Flex and Normal

[Deleted]

For healers flex feels roughly the same, but there is more of a lenience on DPS requirements. Our realm is pretty crap, but we just get 3-5 guildies and hope the pugs can be carried. We don't check for ilvl. If someone sucks they get kicked.

Um what? You can easily 2 heal a 20~ man flex.

[Deleted]

Um what? You can easily 2 heal a 20~ man flex.

I dont know how good you are and what kind of supergroup you did flex with. But I know that some of the bosses in flex part 2 gave me and my healing companion a good workout with a 10man group. Not all of them, but some of them.

[Deja Thoris]

Flex was a great addition but there's STILL a jump to Normal. All Flex did was add an extra subpar level and give the people who can't/won't see that Normal has issues for average guilds another excuse to point to i.e. "Then Normal isn't for you, and Flex is" while ignoring the actual issues entirely. It's almost like:

LFR = Bad players/people who don't care
Flex = Wannabes who can't complete Normal
Normal = Good raiders
Heroic = Great raiders

When it should be more like:

LFR = Can't/won't commit to a schedule
Flex = Want to include everyone, good and bad, and not min/max performance
Normal = Have a solid team you raid with
Heroic = Pushing the limits with a solid team

Both of them sound like the same thing to me, just packaged differently.

[Nobleshield]

Both of them sound like the same thing to me, just packaged differently.

The difference is primarily the attitude towards Flex raiders as people who want to include everyone, and not as "wannabes" who just suck, and towards LFR as not necessarily scrubs who want to "AFK and get loot" but people who don't want to have scheduled raids.

It's all about perception and positive reinforcement.

[Deja Thoris]

The difference is primarily the attitude towards Flex raiders as people who want to include everyone, and not as "wannabes" who just suck, and towards LFR as not necessarily scrubs who want to "AFK and get loot" but people who don't want to have scheduled raids.

It's all about perception and positive reinforcement.

Blizzard can't change peoples attitudes, all they can do is pitch content at an appropriate level to peoples skill and pitch it with some positive spin. As long as they do this without calling it "loser" difficulty its fine.

I'm not sure why there is a stigma with regards to flex. I think it's serving its purpose nicely.

[Deleted]

I dont know how good you are and what kind of supergroup you did flex with. But I know that some of the bosses in flex part 2 gave me and my healing companion a good workout with a 10man group. Not all of them, but some of them.

Our mains are probably 550-560 ilvl, and the alts/socials/friends are whatever. Probably about a 40/60 mix in flex.

[Deja Thoris]

Our mains are probably 550-560 ilvl, and the alts/socials/friends are whatever. Probably about a 40/60 mix in flex.

Do you really think people in gear and "skill" appropriate to the content can 2 heal it with 20 men?

You're post has no point unless it was to e-peen or prove how far removed from reality you are.

[Maelle]

Do you really think people in gear and "skill" appropriate to the content can 2 heal it with 20 men?

You're post has no point unless it was to e-peen or prove how far removed from reality you are.

Thats why it's called flex.

So overgeared people can flex their epeen about how easy it is when you outgear it by 30 ilvls
^^

[Nobleshield]

I'm not sure why there is a stigma with regards to flex. I think it's serving its purpose nicely.

Because it's easier than Normal, which many people think is tuned exactly right, therefore Flex is for "losers" who can't handle Normal.

[Fluttershy]

Well, flex raids have 30%(give or take) less health and damage if you look at the dungeon guidebook.

It's kind of like releasing dragonsoul with a 30% penalty at the beginning of patch 4.3. Still, I'd be impressed if you can 2 heal norushen on 20man this early in the expansion.

[Deleted]

Then maybe you should write an application for a guild on their guild-website instead of trying to find a guild in trade or looking for pugs.

Of course people will ask for ilvl/achievements in pugs, its been there since day one. You need to put in some more work if you want to become part of an active raiding-guild. OP is just coming off as lazy to me.

[judgementofantonidas]

I just cleared 8/14 tonight in Flex. I'm currently LF a raiding guild. People on my realm don't care about skill..ie..I have been a HM raider since ulduar. They only care about Ilvl and Ach(Exp). LFR is excluded, they even say "pst with ilvl and exp. Not LFR". Are people treating flex exp the same way?

I have been doing some Flex raiding through Oque groups the past couple of days in order to look for some possible new guild members and let me tell you it is a real mixed bag of nuts.

You have many players who are decked out in their fresh new timeless isles welfare gear not pulling numbers, not following mechanics, and it leaves you with the feeling that anything out of an organized guild flex is nothing but a more aggravating form of LFR.

[hablix]

They are. So I guess I won't be raiding until next expansion.

Sign up for Open Raid (openraid.us or openraid.eu). Keep watching the upcoming events, and keep watching chat during peak raid time. It's not hard to get into a group, even without experience, and the ilvls demanded by most groups are totally reasonable.

Last night I went onto OR.us for the first time all week to find a Flex group. Took a little while to find a group, in the process I found a group for Ordon. But then I found a group that did the first wing, and then the second wing straight through. Again first time I looked all week and I was in a Flex group within a half hour. Last week same thing pretty much with the first wing. It's also not hard to find ToT Normal groups through OR.

EDIT: Not all groups will be so successful though. Oftentimes you can get in with a core raiding group who are just looking to fill in a few spots. That's like striking Flex mode gold. We got through 2nd wing with one wipe each on bosses 2, 3 and 4 but I can imagine it will be considerably harder with a lesser-geared or pure pickup group.

