mob and they have exactly the power to do that. Nothing has to be like anything. Except in so far as you apply a narrow morality and world view onto the issue. Again I'm pretty sure you'd think it was a horrible thing if everyone could raid normals because they were so easy when clearly it is an obvious desideratum. Or at least it should be until you apply a moral and world view about your work ethic in real life and then bizarrely to apply that to a video game. Wether inadvertently or not you have colored the discussion with your general ideas and opinions about the real world when it wasn't necessary to do.

Calling them lazy is a moral judgement. Yes I know you have your beliefs about what people can and can't do but that also is ironically just a reflection about your view on morality and your view on life and the world in general. Yes everyone can be a millionaire except clearly not.

[Skallfraktur]

Lol, can't believe people are actually complaining about normals. If you can't beat an encounter on normal (or heroic tbh) by now it means you're not good enough. The solution to that is NOT nerfing the raid (which they have already indirectly done via item upgrades) but to improve.

[Deleted]

No matter how you square this the complexity of raid design is going to have to come DOWN... way fucking down if you want to introduce a whole new population of players to normal raiding.

Dude, opinions are like arseholes... Everyone has one.

I'm well aware that WoW isn't the same game that it was a few years ago. "Raiding" (in it's many incarnations) is now the endgame focus for every player, not just the few who manage to get into a raiding/progression guild. This means that, obviously the focus on the 5man dungeons etc has moved to raid encounters and so, rather than it being OK for raids to be difficult Blizzard are suddenly faced with the challenge of designing raid content for the entire level90 playerbase.

I'm personally fine with the current difficulty level. If it was my game then it would simply be a case of "get your act together, improve, learn your class or GTFO" but it's not my game and I'm sure that the thousands of people who enjoy LFR as their only way of raiding are thankful for that fact :-P. LFR is easy, it has to be, it's a mess of different classes and skill levels that neither communicate or generally have the patience to sit through more than a wipe or two. LFR is not "raiding" as I know it. Raiding involves communication, coordination, effort in terms of gemming/reforging/knowing your class and, above all you generally learn through failure. Raiders don't expect to walk into encounters and faceroll them on the first attempt. Just like any game of skill and tactics it requires planning and preparation - there's simply no room for that in LFR and that's where the problem comes in.

So... With Blizzard opening up raiding to the masses they have challenges that were never there before:

1.) Evening out the skill/difficulty steps between all forms of raiding.
2.) Keeping LFR "rewarding" for the ultra casual but also making it less attractive than normal/heroic modes for people who could potentially become normal raiders.
3.) Keeping the normal/heroic raiders happy. While they're a smaller portion of the population they're also the ones more likely to subscribe for a long period of time as they have more organised/social content to keep them occupied and happy.
4.) Possibly adjusting difficulty levels in the knowledge that Xrealm content is here to stay which means people who afk/act like douches/simply don't care without the worry of repercussions effecting their reputation or progress.

What can be done? (pros and cons):

1.) Make heroic 5man dungeons more difficult.

The addition of the new heroic scenarios is a step in the right direction. Content that requires grouping with people on your realm means the possibility of new friendships/networking. This generally promotes skill improvement. Heroic 5man dungeons, IMO should be slightly more difficult because they're effectively pre-endgame content that gets you ready to raid. That gearing process can't be skipped and a rise in difficulty level could mean a skill improvement, learning to CC, perhaps the inclusion of more complex boss mechanics. Challenge modes don't really count as they're not part of the gearing process. The downside is that, as newer raid gear (and honor pvp gear) rises in ilvl you can effectively negate that initial gearing process by derping around in BGs for a few days. The community in general also gets pretty bored with difficult dungeons rather quickly (see cataclysm).

2.) Lower the difficulty of normal and heroic raiding.

If you lower the difficulty of normal modes to reduce the gap between that and LFR then you might as well lower the difficulty of heroics too for the same reason. This would be a good band-aid initially but Blizzard would inevitably lose a lot of respect from the long running normal-mode community as well as losing a lot of the heroic guild community because there would no longer be a level of respect associated with being a heroic raider. I have no evidence to support this but I'd wager the majority of Blizzard's long-term subscriptions come from the normal and heroic raiders with the ultra casuals subscribing for short periods of time between content patches. Shunning the more skilled members of the WoW community could be a risky proposition from a business PoV.

3.) Shared lockouts.

Possible introduction of LFR-Normal-Heroic shared lockouts would inevitably make LFR harder as normal/heroic raiders would no longer set foot in there. At the moment, especially on reset days you have raiders that effectively boost other players through LFR. It's not a huge issue but it might also promote more focus on normal mode raiding. The downside could be that people who aren't clearing normal modes at a steady pace will just focus on LFR exclusively.

4.) Addition of extra difficulty mode/modes.

Future encounters could be designed with "hardmode" styles built in. You could still have an LFR/normal/heroic split but there could be features per encounter that you could activate for improved loot/achievements/whatever. For example, on Horridon you could receive specific ilvl loot depending on how many doors you manually activated before killing him. Or Choosing to activate an additional Magaera head etc. Heroic-hardmode would possibly be harder than it is now but other guilds would also have the option to "progress" through bosses that would have otherwise been a brick wall. LFR would be unchanged and not have inbuilt difficulty options. The problems would come due to design flaws that made heroic modes easier than normal-hardmodes and/or balancing gear rewards around the different encounter difficulty levels.

5.) LFR - 10 - 25 - 10 HC - 25 HC

We could return to the wotlk model of 10man being easier than 25man and dropping lower ilvl loot. This would bridge the LFR-normal gap quite easily and make raids more puggable as organised content but, because of the reduction in realm populations it would 100% require realm merges for those people who still want to raid the harder content but can't get 25players for a team. It would also be a slap in the face for those people who simply prefer 10man content for whatever reason.

6.) Do nothing, keep the status quo.

I personally don't like the idea of easier content so I'd likely go for this option :-P But the game wasn't built for me, it was built for everyone and I seem to be in the minority.