[Weightlifter]

Flex is too easy for any kind of organized group, but too hard for pugs that are not using voice comms or taking people without achievements. It really serves no purpose, except forcing raiders to do it for overpowered trinkets and set bonuses. The idea is good in theory in but fails in practice. They should have incorporated the flex technology into normal modes instead of making a new redundant lockout for it.

[Deleted]

Flex is too easy for any kind of organized group, but too hard for pugs that are not using voice comms or taking people without achievements. It really serves no purpose, except forcing raiders to do it for overpowered trinkets and set bonuses. The idea is good in theory in but fails in practice. They should have incorporated the flex technology into normal modes instead of making a new redundant lockout for it.

Except it does exactly what it is supposed to do.

My guild has killed the first three normal mode bosses so far (they'd easily kill Sha too if it wasn't for limited raid times), but I'm fairly certain they won't kill Galakras in the next few weeks. Outside of 3-4 good players in that raid, all the players lack the understandings of their class necessary to kill the normal modes easily. Each one of those players makes a mistake here and there, uses bad spells at wrong times (especially healers), has bad DoT uptimes etc. People don't play their characters at 100% efficiency (and I don't mean raidbot efficiency by this), but at 80-90% instead. Just not enough to down the bosses.

I went with them today through flex on my awful mage. I was one of 4 or so really bad players, we downed the first four bosses without any issues, wiped once on Galakras, killed Juggernaut in one pull, wiped to shamans two or three times, wiped once on Nazgrim.

So it's exactly what it's there for. You can pull some bad players along with your average normal mode raid group and down the bosses with relative ease. The actual raiders get to see, learn from and kill the next few bosses they can't kill on normal mode yet; the other players simply not ready for normal modes get a nice taste of it.

It's exactly what you said it isn't. It's a mix between LFR and normal mode in difficulty and thus requires you to use voice coms. All the people who are too bad for normal mode can easily be towed through it.

[NeverStop]

Except it does exactly what it is supposed to do.

My guild has killed the first three normal mode bosses so far (they'd easily kill Sha too if it wasn't for limited raid times), but I'm fairly certain they won't kill Galakras in the next few weeks. Outside of 3-4 good players in that raid, all the players lack the understandings of their class necessary to kill the normal modes easily. Each one of those players makes a mistake here and there, uses bad spells at wrong times (especially healers), has bad DoT uptimes etc. People don't play their characters at 100% efficiency (and I don't mean raidbot efficiency by this), but at 80-90% instead. Just not enough to down the bosses.

I went with them today through flex on my awful mage. I was one of 4 or so really bad players, we downed the first four bosses without any issues, wiped once on Galakras, killed Juggernaut in one pull, wiped to shamans two or three times, wiped once on Nazgrim.

So it's exactly what it's there for. You can pull some bad players along with your average normal mode raid group and down the bosses with relative ease. The actual raiders get to see, learn from and kill the next few bosses they can't kill on normal mode yet; the other players simply not ready for normal modes get a nice taste of it.

It's exactly what you said it isn't. It's a mix between LFR and normal mode in difficulty and thus requires you to use voice coms. All the people who are too bad for normal mode can easily be towed through it.

It's really easy to carry people in Flex with 3-4 good DPS, 1 good healer and 1 good tank. As long as you're not a retard who can't stop DPSing through Defensive Stance or die to every 1 shot mechanic you can get carried through Flex and get free 540 loots.

[Celarent]

Flex is too easy for any kind of organized group, but too hard for pugs that are not using voice comms or taking people without achievements

It's perfect for groups in-between, allowing competent players to run content with friends or others they would otherwise have needed to leave behind. They can impart some understanding of mechanics into the others without requiring near-perfect performance — unlike normal, where there is little margin for error; or LFR, where there aren't stakes of any kind.

More importantly, Flex solves the problem of What To Do On a Saturday Night. Bring your friends, bring your alts: it's 90-120 minutes of a little challenge and a lot of fun in current content, something that's been missing from the game for almost three years.

[Adhemar]

One of my guild members talked several of his former-WoW-player friends into coming back for this expansion. He worked to help them catch their gear up (to around 500 average item levels) and asked his other friends (current content raiders) to come help them out.

We ended up with 18-20 people (two had to leave during the run), many of them just starting to re-learn the ropes. Some of them were not what any reasonable analysis could call good, but most of them managed not to die in the fire (one with FPS issues did have regular problems) and most did their assigned jobs.

To the original point, it is absolutely possible to carry players in Flex who would not cut it in normal. Flex kills are more meaningful than LFR kills (if someone tells me they know the fight on Flex, at least I know they weren't playing a horribly disfigured version of the encounter which cuts out the importance of any number of key mechanics) but not different enough that I'm going to decide you're ready for actual raiding just because you have Flex kills.

[Nobleshield]

FWIW I'm not finding Flex to be faceroll easy, myself. It's still pretty challenging.

[kamuimac]

More importantly, Flex solves the problem of What To Do On a Saturday Night. Bring your friends, bring your alts: it's 90-120 minutes of a little challenge and a lot of fun in current content, something that's been missing from the game for almost three years.

this people have been asking for "beer league" raids - blizzard read it and delivered - this way they wont have to nerf normals anymore - if normal was too hard for someone - now he has reliable alternative.